Category: Trump Second Term

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The Dark Quarter — With winter comes dark and scary

The Dark Quarter

With winter comes dark and scary

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 31st 2026

There’s a period on the Celtic calendar, beginning around November 4th (Samhain) and ending around February 3rd (Imbolc) that I think of as “the dark quarter.” Days are at their shortest on average in that period, culminating in the winter solstice.

In the North, the sun is a distant memory, and even here in more temperate climes, the solar panels exist only to shield the roof from rain and snow. For most people it’s a time of getting up in chilly dark mornings and going to bed long after the sun has set. It’s a merciless time for people with seasonal affective disorder. Even dogs get depressed.

For those of us who are early risers and / or have cats in the house, reverting to standard time gives some respite; for myself, sunrise today according to my dumb clock, is 7:40 AM. Tomorrow’s sunrise will be at 6:41 AM. Sunrise’s latest morning here is January 4th, at 7:34 AM. So while the universe may have other ideas, our political latest morning of the year was today. Yuck.

If we were to stay on permanent Daylight Savings Time like Trump wants, sunrise in early January would be well after 8:30 AM. The further north you go the worse it gets until you reach the Arctic circle, at which point it’s moot what your clock thinks; the sun has had enough of this shit and is in hibernation.

While the biannual time change takes the edge of the diurnal vagueries caused by our axial tilt (yes, MAGAts, it really is a globe and it really goes around the sun!) the medical and economic costs of the time change are manifest. By now you might have guessed that I’m not a fan of permanent Daylight Savings Time, but in fairness, being on Standard Time permanently has its own drawbacks. The long summer evenings would be an hour shorter, and the earliest sunrises would be around 4:35 AM, a time most people associate with baker’s hours or the dog throwing up in the kitchen.

That said, it’s time for a clumsy and jarring segue; America is about to enter its own darkest quarter. (OK, so “dog throwing up in the kitchen” is at least a transitional phrase!). The election will be November 3rd, and if the polls are to be believed, Republicans will be swept from power in the House, and in all likelihood, the Senate. In normal times, that would occasion a sigh of relief and a return to the liberal standards that made the United States the envy of the world.

But these aren’t normal times. The President is a madman propped up and succored by some of the vilest capitalistic fascists this side of the Third Reich. Trump won’t accept the results of the election. We can say that much for certain. And the people behind him, including most of his cabinet along with billionaires such as Elon Musk won’t mind sacrificing as many of us as it takes in order to secure power.

Rumors are rife, of course. Among the ones I’ve heard this week: he plans a massive escalation of military action, up to and including nuking Tehran, or conducting a lightning invasion of Greenland. He will contest any and all election results that result in election losses, including the ridiculous “Don Simpsons” case in Alaska. He may try to seize ballots. There’s a chance he’ll deploy ICE and even the military to voting polling places. He may order his dog Mike Johnson to not allow the new Congress to convene. He may unilaterally implement policies ruinous to the United States and its people, but highly profitable for himself. He might simply flee to Russia armed with America’s remaining military and diplomatic secrets, a down payment on a lush dacha. He may try to instigate a major insurrection and declare martial law. Any and all of these possibilities are in the air, and should not be simply dismissed.

And yes, none of them may come to pass, and I’ll be very happy if that happens. But I’m not going to pretend they can’t happen, and of course those are only the “known unknowns”.

We do know that the drunken and incompetent Pete Hegseth has fired most of America’s military leadership, including a fresh round just this week. We know that he has had anti-aircraft batteries installed around Mar-a-Lago, although with drones capable of reaching Florida across the Atlantic or anywhere in North America, that’s probably a sensible precaution. We know that some of the most damaging elements of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” will come into effect, ruining millions of lives in America. And it’s not just rumor to say that he is desperate and probably frightened; it’s been obvious from his ongoing temper tantrums at his rallies and the disturbing increase of neurological tics and twitches and lack of physical and emotional control that are disturbing signs of dementia.

The dark quarter will end in January when the new Congress is seated, and if we haven’t stumbled into the world’s first for-profit world war, or had the military seize state capitols. Unless Trump has fled the country or died (my favorite rumor since it involves the least bloodshed and trauma) danger will remain. For a balanced evaluation of these rumors, visit today’s Guardian.

And of course the billionaire class will still be there, and still present its own grave danger to America. Polls suggest that they have spent enough money to defeat the billionaire tax that is on the California budget, and I will say this: no people who believe the ultra-wealthy should be coddled and obeyed can ever call themselves ‘free’. At best, they are vassals. Jefferson and Madison recognized the danger of such an aristocratic class. Jefferson even urged Madison to include in the Constitution a 100% Estate tax, arguing that “land should belong, in usufruct, to the living.” After Trump is gone, the billionaires will remain, a far more intelligent and subtle enemy.

But for now, let’s sigh and change our clocks, and hope we’re all around at the far end of our darkest quarter.

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Aprés le deluge — As Trump falls, we must rise

Aprés le deluge

As Trump falls, we must rise

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 25th, 2026

David Brin wrote to some unknown person on Facebook yesterday: I have got to repost this utter MALARKEY! If you issue a sanctimonious yowl like this one, while knowing nothing at all about how hard Bernie+AOC+Liz worked WITH Pelosi+Biden+Schomer in 2021-22… the one year in the last 20 when democrats had power, then all you are is a self-righteous ignoramus.

These are strong, smart people, fighting for us daily and WE LET THEM DOWN, not the other way around!

Try actually knowing something before yowling your smarmy righteous trap, hm? You could start here https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2019/08/five-devastating-rebuttals-to-use-with.html

Am I pleased with them? Not entirely. They are horrible tacticians. Are YOU better?

Try out my own proposed Newer Deal tactics and reforms

https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-contract-part-three-aggressive.html

Me: Do you propose we just forgive and forget the Trump administration?

Brin: You can go to hell. Masturbatory sanctimony is not restricted to MAGA. I have worked harder and more effectively against the madness on any given day than you have in the last YEAR and yet you are SO righteous! Whatever. If you are not a Kremlin bot you might as well be.

Me: In these times, telling me to go to hell is probably superfluous. You’re a better writer than that. But it’s a legitimate question: should we just forgive and forget?

OK, for anyone who thought the exchange is a bit startling, Brin and I go back a decade, and we’ve always had a contentious relationship. I suspect he thinks of me as some wet-behind-the-ears college sophomore with a single class in polisci, and he in the role of the irascible and hidebound professor from The Practice Effect.

The thing about Brin is he likes to challenge people to think. That why he does what he does for a living, and he’s very good at it. I’ve been reading him for 40 years, and a fair chuck of my philosophy grew from his observations. He hasn’t posted a reply as of now, but anything beyond “I’m David Brin and you’re not” I’ll be sure to include.

So: the issue was whether we should forgive and forget with the Trump regime. My answer in a nutshell is “Forgive? Sometimes. Forget? Never. But this regime must go.”

It’s the day after the election, and despite Trump and Elon’s best efforts, the Dems have gained 40 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate (which is what the conservative reading of the polls suggests.). They have clear working majorities in both houses. The notion of Trump wielding unchallenged and nearly absolute authority has ended, and an era has effectively ended.

Now, it may be amusing to consider little old ladies sitting around knitting while the guillotines chop, chop, chop, but remember—it took France decades just to achieve the hideously poor standard of living it had before the revolution, and the bloodshed didn’t stop with les aristos. Revolutions may be stirring, but are always a shit idea. Even the American revolution, lauded as a “successful revolution” involved at least one subsequent government collapse, widespread popular revolts, and about 40 years before living standards for the plebs reached the levels they enjoyed under the oppressive English. I’m not praising the blood and horror and terror; I’m just pointing out that even without them, revolutions never work out well for at least decades. So let’s put post-revolutionary bloodbaths on the back burner, OK?

The flip side is excessive forgiveness. People point to the Civil War and Reconstruction as a gleaming example of how “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” bound up the nation’s wounds. But Lincoln got shot, and his successor, a southern Democrat, helped to dismantled the social progressive ideas that might have actually reformed the South, and as a result, we’re still fighting that fucking war in myriad ways.

Ford’s pardon of Nixon was a body blow to America: rather than heal, it grievously hurt the long-held belief that government could always be held accountable, and the Republicans learned they Could Get Away With It. Treason was already on their minds:

Nixon’s subversion of the Paris peace talks got him elected and extended the war two more years to no gain. He didn’t pay for that.

Reagan subverted negotiations over the hostage crisis, arranging with gleeful Iranian ayatollahs to delay the release of the hostages until after the election. He paid no price.

Reagan traded arms for hostages, and some of those arms led to the massacre of over 200 Marines in Beirut a few years later. He paid no price.

George Bush Jr ginned up wars with Afghanistan and Iraq, on the totally ersatz ground that Afghanistan was involved in 9/11 and Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He paid no price.

Is it any wonder that Trump and the fascists propping up his regime felt no compunctions about running roughshod over all laws and decency and honor? They are convinced nobody would make them pay.

Brin is furious that people don’t trust New Democrats to finally make a stand and make the fascists pay for their undeniable crimes. “But they are with us on social democracy and justice and the working class and human rights!” he might say. But when it come to fighting the enemies of those laudable ideals, their track record, going all the way back to the Nixon impeachment, has been pitiful. Brin can point to the indisputable accomplishments we’ve seen under Clinton and Obama and Biden, but when it was time to stand for what is right rather than just what is politically popular, most Democratic office holders folded. They couldn’t withstand corporate money and religious fevers and the endless stream of lies from the far right. They couldn’t stand and deliver a stentorian shout of “THIS IS BULLSHIT!” Long after they needed righteous rage, they were mumbling about “taking the high road” against an adversary who sees decency as a weakness.

This may be their best, and possibly final, chance to address that.

The first thing they need to do is assure the general population and surviving Republicans (and the masters the Republicans serve) that efforts to subvert or nullify the results will be met with resistance up to and including street riots, such as the storming of the Parliament that saved South Korean democracy in 2024. These efforts are illegal, treasonous, and the people reserve the right to oppose such by all means necessary. “The tree of liberty…” and so on. We won’t be fighting against the United States; we will be fighting to restore it.

Once the new Congress is installed, the time has come to end the Trump regime once and for all. And the way to do that is by trying the entire Trump administration for treason.

The Constitution reads: Article II, Section 4 says: The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Now add this: Article III, Section 3, 2 which says: The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

This means that on majority votes, the Senate can remove Trump, Vance, and the Cabinet in one fell swoop.

This doesn’t mean mass executions or even punishment: it limits the consequences to removal from office. Criminal trials, if any, will fall under the purview of the judicial system and by existing law, which is as it should be.

This means the Speaker of the House to become President, and with concurrence of the Senate, select a new vice president.

Then begins the tedious process of clearing out the corruption in all the government agencies. As a matter of precedence, all Senate appointees turn in resignations upon the seating of a new administration. The new Senate will have the ability to reappoint or not.

All agencies, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security in particular, must evaluate all persons employed under the Trump regime, and if they have not meet the standards for employment established by law before Trump, be on probationary status until they can meet the requirements, including background checks, educational attainment requirements, and demonstrations of general competence and knowledge for the jobs they hold. All resignations will be accepted “without prejudice.” Yes, some evil bastards may skate, but a lot more bastards and incompetents will accept the deal for the sake of a quiet life without stigma.

Trump appointed judges will deserve scrutiny from various existing judicial review boards, but don’t assume all, or even many such appointees are corrupt. In Trump’s endless interactions with the legal system, most Trump-appointed judges involved have proved honest. The Supreme Court, on the other hand…well, start with inviting them to resign, and we can go from there.

Only after this is under way can political life as we know it return. Democratic centrists and the social democratic left differ not so much in the right directions to take, but rather how far we need to go on each trajectory. Our differences are political, not existential.

If I can make that distinction, then I’m certain Brin can as well.

I once had a comic piece in which I had a city planner in blitz-torn London saying, “First we destroy the Nazi monster. Then we debate what colour to paint the fire hydrants.” We’re at the “destroy-Nazi-monster” stage. The fire hydrants are tomorrow’s debates, and we won’t need to destroy any monsters in doing so.

Americans need to fight like wolverines to save the country now. Save the country, then we can worry about what it’s going to take to fix the damage.

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The Fall of Trump — He will not go gentle into that good night

The Fall of Trump

He will not go gentle into that good night

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 15th, 2026

Does this sound like a sane man?

“Somebody leaked, some sleazebag,” said Trump. “They ought to go to jail and be shot for the rest of their life. They should be in jail. Leakers should be — in my opinion, leakers should be shot. They should be shot. In the old days, we used to shoot leakers. You know, leakers should be dealt with very, very strongly. They’re real to me. They’re the scum of the Earth!”

He also said this: “We had a rigged election. But because we did so well—we actually won by millions and millions of votes. It was just rigged. They rigged it through COVID and other things.” He was talking about the 2020 election, which was held while he was President.

Then there’s the openly racist garbage: “Barack Hussein Obama got into college for different reasons than you did. He’s not a smart guy.” [Italics mine]

This is stuff Trump said while barnstorming for Republicans in the past few days. He’s also been mocking the guy who climbed into a tiger enclosure in a Yorkshire zoo and was killed, despite pleas from the deceased’s family for him to stop.

Despite denying it, he did press the DoJ to open a politically-motivated “investigation” of Ilhan Omar, congresswoman from Minnesota. Supposedly, the date of her entry was falsified thus making her citizenship null and void. I suspect that her real crimes were those of representing Minnesota (Trump hates Minnesota almost as much as he hates California), being from Somalia, being a female, and openly opposing Trump. Trump has mused on the notion of revoking naturalized citizenship of anyone suspected of a crime. In Trump’s mind, crimes include being a Democrat, being a woman, having dark skin and/or not being a Nationalist Christian.

He’s claimed, falsely, that Greenland has agreed to allow unlimited oil and gas exploration and extraction for the US. Similar false claims include that gas prices have plummeted (they shot up 9% last month), that there is no inflation (now up to 3.7% admitted to by a now-compromised Department of Labor. (Due to an influx of Trump loyalists, nearly all branches of the government, the Department of Justice in particular, are now compromised).

He’s also promising prices will plummet. That’s called ‘deflation’ and any economist will tell you that counterintuitively, it’s not a good thing. This chart tracks price changes month by month going all the way back to 1913. Negative numbers signify “prices plummeting” and they don’t correlate with particularly happy times in US economic history. Most of them are 1930-1934. Either Trump is too stupid to understand basic economics (likely) or he thinks you’re too stupid to understand them (almost certainly).

Forget for a moment the breath-taking corruption (he personally has raked in some four billion dollars while president as his buddies and fellow grifters among the 400 billionaires in America rape the country to death). Forget the savage attempts to censor any speech critical of him, and his administration’s efforts to let a few right wing billionaires utterly control all American media. Forget his efforts to drive away allies while cozying up to the worst dictators in the world. He even seeks to emulate dictators he professes to hate. His recently-abandoned efforts to stage a public execution of the Fort Hood shooter put him in a small list of other countries with public executions: Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Forget his berserk foreign policies and abuse of tariffs. Did you know Canada was the leading exporter of diesel fuel to the US until this year? Remember that as you spend $150 to tank up.

Even if you overlook all of the things that have already gravely injured the United States and threaten to destroy the country altogether, there is this: He was already morally corrupt, has severe psychological problems including narcissism and sociopathy, and was the ultimate child of privilege, exempt from all consequences for his actions and who, as an adult, is unlikely to have ever had to pump his own gas or buy his own groceries, let alone care what they cost. Now he has dementia to boot. His impulse control and ability to cope with even simple problems is slipping rapidly. Just the three quotes above from the past few days show how bad it’s gotten.

If he ever did have to do his own driving, people around him would be hiding the car keys from him, and I doubt he could pass a DMV license renewal test.

Right now, he’s also scared. It’s penetrated his self-imposed bubble that the voters hate him in record numbers, and they are going to punish the party of liars, grifters and cowards that have enabled him for the past decade. For perhaps the first time in his life, he’s facing the possibility of consequences, and, being mad and senile, is convinced that he is the innocent victim in all this, and must do anything and everything to prevent his enemies from defeating him.

If the election goes as expected and the GOP lose control o the House and possibly the Senate, expect him to pull out all the stops. He will be absolutely willing to destroy the country, possibly kill many people, in a wild effort to save his own ass. The election won’t end the danger; it will bring it to the fore.

He’s at his most dangerous. Plan accordingly.

 

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Consent of the Governed — …and the dog that didn’t bark

Consent of the Governed

…and the dog that didn’t bark

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 18th 2026

Trump’s prime time ‘big speech’ about saving American democracy Thursday drew a total of 580,000 viewers. That’s about one in every 600 Americans. You would have to go back to the days of Truman, when maybe one in 50 households even had a television, to get numbers like that.

Two of the major networks, ABC and NBC, didn’t air the speech at all. CBS, which has a well deserved reputation for being servile to Trump, aired part of the speech, and then cut away, ironically just after Trump demanded that his FCC lift the broadcast licenses for ABC and NBC. Fox and MSNow carried part of the speech and then cut away—MSNow to fact-check the lies, Fox because they realized Trump was doing himself no favors. Newsmax ran with it, of course and as for OANN…oh, who the fuck cares? They probably ran it. They have nowhere to go, and when Trump goes down, they probably will too.

The average ratings for the combined stations that ran the speech probably ran into the tens of millions combined. And if there are any Trump supporters normally watching ABC or NBC in the first place, they would have switched to Fox or Newsmax to watch the speech, right? So it’s safe to say that not only did half the available stations not air the speech, but the remaining stations saw their ratings depressed because they did air it. I know that I normally watch Jen Psaki’s show, and when it went to Trump, I went and watched Netflix instead.

Even more curious was the fact that aside from a few relatively isolated whines, the MAGAsphere was pretty quiet about a situation they normally would be screaming of censorship by the enemies of their beloved leader. (One clear sign of a cult is when the leader is pure, noble, above reproach, and also has enemies everywhere).

Fox News, which promoted the notion of election fraud for years before the defamation suits started landing, had this, and this only, to say about Trump’s speech on election fraud: “We are not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the President’s statements and claims at this time.”

Among elected Republicans expecting catastrophe in the November midterms, the reaction seems to be “Nobody watched it? Hmm. Just as well, really.” It was “The dog that did not bark in the night.”

Trump claims 82% of Americans think the 2020 election was stolen, but polls show the number is 30%, and I’m guessing the actual number is lower because to admit Trump lost fair and square would make a person a pariah in the GOP. Did that 30% (or smaller number of true believers) raise hell about the speech not being aired? They did not.

That nobody watched the speech is telling. That very few complained of censorship is damning. This whole episode shows how weak Trump’s grasp on the reins of power has become.

I’ve been saying for some time that when support for Trump collapsed, it would be rapid and a very dangerous time. Like the Soviet Union in 1989, Trump still looks powerful and dangerous, and his supporters appear unified and resolute. But looks are deceiving. In 1988, I was working in a nightmare job for an outfit that was corrupt, incompetent and overbearing, and I told a coworker that I expected the Soviet Union to collapse within ten years. When he asked me why, I told him it was because the whole damn country was being run like our employers’ shop. I got raised eyebrows from other players in a near-future inline game when I referred to Leningrad as Saint Petersburg, then its pre-revolutionary name.

Trump is about where the USSR was in 1989. Still looks powerful and very dangerous, but completely rotten on the inside, and more importantly, losing the consent of the governed.

Consent of the governed. There’s a reason why that phrase played such a key role in the American revolution, and indeed is a factor in most revolutions that go anywhere (most don’t, of course, or just make things worse). If a ruler or government loses that, they are finished. At the start of the American revolution, less than one in three colonists supported secession, and many of those simply wanted responsible and local government while remaining under the crown. It took a fair number of British military and political blunders to move that needle significantly, but when it did, it was over for the British.

Similarly, in the Soviet Union, a similar collapse signaled the end of Soviet rule. Dismayed by an increasingly lousy economy that make it hard for people to feed, shelter and clothe themselves, and military misadventures such as Afghanistan, support for the regime simply collapsed in a matter of months. And thus the most repressive and seemingly impregnable tyranny in the history of the world just vanished overnight, with hardly a shot being fired. One day, the wall came down, and everything changed, everywhere all at once.

It should be noted that in both examples, it took decades for the two countries to recover even to the point of life that made revolution inevitable in the first place, and America is going to face some rough times when Trump and his fascist backers fall, but it will, in time, at least steer America from the course Trump has it on now. And that may save many lives.

Trump is at the fin de siècle of America’s foray into fascism. What lies ahead will be both dangerous and difficult, and there will be suffering and privation.

But it’s still better than what five more years of Trump offers.

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Dead Men Balking — Secrets and lies don’t create transparency or honesty

Dead Men Balking

Secrets and lies don’t create transparency or honesty

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 12th, 2026

I won’t miss Lindsey Graham. It wasn’t just because he became a blind, pitiful Trump supporter. It was because he assumed that role even though he knew better. In 2016, he was saying things like “There’s only one way to make America great again. Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” He called Trump “crazy,” “a jackass,” and “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” who “shouldn’t be commander-in-chief.”

He was right, of course. And then he pissed it all away in a cringing desire to cling to power.

When the inevitable collapse of America’s nasty little experiment in fascism comes, many Republicans will find themselves having to answer for their actions, and Graham would have been one of the prime examples of the perfidy, hypocrisy and viciousness of the sick converts to Trumpism. Basically, he’s lucky he’s dead.

Of course, there’s all sorts of conspiracy theories floating around, and most come from Trump’s orbit, whether psychotically (Laura Loomer blaming the Russians) or from spotlight-grabbing incompetence (Kash Patel talking about a federal investigation). Occam’s Razor doesn’t need whetting for this one: he was a guy with a heart condition who was getting on (71 years old) and he had just taken a long flight from Kiev to New York. Air travel, because of the varying cabin pressure and oxygen levels, is an elevated risk for people with cardiac or breathing problems. That’s what killed James Gandolfini and Carrie Fisher.

But this is an administration and government of secrets and lies, one that has resurrected the old Cold War tradition of Kremlinology needed to unravel the paranoid psychosis of a government running on paranoia and fear. Trump himself wasted no time taking Graham’s death and using it to promote one of his pet projects, and told us that immediately before his death, Graham called Trump to aver his support for the SAVE project, Trump’s ploy to disenfranchise millions of American voters, and promised to help herd it through the Senate. Only Trump Toadies will believe that, of course, and I’ll bet long odds there was no such phone call, and that Graham looked at the Senate, with 45 Democratic votes, 6 Republicans who were retiring and no longer needed to play up to Trump, and a Mitch McConnell gone MIA and possibly KIA, and knew the SAVE Act was dead. Graham had many faults, but stupidity wasn’t one of them. Doubtless exhausted from his long trip, he wasn’t going to call Trump, a man he did not respect, to spout chipper bullshit about one of Trump’s more treasonous fantasies.

That brings us to Mitch McConnell. Is he dead? When I first heard the rumors two weeks ago, I dismissed it as the sort of paranoid bullshit that infests the web (Cyclospora, which causes explosive diarrhea, is a plot by Big Med to scare everyone into getting vaccines, or Tallerico is a transgender vegan).

But this is a government of secrets and lies, and pretending to be alive when you’re actually dead in order to subvert democracy is about the most Mitch McConnell thing you can imagine. This, after all, is the same shameless manipulator who refused to entertain a supreme court nomination because it was less than six months until an election, but who turned around and made a supreme court nomination three years and five months later, a month before an election.

You’ve probably heard the more salient elements of the “Mitch is dead” story. His wife, Elaine Chao, was traveling in China for a long-planned sortie when her husband had a heart attack on June 14, 2026. She returned to the US on July 7. Her spokesperson said, “The Senator’s health did not warrant an immediate return to the US.”

OK, so maybe she isn’t the real dutiful and caring sort. Or maybe it was just indigestion, and they’ve been holding him incommunicado in the ICU until they’re sure the Pepto-Bismol has kicked in. No sensible wife is going to hurry all the way back for a minor four-week hospitalization for an upset tummy. After thirty-three years of marriage, a wife learns to tune out the drama.

Then there’s the video of Mitch being loaded onto the ambulance. Usually, when the patient is having a heart attack, there is an understandable atmosphere of urgency in getting the patient under oxygen and if possible, stabilized. These guys were doing the Meat Wagon Saunter. It’s end of shift. Maybe they’ll stop for a burger and beer on the way back. Oh, wait, they’re professionals. Make that a burger and soda.

While McConnell’s staffers have been maintaining that he is alive and pursuing his duties as a US Senator, nobody from his family has spoken out, which seems odd. He has three adult children from a previous marriage, any of whom might normally be willing to say whether the old man is alive or not. The only person outside of McConnell’s party apparatus willing to claim the Senator was, to his immediate knowledge, alive was CNN’s Trump flag waver Scott Jennings, who claimed, “[McConnell’s] still recovering in the hospital. We talked for just shy of 20 minutes … about Iran, Ukraine, the unfolding situation in Maine, my visit to the TR Presidential Library, and even a little bit of Senate history…I told him we want to see him back at work as soon as possible.”

That story was so widely disbelieved that Jason Miciak at RawStory speculated that Jennings’ whopper of a story might amount to ‘professional suicide.’ He expanded on what Jennings said of the call, quoting him as saying “I wasn’t really expecting him to call this morning to be honest, so when the phone rang and I was able to talk to him, I was frankly pretty grateful. All the rumors about him being dead or brain dead or, you know… That’s obviously not true because he picked up the phone and called me.”

Four weeks in the hospital and that was the only person McConnell has called, apparently.

Well, that’s why America has a new cottage industry in Kremlinology. This is a paranoid, dying regime, a government of secrets and lies. Don’t expect clarity, or even common sense any time soon.

 

 

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Articles II and III — On Treason against the United States

Articles II and III

On Treason against the United States

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 1st, 2026

www.zeppscommentaries.online

 

Did you know the Constitution has a clause that could make it possible to throw out not just Donald Trump, but all of his executive orders, most of his appointments, and even the Big Beautiful Bill that is destroying the lives of millions so the rich can steal more?

Turns out the Founders did expect that at some point the populace would vomit up a complete and utter moral and ethical wastrel, and gave us an out to deal with such.

Article II, Section 4 says: The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Now add this: Article III, Section 3, 2 which says: The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

It does NOT state that impeachments under Article III must be individual and separate. Nor does a Congressional finding of treason require a supermajority the way a simple impeachment would. But if the Congress finds the President committed treason, then all of his acts and appointments can be nullified.

Convicting Trump of bribery would require the same level of difficulty as, say, proving that cows really exist. He’s racked up the better part of five billion dollars through his various grifts, frauds, and outright bribes for which he has so badly abused his office. But bribery limits culpability to a now-standard Trump impeachment and given the number of corrupt cowards and lackeys in Congress, may not succeed because it would be like asking a Colombian cartel to just say no to drugs. Unless, of course, Trump sparks a popular rebellion, which he could possibly do, given his approach to things, in which case Congress might realize that throwing Trump to the wolves might save their asses from anything worse than just getting voted out of office.

Treason, of course, is much harder to prove, which is appropriate, since it is a much more serious crime than bribe-taking. That Trump acts against the best interests of the American populace is evident, but that doesn’t rise to the level of treason. His associations with antagonists to America such as Putin or Netanyahu are also pretty obvious, but minus a smoking gun, outright proof that Trump conspired to betray his country, treason would be hard to prove.

However, Trump may have committed treason with his attack on Iran. He got at least 14 American service personnel killed, and hundreds more injured. And it isn’t difficult to show that he attacked, not because of his imaginary nuclear threat, but at the behest of Netanyahu. He has publicly admitted to that. And it’s very clear that he has played around with the conduct of the operations primarily for the purposes of manipulating the markets to his own benefit and the benefit of his insider trading buddies, many of whom are sitting in his cabinet and many more are in Congress.

Anyone who gets his own soldiers killed and injured in the name of personal profit is pretty clearly committing treason. It’s an action that pretty much DEFINES treason. A case can be made that Donald Trump committed treasonous acts while serving as President.

It’s possible that Trump’s dismantling of the nation’s intelligence-gathering apparatus and undermining of relationships with friends and allies provided aid and comfort to America’s enemies, but the legal requirements for specificity and hard evidence make that a bit of a stretch.

Congress could establish a finding of treason on a simple majority vote in each House, and then proceed to impeachment. If the case is strong enough, and Congress honest enough, Trump could be impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate of treason. He would have to leave office. But unlike other impeachments, it wouldn’t be just him. His officials, which would include the vice president and the cabinet would also have to go. And all his executive orders rendered null and void.

Subsequent criminal prosecutions would of course have to be conducted on an individual basis. And it’s likely that many if not most cabinet members never committed any acts that rose to the level of treason.

And while Donald Trump has always been a huge fan of the death penalty, it’s extremely unlikely that he would face capital charges. I doubt the country could stomach the notion of a president, even a shoddy specimen such as Trump, being on trial for his life. But he could face imprisonment and loss of most if not all of his fortune. (Most of it was attained through pretty dubious means to begin with!)

Will this actually happen? I’ve no idea. Honestly, the way he’s disintegrating, I think it’s far more likely that he’ll be removed under the 25th amendment for being unable to discharge his duties as president, and if it was on grounds of dementia, then he would never stand trial. And honestly, I couldn’t support trying a man who is too far gone to understand that he’s on trial, let alone for why. Even Trump deserves that much mercy.

If America learns from the lessons Trump is giving us all, then perhaps that will suffice unto the day.

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In Hot Water — The Pool Reflects Trump’s Woes

In Hot Water

The Pool Reflects Trump’s Woes

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 20th, 2026

For some reason, an old golden-age science fiction story has been going through my mind this week as I watch the antics of the rapidly-disintegrating Donald Trump. The 1941 story was called “Bullard Reflects” by Malcolm Jameson. It’s available free to read at the link, and is worth it simply because it has one of the greatest closing lines of all time. Jameson’s story also played a significant role in naval strategic operations going forward.

Now, Bullard’s antagonist was “Egon Ziffler, chief of secret police of the Jovian Empire—the Torturer.” Egon was vicious, vainglorious, with a wildly inflated sense of self-worth and utterly abysmal strategic or tactical skills. So, OK, there’s a lot there to remind me of Trump. But I think it’s because of the use of the word “reflect” in the story that brought it to mind.

It’s a weird situation in pretty much any context, but the fact is that Trump has probably taken more political damage from a vanity project to pretty up a Washington landmark then he has from his catastrophic defeat in his ill-considered foray against Iran. It takes real talent to put a minor refurb project ahead of America’s greatest military and diplomatic defeat in the eyes of the public, but Trump managed.

I’m talking, of course, about the Reflecting Pool. I’ve already had a couple of Trump supporters complain that “liberals never gave the Reflecting Pool a second thought until they saw an opportunity to embarrass Trump.” There’s a certain amount of truth there: most people, including most liberals, just sort of thought of the Pool as one of those pretty sites that was part of DC’s character and that was about it. It was more a matter of good taste and ambiance rather then the sort of deep significance of the Lincoln Memorial or the Vietnam Wall. So no, I never gave it much thought beyond, “Oh, that’s pretty.” I doubt most other people did, either.

Until Trump, as part of his monomaniacal and egotistical drive to reshape DC in his image, declared the Pool a disgrace and blamed its allegedly deplorable condition on Obama and Biden and any other Democrat nearby. As with his other ‘renovations’, he moved unilaterally, without regard to whether he had authority, funding, or if the property was his to reshape. Other presidents, following set procedures, have made similar changes, and nobody ever heard of them. But this is Trump, and the public, already deeply outraged by his destruction of the East Wing and the Kennedy Center, were, at best, deeply skeptical. Experts weighed in, noting that granite couldn’t hold paint well and noting that making the shallow Pool darker under that Washington sun would make the water much warmer.

The rest you know about. The algae exploded, and in an effort to contain it, they dumped in hundreds of gallons of hydrogen peroxide. It killed the algae, but, as Matt Viser at the Atlantic explained, it was replaced by “Scenedesmus, a genus of green algae nicknamed ‘Skinny Dead Mouse’ by scientists.” It’s much harder to kill. Even worse, the lining of the Pool laid out by the contractor, the aptly-named “Greenwater, Inc.” began to disintegrate and bob to the surface. The lining was the same stuff used in truckbeds, and usually works pretty well, assuming it’s given time to cure, isn’t under water, and isn’t exposed to hydrogen peroxide.

So another Trump-created crisis has turned into an utter fiasco. At last word he had stationed National Guard troops around the Pool to prevent souvenir takers from making off with the erstwhile Pool bed while his flying monkeys swamp the social media with screams that Democrats somehow sabotaged the project. This is farce of the purest ray divine.

A court blocked him from closing the Kennedy Center for two years for ‘renovations’–a move on his part to hide the utter fiasco of his renaming the center and alienating all of the world’s higher art community. The running joke was that he only had the option of 900 consecutive nights of some country and western twat yodeling “Proud to be an American” in lieu of all the other performances. He had to hide the utter failure. While the court was at it, they ordered his name removed from the center. He had that done, behind a tarp so the public couldn’t see, a calculated three hours after the court deadline. The tarp is still in place, which is having the opposite effect of what Trump hoped for by paradoxically keeping it in the public eye. There’s already rumors he didn’t really remove his name. Eventually someone will paint “8647” on the tarp and he’ll have to replace it and station more troops to guard it.

Then there was the G7 conference. It was an even bigger fiasco than the Reflecting Pool, and while the stakes are far higher, the nuances were less obvious. Hell, the Pool may have distracted the public enough to spare Trump a greater humiliation.

First, he tried, on camera, to kiss French First Lady Brigitt Macron. He looked for all the world like Uncle Pervy trying to lay a big wet on on an obviously flustered and unwilling twelve-year-old niece. But French President Emmanuel Macron already had the last laugh, arranging for the historically illiterate US leader to sign his agreement with Iran at Versailles, a place that enjoys a certain infamy when it comes to bad treaties and French vengeance.

In another extraordinary diplomatic gaffe, he claimed that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the closest thing to an ideological ally he had in the G7, ‘begged’ him to have her picture taken with him. Understandably infuriated, Meloni called the Trump claim ‘fabricated’ and wrote, “As for my popularity, being your friend has certainly not helped it, nor does it depend on my relationship with you. My popularity depends on my ability to defend Italy’s national interest, and that is exactly what I have always done.” Trump, ever the fool, reiterated that she begged him, ‘over and over.’ The US just lost one of its few remaining friends.

Did I mention Trump called Netanyahu a ‘motherfucker’? Yup. One of the few things he got right this week, but not particularly helpful.

Another image caught a seemingly oblivious Trump standing in the midst of other world leaders who were affably greeting and meeting, as isolated and spurned as the proverbial turd in the swimming pool.

And back to the Pool: It just came out that Olympian David Hearn was just arrested. He stopped by the Pool to see for himself, and apparently reached in and felt a chuck of the lining fragment. He then released it, stood up, and walked back to his bicycle. Park Police promptly arrested him for “destruction of government property”! You can’t make this up!

Trump apparently never heard the Charlie Chaplin quote, “The tyrant fears the laugh more than the assassin’s bullet.” But he does have some dim, rat-like awareness that looking like a fool is very dangerous for him. And in increasingly frantic efforts to counteract that, he acts like a greater fool with every passing day. And the laughter grows.

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Birthday of the Strait Man You can make a street walker think, but you can’t make a Hormuz

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 13th, 2026

Tomorrow, June 14th, is Barack Hussein Obama Day. Everyone alive and decent back then has a good memory. Mine was of him singing “Amazing Grace” at the church in South Carolina where a racist gun nut killed a dozen people, including Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, State Senator and pastor at that church. Very moving, and I’m not even religious.

People who hate Obama are welcome to express their thoughts, as well. We can laugh at you, and let’s face it; smearing Obama is a hell of a lot easier these days than praising Trump.

The Orange Shitstain turns 80 tomorrow, and of course he’s celebrating with all the class and dignity of a Dogpatch Kickapoo Joy Juice festival. (Oh, look it up; it’s the sort of Boomer shit the Internet was born to immortalize).

Fresh off his triumph at The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, Trump announced that a peace deal with Iran would be signed tomorrow. That, or he would deploy the ultimate weapon against them. It was quite vague, which with Trump is a bit of an improvement.

I was puzzled at first. Usually Trump announces a peace deal in order to manipulate the markets for a bit of insider trading. But the markets are closed Sunday. Then it hit me: right. His big 8-0. He wants a big “peace is at hand, inflation is done, and it’s all Biden’s fault” speech for his White House Cage Match. Yes, “White House Cage Match.”

Trouble is, Iran holds the whip hand. They control the Strait of Hormuz. Even if Trump’s recent unfounded claim that the US was able to sneak 40 million barrels of oil through (even assuming tankers can tip-toe, 40m/bbl is about a month supply for California alone) was true, Iran’s control is pretty much absolute. The regime is very firmly in control, since opposition dropped out of sight. (That tends to happen in countries where you try to influence them by bombing them. Ask any Londoner). And major financial dislocation is expected to really hit in August. That’s when the last of the tankers that sailed through the Strait in late February arrive at the more distant ports—including Long Beach or Galveston or, well, you get the idea.

Trump doesn’t want massive economic dislocation six weeks before the midterms. So if he’s desperate enough, he might just accede to Iran’s demands, which include control of the Strait, $300 billion in war damage reparations, release of another $35 billion or so in frozen assets, and an agreement to reestablish the nuclear proliferation agreement that Obama negotiated and which Trump unilaterally tore up.

Yes, I’m sure they included that last as a deliberate insult to Trump, but why not? Assuming they don’t really want to build nuclear weapons—and the fact that they haven’t in the past 45 years that they could have is suggestive—the agreement costs them little and helps ensure stability in the region.

Of course, Trump is almost certainly lying. Isn’t this the fortieth “peace is at hand” declaration he’s made since it became obvious he wasn’t going to get a quick-and-dirty win like he did in Venezuela? So whatever he says at tomorrow’s trash-fest, don’t believe it.

Suppose we all get a giant surprise tomorrow and Iran announces that a deal has been reached? That the Strait of Hormuz is now open for business, with Iran getting $10 million per supertanker and all the rest of it. Trump will strut and dance like a lobotomized Robin Williams on Quaaludes, Republican congressmen will drop to their knees if not already there and sing hosannas, and on Monday the markets will explode, making “irrational exuberance” look like mildly amused.

Only…well there’s a fly in the ointment. Remember what I said about the last ships to clear the Strait in late February arriving in August? There’s about 2,000 ships awaiting passage. The Strait in normal times can handle 100 ships a day, so there’s a three week backlog just to clear the existing traffic. So normal shipping wouldn’t resume until early July. Now factor in what I call “transit latency” – the amount of time needed for ships to reach their destination ports. While two months is average, some destinations lie five months away.

So trade won’t even begin to reach normal levels until…hmm…September. Careful calculation reveals that that comes after August, the point where things start to come apart in earnest.

So even if the crows of an agreement being signed tomorrow actually are more than the usual Trump duck-and-weave bullshit, it’s too late. Trump probably doesn’t have the brights to understand any of that, but his handlers certainly do, and after a brief pause for the sell-short guys to weigh in, the markets will, as well. An actual market crash in June is possible. Then the fun begins in earnest. Come August, we’re screwed.

It comes at a time when we already face: A screwworm invasion, a massive disruption in medical supplies, a super El Niño that may start making significant disruptions by September—including, yes, shipping lanes—and several financial bubbles—housing, AI, and derivatives—all nearing the point of the inevitable implosion. And it comes at a time when the government is crippled by the self-serving malice of the Trump crime syndicate and the sheer libertarian foolishness of the tech bros headed by trillionaire Elon Musk.

I used to joke that I didn’t write summer solstice pieces because if the message in the winter solstice piece was that the sun was coming back so there is hope, a summer solstice theme would have to be “it’s all downhill from here.” My winter solstice piece preceded a planned two-month hiatus that extended to six months because I’m a lazy bastard, but here we are approaching a summer solstice, and here I am, with a message.

And that message is: “Cheer up. Most of us will get through this.”

 

 

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Solstice 2025 — The end of the beginning is not the beginning of the end

Solstice 2025

The end of the beginning is not the beginning of the end

To say we’re in perilous times is a bit like saying that crossing the Sahara on foot presents challenges. Even if you only know a small portion of the possibilities, it’s a daunting prospect.

Historians are all too familiar with what we are going through right now. Most nations on Earth have, at one point or another, had a leader who was utterly mad, utterly corrupt, and utterly contemptuous of the damage his actions were causing.

Just as the specifics of such misrules are as varied as human psychopathology, so too are the end results. The spectrum can range from utter ruin to widespread reform that restores sanity and a functional society and economy. Determinants include how much the Mad Emperor gets away with before the inevitable collapse, the strength of the saner and more stable traditions of the nation so afflicted, and the extent of the damage.

European history is full of Mad Emperors, and the results cover the full panoply ranging from the Emperor being executed or deposed to widespread war, an emptied treasury, and even occupation by annoyed neighbors. England had both the mildest and one of the worst examples of such; in 1688 the generally incompetent and egotistic James II was bloodlessly overthrown by William and Mary of the somewhat better-behaved House of Orange. It was done so competently and peacefully that few Britons realized they had staged an invasion and coup. To this day the “Glorious Revolution” is seen as a peaceful transfer of power, much like Presidential inaugurations were. At the other end of the spectrum was Charles I, who led England to a civil war followed by a vicious republic of religious fanatics. You could say he was in over his head.

In fact, England is noted for its monarchs of misrule. I could easily give as horrible examples Edward II, Henry VI (who also caused a civil war), Richard III, Henry VIII, and George IV of whom one of his aides wrote,‘A more contemptible, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog does not exist. There have been good and wise kings but not many of them and this I believe to be one of the worst.’

That last one might sound familiar to most of us. Wikipedia says of him, “He led an extravagant lifestyle that contributed to the fashions of the Regency era. He was a patron of new forms of leisure, style and taste. He commissioned John Nash to build the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and remodel Buckingham Palace, and commissioned Jeffry Wyatville to rebuild Windsor Castle. George’s charm and culture earned him the title “the first gentleman of England”, but his dissolute way of life and poor relationships with his parents and his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, earned him the contempt of the people and dimmed the prestige of the monarchy. He excluded Caroline from his coronation and asked the government to introduce the unpopular Pains and Penalties Bill in an unsuccessful attempt to divorce her…George’s rule was tarnished by scandal and financial extravagance. His ministers found his behaviour selfish, unreliable and irresponsible, and he was strongly influenced by favourites.”

Hoo, boy. And good old George IV would actually be an improvement over what we have now. “The first gentleman” is not a phrase that springs readily to the minds of most Americans when it comes to The Leader.

But if you take a look at the map, you’ll notice that it still says “England” on that portion of the British Isles. Similarly, other nations that have had even far worse and more destructive rulers are still there: France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Russia, and Italy. All suffered horribly at various junctures because of vicious and incompetent misrule. But they survived, and while all cultures change and evolve, none were annihilated by Mad Emperors. Even the most extreme recent example, Germany, came out of Hitler’s horrific 12 years and eventually became the prosperous and peaceful land it is today.

I can’t begin to guess how much damage this regime has done to America at this point. I strongly suspect our national security is now at best a joke, with most of our most strategic secrets available for Kremlin perusal. Project 2025, the thinly disguised rape of the national treasury and elimination of those pesky civil rights, has proceeded apace, and millions of Americans are facing financial ruin and deprivation as a result. All America’s allies are estranged, and rivals are picking our bones. We’ve lost, perhaps for decades, the advantages of free trade and good will.

Mad rulers die and/or are deposed sooner rather than later. Many bring doom upon themselves. Without the mesmerizing toxic attraction of the madman (or as John Randolph once wrote about Henry Clay, ‘like a rotten mackerel in the moonlight, he both shines and stinks.‘) public fury against the architects of Project 2025 will explode.

I can’t predict how much more damage we’ll take, or how harsh or prolonged the recovery will be. All I can promise is that there will be a recovery. Many nations have suffered worse than America is going through now, and survived to tell the tale. America will, as well, and with great good luck, will emerge with its core values of democracy and justice still intact. That will speed the recovery.

And yes, there will be a recovery. It may be painful, but those that live to see it will be the lucky ones.

The sun rises again tomorrow.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

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