Posted by the wannabe Pontiff himself on Trench Central.
The photo is as real as the MS-13 “tattooed” on Abrego Garcia’s knuckles. You can trust Truth Social, it’s social, meaning friendly, and it has truth in the name. Why would they lie? Trump is obviously the new Pope, though the lying media (die lügenpresse) will not let the world know.
From a New York Times May Day editorial, entitled — There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab. Here they describe a few of his despicable acts of vengeance against a nation that rejected him by a large margin in 2020.
He has fired federal workers without the 30-day notice that the law requires.
Doesn’t this also mean he fired federal workers illegally? Can’t say it, can you?
He has tried to cut university funding by citing antisemitism without following the established procedures for such civil rights cases.
“Such civil rights cases?” More accurately: he has threatened universities, and unilaterally withheld their federally funding, on transparently baseless grounds.
He has issued executive orders punishing law firms for invented wrongdoing.
Well, no problem with that one.
I did have a real problem with this earlier paragraph:
The building of this coalition [to oppose a Trump dictatorship, which the Times apparently calls for] should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. On several key issues, his views were closer to public opinion than those of Democrats. Since taking office, he has largely closed the southern border, and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. He has reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support. He has pressured Western Europe to stop billing American taxpayers for its defense. Among these policies are many that we strongly oppose — such as pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, cozying up to Vladimir Putin of Russia and undermining Ukraine — but that a president has the authority to enact. Elections have consequences.
The Grey Lady’s normalizing characterization of Trump’s ridiculous performance as president with a massive mandate is, to say the least, cherry-picked. His many destructive acts, his administration’s rampant lawlessness and contempt for truth, his unqualified, lie-spouting loyalist appointees in crucial positions leaving America open to ridicule and worse, the president’s unprecedented and well-earned unpopularity, all left out of the Grey Lady’s delicate balancing act, their attempt to treat a psychopath as a perfectly normal president just doing the job like any other duly elected president.
To take one example — did he win the election fairly? We all seem to accept it, in the name of affirming democracy as expressed at the ballot box, but to me the jury is out after every MAGA state suppressed voting with new laws making it harder to vote, Trump being the sole Republican to win in several swing states, and Russia literally calling in bomb threats to Democratic districts on election day. Also, I saw no reporting whatsoever (except for mine) on the 20,000,000 less mail-in ballots delivered by the Trump megadonor postmaster in the first election since 2008 when mail-in voting didn’t increase.
Then I read a line like this and just say “fuck you” and turn away:
We understand that Mr. Trump’s defenders believe that Democrats started this cycle by prosecuting him, and there are reasonable arguments against some of those cases.
We understand that the New York Times represents a certain well-invested segment of the status quo, so what else are they going to say? Still, the words “fuck you” ring in my head when I read this kind of pandering nonsense in the journal of record. “His defenders defend him against what they call political persecution and they make some reasonable arguments.” Can you give us one?
The conspiracy theorist/far-right influencer, Laura Loomer, is able to get Trump to fire experienced, nonpartisan national security officials she deems disloyal to MAGA. The perfect face of MAGA, this portrait was published by the New York Times the other day, as part of an editorial about the damage Trump and his myrmidons have done in the first hundred days.
Also in the New York Times, among a full spectrum of legal experts weighing in on Trump’s enactment of Project 2025:
The impression of a constitutional crisis is misleading. That impression was initially created by overreaching district judges selected by plaintiffs, who obtained temporary victories and leveraged those victories in the media. If there is a crisis, it does not arise from the actions of the administration but instead from a slew of highly aggressive judicial decisions that have transgressed traditional legal limits on the relationship between the judiciary and the executive branch — limits the courts respected during the Biden administration. — Adrian Vermeule, professor, Harvard Law School [1]
[1] Wikipedia: A convert to Catholicism, Vermeule has become an advocate of integralism, a form of modern legal and political thought originating in historically Catholic-dominant societies and opposed to the Founding Fathers’ ideal of division between church and state. Integralism in practice gives rise to state order (identifiable as theocratic) in which the Common Good has precedence over individual autonomy, the value prioritized by American democracy. Rather than electoral politics, the path to confessional political order in integralist theory is “strategic ralliement“, or transformation within institutions and bureaucracies, that lays the groundwork for a realized integralist regime to succeed a liberal democratic order it assumes to be dying. The new state would “exercise coercion over baptized citizens in a manner different from non-baptized citizens”.[11][12][13]
I grew up in a home where incoherent positions were taken regularly by our parents during our nightly standoffs at the dinner table. I was told over the years, with no uncertainty, that at three days old I silently declared myself an implacable enemy of my innocent father. My parents, both highly intelligent and well-educated, believed this to the day they died, eighty years later. As a result of this kind of mind-numbing idiocy, from two otherwise smart people, I have a lifelong intolerance for incoherence, particularly when it is being asserted as a fact you’d better goddamned believe, because I insist it’s true.
Spirited debate is sometimes necessary to resolve a disagreement. This process is not always easy or fun. But with good faith we can often thrash out solutions to difficult problems by producing arguments that persuade the other person to consider their position from another angle. This ability to reason a way to compromise is what enables democratic government to function. It stems from mutual, if sometimes grudging, respect and a recognition of objective reality that serves as the baseline for discussion and negotiation. It is the ability to reach consensus, and the logical methods used, that tyrants attack with everything they’ve got. The main weapons of tyranny are incoherence, fear and violence.
Incoherence is absolute, rigid, brazen, unblinking, it never changes its tune. Compromise is never possible when faced with an incoherent position defended to the death. The project of those who argue incoherently is total domination. As a matter of logic, it is impossible to reason with somebody who is rigidly irrational. If they offer no proof of something baseless that they insist is true, and they insist it’s true loudly and proudly anyway, you will never find common ground on anything.
This is the dilemma we find ourselves in today as Americans. One of Charles Koch’s most respected Libertarian thinktanks, The Heritage Foundation (author of Project 2025), maintains a database of election fraud going back to 1982. The documented incidents of voter fraud comprise a microscopic, statistically insignificant fraction of all votes cast. Even Bill Barr, as despicable and bellicose a Christian hypocrite as you will find anywhere, called MAGA claims of massive voter fraud bullshit.
Still, you will hear endless claims of widespread voter fraud used to support various voter suppression schemes in every state controlled by a gerrymandered MAGA legislature. If you can’t win at the ballot box, make an incoherent, but relentless argument, about the need to defeat widespread fraud. Anyone inclined to believe that Blacks, Muslims, Asians, college students, city dwellers, college students, naturalized citizens, gay people, environmentalists, humanists, atheists, those manipulated by Jewish practitioners of the Great Replacement “theory”, enemies of the anonymous, all-seeing Q, child blood drinking pedophiles, etc. commit voter fraud in massive numbers does not need proof. That there is a database, even if it has only 1,200 cases of fraud out of a billion votes cast, is enough to convince them.
It seems to me there are two basic kinds of people in society. One needs, above all, honest, mutual conversation, they are open to changing their minds in light of new information from a trusted source. The other kind is willing to accept lies, no matter how absurd, if there is something to be gained — money, membership in a group, prestige, power, being on the “winning team” — and they tend to be rigidly faithful in their beliefs. Black and white thinking characterizes this second type, a certainty that makes logic irrelevant. This kind also demonstrates a willingness to do whatever must be done to feel part of something greater than themselves.
I’ve heard this incoherent style called the dance of rage. The part of the brain that processes logic and can put things into cause and effect sequence is disabled if the anger center is inflamed. If you need to be right, above all else, you will fight to the death with any weapon that comes to hand. You may not be able to win a debate based on what actually exists, but there’s nothing stopping you from insisting on something that clearly doesn’t exist until the other person’s head simply explodes. If you can’t make the other person’s head explode, physical violence is your next best option, provided you have the numbers on your side.
You can’t reason with someone whose mind is closed. You may be able to find common ground, with enough skill and persistence, since we are all humans and have similar basic needs. Common ground is great, but often not enough to move the needle much. When you see that someone is prepared to assert incoherent talking points in order not to be wrong, that’s a pretty good sign it’s time to smile, wink and say goodnight.
That decision [man born in America, to Chinese-born parents, is a US citizen — U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark 1898] has stood ever since, as a majority of Americans have recognized the principle behind the citizenship clause as the one central to the United States: “that all men are created equal” and that a nation based on that idea draws strength from all of its people.
On the last day of his presidency, in his last speech, President Ronald Reagan recalled what someone had once written to him: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
He continued: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
There are some people who reveal an ugly side of themselves, often at the worst time for you. You cannot unsee the ugliness of contempt once it reveals itself to you. It’s human nature to make excuses for that person, if we love them, but once an ugly pattern emerges, with the insistence that only you are to blame for any bad feelings, wishful hoping will not change the person you are making excuses for or your relationship with them.
Just because you love dogs, and dream of having an affectionate lapdog, that love doesn’t turn the fish struggling in your lap into a dog. The fish will always die, no matter how many beautiful, friendly fish you try this with.
I had a childhood friend I haven’t seen for many years at this point. He called periodically and we spoke calmly about things in our lives. The reason we don’t see each other anymore is that in spite of provoking me to anger every time we met, for years, he refused to acknowledge this, instead insisting that I have a problem with my temper.
We all have a problem when we lose our temper, but that is another story. We do not all provoke our closest friends every time we get together with them. We also don’t all reflexively fight to deny that we are doing anything bad to anybody, ever.
I urged him several times over the years, if you see me start to get upset, hear my voice tighten, see my muscles tense and my face redden, pump the brakes and let’s change the subject for a while. He doesn’t know how to do this. It’s not his problem. It is mine, as he always reminded me. So, in the end I finally did what I needed to do not to be provoked by someone who can’t help himself. I stopped pretending this handsome fish was a cuddly lapdog.
He is, sadly, unable to view his actions, and the actions of others, with the same clarity. To him we were still friends, somehow, because I took his calls and we talked on the phone once in a while. I always like talking to people, it is one of my favorite things to do.
I like comparing notes on what we’ve learned over our aging lives. He listened as I recited hard lessons I’ve had to learn. This made him feel close to me, that I was always honest with him, and talked in a relaxed, nonjudgmental way. I didn’t mind talking to him, but that’s a much different thing than us being friends.
Friends comfort each other during painful times. Friends ask good questions when they don’t understand something. Friends extend the benefit of the doubt when the other one is off kilter, gently find out what’s wrong, how they can help. Friends accept responsibility when they hurt their friend. Friends make sure that ill-feelings do not fester in their dear ones. Friends are responsive, and honest, when a friend expresses unhappiness with the way things are.
Not all friendships can always be saved, though some can. No friendship can be saved if one friend is always blamed for any conflict, unless the blamed person is a masochist.
If I tell you a sad story of death, with a terrible lesson I reluctantly had to learn, and you reply that it was a beautiful story of life, with an inspiring lesson that is the opposite of the lesson I described, what can I possibly say, without being dishonest, that will make us friends again?
Trump is a childishly self-centered person who can’t be wrong. In order to prove that he was right all along about his dystopian hellscape of a desperate, abused, ripped off, violent, ugly, unfair, criminally infested shithole America, he’s brought that vision about by his own, and the Charles Koch network’s, determined willfulness to destroy essential government programs and angrily divide the masses in the recently great nation they are determined to continue to loot, immiserate and poison with impunity. The winner of Trump v. US, according to Koch’s handpicked majority, gone wild.
Here’s a snapshot of one tiny corner of the hideous picture the enraged, insane, medium IQ master of chaos and destruction is painting right now:
I have been forced, over the last couple of years, to accept that there are people utterly incapable of compromise. When you are in a relationship with one of these folks, often called narcissists, and find yourself in any kind of conflict with them, your choice is accepting their blame-shifting terms, and all blame, or getting the hell away from them. Many of us have come to recognize and understand this destructive personality type in recent years. They see the world in black and white, win/lose, and are compelled, by a gnawing terror of humiliation, to act as they act. They are incapable of real self-knowledge, vulnerability or change.
As a result of constant bombardment by an angry, entitled, mentally unstable, destructive MAGA president, and his hand-picked loyalists, we have all learned, along with the dark, neutral, meaning-obscuring term “transactional”, the term “malignant narcissist”, a psychologist’s post-World War Two explanation of evil. Though a diagnosis of malignant narcissism is not found in the DSM, psychiatry’s bible of diagnostic categories, its workings can be easily observed in the real world. It describes a megalomaniac so intent on dominating others that they will do anything, including violent intimidation and mass murder, to be the most important human on the planet.
In 2022 “gaslighting” was Merriam-Webster’s (famous longtime dictionary) word of the year. It was the word of the year because it described what is being done to the American public, constantly, by a powerful group intent on absolute power and completely unbound from any sort of ethical restraints. Gaslighting is, according to Merriam-Webster:
psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator
But in recent years, we have seen the meaning of gaslighting refer also to something simpler and broader: “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage.” In this use, the word is at home with other terms relating to modern forms of deception and manipulation, such as fake news, deepfake, and artificial intelligence.
When our president and his acolytes practice this technique, and demonstrate every other trait of the narcissist, and no consequences befall them, it empowers anyone inclined to act this way to pull out all the stops. Destructive behavior is normalized, as we say, and suddenly angry drivers feel free to blow through traffic lights as civility itself becomes a vulnerability.
Gaslighting is a major technique of the narcissist. You can’t be right because I have a perfectly good explanation, very convincing, for why you are wrong, insane, deluded, crazy, dangerous, a threat and I am your innocent victim, who loves you very much. Narcissist, I think, was also a recent word of the year, I may be wrong but I’m too lazy to keep searching. There is much on-line opinion that the term is overused. In any case, narcissism is the new N-word. It describes a person so damaged early in life that they construct a superficially confident, brittle, grandiose public persona that can never be wrong, attacks when criticized, blames others exclusively and will fight to the death over any conflict. One of their chief weapons of attack is gaslighting.
Our best hope as humans is avoiding assholes who act this way and practicing mutual vulnerability in our personal lives. This allows us and our loved ones to make human mistakes without immediately hunkering down into kill or be killed mode, as is the narcissist’s reflexive reaction. It is an open question how long it takes to recover from a narcissist’s abuse, full recovery may be elusive if you’ve been subjected to it long enough. On the other hand, the only way forward is through healing, and part of healing is learning to protect yourself from this type, once your antennae is attuned to the clear warning signs of someone who is so perfect that they will kill anyone who says otherwise.
As the Times op-ed editor ended his piece defending publishing the satire:
Larry David, in a provocation of his own, is arguing that during a single dinner or a private meeting, anyone can be human, and it means nothing in the end about what that person is capable of.
I love that while MAGA Pete Hegseth was standing in front of his kids angrily defending himself, (right sideburn down past the bottom of his ear, the other cut short), for at best sloppiness with national security (under normal circumstances violations of the Espionage Act) he had a moment of real human emotion. Listen to how his voice goes up after he delivers the word “disgruntled” to describe his three top advisors that he fired and blamed for being “leakers”. He sings those words in a high-pitched, childish tone, wonderful to hear from our Christian white nationalist Secretary of Defense. If you’re Putin, that is.
I understand now why my sister, as a girl, was always terrified of “scary clowns.”
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