Tag: donald trump

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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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Bombs Awry! Behind the bluster, a real threat

Bombs Awry!

Behind the bluster, a real threat

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 7th, 2026

With nearly everyone else, I would have just assumed that Trump’s remarks about “Let them take out San Diego [or] Los Angeles” would just result from garbled phrasing. With a lot of extemporaneous speeches, the spoken word sounds more coherent than it would appear in writing, especially since the spoken word has all sorts of cues that words on paper lack: tone, pitch, timbre, pauses, timing, and of course facial expressions and body language. Anyone who has caught flak for being funny or “cute” on line realizes that humor without those cues can often be missed or misinterpreted—along with the fact that a given percentage of your readers are going to be humorless twats.

With Trump, that benefit of the doubt can’t really apply. Humor is out: he’s a cold, cruel man whose idea of hilarity lies in mocking and hurting the weak and defenseless. Forty-eight hours after he said that and the uproar began, his lackeys have spun endless “what he meant” excuses, but Trump himself has made no effort to correct or amend his remarks. He meant it.

These days his speeches totally lack any sense of real purpose, but are the same collection of prepackaged spiel that he uses regardless of occasion or tone that the speech might require. He’ll tell the same “you knew I was a snake” story at a campaign rally or at a military memorial. I’m not sure he has any actual understanding of half of what he says, but is just repeating himself like a broken Chatty Cathy doll.

And there is the constant element of actual malice. Trump hates California; not only has the state voted against him overwhelmingly in all three elections he’s faced, but it’s home to Governor Gavin Newsom, who was one of the first politicians to openly mock him, and did so very well. It’s also home to late night entertainers like Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel, along with all the hated Hollywood personalities who have stepped forth to oppose him.

The right wing propaganda campaign is that prosperous social democratic states like California, and especially California, are in reality vast wastelands of homelessness, drug use, immigrants and homosexuals. Even here in far northern California, which admittedly is quite different from the rest of the state, it’s not hard to find MAGAts complaining about what a hellhole the ‘dumocrats’ have turned California into. If you ask them what makes their lives in California a living hell, they’re usually reduced to bitching about gas prices, and the two point two cents per gallon in taxes that were added since Newsom became governor. (Yes, I’ve actually had people tell me that 2.2 cents is the reason prices are so high!) But this plays into Trump’s paws, and even if the vast majority of Californians know the agitprop campaign is bullshit, people in Nebraska and other places eat it up, and even cheer the promised destruction of that librul hellhole to the west that is why their taxes suck, or something.

Finally, Trump is scared and desperate. Most of his policies have blown up in his face, he’s the least popular president since polling began, and increasingly, it looks like Dems will pick up dozens of seats in the House and perhaps a half dozen seats in the Senate.

Even Trump has to realize that in the aftermath of such a shellacking, his own party will largely turn against him. He has to seriously consider the consequences of being convicted, expelled, and put on trial for a huge assortment of crimes.

He needs a 9/11, a Reichstag fire, an October 7th. To that end, he might consider creating at least the impression of a catastrophe hitting in America, and if there is to be such a thing, have it in a place he doesn’t care about, such as Los Angeles or San Diego.

While I doubt this would result in mushroom clouds over either of those cities, I could image “nuclear devices” being “discovered” in those locales, obviously snuck in by Iranians, or perhaps Canadians. And hey, if that caused widespread panic in southern California that interfered with voting, why, so much the better! Two birds, one stone, right?

I suspect that given the level of competence and intelligence we’re seen from his administration, any such effort would backfire on him. His ability to bullshit his way out of any threat has worn thin. People realize Mexico isn’t sending rapists, Iran doesn’t have nukes, Haitians aren’t eating our dogs and cats, they aren’t forcing gender change on kids at school, and Canada isn’t shipping tons of fentanyl into the US inside Iranian nuclear plants. (Apparently nuclear plants are illicit drug factories. Stop by your local atomic plant and pick up a couple dime bags for the kids on Halloween!) In short, the Donald softshoe show has run its course.

But if we assume that Trump can’t conjure up some sort of credible crisis to save his ass, the threat level escalates after the election, especially if it makes clear that Trump has lost control of Congress and possibly his own party. (I don’t think he’s going to try to cancel the election. Even his flunkies realize that might spark a widespread revolt and a very one-sided civil war he would lose.)

But in extremis, he’ll do everything he can to maintain control, and he’ll be a raging and unpredictable mass of howling paranoia and narcissistic end-stage rage. He’ll be extremely dangerous. He’ll risk anything and everything. He may even forbid Congress from convening in January.

For Californians, there’s an extra element of danger. He hates us because we are “disloyal” and “librul”. And he is perfectly willing to punish ‘blue states.’

Example: under all presidents since FEMA was established, there was no difference in emergency FEMA request grants among various states. It was a steady 85-90%. In Trump’s second term, that has changed. Red states enjoy the same 85-90% approval rate. Blue states are seeing a 20% approval rate. It’s almost like natural disasters no longer afflict blue states! Yeah, that must be it.

But meanwhile, California is looking at the winter from hell. The most recent projections of El Niño effects are flat out terrifying. One model I saw showed expected precipitation along the California coast to be an absurd 300-500% of normal for December through March, which is our wet season. If that actually comes to pass, the floods and landslides would be catastrophic!

Federal relief? Fuhgeddaboutit. We’re a 20% state—if we’re lucky. More than likely, Trump would just station troops along Oregon, Nevada and Arizona border to shoot Californians trying to escape. So if you happen to have El Niño’s email, you might want to send a note politely asking it to hold off until mid January, when hopefully we’ll have a new Congress and Trump has fled to Russia.

Otherwise, we’re on our own. Good luck.

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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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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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But his emails…! — House Oversight releases twenty thousand documents

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 13th 2025

We expected to glean from yesterday’s release that Trump was vile, amoral and an inveterate liar. Of course, many of us knew that already, but the new light would shine so brightly that even the most gullible true believers in MAGAland would start to have serious doubts about their fuhrer and savior.

I will mention that the vast trove of Epstein’s emails are on-line and searchable at https://splendorous-chaja-f79791.netlify.app/ It’s free to use.

And there are such reports: hours spent alone with Virginia Guiffre, the late author of “Nobody’s Girl.” Reports of him in company with a 14 year old “who looked much younger.” Evidence of him engaging in transactions with Jeffrey Epstein as late as 2017, long after their supposed falling out and after Trump had become President of the United States.

In one email to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein wrote: “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. (Victim’s name redacted, but believed to be Guiffre) spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there.”

The White House is declaiming yesterday’s release as fake news, of course, and Baghdad Barbie even came up with the amazing claim that it wasn’t her boss they were talking about, but someone ELSE who was ALSO named “Donald Trump.” Even by the standards of this regime, that may mark a new record in the realm of idiotic bullshit.

In the searchable tranche above, Trump is mentioned over 1,000 times (the round number leads me to suspect the counter only went up to 1,000). By way of comparison, Bill Clinton is mentioned 756 times, and of course there is a fair bit of evidence showing that he took many trips to Epstein’s island, reportedly because Epstein owed him some favors.

But what is striking is that even among the rich filth pervading Epstein’s racket, Trump was considered a step too far in terms of creepiness and moral depravity. Epstein in 2018 wrote that Trump “feels alone, and is nuts !!! , I told everyone from day one. beyond belief mad, and most thought i was speaking metaphorically, its obvious he could crack. stormy daniels. ? lies after lies aflter lies.”

What does it tell you when a serial child rapist and sex trafficker calls you “evil beyond belief.”? This doesn’t exactly fall under the category of ‘glowing reference”. Apparently, based on what he wrote there, Epstein had been repeatedly and publicly calling Trump ‘mad’ for quite some time.

Per the Guardian’ “I have met some very bad people,” Epstein wrote in a 2017 email. “None as bad as Trump. Not one decent cell in his body.” In other messages, Epstein described Trump as a “maniac” showing signs of “early dementia”.

In a Thursday, August 9 2018 email to someone named BS Stern, Epstein forcefully argued for a third party candidate in 2020 as being greatly superior to Trump being reelected or the Dems finding a winning candidate, something Epstein wasn’t willing to bet on. His politics were vaguely liberal-centrist and he clearly didn’t want to see Trump redux. Of course, most people didn’t.

Other, heretofore uninvolved public figures may be ensnared in the vast trove of data the House Oversight Committee released. For example, Brett Kavanaugh, Supine Court Justice. Sean Morrow wrote on Bluesky yesterday, “Jeffrey Epstein advised Steve Bannon that the lawyers representing Brett Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearing should accuse Christine Blasey Ford of being on medications that cause false memories or memory loss.” Obviously Epstein was an expert at discrediting women (and girls) who made accusations of rape, and while this exchange doesn’t even hint that Kavanaugh had any knowledge or consent of the exchange, the question must be asked: Why would Epstein volunteer his vile expertise to the cause of ramming through the Kavanaugh nomination? Conspiracy, or just a perverted sense of professional courtesy?

It will get even worse for Trump going forward. The House will vote on the discharge petition to release all the Epstein files, since Squeaker Johnson’s belated and highly reluctant swearing in of newly minted Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona, Adelita Grijalva, brought the vote to the needed 218. With Trump’s sway over the party disintegrating in earnest, there are reports that some 50 to 60 Republican members will vote for the release. Trump, who campaigned on releasing the files “on day one” of his new term reportedly tried pressuring two members, Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert, to retract their signatures on the petition without success. Anyone who still thinks Trump is innocent and has nothing to hide has to be as crazy and/or dishonest as he is.

The country might survive the damage Trump and the Republicans are doing, over time. But Trump himself is unlikely to survive this.

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Cornered Rat — More dangerous to deal with

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 27th 2025

This week’s offensives against George Soros and the city of Portland reflect, not a disintegration of America, but a disintegration of the Donald Trump regime.

The Epstein files aren’t going away, and now, with the election of a new Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona (in a deep red district that went for Trump by 30 points!) Congress now has the votes to force a floor debate and vote on the matter.

Mike Johnson, perhaps the greatest coward in the history of Congress, has suspended congressional business for a week while frantically trying to delay swearing in newly minted Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva. This would under normal circumstances, be the sort of chickenshittery you might expect from Johnson-without-a-Johnson, but what makes this far more remarkable is that it means Congress cannot do anything to avoid a government shutdown on October 1st. Trump is, incredibly, trying to make that part of his plan, which apparently involves firing most of the people that made government functional. While the shutdown would not affect Social Security or Medicare or Veteran Affairs (already damaged by Trump and Musk’s sweeping rape of the government) it would bring to a halt most of the government’s most loved elements—national parks and reserves, monuments, and most other non-essential functions.

We’ve been through this contrived “crisis” a dozen times or more since Newt Gingrich realized it was a great way to extort the country. And sometimes the government has shut down, and Republicans have taken it on the chin each time because the public, for the most part, realized who the extortionists were.

This time is different. Not only can Congress not come up with a last-minute solution to the crisis, but Trump’s answer is to fire all the non-essential workers, ensuring the crisis becomes permanent no matter what Congress does.

The Republicans rigged the “Big Beautiful Bill” to ensure that the most vicious fallout wouldn’t occur until after November 2026, and this will undo in one swipe the palatability for the stupid people who love Donald Trump.

Donald announced a military invasion of “war-ravaged” Portland, Oregon yesterday. This will come as news to Portland residents, who probably thought their greatest adversary was forest fires—and this has been a relatively mellow fire season.

He also declared AntiFa a “domestic terrorism” organization. He needs to set up a new PAC: “Fascists against AntiFascism.”

He has also declared war on George Soros because decades of antisemitic “pro-Israel” propaganda from Faux News means most of his supporters have heard of Soros. But then, Soros is supporting Newsom’s redistricting battle after Texas’ Trump-sponsored move to steal five Congressional seats.

And last week was an unmitigated fiasco for Trump. First, there was the Jimmy Kimmel thing. The only thing stupider than losing to a comedian with twenty million followers is picking a fight with a comedian with twenty million followers in the first place.

Then there was the catastrophe of the UN address. Bad enough that Trump’s staff fucked up the teleprompter, which meant that the wingless Donald had to fly solo, but he went on to tell the assemblage their countries were all “going to hell”, and whined about the teleprompter, an escalator that stalled, and that the UN rejected a remodeling bid from Trump FIFTEEN YEARS AGO.

One Blue Sky wit wrote, “Lead your life in such a way that if the escalator breaks, it isn’t because someone wants to kill you.” Seems easy enough advice to follow, doesn’t it? Well, funny story…

So, Donald is on the ropes. He’s scared, he’s desperate.

That isn’t necessarily good news: cornered rats are considerably more dangerous than regular rats. Remember that.

But murderous desperation is showing up in Congress, too. Marjorie Taylor-Greene posted a tweet today telling her members that In the Event Of, she wants them to know she isn’t even remotely suicidal and any unexpected death should be met with a healthy skepticism. Now, MT-G is noted for histrionic persiflage, it is true, but this sounds more like someone who is genuinely frightened. I’ve little love for her, but I wish her a long and healthy life!

Meanwhile, another nasty clown in the GOP, one “John Gillette (R-Kingman), wrote on the social media site X that U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., was calling for the government to be overthrown and should be hanged. ‘Until people like this, that advocate for the overthrow of the American government are tried convicted and hanged.. it will continue,’ Gillette said in response to a video of Jayapal.’’ [excerpt from Huffpost]

Jayapal’s ‘crime’? Calling for people to get out and demonstrate. That’s all.

I have a feeling that we are rapidly approaching a climax to the rise and hoped-for fall of Donald Trump. But I won’t breathe freely until he is out of office and in prison where he belongs.

Best of luck, everyone!

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Trump’s Terrors — Toujours, mon brèves et mon brefs, toujours!

Trump’s Terrors

Toujours, mon brèves et mon brefs, toujours!

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 22nd, 2025

Fearless Leader has officially executive ordered and deemed AntiFa to be a “Terrorist Organization.” Yes, with the capital letters. Scarier that way, you know.

I’ve never really considered myself a terrorist. My idea of a terrorist campaign would be sharply-worded letters to the editor, or snide memes posted for the edification of the local MAGAts. In moments of extreme rage, I have been known to cancel subscriptions. If I was working for Al-Qaida, I would probably be the bloke who writes the ads for the newsletter.

But I’ve been AntiFa since I was five years old, when I learned what fascists were. They were the nasties who were why some of my classmates had rickets, or were missing older brothers and dads. Prime Minister Churchill hated them, and by gosh, that was good enough for me. Down with fascists! Boo! Hiss!

So if I’m AntiFa (and the past seventy years haven’t offered any reasons to change that stance) does that mean that we now refer to them as just “Fa”? I don’t know. They aren’t very nice people. I don’t really want to be on a first-syllable basis with them.

The thing is, the more I learn about fascism, the less there is to like. I slowly evolved from “Hitler was a mean sort who bombed us and was horrid to his people” to learning about the death camps and death marches to the general horrors of authoritarianism.

Turns out that AntiFa was around back in the 30s. Not surprisingly, Germany, the 1930’s version of America Project 2025, had a communist-aligned group, the Antifaschistische Aktion. This was back when communism was fashionable, and people really believed the Soviet Union would become a Workers’ Paradise.

We learned to admire AntiFa terrorist organizations over the first few decades of my life. Of course, we had different names for them: The Resistance. The Underground. Freedom Fighters. The Irregulars. They blew up bridges and trains and best of all, bridges with trains on them. They were masters of sabotage, both passive and active.

If anyone bothered mentioning that the fascist governments considered them to be Terrorist Organizations, we probably just shrugged it off. They were fascists, after all. Bunch of bloody clots, that lot. Who cared what they thought?

Americans generally shared that view of AntiFa until the race riots and Vietnam protests came along, and the vicarious resistance heroes of World War 2 suddenly found themselves perched on the other side of a very uncomfortable fence. How dare those People demand equal rights, and why are those long-haired hippies be upset about being sent to die in the tens of thousands for no good reason at all? Repress! Repress! Repress!

The fascists, discredited by World War 2, saw an opportunity in America’s somewhat naive authoritarian streak, and began a long, systematic assimilation of the American right, beginning with the McCarthy era and the John Birchers and reaching its apex with the Trump coup. The AntiFa rebels of yesterday were now the settled and jealous establishment. And they prefer law and order to rebellion and idealism.

But there’s this one problem: most Americans, at heart, are still AntiFa. They don’t like authoritarians. They don’t like cowards and bullies and vicious hatemongers. In short, they don’t like fascists. And no number of executive orders is going to change that.

And fascists, no matter how much lipstick they slap on, are still pigs. It’s intrinsic to the philosophy, which is that a select few are superior to the unwashed masses. They are entitled to control, supress, and exploit. It’s the will of God. It’s for the fatherland. Resistance is useless.

This past week’s uproar over the removal of Jimmy Kimmel from his show, and the largely unsuccessful effort to deify the reprehensible Charlie Kirk (more on that in a moment) showed that cracks are starting to appear in the Trump coup as people finally realize exactly what it is they are facing.

Kimmel said this to get banned: “The Maga Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” He didn’t attack Kirk, or mock his death, or praise the assassin, no matter what the liars of MAGA say. Just that. That’s all it took to scare the fascists.

The reaction to Kimmel being taken off the air was easily the biggest spontaneous explosion of public rage since the George Floyd demonstrations—and it was both totally non-violent and in a form the right couldn’t infuse with violence. It may have been the biggest single boycott in American history. Millions of people canceled their subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu, and millions more sent protests to Sinclair and Nexstar Media Group. Sinclair in particular is a far right concern famed for having its television “journalists” chant fascist talking points word for word. People started compiling lists of companies advertising on the stations of either consortium.

Disney, out 4 billion dollars in stock value and millions of subscriptions, backed down and reinstated Kimmel. It remains to be seen if the authoritarians at Sinclair will broadcast him. It’s too early to declare victory, but the administration and Disney got a taste of what damage a determined underground can do.

Then there was the grotesque Horst Wessel rally masquerading as a memorial service for Charlie Kirk. Curiously, few of the speakers, including Trump, seemed to give a wet shit about old Charlie, but instead put on their best Nuremberg presentations. Of particular note was Steven Miller, who for some reason doesn’t have a large black swastika tattooed on his billboard-sized forehead.

He said, “We will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen. We stand for what is good, virtuous, noble.”

He continued: “To those who are against us? “What do YOU HAVE? You have NOTHING, you are nothing! You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are hatred, YOU ARE NOTHING! You can build nothing, produce nothing, create nothing. You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk? You have made him immortal.”

I’m sure it sounded better in the original German. It was, almost word-for-word, a translation of the speech Joseph Goebbels gave in a paean to dead Nazi nobody Horst Wessel.

It is no longer possible to disguise what these people are, and the threat they pose to all of us.

There’s a reason Trump calls AntiFa a “Terrorist Organization.” He fears us. We are AntiFa in our tens of millions, those who understand how important freedom and rights really are.

There are reasons we glorified The Resistance in the fifties and sixties. They were brave and steadfast in the face in ultimate evil.

We need to remember that, because Fascists don’t go away if you ask them nicely. Be prepared to resist. This week we showed that it can be done without violence or even defying the law (Executive Orders are not law). But we have to be firm. We have to be resolute. We have to be brave.

Nous sommes toujours la résistance!

 

 

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Adolf Jesus Trump — Honks from heaven above

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 8th 2025

I could write a hundred essays about the incompetence, cruelty, corruption and sheer stupidity of Trump and his fascist minions, and the main reason I haven’t is simply because thousands of other people are all writing about it, and a lot of them are doing a better job of it than I could. I’m not going to make a difference of any sort if my content boils down to “What Thom Hartmann, Robert Reich, Paul Krugman and Lev Parnas all said.” It’s all I can do to avoid writing in the same cadence with which Rachel Maddow speaks!

It doesn’t mean I’ve nothing to say; I just don’t want to be a “me too” voice in the crowd.

So I watch for something that may not get a lot of attention normally, but which I think is important and could really matter.

Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) gave me that opportunity yesterday when I found he responded to Christian Nationalist footpad Marco Rubio’s honks about how “’our rights come from our creator…” Kaine, who actually went to school and studied history, called Little Marco’s remarks “extremely troubling.”

If it had ended there, it would have been dismissed as a sincere but utterly ineffectual complaint from a member of a Congress completely neutered by Republican corruption and cowardice.

But then Dim Donald, that exemplar of Christian Nationalism, the figure who Adolf Jesus looks up to from his swastika-shaped cross, decided to jump in with both swollen feet.

He wrote. “Under the Trump administration, we’re defending our rights and restoring our identity as a nation under God, we are one nation under God and we always will be. The need for this commission has never been more clear than it was last week when the ineffectual senator from Virginia, a man named Tim Kaine, stated that the notion ‘our rights come from our creator’ is ‘extremely troubling’ to him. Isn’t that terrible, how he would say something like that? The senator from Virginia should be ashamed of himself, for many things! For many things, for things even beyond that, but in its own way, nothing is more important than those words, they were terrible words. We have to bring back religion in America, bring it back stronger than ever before.”

Donald has captured perfectly the essence of the philosophy of Christian Nationalism: the arrogance, the intellectual and moral dishonesty, and the towering hypocrisy. He IS the face of Christian Nationalism, right down to the child raping and wanton murder for political convenience.

For any Christians reading this, I’m not talking about your religion. I know a lot of Christians who are good, kind people who respect themselves and respect others. I’m talking about Christianity’s dark cousin, the vicious mean-spirited fundamentalists who in this incarnation call themselves Christian Nationalists. Christian Nationalism bears the same relationship to Christianity that National Socialism does to Democratic Socialism: that is to say, it’s nearly the exact opposite.

They love to claim a God that is responsible for the very rights they are trying to destroy: the right to chose representation; the right to freedom from religion; the right to personal bodily autonomy; the right to fair and equal justice. The “god-given rights” was a rhetorical flourish added to the Declaration of Independence over Thomas Jefferson’s strident objection, Ever since, they’ve done what religion always does and stolen credit for the good & ethical things humanity has come up with.

Want proof? Take a look at the list of rights Jefferson had in mind, and find anywhere in the bible where such rights are mentioned, let alone supported. You can find long lists of offenses for which people should be executed, such as eating shellfish or getting tattoos, and cheerful advice on how a woman should be forced to get an abortion if her husband claims she has been unfaithful, or advice on tearing children apart for making fun of a prophet, but not much about secret voting or freedom of speech. About the only ‘god-given’ right the Constitution had was the right to own slaves, and the Constitution got over that.

I’ve often stated that theocracy is the worst form of government humanity has ever invented. It demands obedience and blind belief to begin with, but unlike regular tyrannies, there is no Leader who must eventually take responsibility for his autocratic cruelty, but instead tyrants dressed as supplicants who can foist any accountability off on an invisible and silent god (and all gods are silent and invisible for the same reason unicorns are), making them much less accountable.

And since most holy texts are utterly horrifying, it’s assumed that any nearby deity will rubber stamp various and assorted atrocities.

Most fundamentalist leaders are utter phonies, and nobody with an inkling of history should be surprised that Donald Trump would be quick to seize the opportunities of being a Christian Nationalist leader. No belief required. Or ethics. Or honesty. Or even humanity. If he does it in the name of God, he can get away with anything.

The only thing more dangerous than a sociopath as a religious leader is a sincere sociopath as a religious leader. The nut who wants to carry out his notion of the will of God is pure schizophrenia legitimized by religious fervor. Fortunately, Trump is just your garden-variety thuggish con artist. That makes it easier to limit the damage he’s doing.

Christians are going to have to stand up to Trump’s ecumenical bullying and take their religion back. They have to join everyone and rise up to bring Trump and his toxic crowd down.

 

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Gavin the Grinner — He who smirks lurks, a danger to the sanctimonious

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 23rd, 2025

“I have trouble buying the argument that Americans have lost their moral perspective. Let’s be honest—who’s being accused here? Isn’t it true that older Americans are the backbone of Trump’s support? And aren’t older people the least likely to suddenly shift their values? If that’s the case, then who exactly is it that supposedly “changed”? Did we suddenly forget God? Start stealing from our neighbors? Did we run to the riots and loot the stores? No—we didn’t. Something else is going on.”

A right winger who normally isn’t very rational wrote that. He’s one of those sorts who thinks anyone who doesn’t support Trump is living in a “moral cesspool.” Not that he would ever generalize, right? But he raises a good point here, I think, one that we should stop and think about.

A lot of people, myself included, say things like “America lost its collective mind” or “The US abandoned morals” in electing Trump, and then electing him again. There is a built-in unfairness to that characterization, of course. Sixty-five percent of American adults did not vote for Trump in either election, and current polls show 62% of respondents think he’s doing a lousy and even criminal job.

And while I might seriously question the values and ethics of anyone who supports Trump, even there would be a few caveats. While a number of Trump supporters are aware of at least some of the myriad failings and nihilism of Trump, many simply disbelieve the reports, or are so low-information they have simply never heard about them.

To pick a seemingly minor example: the number of people sputtering with rage and disgust at California Governor Gavin Newsom’s brilliant take-down of Trump’s ‘style’–the erratic, over-the-top and often nonsensical posts, and the vast library of tractor art showing a buff, tall, noble Donald Trump in a variety of heroic poses doing manly things. They honestly seem to have no idea that Trump himself had been doing exactly that for ten years now, and Newsom was parodying (and mocking) him. Given that this silliness is the beating heart of Trump’s voter outreach, it seems preposterous that so many of his followers knew nothing of it, but here we are.

The cognitive dissonance is encouraged by the paid liars at Faux News and Newsmacks, who feign shock and outrage that an important personage like the Governor of (shithole, failing!) California would stoop to such immature, goofy, even insane antics. After a few dozen such repetitions, their viewers manage to forget all those posts on Truth Social and the often Groucho Marxist executive orders. Trump is noble, mature, reasonable, and measured. It’s that silly little Newsom who created this horrible style!

The dissonance goes well beyond that. Every day, I get mail from people who declaim that California is a horrible place, overrun with drugs, homeless, gangs and “illegals,” and these are people who happily live in California. I always ask them why, if it’s such a shithole, why they just don’t move to a prosperous, well-run state such as Mississippi or Oklahoma, and they inexplicably erupt in rage. At least, the few who even try to answer that one. You should see their faces when I point out the rural California county I live in actually has a higher over-all crime rate than does Washington DC.

People who cheer the locking up and/or deportation of “illegals” always hate when I tell them that using that term to describe groups of humans makes them sound like goddamned Nazis. What a dehumanizing thing for me to say! Unlike Nazis, all we want to do is defend our noble fatherland against vermin poisoning the blood of loyal patriots! They steal, they cheat, they’re like rats! They dwell in their ghettos and conspire to world domination. We’re nothing like the Nazis, who targeted weak groups of people to hide their corrupt Nazi deficiencies!

Voltaire supposedly uttered the phrase, “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” The far right have spent billions of dollars flooding the American consciousness with absurdities and flat out lies, repeated endlessly, for years.

The result is that many people who see themselves as sane and decent, and who, without the endless Nazi propaganda, would probably be sane and decent. But they have been persuaded to commit atrocities in the name of sanity and decency. People who revere their right to appear in court to contest a speeding ticket have no problem with forcibly deporting people—some of whom didn’t even have their papers in order—to a horrific skein of concentration and death camps in places like El Salvador and Uganda. The same people appalled by a brief encounter in public between an Attorney General and a President under investigation on an airport tarmac see no problem with a criminal president and his vicious stooge of an Attorney General saying proudly that “We are liberating American cities to crack down on crime, especially by those filthy ‘illegals’.”

They also believe in Trump and his propaganda machine, who work endlessly to convince them to excuse even the most vicious and heinous actions against their scapegoats, against their country, and even against themselves because they, and not the alien and subhuman rabble, stand for all those things.

And now, the notion, rapidly growing, that the child rape allegations are made, not by over two hundred victims and rafts of evidence, but by anti-Americans, probably Newsom and illegals, to defame a noble, proud man. Why, I bet they’re the real child rapists, so there!

As long as Trump and his billionaire backers can continue to mind-fuck the 30% or so of Americans who have fallen into this moral and mental abyss, that 30% will remain convinced that they are resolute and just, and those who oppose them are the ones in a moral cesspool. They don’t rob, they don’t steal, they believe in God, they believe in country.

It’s a solid wall of smug, self-satisfied sanctimony, but it has a key vulnerability.

When does the charm finally break? Credible reports of child rape haven’t done it. History shows that it sometimes requires the deaths of millions and the destruction of entire nations to manage that.

But not always. Mark Twain once said, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” Another quote comes to mind: “The tyrant fears laughter more than the assassin’s bullet.”

People like Gavin Newsom, Steven Colbert, South Park and many others have found that vulnerability in the humorless wall of right wing hate and lies. And it may be what saves America from itself.

 

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Jerk Release Program — Child rapist 20 year sentence reduced

Jerk Release Program

Child rapist 20 year sentence reduced

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 12th, 2025

Just days after Trump’s corrupt lawyer/slash DoJ assistant attorney general met privately with convicted child sex felon Ghislaine Maxwell, then serving twenty years for child rape and child sex trafficking, she got moved to Club Fed, a luxurious minimum security prison reserved only for the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful criminals.

Now Maxwell’s on a work release program. The sort of thing someone gets if they get a speeding ticket and can’t pay the fine.

Frankly, I don’t expect her to live long, and I’m perfectly fine with that. Someone’s going to kill her—one of her nearly a thousand victims, perhaps, or relatives of same. Or one of millions of Americans who feel death is about the correct penalty for child rapists.

Or, of course, at the orders of Donald Trump. There’s a saying, attributed to Arabia, that goes, “It is unwise to know the secrets of a king.” And Maxwell has known Trump extremely well for many decades; there cannot be any possible doubt in her mind as to what a loathsome and vicious creature Trump is, and she also no doubt suspects he had something to do with the death of her partner, Jeffrey Epstein. I’m sure Trump would love to order her murdered.

I have absolutely no doubt that she has tons of evidence of her exploits, and Trump’s role in them, stashed away somewhere very safe and secure, held in abeyance by a “dead man’s switch.” She probably told Todd Blanche, Trump’s fixer, that someone, somewhere, had the files and other evidence, and they would remain hidden only for as long as she stayed alive.

It wouldn’t have worked with the Biden administration because there wouldn’t have been any evidence to incriminate them. While there were doubtless some Democratic politicians who availed themselves of her young charges, none had the power to entrap the US government into such a sleazy and sordid deal as the one Maxwell was able to wrangle with the once-proud Department of Justice. Yes, Clinton is on a lot of people’s lists of perpetrators involved with all this, but he’s been out of office for twenty-five years. There’s very few Democrats who won’t agree that if he was involved, then they should throw his ass in jail, too.

I suspect Trump effectively put the National Capitol under martial law because he knew this work-release was coming, and he wanted to try to distract the public. I think he has very badly miscalculated, based just on the initial responses I’ve seen on line.

Trump’s relations with his cult following were already badly strained before this. Most were betrayed by his flip-flop on the Epstein files, and this is going to blow that deep unease sky-high. It comes at a time when the general public is deeply fed up and disgusted with his incompetence, his cruelty, and his obvious lack of interest in anything other than scamming more money.

The military are deeply unhappy with him. Many suspect—correctly—that he doesn’t have the national interest in mind, and regard this week’s meeting with Putin with serious apprehension. His stunt of imposing federal troops on Washington DC on the transparently false excuse of a crime wave is going to result in American soldiers being taunted and booed by their fellow Americans. Further threats to deploy troops in New York and Chicago, following the fiasco in Los Angeles, have further angered military leadership.

And with the on-again off-again tariffs finally in place, and the farm labor force effectively scared out of the fields, the economy is going to take a huge hit and prices are going to explode. People who were whining about 12% inflation in 2016 better brace for 20% inflation starting now.

The possibility that Trump may be brought down by a coup is increasing to levels not seen in America since the crisis of 1933. That was a time when the economy was in utter collapse, and nearly a third of states were using scrip and barter, because they didn’t expect the dollar to be around for much longer.

People were pissed at the incompetence and lack of willingness by the Hoover administration to fix the economy back then, and it was several years, and one half-assed coup attempt, and a strong economic recovery on the strength of the New Deal, before the government was out of the woods.

Now, we face similar factors, combined with a deep and rapidly growing moral disgust with the government. Trump is every bit as incompetent and ineffectual as the hapless Hoover was, but at least people respected Hoover as a human being. Trump is moral filth, and his followers are now realizing it, and they, and an appalled military, realize that Congress and the Court are too compromised by the moral rot and cowardice to solve the matter.

Trump must go, or America dies. There’s no middle road any more.

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