As every American school child knows, morality is not the concern of the American president. The president’s job is not to model or otherwise influence good or bad behavior, it is to dictate American public policy. Which makes him… a dictator? Hey, the pope was good with Mussolini and Hitler, he signed a peace treaty with them, why not the American version? Perhaps JD ought to pray on that, to God, not Peter Theil, before he opens his vapid mouth.
Until Trump there was never a stable genius president who attacked numerous foes daily. Not sure an American president has ever attacked the Pope, (possibly during the heyday of the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, when hatred of Catholics raged) but this president is undeniably special. Heather:
Trump tonight posted on social media, in part: “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.” Trump suggested the Pope was elevated to the papacy only “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” He wrote “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”
Today is Orthodox Easter, and about 45 minutes after attacking the Pope, Trump posted an image of himself in the place of Jesus, apparently healing a sick man in a bed, surrounded by a soldier, a nurse, a woman praying, and an older man. Behind him are the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, and a giant American flag, while in the sky are two eagles, three fighter jets, soldiers, and what seems to be a monster.
Amid popular revulsion at what people are calling heresy and blasphemy, former U.S. representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote: “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.”
A minute after posting the image of himself as Jesus, Trump posted an image of a Trump tower on the moon.
Try not to be upset that our president has threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if his demand that Iran drop its defensive posture after refusing to unconditionally surrender, in spite of literally thousands of bombing raids against it in recent weeks, is not immediately met.
You have to see it from Trump’s point of view — he’s upset because the world still doesn’t take him seriously as a major league mass murderer. What does a strongman have to do to earn his place alongside the all-time greats? He’s killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, but that’s chump change to members of the strongman Hall of Fame. He needs a big kill to get the cred as a killer for the ages that he has sought since childhood.
Checking to get the insane bastard’s genocidal quote right, AI gave the first result (I forgot to add “-AI” at the end of my search) I got this:
The auto-generated answer “may contain inaccuracies,” as the psychopathic monetizers of incoherence, fear and hatred — the masters of the universe — inform the users at the bottom of the partially accurate answer. The president’s statement reflects, it’s plain to see, “escalating tensions and the potential for severe military action.” AI does not reflect any kind of psychotic break from reality, not derangement, dementia, a desire to commit war crimes, an inability to back down, ever, stemming from childhood trauma and an overwhelming terror of more humiliation. “Escalating tensions.” you understand, between reality, which has a famously anti-Trump bias, in fact, hates and vilifies all Christian white men, and … the violently acted out prejudices of terrified, enraged white Christian men, as well as Mr. Trump himself.
Look, if an American president, surrounded by sycophantic, militant white Christian Protestants, (including a Secretary of War who believes there’s no such thing as a stupid war crime), can’t make a little Easter joke in a menacing social media post threatening mass killing and sarcastically praising Allah, what is our freedom really worth? Others have a right to hate that freedom, but, you have to admit, it’s pretty incoherent to insist on your right to freedom while denying a Nazi’s right to the same freedom, right? The freedom of the top of the top 1% to do what benefits them is so precious and inviolable, in an incoherent schema, that the lives of a couple of billion poor people don’t amount to a hill of beans. Fair is fair. Be a billionaire or shut the fuck up.
You have to like the symmetry here. Trump promises oil executives that if they give him a billion for his campaign he’ll take care of them once elected. Then he cuts all the renewable energy projects funded under Biden. Then he drops bombs on a country whose predictable defensive move is to close the Strait of Hormuz, driving oil prices up and with oil prices, most other prices. Win-win, if you’re an oil billionaire. Charles Koch may privately hate the vulgar, incoherent, criminally insane Mr. Trump, but he sure is good for the bottom line.
Below is Dan Rather’s clear analysis of the deadly box Trump has placed himself (and all of us) in. I’ve been at a loss to explain my recent level of anxiety to myself, this — starting with a photo of a woman walking through a bombed out section of Tehran — puts some of my anxiety into pretty good perspective. After watching the excellent Nuremberg the other night on Netflix — the story of how the nations that defeated Nazism began creating a body of international law to prevent another such threat to life on earth — to see our own country in the hands of creatures so similar to the soul-dead men on the docket at the world’s first war crimes trial, makes my skin crawl. It is horrifying to know that the U.S. is now the single greatest threat to life on the planet the world has ever known. Because we have an enraged victim of lifelong epic fury as our Unitary Executive, manipulated by a cabal of determined “ideological” psychopaths with unlimited wealth and power. Here’s Dan:
Wars are chaotic. They’re unpredictable — hence the phrase “the fog of war.” That fog has descended on the war in the Middle East. There are some people who believe Trump’s war is going well. But the consensus of opinion right now is that the battle is going poorly for the United States and Israel.
You have to wonder if anyone is telling the president the truth. Because his version of what will happen if the war continues much longer differs wildly from that of experts in the region. If we think gas prices are high now, just wait.
It boils down to this: Donald Trump is trapped. As of this writing, there is no good option to end this conflict.
Any of the above scenarios could lead to a worldwide recession, or worse.
By the tone of his tweets, Trump’s frustration with the options is boiling over.
Could be, Grey Lady? Bombing civilian targets like water desalination plants, power plants, infrastructure like bridges and girls schools, all calculated to terrorize and kill masses of noncombatants, ARE war crimes.
There is no proof that the president is insane, demented, gravely ill, so traumatized early in life that his worldview is irremediably dark, childishly selfish, that his only motive is retribution, but the evidence continues to mount. Easter Sunday he posted this message to the people we have “eviscerated”, the evil Iranian regime and all the Iranian people. No time like Easter Sunday for the leader of white Christianity’s mightiest army to threaten the enemies of Christ with massive war crimes. Open the fuckin’ straits or I’ll commit so many war crimes against you scumbags they’ll be shooting the Flintstones, live, in Tehran.
Speaking of hell, does the demon to the left of the flawed vessel of Jesus look familiar?
And here’s Elon Musk’s Grok’s take on the VERY STABLE GENIUS’s holy day threats:
Charisma, times two
I love the way the New York Times implies that Trump, who is as empathetic and ethical as his long-time friend Jeff, really wanted to, and actually did, give masses of Americans significant tax breaks, when 99% of the tax cuts went to people who are already billionaires. You’ve got to love the poker face on that Grey Lady…
Lying is one thing, and it’s a bad thing, most of the time. Without trust, there’s not much basis for dialogue or friendship. You can lie to spare someone’s feelings, but outside of that, it’s hard to think of a good lie. The truly corrosive thing in human relations is incoherence. If someone insists on an incoherent version of events, no communication is really possible with that person. The only healthy course of action is to understand you’re dealing with someone who is incoherent and disengage.
You can never persuade an incoherent person to listen to nuance or to compromise based on shared reality because their need to believe what they believe is impervious to reason. They are incoherent because they have no emotional choice but to believe what they believe, 100%. Doubt would crush them, because, in any dispute based on what is really going on, they have no ammunition, outside of a blind, angry insistence that they’re right. Being wrong in any detail of anything is an intolerable humiliation they will never submit to. In a war with such brutal stakes, incoherence is truly their only play.
I’ve had the misfortune to know many of these motherfuckers over the course of my long life. Some have been very good companions, everything is fine with them, as long as you’re conciliatory. You can laugh with them, enjoy a good meal, go on an adventure together, until any conflict arises. In the event of any kind of disagreement, unless you drop it immediately and pretend it never happened, you get a childish insistence that what happened never happened, they don’t remember, or understand, or that you’re a liar, or that they might have been lying when you quote them as saying they might have been lying, that they never called you a liar and certainly never said they might have been lying, etc. It can make your head spin when these creatures really get going.
I knew an old lady, 98 now (same age my mother would be if she was alive), since I was her son’s best friend in fourth grade, who often insisted on things that were incoherent. She had to believe, for example, that the nightmarish marriage her son fought in for almost thirty years was completely the fault of his insane ex-wife. It was one of those conflicts, you know, where only one person is to blame for all the ugliness and the other, the innocent party, simply made the mistake of engaging with someone who was a violently enraged lunatic. There was no reason, in the old lady’s version, for the furious wife’s rage, outside of her own troubles. Her husband had absolutely nothing to do with it, even if he was passive aggressive, habitually untruthful, a provocative weasel, etc.
In the end I did the only thing possible in the face of an insistence on an insane worldview. After hearing the same insane insistence that I must forgive even people incapable of regret, empathy or apology, I stopped taking her calls and wrote her a note which I put in the mail. Her response was a classic, a close variation on the one you will always get from someone who insists incoherence by way of the last word is simply fine and dandy and there will be no further discussion of the matter. I put the perfectly polished turd of her last word in a frame, nobody I know ever phrased it more to the point:
Incoherence, when it comes from the most powerful man in the world’s most powerful country, is truly fucking horrific.
This morning, Trump’s social media account once again blamed U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for not joining his war, although NATO is a defensive alliance, designed to respond to an attack. The account posted: “Without the U.S.A., NATO IS A PAPER TIGER! They didn’t want to join the fight to stop a Nuclear Powered Iran. Now that fight is Militarily WON, with very little danger for them, they complain about the high oil prices they are forced to pay, but don’t want to help open the Strait of Hormuz, a simple military maneuver that is the single reason for the high oil prices. So easy for them to do, with so little risk. COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
This afternoon, Trump told reporters: “You know, we don’t use the strait…we don’t need it. Europe needs it, Korea, Japan, China, a lot of other people, so they’ll have to get involved a little bit on that one.” He also said: “I think we’ve won, we’ve knocked out their Navy, their Air Force. We’ve knocked out their anti-aircraft. We’ve knocked out everything. We’re roaming free. From a military standpoint, all they’re doing is clogging up the strait. But from a military standpoint, they’re finished.” . . .
. . . Aware that [Trump’s impulsive] war is historically unpopular, Republicans in Congress are refusing to exercise any oversight of the Pentagon and the White House. Megan Mineiro of the New York Times reported today that Republicans don’t want to expose disapproval of the war and so are simply cheering Trump on in public. Rather than holding public hearings that would allow the American people to hear the administration’s justification for the war and plans for its execution, as Democrats demand, Republicans are permitting the administration to inform Congress as it wishes, behind closed doors.
“You don’t want to show that kind of division to your enemy when you’re in the midst of a war,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Mineiro. “I don’t have a problem with the administration avoiding showing our enemy that they don’t have 100 percent support of the Congress.”
“They’re holding news conferences,” Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters last week, so there is no need for official hearings. source
See, as long as FOX NEWS CHANNEL is covering the ongoing story, there’s no reason for debate in Congress. Unite behind the Commander-in-Chief or make yourself liable to the punishment for treason. Debate only aids our enemy, whoever that might be, and the Commander-in-Chief is the only one who determines who is an enemy and who deserves death, so stop being disloyal and just support our troops. So-called intellectuals, and so-called pragmatists, always insist that men of action have to explain themselves. That is the fatal liberal error of history, according to devotees of the incoherence of the will.
If you are the kind of person who cheats at games, you assume everyone else is cheating, that’s why you have to. Apply this to any asshole behavior and you’ll find the same thing. We “wise apes” (homo sapiens) rarely do anything without feeling completely justified. How do you lie about people legally in the country being savages who eat good people’s dogs and cats? Your enemy would do the same thing, to gain an advantage, if they had the cojones, el huevos. If you rig elections, it’s only because your enemies are rigging elections, otherwise how else would they win?
Trumpism, like the ethos of our own religious white Christian slaveholders, is the perfect illustration of this principle. The slaveholders used overwhelming violence, well-armed militias and the threat of death to keep the slaves in line because if the slaves ever got free they would, according to their innocent masters, mercilessly massacre all the people who committed what they felt were atrocities against them. For that reason, the terrible vengeance an enslaved people would rightfully seek, the masters had to be extremely violent.
Old Mr. Day of Love himself told the crowd he was whipping up to peacefully storm the Capitol to gently convince reluctant members of Congress to declare him the winner of an election all evidence, and several of his closest advisers (including giant human turd Bill Barr who used the word “bullshit” to describe the baseless election fraud claim) said he’d decisively lost:
This little piece, repeated by MAGA spokespeople from time to time, reminded me of that timeless human principle, that wrongdoers always justify themselves by accusing everybody else of doing the same thing, in their position.
Let’s leave aside the fact that the Trump administration is continually pursuing baseless prosecutions, without any evidence of wrongdoing, with their weaponized, scofflaw Department of Justice, a department that also routinely defies court orders. And not to apply logic to an unfounded and false statement, but the FBI in the lead-up to the 2020 election was under the control of Trump enabler Bill Barr’s Department of Justice.
They had just suicided Jeffrey Epstein so he’d be nice and quiet about his long friendship with his longtime running buddy President Trump. There was, literally, nothing to see there — both guards were gone and the cameras were out when he suddenly died — a series of regrettable fuck ups, as Barr shrugged when the threat of Epstein was gone. Who exactly would have weaponized these “untrue and sensationalist” claims? Trump’s enemy former FBI director James Comey had been dismissed years earlier, he couldn’t have done it. Hugo Chavez, perhaps?
We are to believe that all the heavily redacted Epstein files that have been released are all totally kosher, in accordance to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law, veto-proof, by Mr. Trump. The names and nude photos of underaged Epsyein victims revealed to the public, oops, DOJ said they were under pressure to release files and mistakes happened (though no abusers’ names were mistakenly revealed). The three million pages Blanche and Bondi refuse to release? Well, the EFTA has no criminal enforcement provision, so fuck you. The president has nothing to hide (it’s not like he’s hiding his entire educational record or anything like that). How dare you question the most transparent administration in the history of the world?!
In fairness to the serially immoral, criminally insane Mr. Trump, he assumes anyone would do the same, act exactly as he knows he has to act, so he’s just doing it before somebody can do it to him. If you had evidence of your own crimes, wouldn’t you do everything possible to hide them? Come on, be honest.
Though he lied about it at the time, obviously, the Hitler book the totally non-racist Mr. Trump had on his nightstand was not Mein Kampf, as some reported, but The Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler. Trump is not known to be much of a reader, I suspect the Hitler tome was just there to remind his wife, Ivana, who she was married to. Anyway, the German strongman had nothing on our American Dictator On Day One. Though I got lots of shit for comparing Trump and his hand-chosen cast of freakishly cynical, ambitious, amoral shapeshifters to Nazis, I get less shit about it today than a couple of years ago.
I’ve always been fond of long sentences. Why place a period to end a thought you’re still thinking when you can use a comma, you know, sometimes an em dash — and continue on indefinitely; when in doubt, why not a semicolon? Anyway, here’s one of the longest English language sentences I’ve ever seen, and it’s a beauty in its catalogue of recent inhuman cruelty and incoherence. It’s written by a self-identified human named Gene Weingarten.
In the last two weeks alone, Donald Trump has destabilized the Middle East, turned the United States into a pariah state, killed more than a hundred little girls by mistake then denied he had done it and then admitted he might have done it but he didn’t know for sure because he hadn’t bothered to look into it, caused gas prices to spike by 25%, enabled Israel to commit atrocities against Lebanon, begged for military help from our historic allies whom he had previously insulted and alienated, and then threatened to punish those same allies if they don’t help him, said many in the media were “guilty of treason” for not cheerleading his benighted, unpopular war, gloated about having castrated the fourth estate, proudly identifying his conquests by name in a social media post …
… declared the Iran war over, then not over, and then over, again, then said that we had “totally demolished” a key Iranian oil facility, but added that he might bomb it a little more “just for fun,” continued pardoning his cronies and white-collar felons whose crimes have already wiped out nearly $2 billion in victim repayment and taxpayer recovery for various frauds, said that a former U.S. president he wouldn’t name had told him he regretted not bombing Iran first, but all four living former presidents immediately denied having said it, saw his approval rating plummet like a flapping turkey dropped from a helicopter, said he might “take” Cuba, revealed that his administration was considering withholding HIV aid to Zambia “on a massive scale” unless that impoverished country gives us access to their copper, cobalt and lithium stores … and played at least four rounds of golf.
According to my research, at 286 words the passage above was the longest single sentence ever written in a Substack newsletter.
Also, just an aside, in researching that item about Trump threatening widespread death to Zambians, I discovered that The Wikipedia entry devoted exclusively to DonaldTrump’s racist views is significantly longer than the Wikipedia entry for The Korean War.
These psychopaths (self-obsessed, manipulative, always ready to lie, lacking any ability to empathize) want you to believe their power is absolute, unchallengeable, the strongest force in the universe. They control their lackeys through transactional bribes, promises of unlimited opportunities for power and corrupt self-enrichment; their followers by lying promises they have no intention of keeping, and; all others by terror.
Terror is the main weapon of fascists. If they can keep masses of citizens in constant confusion, perplexed, anxious, in fear for their physical safety, the lives of their loved ones, they have a tremendous advantage. Like all bullies, pushing an incoherent claim to the right to make others do what they want, they are also very fragile. Defiance drives them insane. It is important, in these dangerous times, not to give in to the despair they are laser focused on instilling. There is nothing at all inevitable about their transforming the United States into a permanent one party fascist police state, though that’s clearly their goal. They are fucking up massively and spectacularly, over and over, in spite of controlling all three branches of the federal government. Every election, every poll, every utterance by any of them, demonstrates the unpopularity of their cruel grift, over and over.
FCC chairman Brendan Carr can’t cancel broadcast licenses for stations that don’t kiss an insane president’s ass passionately enough. He performs that threatening dance, on Elon Musk’s social media platform, to please his enraged master. Pete Hegseth can openly announce his intention to keep committing war crimes, and kick out photographers who don’t get his makeup and lighting right, he’s still ordering war crimes to be committed. Kristi Noem can’t keep her job, no matter how incompetently she did it, once she announces Trump was in on her $220,000,000 emergency vanity project that enriched her friends and her. The same holds for every one of Trump’s fire breathing lickspittles. Things are very, very bad when creatures like Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner have more power and influence on world affairs than Congress, than anyone confirmed as a member of Trump’s cabinet.
Remember that all of these people were chosen by the Very Stable Genius for their incompetence for their respective jobs. They were hired based solely on their fawning obedience to the master’s will, their ability to gratify his need for praise, and the destruction or weaponization of every federal administrative agency they oversee. The rightwing billionaires who pay for Trump’s campaigns have long been determined to destroy the “administrative state.” They are getting what they paid for, at the moment.
Trump, like his German hero of a century ago, believes he is an infallible genius in all matters. He’s a genius at conning about 35% of the country, he has an undeniable talent for that, got to give the handsome rascal his props there. His boy, the Austrian corporal with the little mustache, shared that genius for moving crowds of his aggrieved countrymen to passionate ecstasies of rage and religious fervor. Outside of that, their outsized talent for lying and throwing tantrums terrifying to their inner circles, and their recklessness, there is little remarkable about either one. True, Mr. Hitler racked up impressive numbers in the mass murder department, but that doesn’t make him a genius. Nothing that Mr. Trump has done so far suggests he will get the chance to match those numbers, though he may well try, and with the nuclear code and his thirst for murder, who knows?
The desperation of the deteriorating Mr. Trump is evident in his obsession with the election he lost, still insisting he won. He’s now trying to force the Senate to pass a bill for him to sign into law that will disenfranchise about half of the voting population. Massive voter suppression on a national level is his only hope for avoiding what is coming for him and his party.
If not voter suppression he must again provoke his followers to commit mass violence he can blame on antifa. That or stage a mass death terrorist attack on a sanctuary city in the US. He is perfectly capable of doing both of those things, as he’s already shown on his infamous Day of Love in January 2021. It would not be wise to bet against his willingness and ability to have his lackeys organize a false flag terrorist attack, if pressed. As always for his type, he must maintain power at all costs. Otherwise, it’s… crap, it just won’t go away, will it?
Take courage, my fellow humans, from Lawrence O’Donnell
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