“A populace that is chloroformed day and night by TV stations like Fox News could do with inoculation by poetry. Obviously, poetry can’t be administered like an injection, but it does constitute a boost to the capacity for discrimination and resistance.”

– Seamus Heaney

I gave up long ago on the utility of psychoanalyzing Trump. His pathologies seem so all-encompassing and theatrical as to defy interpretation, even by anti-analysts like RD Laing and Thomas Szasz. But watching Trump in quick succession at the Kirk memorial, the Tylenol press conference and the UN General Assembly, he seemed like a personality in the midst of physical and mental breakdown. Not a crackup, so much as a kind of psychological entropy that is finally beginning to splinter a subject that it’s pawed and scratched the surface of for decades.

The body slumps. The face sags. The loose skin of the throat droops over the collar and onto the tie. The voice speaks in unnatural cadences that don’t harmonize with the often slurred words it tries to pronounce. The volume rises and falls: a blurt, a grunt, a pneumatic whisper. Many of the sentences die out in mid-stream. Others don’t seem to end. More and more often, the thoughts refuse to connect and the voice ends up talking in circles or figure eights. Only the bluster still breaks through. Here’s a narcissist staring into a cracked mirror, no longer sure he’s still in love with the only thing he’s ever really loved: his own image. The mind seems frightened by shadows. Everything is conspiring against him: wife, escalator,  Secret Service, teleprompter, ghost of Epstein. Of course, as the Pretenders sang, “It’s a thin line between love and hate.”

Hate is the dominant theme. It spreads through everything Trump says, like the venom of a pit viper. And not just the political hate for his enemies, who he sees behind every corner, that he bragged about at Kirk’s funeral or the person hate that he’s incubated all his life for immigrants, blacks, independent women, professors, Europeans, trans people and greens. But the deeper hate, the hate that is eating him up from the inside and is now showing in his face, his blackening hand, his bent posture, his precarious gait, his tremulous voice, his fraying memory, for the fact that he is only liked by people he hates and hated by the people whose approval he’s desired all his life. His hatred has become self-consuming.

+++

Here’s an offering of some of Trump’s stranger riffs during his nearly hour-long rant before the UN General Assembly, with some annotations.

I don’t mind making the speech without a teleprompter, because the teleprompter is not working. I feel very happy to be up here with you, nevertheless, and that way you speak more from the heart. I can only say that whoever’s operating this teleprompter is in big trouble.

I recall in 1993, when Bill Clinton gave a speech on his (bad) health care plan to a joint session of Congress, someone loaded the wrong speech into the teleprompter. Clinton recognized it, whispered something to Al Gore and then ad-libbed his speech for the next 7 minutes with no one noticing except his speechwriters. Trump, however, skidded to a stop in mid-sentence and couldn’t proceed to read gems like this until it restarted: “I’m right about everything…You are destroying your countries. They are being destroyed. Europe is in serious trouble.” Or this one: “Environmentalists want to kill all of the cows.”

The teleprompter was controlled by Trump’s staff.

Under my leadership, energy costs are down, gasoline prices are down, grocery prices are down, mortgage rates are down, and inflation has been defeated.

Energy costs are up, gas prices are up, grocery prices are up, inflation is rising.

In just eight months since I took office, we have secured commitments and money already paid for $17 trillion. 

Sheer fantasy. The entire US GDP is about $30 trillion.

In my first term, I built the greatest economy in the history of the world. We had the best economy ever, in the history of the world, and I’m doing the same thing again, but this time it’s actually much bigger and even better. The numbers far surpass my record-setting first term.

The first Trump term ended in a recession and record unemployment. The second term has seen rising layoffs, increased unemployment and plant closures, increased consumer debt, stagnant wages and rising inflation.

I want to thank the country of El Salvador for the successful and professional job they’ve done in receiving and jailing so many criminals that entered our country, and it was under the previous administration that the number became record-setting, and they’re all being taken out. 

The vast majority of people Trump sent to El Salvador’s abysmal prisons had no criminal record.

I ended seven wars. And in all cases, they were raging with countless thousands of people being killed. This includes Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda, a vicious, violent war that was. Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The ceasefire between Iran and Israel ended the bombing, much of which was done by the US, not the covert war between the two countries. Ethiopia and Egypt are not at war. Trump’s claim that he ended the border skirmishes between Pakistan and India so enraged Modi that he made a point of meeting with Xi and Putin in a united front. Kosovo and Serbia aren’t at war, in part because of the presence of UN peacekeeping troops in Kosovo. The fighting is far from over in the Congo and Rwanda and the peace accord Trump helped to broker didn’t include the leading rebel group in the eastern Congo, M23. Armenia and Azerbaijan have yet to sign and ratify the proposed peace treaty. The ceasefire between Cambodia and Thailand was principally negotiated by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. Well, at least he didn’t claim to have resolved the war of many years between Cambodia and Armenia, as he did earlier in the week.

No president or prime minister. And for that matter, no other country has ever done anything close to that, and I did it in just seven months. It’s never happened before. There’s never been anything like that. Very honored to have done it. It’s too bad that I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them. And sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them. I ended seven wars, dealt with the leaders of each and every one of these countries, and never even received a phone call from the United Nations offering to help in finalizing the deal. All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that, on the way up, stopped right in the middle. If the First Lady wasn’t in great shape, she would’ve fallen. But she’s in great shape. We’re both in good shape; we both stood. And then a teleprompter that didn’t work. These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank you very much…Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements.

The United Nations was involved in negotiations to end all of these conflicts. Under Trump I and II, the US has bombed: Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iran and Somalia, as well as Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean. And according to the UN,  someone from the president’s party who ran ahead of him “inadvertently” triggered the stop mechanism on the escalator. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the White House was also operating the teleprompter for Trump when it stopped.

Many years ago, a very successful real estate developer in New York, known as Donald J. Trump, I bid on the renovation and rebuilding of this very United Nations complex. I remember it so well. I said at the time that I would do it for $500 million, rebuilding everything. It would be beautiful. I used to talk about, “I’m going to give you marble floors, they’re going to give you terrazzo.” The best of everything. “You’re going to have mahogany walls, they’re going to give you plastic.” But they decided to go in another direction, which was much more expensive at the time, which actually produced a far inferior product.

Trump’s buildings were notorious for shoddy materials, cost overruns and unpaid contractors.

Today, many of Iran’s former military commanders, in fact, I can say almost all of them are no longer with us; they’re dead. And three months ago, in Operation Midnight Hammer, seven American B-2 bombers dropped the 14 30,000-pound H-bombs [sic] on Iran’s key nuclear facility, totally obliterating everything. No other country on earth could have done what we did. No other country has the equipment to do what we did. We have the greatest weapons on earth. We hate to use them, but we did something that for 22 years, people wanted to do.

The Pentagon’s own damage assessment estimated that the bombing had set back Iran’s nuclear weapons program–to the extent it had one–months, not years.

As everyone knows, I have also been deeply engaged in seeking a ceasefire in Gaza. We have to get that done, have to get it done. Unfortunately, Hamas has repeatedly rejected reasonable offers to make peace, and we can’t forget October 7th, can we? Now, as if to encourage continued conflict, some of this body is seeking to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists for their atrocities. This would be a reward for these horrible atrocities, including October 7th, even while they refuse to release the hostages or accept a ceasefire instead of giving to Hamas and giving so much because they’ve taken so much, they have taken so much, this could have been solved so long ago, but instead of giving in to Hamas ransom demands, those who want peace should be united with one message, release the hostages now. Just release the hostages now. Thank you.

Hamas has repeatedly accepted US-proposed ceasefire deals, only to see Netanyahu reject them at the last minute. Israel attempted to assassinate the Hamas political leadership in an airstrike on a Qatari compound in Doha, where they were meeting to assess the latest Trump-approved ceasefire plan.

I’ve also been working relentlessly stopping the killing in Ukraine. I thought that would be, of the seven wars that I stopped, I thought that would be the easiest because of my relationship with President Putin, which had always been a good one. I thought that was going to be the easiest one. But in war, you never know what’s going to happen. There are always lots of surprises, both good and bad. Everyone thought Russia would win this war in three days, but it didn’t work out that way. It was supposed to be just a quick little skirmish. It’s not making Russia look good; it’s making them look bad.

Trump said he would end the Ukraine war days after taking office. This week, he bragged about making “billions” off the war by selling weapons to NATO.

No matter what happens from here on out, this was something that should have taken a matter of days, certainly less than a week, and they’ve been fighting for three and a half years and killing anywhere from 5 to 7,000 young soldiers, mostly, mostly soldiers on both sides, every single week, from 5 to 7,000 dead young people. And some in cities, much smaller numbers, where rockets are shot, where drones are dropped. This war would never have started if I were president.

Trump has a morbid fascination with talking about the maimed and the dead.

China and India are the primary funders of the ongoing war by continuing to purchase Russian oil. But inexcusably, even NATO countries have not cut off much Russian energy and Russian energy products, which, as you know, I found out about two weeks ago and I wasn’t happy. Think of it, they’re funding the war against themselves. Who the hell ever heard of that one?… It’s embarrassing to them, and it was very embarrassing to them when I found out about it. I can tell you that. But they have to immediately cease all energy purchases from Russia. 

Europe’s imports of Russian oil have declined by 98%.

I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to Sharia law, but you’re in a different country, you can’t do that. Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe if something is not done immediately.

Sadiq Khan: “I think he’s got a crush on me. It’s either that or he believes in giving me squatters’ rights inside his head.”

I mean, I was very proud to see this morning. I have the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had.

Trump’s approval rating in Texas is -17%.

The previous administration also lost nearly 300,000 children. Think of that. They lost more than 300,000 children, little children who were trafficked into the United States on the Biden watch, many of whom have been raped, exploited and abused and sold. Sold. Nobody talks about that… More than 300,000. They’re lost or they’re dead. They’re lost, or they’re dead because of the animals that did this.

300,000 migrant children aren’t “missing or dead.” The paperwork for 291,000 children was never filed. There’s no evidence that large numbers of migrant children have been sex trafficked, “raped” and “sold.”

To protect our citizens, I’ve also designated multiple savage drug cartels as terrorists. And you see this and you see it happening right before your eyes. Let’s put it this way. People don’t like taking big loads of drugs in boats anymore. There aren’t too many boats that are traveling on the seas by Venezuela. They tend not to want to travel very quickly anymore. And we virtually stopped drugs coming into our country by sea. We call them the water drugs. They kill hundreds of thousands of people.

Venezuela is not a major drug trafficking nation. Trump’s airstrikes on Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean violate both US and international law. Colombian President Gustavo Petro: “Drug traffickers live in Miami, New York, Paris, Madrid, and Dubai. Many have blue eyes and blond hair, and they don’t live on the boats where the missiles fall. Drug traffickers live next to Trump’s house in Miami.”

Please be warned that we will blow you out of existence. That’s what we’re doing. We have no choice. Can’t let it happen. I believe we lost 300,000 people last year to drugs. 300,000. Fentanyl and other drugs. Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than 25,000 Americans.

There were about 100,000 drug overdose deaths in the US last year, a large percentage of those from prescription drugs. 

We’re getting rid of the falsely named renewables. By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn’t blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all the time and they start to rust and rot. Most expensive energy ever conceived. And it’s actually energy. You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money. You lose money, the governments have to subsidize. 

Like them or not (and I don’t particularly), wind power is the largest source of renewable energy in the US, producing more than 10% of the nation’s power and 25% of the power in eight states, generating more than $50 billion in revenue and employing 131,000 workers.

Most of them are built in China, and I give China a lot of credit. They build them, but there are very few wind farms. So why is it that they build them and they send them all over the world, but they barely use them? You know what? They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don’t like wind, but they sure as hell like selling the windmills.

China’s expansion of domestic wind and solar capacity overtook its coal capacity in 2025.

I’m in New York City, and I’m feeling a lot safer. Crime, we’re getting crime down. And by the way, speaking of crime, Washington D.C., was the crime capital of America. Now, it’s a totally… After 12 days, it’s a totally safe city. Everyone’s going out to dinner, they’re going out to restaurants. Your wife can walk down the middle of the street with or without you. Nothing’s going to happen.

As long as you don’t count those “little fights with the wife,” perhaps. Though I still wouldn’t advise walking “down in the middle” of Wisconsin Avenue. As for the National Guard, its latest stats include: “Guardsmen have cleared 1,022 bags of trash, spread 744 cubic yards of mulch, removed 35 truckloads of plant waste, cleared 6.7 miles of roadway, and painted 270 feet of fencing.”

Climate change it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you’re involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that cost their country’s fortunes and given those same countries, no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.

Trump may be right about the models being wrong. But wrong in underestimating how rapidly the climate is warming. Earlier this year, the planet hit 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7°F) of warming above the average pre-industrial temperature, a critical benchmark beyond which catastrophic climate change may be irreversible.

I’m really good at predicting things. They actually said during the campaign that they had a hat, the best-selling hat. Trump was right about everything. And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything. And I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail. And if you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail.

He wasn’t so good at predicting the failures of his Atlantic City casinos, Trump University, the Plaza Hotel, the New Jersey Generals, Trump Ice, Trump Shuttle, Trump Mortgage, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump: the Game and the Donald J. Trump Foundation.

They must take control strongly and immediately of the unmitigated immigration disaster and the fake energy catastrophe before it’s too late. The carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions and they’re heading down a path of total destruction.

The term “carbon footprint” was developed by the PR firm Ogilvy & Mather for British Petroleum as part of a public relations campaign by the oil industry to shift blame from emissions by fossil fuel corporations to the individuals who use their products, such as miles driven in cars or flown in airplanes.

We have a border, strong, and we have a shape, and that shape doesn’t just go straight up. That shape is amorphous when it comes to the atmosphere. And if we had the most clean air, and I think we do, we have very clean air, we have the cleanest air we’ve had in many, many years. But the problem is that other countries like China, which has air that’s a little bit rough, it blows. And no matter what you’re doing down here, the air up here tends to get very dirty because it comes in from other countries where their air isn’t so clean and the environmentalists refuse to acknowledge that.

You have to watch Trump’s extravagant hand gestures to get the full effect of this, to use a Bidenism, malarky. 

While the U.S. has approximately 1,300 heat-related deaths annually, that’s a lot, Europe loses more than 175,000 people to heat deaths each year because the cost is so expensive they can’t turn on an air conditioner. What is that all about? That’s not Europe. That’s not the Europe that I love and know.

The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record in Europe.  Nature Medicine reported this week that 62,700 people died in Europe from heat-related causes in 2024, with women and the elderly representing the largest part of the death toll. The European region is warming at twice the global average. 

Clean. I call it clean, beautiful coal. You can do things today with coal that you couldn’t have done 10 years ago, 15 years. So I have a little standing order in the White House. Never use the word coal, only use the words clean, beautiful coal. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?

The “cleanest” coal still generates more greenhouse gases than any other fuel.

I was walking in and the leader of Brazil was walking out. We saw him and I saw him, he saw me and we embraced, and then I’m saying, can you believe I’m going to be saying this in just two minutes? But we actually agreed that we would meet next week. We didn’t have much time to talk, like about 20 seconds. They were, in retrospect, I’m glad I waited because this thing didn’t work out too well. But we did talk. We had a good talk and we agreed to meet next week, if that’s of interest. But he seemed like a very nice man, actually. He liked me, I liked him. And I only do business with people I like. I don’t, when I don’t like them, I don’t like them. But we had, at least for about 39 seconds, we had excellent chemistry.

As for “chemistry,” Lula, who spoke just before Trump, unleashed a blistering attack on the “authoritarian” policies of Trump’s administration, from tariffs to Gaza to the droning of boats in the Caribbean: “Attacks on sovereignty, arbitrary sanctions, and unilateral interventions are becoming the rule. There is a clear parallel between the multilateralism crisis and the weakening of democracy. Authoritarianism is strengthened when we fail to act in the face of arbitrary acts; when the international society falters in defending peace, sovereignty, and the rule of law. The consequences are tragic.”

Let us defend free speech and free expression. Let us protect religious liberty, including for the most persecuted religion on the planet today. It’s called Christianity.

Trump said last week that a speech that criticizes him is not “free speech.” His Pentagon threatened to ban reporters who didn’t report favorably on the Defense Department. And Trump cheered the punishment of Jimmy Kimmel after ABC was threatened by Trump’s FCC commissioner for jokes he made following the murder of Charlie Kirk. Christians and Muslims are “persecuted” at around the same rate globally.

In closing, just want to repeat that immigration and the high cost of so-called green renewable energy is destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of our planet. Countries that cherish freedom are fading fast because of their policies on these two subjects. You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.

Every EU nation except Poland enjoys a longer average life expectancy than the US. And Luxembourg, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria all enjoy a higher standard of living than the US.

+++

+ Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep…”The Secret Service is involved!”

+ Ishaan Tharoor, foreign affairs columnist for the Washington Post: “A senior foreign diplomat posted at the UN texts me: “This man is stark, raving mad. Do Americans not see how embarrassing this is?”

+ Even Trump’s eulogies are always about himself: “Charlie did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents. And I don’t want the best for them. I can’t stand my opponents.”

+ As if to prove his point, a couple of days later, Trump went off script during a speech at Mt. Vernon, telling his audience why they shouldn’t have any sympathy for a man with Stage 4 cancer, while he encourages his Justice Department to go after anyone who disparages Charlie Kirk: “Very evil and mean Biden. You know, Biden has always been an evil guy, but he has never been a smart guy. Even 30, 40 years ago, he was stupid. But Biden has always been a mean son of a bi*ch… He’s not doing well right now. So when you start feeling sorry for him, remember that he’s a bad person.”

+ Ned Price: “On a single Saturday in September:

–Trump instructed his AG to go after specific political enemies.
–We learned that his DOJ ended an investigation into his border czar, who was caught on camera taking a $50k cash bribe.
–His Pentagon top brass threatened to expel journalists who report info not cleared by them.
–His WH spoke to a shady deal that will see TikTok in the hands of a consortium of GOP mega-donors.
–Trump threatened “bad things” if we don’t re-take Bagram AFB.
–His most senior counterterrorism official is in a Twitter spat with Laura Loomer.”

+ Politically, Trump’s in freefall and it’s hard to see how his bizarre rants this week will stem the collapse. Trump’s support is crumbling even in some of the reddest of red states. These are Trump’s approval/disapproval ratings in the states that Trump won in 2024, according to a tracking poll by the Economist…

ID +31
WY +19
WV +14
TN + 7
Mt +6
AR + 4
AL +3.8
MISS +3.3
KY + 2.7
UT +1.4
ND +1
OK -2
SD-3.6
LA -4.1
NE -4.2
AK -4.8
SC -6
IN -6.7
FL- 7.4
OH -7.6
IO -8.4
KS -8.9
MO -9.3
GA -10.8
PA -10.8
AZ -11.3
NV -14.1
WI -16
MI -16.7
TX -17.7

+++

+ Edward Hip came to the US from Guatemala 22 years ago and has lived here ever since. Hip is married to an American citizen and is the father of two children, including a 5-year-old girl, who is autistic. 

Last week, Hip called his wife from his car and told her he thought he was being followed by ICE. His daughter was in the car with him. Hip drove home, parked the car in the lot and managed to get into his house in Leominster, Massachusetts.  But the ICE agents grabbed his daughter and held her hostage, using the frightened young girl as bait to pressure Hip to surrender. 

A video of the incident shows the young girl sitting on the curb next to a black ICE van, surrounded by armed immigration agents. She’s holding a bottle. Her mother can be heard saying, “They took my daughter, she’s 5 years old! She has autism spectrum. Give me my daughter back!”

Meanwhile, an ICE agent tells Hip, “Is that your daughter? Come here so I can see those IDs.” 

Hip replies: “Hey, I can give it through the door.”

The agent shakes his head and tells Hip, while pointing at the ground in front of him, “You can give it right here.” 

Hip’s wife said that “the agents threatened us, that if we did not open the door in 15 minutes, they would enter the house.”

Eventually, the local Leominster police showed up, took Hip’s daughter from the ICE agents and returned her to her mother. Then ICE left the scene.

Two days later, ICE returned to the Hip house. A neighbor, Liz Roman, described the raid: “They used bounty hunters and agents without a court order. They had them cornered. They went out behind the house and they tried to get there through our window.” They eventually abducted Hip and took him to the ICE detention center in Plymouth, where he remains.  Hip’s wife told Telemundo: “Officers came out behind my house, arrested him, took him away. We are not criminals.”

+ Bodycam footage obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times shows that the ICE agent who killed  Silverio Villegas González in Chicago said his injuries were “nothing major.” ICE has previously said he was “seriously injured” and sent to the hospital. The video also undermines the claim that the person who was killed was driving towards anyone.

+ At the Broadview, Illinois, protests against ICE this weekend, this woman was shot in the chest with a “non-lethal” bullet, slammed to the pavement and put in an illegal chokehold by ICE agents in full-body armor, who she posed no threat to…

This show of political ultra-violence is coming soon to a city near you.

+ ICE raided a group of workers replacing a roof in Naperville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The masked agents knocked down the workers’ ladders, leaving at least four men trapped on the roof. One of the men was seriously injured when he jumped down. “Two agents chased one guy down our neighborhood street with guns drawn,” the homeowner said. “This is a home, they surrounded with guns. I have children!”

All five of the men have documents to legally live and work in the U.S.

“All workers were rounded up and just taken away indiscriminately,” said the homeowner. “There was no checking.”

+ New York State Assembly member Robert Carroll urged Gov. Kathy Hochul to use her power to shut off the electricity at 26 Federal Plaza as a way to shut down ICE kidnappings & detainments. Carroll said that if ICE is going to escalate, then people need to escalate against ICE as well: “We need to change the script. We need to escalate this. Because clearly what we’re doing right now is not stopping the inhumane, un-American and illegal activity that is happening in this building.”

+ Last month, ICE agents pulled two firefighters off the line who were battling the Bear Gulch fire on the Olympic Peninsula. After spending weeks in ICE detention, Rigoberto Hernandez Hernandez, 23, a wildland firefighter from Oregon, has finally been released and is back home. ICE has yet to offer a reason for why he was arrested and held for a month.

+ Former Washington Post investigative reporter, Carol Leonig broke a major story for MSNBC this week, which was soon backed up by reports in the New York Times and a couple of days later by her former paper, that Trump border czar Tom Homan was under criminal investigation for potential bribery and claims he would steer federal contracts in the new administration.  Undercover FBI agents recorded him accepting $50,000 in cash stuffed in a bag from the Cava Grill. Homan says he did “nothing illegal.”

+ DHS Secretary Kristi Noem pushed hard to land the number two spot on the Trump ticket. Then Noem’s book came out, where she bragged about shooting her puppy, Cricket, in the head and dumping its body in a gravel pit. When Trump heard her account of this act of savagery, he turned to Don Jr. and said, “That’s not good, at all. Even you wouldn’t kill a dog and you kill everything.”

+ Kristi the Puppy Killer appointed 28-year-old Madison Sheahan as Deputy Director of ICE. When asked whether she thought she was qualified for the job, Sheehan responded:  “I absolutely think I’m qualified for the job. Because at the end of the day, what really makes anybody qualified for any job?”

+ Federal Judge William Smith ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration’s attempt to coerce states into complying with its immigration enforcement actions in order to receive federal disaster aid is illegal and unconstitutional.

+ “Do you think the Trump admin should be using Kirk’s death as a way to silence political opponents?”

No: 80%
Yes: 7%

Polling USA.

That 7% is carrying a lot of weight in the country right now…

+++

+ Either Trump has now done a complete 180 on Ukraine or, more likely, this is just a screenshot of a split-second in time of a presidential windbag, I mean mill, in rotation…

+ Trump: “We’re actually making money off the Russia-Ukraine war because NATO is buying our equipment.” “War profiteer” used to be one of the worst things you could call someone, now boys raised in the Manosphere will want to grow up to become one…PragueU will probably start offering courses in War Profiteering.

+ Trump wrote on his social media account this week: “If Afghanistan doesn’t give Bagram Airbase back to those who built it, the United States of America, BAD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN!! President DJT”

+ To the US, again, just as “bad things” have happened to every other country that has invaded (or re-invaded) Afghanistan.

+ Apropos of Trump’s vow to reinvade Afghanistan and seize control of the Bagram Air/Torture Base…

+ Can’t forgive college loan debt of American students or medical debt of sick Americans, but can bail out an Argentina bankrupted by the gonzo libertarian, political weirdo and now welfare queen Javier  Milei: “The Trump administration is also willing to provide Argentina with credit via the Treasury’s exchange stabilization fund and to buy Argentina’s dollar bonds, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote Wednesday on X. “The Trump administration is also willing to provide Argentina with credit via the Treasury’s exchange stabilization fund and to buy Argentina’s dollar bonds.”

+ 15 million people are going to be kicked off of Medicaid, hundreds of rural hospitals are closing, but…Scott Bessent on Argentina: “The plan is as long as President Milei continues with his strong economic policies to help him, to bridge him to the election, we are not going to let a disequilibrium in the market cause a backup in his substantial economic reforms.” Gives fresh meaning to “America first.”

+ Nikolas Sarkozy joins Pétain, the Nazi collaborator, as the only two French presidents sent to prison.

+ Now do HRC for turning Libya into a slave-trading state…

Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Trump’s drone extrajudicial strikes on boats in the Caribbean: “Drug traffickers live in Miami, New York, Paris, Madrid, and Dubai. Many have blue eyes and blond hair, and they don’t live on the boats where the missiles fall. Drug traffickers live next to Trump’s house in Miami.”

Forrest Hylton on the fall of Bolsonaro: “The fishermen at Porto da Barra agreed that the verdict was historic and celebrated all weekend. They have been in an uproar over Trump for weeks now. Some of the men who carry umbrellas and chairs down to the beach told me that Brazil’s largest organised crime faction had finally gone down; they, too, talk about how Trump needs to be put in his place. There was much mirth at the thought of Bolsonaro’s life in prison.”

+++

+ Trump on gas prices: “Our pricing is way down. We’re gonna be close to $2 a gallon very soon.”

+ According to the AAA, the national average price for a gallon of regular today is $3.16 a gallon. Here in Oregon, it’s $4.22 a gallon.

+ Will they offer to take the death penalty off the table if the shooter claims he was a card-carrying member of Antifa, who read passages from the Grundisse every night before going to bed…

+ A federal judge has ordered the University of South Dakota to reinstate Philip Michael Hook, a tenured professor who posted criticism of Charlie Kirk on his Facebook page the day of the shooting, finding the action likely violated the First Amendment. A few hours after Kirk was shot, Hook posted this to his Facebook page:

Okay. I don’t give a flying f*** about this Kirk person. Apparently, he was a hate spreading Nazi. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the idiotic right fringe to even know who he was. I’m sorry for his family that he was a hate spreading Nazi and got killed. I’m sure they deserved better. Maybe good people could now enter their lives. But geez, where was all this concern when the politicians in Minnesota were shot? And the school shootings? And Capitol Police? I have no thoughts or prayers for this hate spreading Nazi. A shrug, maybe.

A couple of hours later, Hook deleted the message and made a second post.  The second post stated:

Apparently, my frustration with the sudden onslaught of coverage concerning a guy shot today led to a post I mow [sic] regret posting. I’m sure many folks fully understood my premise, but the simple fact that some were offended led me to remove the post. I extend this public apology to those who were offended. Om Shanti.

Two days later, Hook was publicly denounced by the Speaker of the South Dakota House, Jon Hansen, and the Governor, Larry Rhoden, both of whom called for Hook’s firing. That same day, Hook received a letter from his dean, Bruce Kelley, informing him of the university’s intention to terminate his contract. In her ruling, Karen Schreier found that the university’s move to fire Hook over Facebook posts that did not disrupt activities on campus violated his First Amendment right to free speech.

+ The Washington Post’s letter firing Karen Attiah, the last black staff writer in the paper’s once venerable Op-Ed section, is crazy enough to have been dictated by Donald Trump. Perhaps it was…

+ Matthew Segal (Civil Rights litigator): “In my opinion, when companies or institutions cave to Trump despite the law being on their side, they are not misunderstanding the law; they are making educated guesses that the U.S. is heading in a direction where, in practice, the law won’t matter.”

+ In the wake of news that the Orem shooter had a trans housemate, with whom he may have been in a relationship, the Trump administration is moving to crack down on transgender activists, slotting them into the catchall category of “gender ideology extremism.”

+ Even transphobe JK Rowling couldn’t come up with this plot twist…

FOX NEWS: The militant transgender movement, is that a domestic terrorist threat?

JD VANCE:  If you are encouraging people to commit acts of violence against the US government or against your fellow Americans, absolutely. You’re involved in a terrorist movement.

+ I don’t much like George Orwell for snitching out so many of his former friends to MI-5 as communists and subversives in 1949, so I usually refrain from mentioning his name in this kind of context. But labeling transgender people as a terrorist threat to the nation is truly an Orwellian reversal of what’s really going on out there…

+ Speaking of political violence…Last week, a Fox host called for summary executions of homeless and mentally ill people. Now Ingraham is encouraging ICE to brutalize Democratic Party politicians…

+ Jeremy Fistel, a white man from Plano, Texas, had some very specific and very depraved fantasies about how he wanted Zohran Mamdani to be killed, including, “I’d love to see an IDF bullet go through your skull.” Pretty sure Mr. Fistel is not a card-carrying member of ANTIFA.

+ Trump proclaimed this week that negative press (about him) is no longer “free speech”: “When somebody is given, uh, 97 percent of the stories are bad about them, that’s no longer free speech, that’s just cheating, and they become members of the Democrat National Committee that’s what they are, the networks, in my opinion. They’re just offshoots of the Democrat National Committee.” Meanwhile, the Pentagon announced that it will require reporters “to pledge they won’t gather any information — even unclassified — that hasn’t been expressly authorized for release and will revoke the press credentials of those who do not obey.” Which begs the question: Are “credentialed journalists, really journalists?”

+ On her book tour, Kamala Harris has taken to saying that she pleaded with Biden to extend the empathy he expressed for Ukrainians to Gaza, but “he couldn’t do it; while he could passionately state, ‘I am a Zionist,’ his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced.” Of course, Harris couldn’t do it either, refusing to allow even an elected Palestinian-American from Georgia a speaking spot at the convention. Moreover, Palestinians didn’t need empathy from Biden and Harris; they needed them to simply abide by US and international law and stop the flow of arms to Israel when it became clear Israel was using American weapons to commit genocide.

+++

+ According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, teachers are paid 26% less than other professionals with similar levels of education. Teachers were paid less than other college graduates in every state, with teacher pay gaps spanning from -10.0% in Rhode Island to -38.5% in Colorado. The relative teacher pay penalty was at least 25% in 20 states.

+ Last year, the USDA issued a report warning of rising food insecurity in the US. This year, the Trump administration terminated a decades-long report on U.S. hunger, calling it “politicized.”

+ Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins: The hunger survey that USDA canceled recently was one more waste of taxpayer dollars. There are many, many other surveys collecting that data.

Reporter: What other surveys?

Rollins: I don’t have the names.

+ Nixon ordered his AG, John Mitchell, to go after his political enemies, while in the privacy of the Oval Office, with the tapes rolling. Trump sends his crazy memos demanding vendetta prosecutions to the Attorney General of the US via social media…

+ The Trump administration has ordered the National Park Service to begin removing signage about slavery, climate change and the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II. “This is an outrageous assault on our free speech and ability to educate each other,” charged Rep. Chellie Pingree, the Democrat from Maine. “It’s just bonkers to me that the federal government is imposing these kinds of restraints, that we’re taking away valuable information from our citizens who visit this park, and that we are trying to dumb everyone down and pretend real weather events don’t happen by not letting you read a simple sign.”

+ Does anyone recall this statement by Trump on January 20? “I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”

+++

+ Trump: “I’ve been saying to Bobby and the group, taking Tylenol is, uh, not good. I’ll say it. It’s not good. With Tylenol, don’t take it. Don’t take it. And if you can’t live, if your fever is so bad, you have to take one because there’s no alternative to that, sadly. First question, What can you take instead? Actually, there’s not an alternative to that. As you know, other of the medicines have been proven bad with the aspirins and Advil and others, right? If you can’t tough it out, if you can’t do it, that’s what you’re gonna have to do. You’ll take a Tylenol, but it’ll be very sparingly … I think you shouldn’t take it.”

+ The last paragraph of the FDA memo urging people to follow Trump’s advice and stop using Tylenol, undermines everything that precedes it…

+++

+ MAGA doesn’t want to take us back to the 1950s or even the 1850s, but the 1650s. Here’s Megyn Kelly on the “curses” the feminist siteJezebe placed on the Kirks: “Erika and Charlie Kirk heard about these curses and that news genuinely rattled Erika in particular. She knew Christian teaching on this subject. She loved Charlie absolutely and she was scared when she heard of the curses that Jezebel had called up. So much so, that she and Charlie contacted a friend, who I believe she said was a Catholic priest, but definitely a friend, and asked him to come over and pray with them over Charlie the night before he was murdered. Eventually, she worked it through and so did Charlie. And as she later told me, “Weapons will form but not prosper. That Satan and those witches have no power.”

In 2017-2018, NBC paid this woman $20 million a year!

+ Meanwhile, over on Fox, this noisome dialogue was going down…

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