My wife, who has tried to keep her sanity by ignoring Trump, finally summed it up after reading today's news in the NYTs and on her phone; "What a disgusting human being...except for the human being part". Get everyone you know out to No Kings tomorrow. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!
The organizers are hoping for 700-1000 (very optimistically) here in Frankfurt, Germany at the Hauptwache 1300-1430. Having the largest Labor Union in Germany supporting it could improve the (very optimistic) numbers.
Uhhh...wait. There are "No Kings" marches in Germany? Expats? Actually, it would be great if they were just Germans! Like if people all around the world were telling Trump he sucked...that would be awesome.
Based upon my guesstimate from the first two, 40-60 ex-Pats, the rest being German or other nationalities. And with the largest German Union supporting the Demonstration, could be even closer to parity. If you do not believe it, here is the link that the organizers have established for live coverage (German time, of course, only 5 hours ahead of East Coast US since you are already on DST, we only start this weekend) is: www.youtube.com/@ResistanceRoundtable-Frankfurt.
I will be at NO KINGS tomorrow as I was at I and II. I am still uncertain as to the impact of these "get togethers" which have been, for the most part, peaceful, civil and only gently confrontational. To be honest, I would like to see more real anger, more loud vocalization of contempt for the continued destruction of what remains of our liberal democracy. I would like to see Democratic leaders, representatives and officials turn out in droves and condemn the Trump regime while embracing focused and aggressive measures to combat Maga and the Republican Party. Perhaps it is time to consider such actions as economic boycotts, general strikes, withholding taxes and a physical descent on Washington by the millions of Americans who simply have had enough of Donald Trump.
Isn't, at the moment, "Democratic leaders" a non-starter? Who and where are they?
But,it is certainly time to not just talk about, but actively support economic boycotts of the Broligarchs Money Machines, although many people can't join, since they depend upon deliveries from, e.g., Amazon, given where they live or their own personal situations.
I’d say that the President’s decision to escalate our presence in Iraq, with troops on the ground and increasing their number, shows that he has forgotten the most basic lesson of Vietnam. But he’d have to be smart enough to have learned it in the first place. We see no evidence of that.
Everything we’ve witnessed so far tells us that the only thing he knows (er, believes) is that if you bomb the enemy hard enough and often enough, everything will work out just fine in the end. But the true takeaway from Vietnam was that if the enemy can wait you out long enough, they will win, because they know that someday we will have to go home. They can drain our armaments and oblige us to overspend our vast wealth and turn public opinion until someday the war ultimately becomes an unwinnable battle. Our current leader seems fundamentally ignorant of this most basic lesson from our biggest military and political quagmire, one that happened in our lifetime. There are no excuses not to be aware. Yet here we are, going down those same roads yet again but expecting a very different outcome. As some of our longtime (former?) friends elsewhere might say: not bloody likely, mate.
The President is breaking it. We all own it. The rest of the world pays a price for something it did not seek to buy. MAGA begins to feel the pain, even if they won’t admit it or place the blame where it belongs. They were warned. They chose not to listen. Placed into the increasingly thick and heavy file of: “Choices and Consequences, Trump.”
The lesson for the rest of the world is the risk of being tied too closely to the United States will make you touch the stove whether you thought that a good idea or not. It isn’t clear American voters and those in the cult will ever have a stove touching moment of clarify, but the rest are realizing that sticking to close to the United States could get you sent to the burn unit. They will still find us useful and important, but want to keep just enough distance to keep from being forced onto the stove.
"MAGA begins to feel the pain, even if they won’t admit it or place the blame where it belongs. They were warned. They chose not to listen. Placed into the increasingly thick and heavy file of: “Choices and Consequences, Trump.""
He's just doing what he has done in his business interactions. Pushed whatever situation to the brink, in some cases over it, in order to personally benefit, regardless of the cost to the other side. Now he's doing this with our military and our money. Since he himself generally made out in the past, he must think that he will still make out.
His whole life experience has been that he can make it out of any situation he puts himself in. All he has had to do is lie, lie some more, threaten, extort, delay, sue, play the media, and, if all else fails, file for bankruptcy. The odds are 30% it won't work this time. But until a critical mass of the power elites cease to fear his cult, he will never suffer personal consequences.
His big sister Marianne did his homework for him. He hired a guy to take the SAT's. Defectors during ver. 1 remarked that he is not only stupid but ignorant and incurious.
One thing this Iran war has in common with Vietnam, and also Afghanistan, is that it was not declared by Congress. If he even did start using the word “war” instead of “excursion”, what would be the consequence for him? It’s not like Pam Bondi is going to arrest him.
Deutschmeister - learning a lesson generally involves touching the stove OR seeing how someone else is affected by their touching of it. Since he was well insulated from any personal consequences of vietnam and pays no attention to others’ losses, he had no way to learn anything. A person with some curiosity about their world might still have grasped some passing details, but that’s another attribute he lacks. Turns out for a national leader this is sub-optimal as far as the rest of us are concerned
The problem is that all politicians are like moths to a flame. I saw Ro Khanna interviewed the other day. All Iran no Epstein. He, more than anyone, should never utter a sentence without having Epstein in it. I thought he lived for the victims?
It's working for now, but when you consider that they tried to park this to the side back in 2008 and it's continued to come back, time and time again...
Watching Trump and his billionaire accomplices make money off the blood and sacrifice of Americans brave enough to serve is infuriating. Trump and his followers are filth.
Andrew: "In her ruling, Judge Rita Lin temporarily blocked the government from enforcing its designation as the case continues in court, offering a harsh assessment of the administration’s behavior as she did so: Anthropic, she wrote, appeared to have been “punished for criticizing the government’s contracting opinion in the press.”"
Umberto Eco popped into my head after reading this:
"No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason."
Y'all are slaying me with these footnotes. Footnote #2? Chef's kiss.
Thank you for finding some way to inject levity into an otherwise bleak story. I work in public admin, and the violence done to the civil service under Trump 2.0 is both evil and stupid. Like a kid destroying another kid's sandcastle, Trump took 100+ years of civil service reforms and kicked it all down.
Merit systems are the antidote to political patronage, and the first federal civil service statute was enacted in 1883, about a decade after Boss Tweed went to prison. Teddy Roosevelt was Commissioner from 1889 to 1895. Vought and Trump mean to make Boss Tweed look like a Boy Scout.
So it wasn't that Trump was more agile, canny and inventive in his first term. It was that there were people around him that successfully stopped him from doing some of the crazy stuff he's doing now. And... he seems to be increasingly suffering from dementia. Great situation for his minions, who surely know this, to continue to bootlick.
I don't think he was much different in 1.0 which was and still is an exposed nerve reacting to stimuli and his own deep seated (but few) beliefs. The Cabinet and staff around him were more traditional in how they thought a president should behave and thwarted him in subtle ways. Maybe some of the thwarting directed him in ways that made him appear to be more canny?
Trump makes these apparently stupid political moves in large part because he doesn’t care about the Republican Party, governing or anything except himself and making money from his office.
Staying out of jail, hard yes. On impeachment, not so much. Even his demented brain knows he committed impeachable behavior, yet he keeps doing more of it anyway. His real fear is losing the midterms because then he will get impeached, and of course losing the Senate brings a guilty verdict much closer to reality. However, he has done everything in his power to keep the Epstein files out of sight, because those do mean prison.
It is asbsolutely mind-boggling to think that even a demented person would start a war in a effort to make everyone forget about personal pedophile predilictions of the present puerile president. (Is my love of alliteration showing?😏)
A demented malignant narcissist is not your run of the mill person. This one is hell bent on getting his name plastered everywhere, plus prizes and gold statues. Those pesky Epstein files would ruin everything. What's a war compared to that?
I hope lots of people take a sharpie to black out his signature. Though his response would be to declare a national emergency at this 'insurrection'. We're morphing bit by bit into North Korea
Simply having been unfaithful to one wife or another with a woman "on the younger side" would not elicit this reaction: He used to work at having that kind of behavior revealed in the tabloids. As you suggest, it's got to be statutory rape and/or trafficking.
Ha Colleen -- I initially read "...those do mean prison" as a qualitative assessment of the pedophile incarceration experience rather than a statement about probability. To my delight, it works both ways. Thanks!
Sadly, we seem to be heading toward a point where they will have to release the Epstein files in order to distract us from an effing disastrous war.
What's a functional toddler to do? Use a Magic 8 ball I guess.
Can't wait for the Brits to demand Bondi send them the unredacted files as they determine whether to prosecute the formerly known as Prince Andrew for more than spreading state secrets around for fun and profit. Seems our toddler in chief has done similar spreading of state secrets.
I seriously doubt he is worried about impeachment. TBH, I do not think you could get a guilty vote in the Senate if you had 61 Democratic Senators--because i seriously doubt that Fetterman would vote to convict. Probably one or more others as well.
Unless they openly cheat the midterms, they are going to lose the House. I have no idea WRT the Senate. That, ultimately, isn't going to actually mean much.
Fetterman was and is a populist and so he is doing what a populist in his situation, with his constituency (which is more Trumpian than not) would do.
I grew up in Western PA. I was back there during COVID because my mother had a (non-covid) medical emergency and I had to deal with that for about 6 months.
Outside of major metropolitan areas, PA is deep red. DEEP red.
They were always that way—it is just that it used to match up with teh Democrats when I was a kid, not the GoP—now things have flipped.
And getting phony awards. I am beginning to think they all know he’s going to die soon, so they keep giving him these childish awards to make him feel better.
This is so well put and astute--the fact that this regime considers everything a hill to die on, yet is inept, ham-handed and invariably wrong for America on every front. The reason this is different from his first disastrous term--redefining disastrous--is that he has surrounded himself with idiots in his own image, from fore to aft, and his dementia has progressed. An egregious one-two punch that only Putin could love.
Well, no. he has surrounded himself with some people who are dumber than he is--but also a fair number of people who are more than willing to act that dumb in order to be SecState, for example.
Reading footnote #3, I'm suddenly imagining an oil tanker size Leg in a Fishnet Stocking table lamp like the one in the 1983 movie 'A Christmas Story' passing slowly through the Straight of Hormuz. Trump on the shore smiling appreciatively and nodding his head.
Trump's big prize that he bragged about was other countries getting oil through the Strait when we can't and then charging us a lot of money for that oil. Do I have that right?
I think the present Trump is referring is, as he stated, we do great when the cost of oil is high!
Iran is making bank on the higher selling price of oil. Which then goes to Asia where it's either used for fuel or as feedstock for products that get sold to us (at higher cost).
I read Morning Shots and I'm heartened. Oil prices are skyrocketing. Trump's approval rating is underwater. Senate Republicans cave to Democrat demands. A Federal Court in California rules against Hegseth. Everything's going the right direction.
And then I look around...
Oil, this morning, is $97.16/bbl. A week ago, it was $99.21. It is not skyrocketing. It's hit a plateau just below $100/bbl.
I just watched the Senate question four nominees for lifetime, federal judgeships. Tell me Donald Trump doesn't have them on a short leash. https://youtu.be/3YGBY4uFx8M?si=mYseW9iw0LcWH9UD He owns the judiciary. They'll lie for him. They'll debase themselves for him. They do his bidding while making themselves look ridiculous. It's worth it to them. They're not worried about any kind of sanction, professional or personal. An adverse ruling in California? "Activist judge. No big deal. We'll win in the Supreme Court." And they will.
The war's going badly? How, exactly? The number of American casualties is low. Aside from higher gas prices, there's no impact on American life and the fluffers in Trump Media World will convince his base that a little higher gas prices is the price to pay to avoid nuclear annihilation. And, besides, if Kamala Harris had won, American sons and daughters would be fighting over there, trans kids would be competing in the Olympics, illegal aliens would be murdering everybody while they take American jobs and buy up all the houses that they pay for with their welfare checks.
The Wall Street Journal and Fox News are telling everyone how great everything is 24/7.
Oh, but what about the farmers? They'll have to pay more for fertilizer! Where are all those stories? Even MSNOW can't find the farmer who regrets his vote for Trump. He paid them off with $12 billion of our money. They're happy. They got their welfare checks, all those rugged individualists.
So, yeah, I'm going to Chicago tomorrow to, in my little way, petition my government for the redress of grievances, but while I'm doing that, Jared will be over in the Middle East making some crypto deal with the people we're bombing that'll put billions in his pocket and we'll be stuck here happy that some Democrat nobody'd heard of until yesterday is representing Mar-A-Lago in the FL legislature.
I think your misery might be due, in part, to unrealistic expectations. People are loath to admit they've made a mistake. And the more catastrophic the mistake, the less likely they are to offer a mea culpa. And doing so publicly to an MSNOW reporter will be exceedingly rare.
This is purely anecdotal, but my retired MAGA neighbors next door thought one of them was going to have to get a part-time job at Buckee's (a Texas gas station the size of a Walmart) to afford their health insurance (the wife is 1 year too young to qualify for Medicare). Have they said they regret voting for Trump? No. But clearly, he is making their lives harder. The same couple also spends several months a year traveling the country in an RV. Let's see if they go anywhere this Spring or Summer with diesel prices on the rise. I'm betting the RV stays in storage most of the year.
Well, I hope they detect that the changes in their lives are due in some way to Trump.
If I had to guess, I suspect they'd say it's all Biden's fault. Trump inherited a God-awful mess and it's taking some time for him to turn it around, especially since the Radical Left Lunatic Democrats keep gumming up the works with all their nonsense.
I think I'll change my view when I see a real electoral change. I want to see a red state turn blue. Ohio used to be a swing state. So was Florida. If that swing happens again and I start to see more Republicans like Thomas Massie starting to assert their independence, then I'll believe something is happening. If one or two of those judicial nominees didn't make it through their confirmations because they're demonstrated liars, that would change my mind. I don't have a lot of hope.
dcicero - living in AZ 2014-2025 we saw red to purple, most recent statewide elections went pretty Dem. Many reasons. Not every state Republican party will put up candidates so… undesirable? Not every state has an influx of Californians and refugees from colder/bluer climes like WA state and MN. But miracles do happen. Grateful I got to be part of that one.
He owns the judiciary. They'll lie for him. They'll debase themselves for him. They do his bidding while making themselves look ridiculous. It's worth it to them. They're not worried about any kind of sanction, professional or personal. An adverse ruling in California? "Activist judge. No big deal. We'll win in the Supreme Court." And they will.
I've tried to make the point before that he ran for President in 2015 because he had the courts in his pocket. If he didn't, he wouldn't have run for office. But his greatest power has always been manipulation of the legal system, and masks are off at the Supreme Court.
I suspect personally that the Supreme Court is going to ram through as many of Leonard Leo's priorities as they can before Pope Leo bans Opus Dei and the American Catholic schism begins.
I've never read "Art of the Deal", but from what I can tell, Trump's version of a good deal (whether with congressional Democrats, our trading partners, or a country we're waging war against) is that he gets everything he wants and they get nothing. He also wants to be able to call "backsies" if and when he later regrets the deal.
Remember the wonderful, best renegotiation and renaming of NAFTA back in T1.0? Best ever? And then about how it was a shit deal in T 2.0? He has done that his entire life.
Andrew states the administration had the cards regarding the funding of DHS and their dealings with Anthropic, except the administration does not know what cards they have. We are working with people who have no idea what cards they’ve been dealt and play whatever comes to mind at the moment. There is no strategy, now shrewdness and there no card sharks in this mess. They can’t even cheat at cards because they don’t know what they are doing. Their only moves are based on power ‘because the president says x’, but when that has its limits and runs into gravity he merely TACO’s. Trump doesn’t bluff the way card player does because he is too emotionally transparent. He only knows might and power and when that doesn’t work he TACO’s and goes off into the corner to sulk. You can’t play cards when they are a jumbled mess out in front for everyone to see.
Trump's poker play is he pulls out a gun and demands the other players fold, but it turns out the gun is a water pistol, and all the other players need to do to win is call the bluff because Trump will have distractedly eaten his cards so they win by default.
That was certainly his thoughts on Iran. Straight of Hormuz? No biggie the Iranians will be on their knees begging me for a deal long before that will happen. Well quelle suprise.
I know this won’t be popular, but I think there is a critical missing point in this analysis. These are not losses for The Rotting Orange; they are profound losses for America. Trump is not losing. He secured his ultimate victory the moment he insulated himself from spending the rest of his life in federal prison.
His political survival is now entirely decoupled from the functional survival of the state apparatus, traditional metrics of political success and failure are rendered obsolete. Framing a judicial injunction or a capitulation on departmental funding as personal defeats for the president fundamentally misreads his incentive structure.
I wrote in early 2025 (and it is more true today) about an uncomfortable reality we are now confronting in America, that we have become the bad guy. The degradation of our institutional authority is not a tactical failure for the executive; it is the collateral damage of a system prioritizing personal impunity over state capacity. Consequently, the public has been forced into a profound democratic crisis, psychologically positioned to root against its own government. When the executive branch internalizes adversarial reflexes against its own citizens, workforce, and domestic industries, the state effectively adopts a hostile posture toward its own foundations.
We are cheering these institutional failures and framing them as Trump’s losses to avoid a darker truth: We are actively rooting against America, even if we are unwilling to admit it. We find ourselves deeply alienated from the apparatus of our own country, forced to recognize that the government's tactical blunders are often the only remaining checks on its authoritarian impulses. We are watching the structural exhaustion of the American project, consistently and incorrectly coded by observers as routine political theater, while we quietly applaud our own decline.
"His political survival is now entirely decoupled from the functional survival of the state."
I think we could make the case that it always was. But I keep looking at Atlantic City, NJ, the city Trump and Christie managed, and seeing our bankrupt future. What he did to Atlantic City never mattered, did it?
Thank you, Kate, for drawing such a precise and ominous historical parallel. You are entirely correct that this decoupling is a foundational feature of his methodology rather than a recent adaptation. The Atlantic City analogue perfectly illustrates the operational model currently being applied to the federal government. The aggressive extraction of personal value, the deliberate externalization of systemic risk, and the eventual abandonment of the hollowed-out enterprise.
His destruction of that municipality ultimately yielded no personal consequences and served as the proof of concept for his executive strategy. We are now watching that exact paradigm of predatory extraction scale up from a local economy to the republic itself, confirming your fear that a profound institutional bankruptcy is the inevitable endgame.
Yup. The only bet Trump has left on the table is that he'll die before the implosion, and therefore not be adversely affected by his long list of...accomplishments. Age remains on his side.
Agree. When a leader’s operational horizon extends only to the limits of his own mortality, the long-term survival of the republic becomes entirely irrelevant.
Thank you for providing such a perfectly crystallizing example, Linda. Your instinctive reaction to the Dow Jones is a direct manifestation of the cognitive dissonance we are all currently enduring.
The realization that follows, the immediate acknowledgment that this market decline damages our own livelihoods, is the defining psychological trap of this era. We are caught in a paradigm where the only mechanisms that might theoretically stall authoritarian momentum require the active degradation of our own national stability. It is a profound burden to bear, constantly torn between the desire to see a corrupt system falter and the stark reality that we are standing entirely within its blast radius.
I never would have believed that I would be rooting against my own government. Don’t get me wrong—I place high value on every human life in our military and I do not celebrate their deaths. But much like dark JVL, I simply don’t know how else we will be able to reverse the damage Trump has done until a critical mass of MAGA’s feel the pain personally. I used to stress out over every insane move Trump made at the start of ver 2.0, but my husband would calmly point out that we *need* the insanity until he crosses a line that the deluded amongst us finally draw in the sand. It’s depressing
Thank you, Amy. It is a profound tragedy that engaged citizens are reduced to hoping the systemic shockwaves of this second term finally breach the cognitive dissonance of the administration's base. I have less faith in a population that has proven itself incapable of distinguishing reality from insanity.
Relying on the electorate to experience acute, localized pain before they reject the broader institutional rot requires us to tolerate immense collateral damage, including very real human costs. It is an excruciating position to maintain, recognizing that the theoretical cure for this democratic crisis currently demands the accelerated destruction of the republic we are ostensibly trying to save. It's hard not to feel the crushing weight of reality.
I don’t disagree with you, Patrick. And being ‘just a little’ pessimistic, I have another concern. When Trump loses his battle against Father Time, and his reign ends - I truly believe it will - we will be left to clean up his mess and deal with the carnage left in his wake. But will our country, our fellow citizens, have learned a damn thing from the entire debacle? I think not. I think some slim majority of our fellow citizens will look for someone to blame, and start looking for another demagogue.
Part of this quandry is that in order for the US to survive as a constitutional democracy with all of our basic rights intace, we realize someone has to put Trump in his place. Since nobody in the US seems to be able to do it (and the power elites are mostly willing to bow down to him), we hope foreign leaders will call his bluffs and dish out the consequences.
You’re right, Trump is not losing. Even if he doesn’t manage to wheedle himself into a third term, he’s the spiritual head of the Republican Party to his dying breath. He is Lifetime Chair of the Board of Peace (head villain at Villaincon), and will presumably receive a yearly stipend from that to his dying breath. He’s physically marking his territory all over Washington DC and the White House. He’s a legend in his own mind. He is golden.
Agree. If there is a singular, defining competence to the Rotting Orange's public life, it is a kind of inverted alchemy. Everything he touches is ultimately destroyed, yet he consistently emerges from the wreckage unscathed.
While his tenure is characterized by staggering administrative ineptitude and profound intellectual vacancy, it isn't total vulnerability. He possesses a highly refined reptilian instinct for self-preservation. His life is and has been dedicated entirely to evading consequence. He remains insulated and "golden," as you note, not through strategic governance, but through a predatory ability to externalize complete ruin onto the institutions and individuals that surround him, casually walking away just before the structural collapse.
I'm not sure we are rooting against America when we perceive a few battle losses. To keep from despair we look for little green shoots of life that we wish could grow into something better. It's a compensation and it's probably a healthy thing to do. I don't think we are fooling ourselves very much.
Hey Max, if I really squinted I could probabaly understand the desire to believe this position to be true. I'm afraid the psychological impulse to search for restorative signs of life is an understandable defense mechanism against despair, but categorizing the current systemic collapse as a series of manageable "battle losses" profoundly mischaracterizes the reality of our paradigm. We are not experiencing routine political setbacks that can be absorbed and corrected by a resilient republic.
To frame the current trajectory as a sequence of minor defeats requires ignoring the catastrophic empirical realities actively unfolding. The state-sanctioned murder of citizens, the loss of American military personnel for erratic and nonsensical objectives, the deliberate dissolution of our strategic alliances, and the systemic economic ruin being inflicted upon the populace are not temporary partisan skirmishes. The establishment of internment infrastructure and the total forfeiture of global hegemony represent terminal institutional failure. These are the mechanics of absolute structural destruction, not cyclical political friction.
The broader, and far more harrowing, picture is that this damage is permanent. Comforting ourselves with the illusion that these profound civic and geopolitical casualties are simply temporary anomalies prevents us from confronting the ultimate truth of our era: We are observing the final dissolution of a global superpower, and the American project, as it existed, is not coming back, and the reality is this dissolution is the best possible thing for the continuation of humanity on this planet.
When will Trump be charged for his blatant misappropriation of taxpayer dollars, all done without Congressional oversight or consent? And how much of that money ended up in his personal piggy bank?
My wife, who has tried to keep her sanity by ignoring Trump, finally summed it up after reading today's news in the NYTs and on her phone; "What a disgusting human being...except for the human being part". Get everyone you know out to No Kings tomorrow. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!
The organizers are hoping for 700-1000 (very optimistically) here in Frankfurt, Germany at the Hauptwache 1300-1430. Having the largest Labor Union in Germany supporting it could improve the (very optimistic) numbers.
Uhhh...wait. There are "No Kings" marches in Germany? Expats? Actually, it would be great if they were just Germans! Like if people all around the world were telling Trump he sucked...that would be awesome.
Based upon my guesstimate from the first two, 40-60 ex-Pats, the rest being German or other nationalities. And with the largest German Union supporting the Demonstration, could be even closer to parity. If you do not believe it, here is the link that the organizers have established for live coverage (German time, of course, only 5 hours ahead of East Coast US since you are already on DST, we only start this weekend) is: www.youtube.com/@ResistanceRoundtable-Frankfurt.
Oh, I believe you!
Dear Donald Trump,
The United States was the leader of the free world for 80 or more years. As such, we--the rest of the world--get a vote too in your leadership.
Our say: You suck biggly.
Regards,
Everyone
I will be at NO KINGS tomorrow as I was at I and II. I am still uncertain as to the impact of these "get togethers" which have been, for the most part, peaceful, civil and only gently confrontational. To be honest, I would like to see more real anger, more loud vocalization of contempt for the continued destruction of what remains of our liberal democracy. I would like to see Democratic leaders, representatives and officials turn out in droves and condemn the Trump regime while embracing focused and aggressive measures to combat Maga and the Republican Party. Perhaps it is time to consider such actions as economic boycotts, general strikes, withholding taxes and a physical descent on Washington by the millions of Americans who simply have had enough of Donald Trump.
Why do you consider it an either/or? I and plenty of people I know are constantly doing both.
Isn't, at the moment, "Democratic leaders" a non-starter? Who and where are they?
But,it is certainly time to not just talk about, but actively support economic boycotts of the Broligarchs Money Machines, although many people can't join, since they depend upon deliveries from, e.g., Amazon, given where they live or their own personal situations.
I’d say that the President’s decision to escalate our presence in Iraq, with troops on the ground and increasing their number, shows that he has forgotten the most basic lesson of Vietnam. But he’d have to be smart enough to have learned it in the first place. We see no evidence of that.
Everything we’ve witnessed so far tells us that the only thing he knows (er, believes) is that if you bomb the enemy hard enough and often enough, everything will work out just fine in the end. But the true takeaway from Vietnam was that if the enemy can wait you out long enough, they will win, because they know that someday we will have to go home. They can drain our armaments and oblige us to overspend our vast wealth and turn public opinion until someday the war ultimately becomes an unwinnable battle. Our current leader seems fundamentally ignorant of this most basic lesson from our biggest military and political quagmire, one that happened in our lifetime. There are no excuses not to be aware. Yet here we are, going down those same roads yet again but expecting a very different outcome. As some of our longtime (former?) friends elsewhere might say: not bloody likely, mate.
The President is breaking it. We all own it. The rest of the world pays a price for something it did not seek to buy. MAGA begins to feel the pain, even if they won’t admit it or place the blame where it belongs. They were warned. They chose not to listen. Placed into the increasingly thick and heavy file of: “Choices and Consequences, Trump.”
Trump learned the lesson of Vietnam while it was still in progress— He didn't go!
Yes, the lesson he learned from Vietnam is whine and tell people you're rich, and they'll give you anything you want. Also, lying pays.
see also: Afghanistan and the Taliban.
And Russia and Afghanistan. And Russia and Ukraine.
Bay of Pigs. Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The War of 1812.
I mean, really in the long run, how often does any of this war shit work out?
…France in IndoChina, Britain & the Boers…
The lesson for the rest of the world is the risk of being tied too closely to the United States will make you touch the stove whether you thought that a good idea or not. It isn’t clear American voters and those in the cult will ever have a stove touching moment of clarify, but the rest are realizing that sticking to close to the United States could get you sent to the burn unit. They will still find us useful and important, but want to keep just enough distance to keep from being forced onto the stove.
"MAGA begins to feel the pain, even if they won’t admit it or place the blame where it belongs. They were warned. They chose not to listen. Placed into the increasingly thick and heavy file of: “Choices and Consequences, Trump.""
Actions --> Consequences. Now and forever.
But I fear there is a gross misunderstanding of what the cause is for the effect. There's not a lot of critical thinking skills out there.
What is this "critical thinking" you speak of?
Well, if I had any I could tell you but rumor is that it is a rare thing only found among Bulwark readers
I seem to recall that they understood this when they won in 2016.
"Elections have consequences", remember?
Saying something isn't the same as understanding something.
Elections have consequences for thee, not for me.
The very definition of insanity.
I will be at the rally tomorrow.
He's just doing what he has done in his business interactions. Pushed whatever situation to the brink, in some cases over it, in order to personally benefit, regardless of the cost to the other side. Now he's doing this with our military and our money. Since he himself generally made out in the past, he must think that he will still make out.
His whole life experience has been that he can make it out of any situation he puts himself in. All he has had to do is lie, lie some more, threaten, extort, delay, sue, play the media, and, if all else fails, file for bankruptcy. The odds are 30% it won't work this time. But until a critical mass of the power elites cease to fear his cult, he will never suffer personal consequences.
I agree. As for me, I both want to stop suffering his consequences and for him to suffer them personally. If that could be made to happen......
The offal in the Oval is ignorant of everything. I don't know if he's ever been anything else.
His big sister Marianne did his homework for him. He hired a guy to take the SAT's. Defectors during ver. 1 remarked that he is not only stupid but ignorant and incurious.
One thing this Iran war has in common with Vietnam, and also Afghanistan, is that it was not declared by Congress. If he even did start using the word “war” instead of “excursion”, what would be the consequence for him? It’s not like Pam Bondi is going to arrest him.
Deutschmeister - learning a lesson generally involves touching the stove OR seeing how someone else is affected by their touching of it. Since he was well insulated from any personal consequences of vietnam and pays no attention to others’ losses, he had no way to learn anything. A person with some curiosity about their world might still have grasped some passing details, but that’s another attribute he lacks. Turns out for a national leader this is sub-optimal as far as the rest of us are concerned
I'm convinced that the bulk of his foreign policy is based on 80s action movies.
Trump said it himself, loud and clear: He does not care.
(Of course, we here all have none that since the beginning of this entire shitshow).
of course private Bone Spurs knows nothing about war.....
In the flurry of activity regarding the non-war war, DON'T FORGET EPSTEIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
People are talking way less about Epstein since the war began. Operation Epstein Fury has succeeded in that regard.
The problem is that all politicians are like moths to a flame. I saw Ro Khanna interviewed the other day. All Iran no Epstein. He, more than anyone, should never utter a sentence without having Epstein in it. I thought he lived for the victims?
Me thinks Congress member Khanna lives most of all for media attention.
It's working for now, but when you consider that they tried to park this to the side back in 2008 and it's continued to come back, time and time again...
It's not going away.
Watching Trump and his billionaire accomplices make money off the blood and sacrifice of Americans brave enough to serve is infuriating. Trump and his followers are filth.
Andrew: "In her ruling, Judge Rita Lin temporarily blocked the government from enforcing its designation as the case continues in court, offering a harsh assessment of the administration’s behavior as she did so: Anthropic, she wrote, appeared to have been “punished for criticizing the government’s contracting opinion in the press.”"
Umberto Eco popped into my head after reading this:
"No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason."
Oh man, I would love to have Eco still alive and be able to comment on the world today.
Y'all are slaying me with these footnotes. Footnote #2? Chef's kiss.
Thank you for finding some way to inject levity into an otherwise bleak story. I work in public admin, and the violence done to the civil service under Trump 2.0 is both evil and stupid. Like a kid destroying another kid's sandcastle, Trump took 100+ years of civil service reforms and kicked it all down.
Sociopaths will behave like sociopaths. Trump's being true to who and what he is.
Merit systems are the antidote to political patronage, and the first federal civil service statute was enacted in 1883, about a decade after Boss Tweed went to prison. Teddy Roosevelt was Commissioner from 1889 to 1895. Vought and Trump mean to make Boss Tweed look like a Boy Scout.
HE didn't build it, so he doesn't want it to exist.
He doesn't care if he built it. He wants his name on it and a cut of the profits.
"Trump seemed more agile, more canny, more inventive in his first term. Agree or disagree? Tell us why."
In the first term, their were a few people around him that wouldn't have worn the Florsheim's.
Yes, in T1.0 there was a lot of "yeah, we're not doing that" upon leaving an insane meeting.
So it wasn't that Trump was more agile, canny and inventive in his first term. It was that there were people around him that successfully stopped him from doing some of the crazy stuff he's doing now. And... he seems to be increasingly suffering from dementia. Great situation for his minions, who surely know this, to continue to bootlick.
If the shoe fits…??
If the shoe doesn’t fit, wear it!
I don't think he was much different in 1.0 which was and still is an exposed nerve reacting to stimuli and his own deep seated (but few) beliefs. The Cabinet and staff around him were more traditional in how they thought a president should behave and thwarted him in subtle ways. Maybe some of the thwarting directed him in ways that made him appear to be more canny?
In a nutshell...
perfect
Nobody who knows anything willingly wears Florsheim.
Trump makes these apparently stupid political moves in large part because he doesn’t care about the Republican Party, governing or anything except himself and making money from his office.
I have to add, "...and staying out of jail or being impeached."
Staying out of jail, hard yes. On impeachment, not so much. Even his demented brain knows he committed impeachable behavior, yet he keeps doing more of it anyway. His real fear is losing the midterms because then he will get impeached, and of course losing the Senate brings a guilty verdict much closer to reality. However, he has done everything in his power to keep the Epstein files out of sight, because those do mean prison.
It is asbsolutely mind-boggling to think that even a demented person would start a war in a effort to make everyone forget about personal pedophile predilictions of the present puerile president. (Is my love of alliteration showing?😏)
A demented malignant narcissist is not your run of the mill person. This one is hell bent on getting his name plastered everywhere, plus prizes and gold statues. Those pesky Epstein files would ruin everything. What's a war compared to that?
Just heard reporting that he's getting his signature added to our money. Not sure if it will be all denominations, though.
I hope lots of people take a sharpie to black out his signature. Though his response would be to declare a national emergency at this 'insurrection'. We're morphing bit by bit into North Korea
Awesome alliteration against an addled autocrat
I have always thought that "fire in the belly" that politicians are supposed to have is slightly demented.
Simply having been unfaithful to one wife or another with a woman "on the younger side" would not elicit this reaction: He used to work at having that kind of behavior revealed in the tabloids. As you suggest, it's got to be statutory rape and/or trafficking.
Money laundering.
Yes. What he did for decades as an associate of he Russian mob.
Ha Colleen -- I initially read "...those do mean prison" as a qualitative assessment of the pedophile incarceration experience rather than a statement about probability. To my delight, it works both ways. Thanks!
Sadly, we seem to be heading toward a point where they will have to release the Epstein files in order to distract us from an effing disastrous war.
What's a functional toddler to do? Use a Magic 8 ball I guess.
Can't wait for the Brits to demand Bondi send them the unredacted files as they determine whether to prosecute the formerly known as Prince Andrew for more than spreading state secrets around for fun and profit. Seems our toddler in chief has done similar spreading of state secrets.
I seriously doubt he is worried about impeachment. TBH, I do not think you could get a guilty vote in the Senate if you had 61 Democratic Senators--because i seriously doubt that Fetterman would vote to convict. Probably one or more others as well.
Unless they openly cheat the midterms, they are going to lose the House. I have no idea WRT the Senate. That, ultimately, isn't going to actually mean much.
VP Vance will swear in new Senators. I can easily see him not swearing in Senators elected via "fraud."
I foresee a lot of fraud accusations after the midterms and a long delay in seating Democrats in the House and Senate.
Fetterman has become bizarre.
Fetterman was and is a populist and so he is doing what a populist in his situation, with his constituency (which is more Trumpian than not) would do.
I grew up in Western PA. I was back there during COVID because my mother had a (non-covid) medical emergency and I had to deal with that for about 6 months.
Outside of major metropolitan areas, PA is deep red. DEEP red.
They were always that way—it is just that it used to match up with teh Democrats when I was a kid, not the GoP—now things have flipped.
Absolutely - that as well!
And getting phony awards. I am beginning to think they all know he’s going to die soon, so they keep giving him these childish awards to make him feel better.
This is so well put and astute--the fact that this regime considers everything a hill to die on, yet is inept, ham-handed and invariably wrong for America on every front. The reason this is different from his first disastrous term--redefining disastrous--is that he has surrounded himself with idiots in his own image, from fore to aft, and his dementia has progressed. An egregious one-two punch that only Putin could love.
He managed to surround himself with people who are even stupider than he is. That's what he was doing the 4 years he was out of office.
Well, no. he has surrounded himself with some people who are dumber than he is--but also a fair number of people who are more than willing to act that dumb in order to be SecState, for example.
So absolutely true.
Reading footnote #3, I'm suddenly imagining an oil tanker size Leg in a Fishnet Stocking table lamp like the one in the 1983 movie 'A Christmas Story' passing slowly through the Straight of Hormuz. Trump on the shore smiling appreciatively and nodding his head.
Trump's big prize that he bragged about was other countries getting oil through the Strait when we can't and then charging us a lot of money for that oil. Do I have that right?
I'm wondering if he needs to be applauded every time he takes a poop.
He certainly needs someone to change his diaper + wipe, powder and perfume his ass. But I think that person only works M-F and goes home sick a lot.
I wouldn't doubt it.
I think the present Trump is referring is, as he stated, we do great when the cost of oil is high!
Iran is making bank on the higher selling price of oil. Which then goes to Asia where it's either used for fuel or as feedstock for products that get sold to us (at higher cost).
Disguising it as an Italian ship (the "Fragile") was brilliant!
"It's a major award!!!"
I read Morning Shots and I'm heartened. Oil prices are skyrocketing. Trump's approval rating is underwater. Senate Republicans cave to Democrat demands. A Federal Court in California rules against Hegseth. Everything's going the right direction.
And then I look around...
Oil, this morning, is $97.16/bbl. A week ago, it was $99.21. It is not skyrocketing. It's hit a plateau just below $100/bbl.
I just watched the Senate question four nominees for lifetime, federal judgeships. Tell me Donald Trump doesn't have them on a short leash. https://youtu.be/3YGBY4uFx8M?si=mYseW9iw0LcWH9UD He owns the judiciary. They'll lie for him. They'll debase themselves for him. They do his bidding while making themselves look ridiculous. It's worth it to them. They're not worried about any kind of sanction, professional or personal. An adverse ruling in California? "Activist judge. No big deal. We'll win in the Supreme Court." And they will.
The war's going badly? How, exactly? The number of American casualties is low. Aside from higher gas prices, there's no impact on American life and the fluffers in Trump Media World will convince his base that a little higher gas prices is the price to pay to avoid nuclear annihilation. And, besides, if Kamala Harris had won, American sons and daughters would be fighting over there, trans kids would be competing in the Olympics, illegal aliens would be murdering everybody while they take American jobs and buy up all the houses that they pay for with their welfare checks.
The Wall Street Journal and Fox News are telling everyone how great everything is 24/7.
Oh, but what about the farmers? They'll have to pay more for fertilizer! Where are all those stories? Even MSNOW can't find the farmer who regrets his vote for Trump. He paid them off with $12 billion of our money. They're happy. They got their welfare checks, all those rugged individualists.
So, yeah, I'm going to Chicago tomorrow to, in my little way, petition my government for the redress of grievances, but while I'm doing that, Jared will be over in the Middle East making some crypto deal with the people we're bombing that'll put billions in his pocket and we'll be stuck here happy that some Democrat nobody'd heard of until yesterday is representing Mar-A-Lago in the FL legislature.
It's time to take up day drinking.
I think your misery might be due, in part, to unrealistic expectations. People are loath to admit they've made a mistake. And the more catastrophic the mistake, the less likely they are to offer a mea culpa. And doing so publicly to an MSNOW reporter will be exceedingly rare.
This is purely anecdotal, but my retired MAGA neighbors next door thought one of them was going to have to get a part-time job at Buckee's (a Texas gas station the size of a Walmart) to afford their health insurance (the wife is 1 year too young to qualify for Medicare). Have they said they regret voting for Trump? No. But clearly, he is making their lives harder. The same couple also spends several months a year traveling the country in an RV. Let's see if they go anywhere this Spring or Summer with diesel prices on the rise. I'm betting the RV stays in storage most of the year.
Well, I hope they detect that the changes in their lives are due in some way to Trump.
If I had to guess, I suspect they'd say it's all Biden's fault. Trump inherited a God-awful mess and it's taking some time for him to turn it around, especially since the Radical Left Lunatic Democrats keep gumming up the works with all their nonsense.
I think I'll change my view when I see a real electoral change. I want to see a red state turn blue. Ohio used to be a swing state. So was Florida. If that swing happens again and I start to see more Republicans like Thomas Massie starting to assert their independence, then I'll believe something is happening. If one or two of those judicial nominees didn't make it through their confirmations because they're demonstrated liars, that would change my mind. I don't have a lot of hope.
dcicero - living in AZ 2014-2025 we saw red to purple, most recent statewide elections went pretty Dem. Many reasons. Not every state Republican party will put up candidates so… undesirable? Not every state has an influx of Californians and refugees from colder/bluer climes like WA state and MN. But miracles do happen. Grateful I got to be part of that one.
https://youtu.be/8v9Np4mh3tc?si=j6L3y4uYbD2Yrm4U
He owns the judiciary. They'll lie for him. They'll debase themselves for him. They do his bidding while making themselves look ridiculous. It's worth it to them. They're not worried about any kind of sanction, professional or personal. An adverse ruling in California? "Activist judge. No big deal. We'll win in the Supreme Court." And they will.
I've tried to make the point before that he ran for President in 2015 because he had the courts in his pocket. If he didn't, he wouldn't have run for office. But his greatest power has always been manipulation of the legal system, and masks are off at the Supreme Court.
I suspect personally that the Supreme Court is going to ram through as many of Leonard Leo's priorities as they can before Pope Leo bans Opus Dei and the American Catholic schism begins.
You know, DC, when you put it that way, {clinks glass} Cheers!
Great summation. I suggest a nice rosé.
Bourbon. That's the way to go.
I've never read "Art of the Deal", but from what I can tell, Trump's version of a good deal (whether with congressional Democrats, our trading partners, or a country we're waging war against) is that he gets everything he wants and they get nothing. He also wants to be able to call "backsies" if and when he later regrets the deal.
Essentially, yes.
Remember the wonderful, best renegotiation and renaming of NAFTA back in T1.0? Best ever? And then about how it was a shit deal in T 2.0? He has done that his entire life.
Andrew states the administration had the cards regarding the funding of DHS and their dealings with Anthropic, except the administration does not know what cards they have. We are working with people who have no idea what cards they’ve been dealt and play whatever comes to mind at the moment. There is no strategy, now shrewdness and there no card sharks in this mess. They can’t even cheat at cards because they don’t know what they are doing. Their only moves are based on power ‘because the president says x’, but when that has its limits and runs into gravity he merely TACO’s. Trump doesn’t bluff the way card player does because he is too emotionally transparent. He only knows might and power and when that doesn’t work he TACO’s and goes off into the corner to sulk. You can’t play cards when they are a jumbled mess out in front for everyone to see.
Trump's poker play is he pulls out a gun and demands the other players fold, but it turns out the gun is a water pistol, and all the other players need to do to win is call the bluff because Trump will have distractedly eaten his cards so they win by default.
That was certainly his thoughts on Iran. Straight of Hormuz? No biggie the Iranians will be on their knees begging me for a deal long before that will happen. Well quelle suprise.
"52 Card Pickup". Third grade all the way.
I’d argue ‘Go Fish’, but Hegseth would blow up the boat…
Yep except I'd call it "force" rather than "power."
I know this won’t be popular, but I think there is a critical missing point in this analysis. These are not losses for The Rotting Orange; they are profound losses for America. Trump is not losing. He secured his ultimate victory the moment he insulated himself from spending the rest of his life in federal prison.
His political survival is now entirely decoupled from the functional survival of the state apparatus, traditional metrics of political success and failure are rendered obsolete. Framing a judicial injunction or a capitulation on departmental funding as personal defeats for the president fundamentally misreads his incentive structure.
I wrote in early 2025 (and it is more true today) about an uncomfortable reality we are now confronting in America, that we have become the bad guy. The degradation of our institutional authority is not a tactical failure for the executive; it is the collateral damage of a system prioritizing personal impunity over state capacity. Consequently, the public has been forced into a profound democratic crisis, psychologically positioned to root against its own government. When the executive branch internalizes adversarial reflexes against its own citizens, workforce, and domestic industries, the state effectively adopts a hostile posture toward its own foundations.
We are cheering these institutional failures and framing them as Trump’s losses to avoid a darker truth: We are actively rooting against America, even if we are unwilling to admit it. We find ourselves deeply alienated from the apparatus of our own country, forced to recognize that the government's tactical blunders are often the only remaining checks on its authoritarian impulses. We are watching the structural exhaustion of the American project, consistently and incorrectly coded by observers as routine political theater, while we quietly applaud our own decline.
"His political survival is now entirely decoupled from the functional survival of the state."
I think we could make the case that it always was. But I keep looking at Atlantic City, NJ, the city Trump and Christie managed, and seeing our bankrupt future. What he did to Atlantic City never mattered, did it?
Thank you, Kate, for drawing such a precise and ominous historical parallel. You are entirely correct that this decoupling is a foundational feature of his methodology rather than a recent adaptation. The Atlantic City analogue perfectly illustrates the operational model currently being applied to the federal government. The aggressive extraction of personal value, the deliberate externalization of systemic risk, and the eventual abandonment of the hollowed-out enterprise.
His destruction of that municipality ultimately yielded no personal consequences and served as the proof of concept for his executive strategy. We are now watching that exact paradigm of predatory extraction scale up from a local economy to the republic itself, confirming your fear that a profound institutional bankruptcy is the inevitable endgame.
But cheer up! Atlantic City is nearly 50% recovered, and it’s only taken 25 years.
Yup. The only bet Trump has left on the table is that he'll die before the implosion, and therefore not be adversely affected by his long list of...accomplishments. Age remains on his side.
Agree. When a leader’s operational horizon extends only to the limits of his own mortality, the long-term survival of the republic becomes entirely irrelevant.
When Trump goes he's going to leave the husk of what was America in the hands of religious zealots. Barron's going to be a hyper Christian. Or else...
That's kinda heartwarming.
Absolutely, Patrick, I find myself checking the dow jones each day and cheering when it falls. Then smacking my head, because that doesn't any of us.
Thank you for providing such a perfectly crystallizing example, Linda. Your instinctive reaction to the Dow Jones is a direct manifestation of the cognitive dissonance we are all currently enduring.
The realization that follows, the immediate acknowledgment that this market decline damages our own livelihoods, is the defining psychological trap of this era. We are caught in a paradigm where the only mechanisms that might theoretically stall authoritarian momentum require the active degradation of our own national stability. It is a profound burden to bear, constantly torn between the desire to see a corrupt system falter and the stark reality that we are standing entirely within its blast radius.
At least Pam Bondi won't be able to screech about the Dow being above 50,000 the next time she's under oath trying to avoid answering questions.
I never would have believed that I would be rooting against my own government. Don’t get me wrong—I place high value on every human life in our military and I do not celebrate their deaths. But much like dark JVL, I simply don’t know how else we will be able to reverse the damage Trump has done until a critical mass of MAGA’s feel the pain personally. I used to stress out over every insane move Trump made at the start of ver 2.0, but my husband would calmly point out that we *need* the insanity until he crosses a line that the deluded amongst us finally draw in the sand. It’s depressing
Thank you, Amy. It is a profound tragedy that engaged citizens are reduced to hoping the systemic shockwaves of this second term finally breach the cognitive dissonance of the administration's base. I have less faith in a population that has proven itself incapable of distinguishing reality from insanity.
Relying on the electorate to experience acute, localized pain before they reject the broader institutional rot requires us to tolerate immense collateral damage, including very real human costs. It is an excruciating position to maintain, recognizing that the theoretical cure for this democratic crisis currently demands the accelerated destruction of the republic we are ostensibly trying to save. It's hard not to feel the crushing weight of reality.
I don’t disagree with you, Patrick. And being ‘just a little’ pessimistic, I have another concern. When Trump loses his battle against Father Time, and his reign ends - I truly believe it will - we will be left to clean up his mess and deal with the carnage left in his wake. But will our country, our fellow citizens, have learned a damn thing from the entire debacle? I think not. I think some slim majority of our fellow citizens will look for someone to blame, and start looking for another demagogue.
Part of this quandry is that in order for the US to survive as a constitutional democracy with all of our basic rights intace, we realize someone has to put Trump in his place. Since nobody in the US seems to be able to do it (and the power elites are mostly willing to bow down to him), we hope foreign leaders will call his bluffs and dish out the consequences.
You’re right, Trump is not losing. Even if he doesn’t manage to wheedle himself into a third term, he’s the spiritual head of the Republican Party to his dying breath. He is Lifetime Chair of the Board of Peace (head villain at Villaincon), and will presumably receive a yearly stipend from that to his dying breath. He’s physically marking his territory all over Washington DC and the White House. He’s a legend in his own mind. He is golden.
Agree. If there is a singular, defining competence to the Rotting Orange's public life, it is a kind of inverted alchemy. Everything he touches is ultimately destroyed, yet he consistently emerges from the wreckage unscathed.
While his tenure is characterized by staggering administrative ineptitude and profound intellectual vacancy, it isn't total vulnerability. He possesses a highly refined reptilian instinct for self-preservation. His life is and has been dedicated entirely to evading consequence. He remains insulated and "golden," as you note, not through strategic governance, but through a predatory ability to externalize complete ruin onto the institutions and individuals that surround him, casually walking away just before the structural collapse.
I'm not sure we are rooting against America when we perceive a few battle losses. To keep from despair we look for little green shoots of life that we wish could grow into something better. It's a compensation and it's probably a healthy thing to do. I don't think we are fooling ourselves very much.
Hey Max, if I really squinted I could probabaly understand the desire to believe this position to be true. I'm afraid the psychological impulse to search for restorative signs of life is an understandable defense mechanism against despair, but categorizing the current systemic collapse as a series of manageable "battle losses" profoundly mischaracterizes the reality of our paradigm. We are not experiencing routine political setbacks that can be absorbed and corrected by a resilient republic.
To frame the current trajectory as a sequence of minor defeats requires ignoring the catastrophic empirical realities actively unfolding. The state-sanctioned murder of citizens, the loss of American military personnel for erratic and nonsensical objectives, the deliberate dissolution of our strategic alliances, and the systemic economic ruin being inflicted upon the populace are not temporary partisan skirmishes. The establishment of internment infrastructure and the total forfeiture of global hegemony represent terminal institutional failure. These are the mechanics of absolute structural destruction, not cyclical political friction.
The broader, and far more harrowing, picture is that this damage is permanent. Comforting ourselves with the illusion that these profound civic and geopolitical casualties are simply temporary anomalies prevents us from confronting the ultimate truth of our era: We are observing the final dissolution of a global superpower, and the American project, as it existed, is not coming back, and the reality is this dissolution is the best possible thing for the continuation of humanity on this planet.
A “layer cake of trauma,” describes how I feel having just read this most excellent edition MS. And I live in Canada. Sigh.
When will Trump be charged for his blatant misappropriation of taxpayer dollars, all done without Congressional oversight or consent? And how much of that money ended up in his personal piggy bank?
trump always gets his cut.
When? Never. How much? Too much.