Trump and Hegseth Make the World Weirder and More Dangerous

I'm not particularly sympathetic to military officers, but I had to feel a little sorry for whatever generals made the 15 hour flight from South Korea to Washington, DC, to have a pissant little TV bitch tell them that they're fat and then watch a barely awake president blather about his signature and his problem walking down stairs when he wasn't talking about how awesome it would be for troops to kill Americans in the city streets of the United States. I mean, beyond "this could have been a fucking Zoom call," imagine spending your whole life immersed in the ethos of the military, of the (at least theoretical) discipline and respect for the Constitution, and you gotta travel until your ass is numb to listen to two dumb motherfuckers say you should forget all that and just fuck shit up because the bulbous orange blob man is ordering it.

The speech by Secretary of Defense (sorry, it's not really the Department of War until Congress makes the change) Pete Hegseth, a drunk who beat his wife, for the forced-gathered leadership of the US military yesterday veered between embarrassingly masturbatory Patton fantasies and genuinely disturbing shifts in policy. Mostly, he wasn't really speaking to the generals, who were there as set dressing for a reel on Instagram. He started by announcing, "The era of the Department of Defense is over... the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: war-fighting, preparing for war and preparing to win. Unrelenting and uncompromising in that pursuit. Not because we want war. No one here wants war, but it's because we love peace." Which is kind of confusing. If you're the "Department of War," that seems to indicate you're going to start, you know, wars; whereas, the Department of Defense would be more concerned with maintaining peace than waging war. I know it's all nuance and bullshit, but the fucking chest-thumping is completely ludicrous. And when was the mission of our military not "war-fighting"? Isn't that what all the guns and bombs and training are for?

Of course, every single person sitting in that room knew that, had lived that, and understood that this fucking shit-for-brains telling them that was a goddamned insult. 

So much of what Hegseth said was childish, ignorant, and deranged. "You kill people and break things for a living," he chest-pounded. "You are not politically correct and don't necessarily belong always in polite society. We are not an army of one. We are a joint force of millions of selfless Americans. We are warriors." Goddamn, he sounds like an incel desperate for likes while live-playing League of Legends on Twitch. Again, this fucking amateur, this pretender, this boy in grown-up clothes is saying this to hundreds of men and women who used to know exactly what the mission was but had that all scrambled for them. And let's be clear: the vast majority of people in the military, like 80-85% (if not more) are not frontline fighters. There's support staff, intelligence, logistics, maintenance, medical personnel, and more, and that's not counting the warriors whose job entails sitting in a trailer in the Nevada desert, piloting drones remotely for recon and for blowing shit up. Oh, and the IT departments that keep all that running.

Hegseth was wantonly, flagrantly insulting, whether it was his fat-shaming rant or his even stupider attack on beards (I guess those religious exemptions don't matter). And he said, "We fight not because we hate what's in front of us. We fight because we love what's behind us. You see, the Ivy League faculty lounges will never understand us, and that's okay because they could never do what you do." This moronic bitch doesn't get that a number of veterans are on Ivy League faculty, including former generals. And just calm down there, princess. It's not like defending the country is the hardest fucking concept to get your head around.

Now imagine the admiral who had to travel 20 hours from Manila to DC just to listen to a sleepy, deranged commander-in-chief talk about walking down stairs. No, seriously. Nearly an hour into his truly bizarre, disturbing, dementia-driven ramble about, fuck, I guess "stuff," Trump mocked Joe Biden for falling down stairs, which led to this extended...something...stream of consciousness? Inner monologue said out loud? Haints in his head he's having a conversation with? Honestly, I don't know...but this is really the president of the United States:

"I'm very careful when I walk downstairs, I'm on stairs like these stairs. I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall because it doesn't work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don't want that. You walk nice and easy. You don't have to set any record, be cool, be cool when you walk down. But don't bop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs. I've never seen him. Bop, bop, bop. He'd go down the stairs, wouldn't hold on. I said, it's great. I don't want to do it. I guess I could do it. But eventually bad things are going to happen and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president."

That's the guy who told the leaders of the military, who have had it hammered into them and hammer it into the soldiers they command that, as very clearly stated in the US Constitution, the US military doesn't wage war against Americans on American soil, that they will wage war against Americans on American soil. Trump said, using the quaint colloquial term for the n-word, "In our inner cities, which we're going to be talking about because it's a big part of war now, it's a big part of war."

Trump described the future battles this way: "The Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places. And we're going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too. It's a war from within...Last month I signed an executive order to provide training for quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it's the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won't get out of control once you're involved at all."

Every single one of those cities has seen a drop in crime. In New York City, shootings are lower than they've ever been. Murders are down. Robberies are down. If you send in troops, they'll just be picking up garbage like the National Guard soldiers are forced to do in DC because there's nothing else to fucking do because the police actually have a handle on the crime situation. Fuck reality, though. Fuck it raw.

One thing I don't get is why police unions aren't pissed off about all this talk. Yeah, we can say a lot of shit about how terrible cops are (and we should), and there are plenty of reasons that crime is down that have nothing to do with policing. But the president saying that troops need to invade cities in order to bring order is a fucking insult to the police in those cities. It's saying that they aren't doing their jobs. I mean, Christ, they already have all the military equipment they could want. It's redundant to send the actual army in. 

Unless, of course, your goal isn't to stop crime but to pretend bad shit is going on so you can take over the cities and intimidate the population and be the mad king you were always destined to be. 

It probably doesn't need to be said, but one thing that our military is not trained to do is be police (except for the ones trained as military police), and every general there knows it. I'm sure there are military leaders who are batshit crazy and would love to use "inner cities" as a "training ground" to attack "the enemy from within." But most aren't. Most know that if they are ordered to, it will be time to decide whether or not they are loyal to the obvious dementia-sufferer-in-chief or to the Constitution and the country.

Trump and Hegseth essentially undermined everything the United States is supposed to stand for, and they admit they don't give a fuck about history, about stability, about the rest of the world. In their very weird and very disturbed way, they have made life more dangerous for everyone on earth.

And now that Trump has declared that we are in an "armed conflict" with drug cartels, that's going to be his and Hegseth's and squamous tumor Stephen Miller's excuse to level what's left of the country they have already wrecked.

Kimmel's Suspension Isn't the Worst Thing Trump Has Done, But It Should Scare the Hell Out of You

It's really important to get this part right: Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was not insulting or even talking about Charlie Kirk when he said on Monday that last weekend we saw "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." Under pressure from the federal government, ABC, owned by Disney, suspended Kimmel's show indefinitely, which is censorship by any measure. The FCC chair, Brendan Carr, who looks like the creepy uncle who touches you too much, claimed that the real issue is that Kimmel "misled" people on the political beliefs of Tyler Robinson, Kirk's murderer, and that's not allowed.

Except that's not what the actual words there are doing. What Kimmel and his writers were saying is that Donald Trump and the entirety of MAGA world is distancing itself from Robinson. We don't know what Robinson believes. We have various hints, but we don't know. Before we knew even the small amount we know now, the MAGA media machine, including the president and his administration, accused everyone from George Soros to Rachel Maddow to "Antifa" for being somehow responsible for the murder, and, again, with no evidence, called for organizations and individuals on the left to be declared terrorists and silenced, forced into poverty from lawsuits, and arrested. That wasn't misleading? 

The other thing Kimmel said is simply undeniably true. Trump and his minions and accomplices are exploiting Kirk's death. Because I'm damned to be included on the mailing lists of assholes, I've gotten multiple emails from right-wing organizations seeking to raise money off it. It's being used as a cudgel against anyone daring to do something as terrible as quote Charlie Kirk on Instagram. They are wallowing in the opportunities the murder has provided them. Indeed, they keep accusing the "left" of "celebrating" Kirk's death (and, yes, there have been some people who posted things cheering it), but the real celebration is on the right as they engage in an orgy of self-righteousness and performative outrage. Which is their First Amendment right, as it is the First Amendment right of anyone to say that what they're doing is scoring political points.

What makes the Kimmel suspension and Carr's promise that "we're not done yet" so insidious and, yes, frightening is that it lowers the bar from mocking Kirk's death to any criticism of Trump or the MAGA movement being reason enough for censorship, intimidation, and punishment. Even worse, as Greg Sergeant points out, is that Carr is making it clear that this really is about Trump by using the FCC's "public interest obligation" as a sledgehammer. But, see, "public interest" is now not about the Constitution or even, really, the public. The administration is saying that "public interest" tied to Trump, that if you attack Trump, you're undermining the public interest. The FCC is saying that what's good for Trump is good for America and everything needs to follow that. If a plane was carrying the Epstein files, I assume Trump would shoot it out of the air and claim it's for the good of the country.

It gets worse. Even as unlikely compatriots like Karl Rove and Tucker Carlson decry the federal government's insertion of itself into TV content moderation, we have a parade of right-wingers saying that maybe they don't think the First Amendment is all that great. Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, who looks like she's waiting to see you drink the tea she put cyanide in, said, "Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right. And that there should be almost no checks and balances on it. I don’t feel that way anymore." So I guess our rights didn't come directly from God, as Republicans are fond of saying. 

Trump himself threatened to strip networks' affiliate stations of their licenses to broadcast, saying, in essence, the hell with the right to free speech: "When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do—if you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative one in years, or something—when you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that." 

Except they are. That's the whole point of the First Amendment. The freedom to shit-talk someone, even after death, even Charlie Kirk, is one of the founding principals of this country. The Declaration of Independence is a long shit-talk about King George III. The founders themselves regularly shit-talked each other (when they weren't, you know, dueling), sometimes in print, sometimes in debates. In a letter written for publication in 1800, Alexander Hamilton accused then-President John Adams of "disgusting egotism,” “distempered jealousy,” and “ungovernable indiscretion." That's just a little sample of vituperation leveled at Adams. There's nothing more American than shit-talking the president.

Indeed, you could argue that the real patriots are the ones willing to shit-talk Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and anyone else. And while, yes, obviously, there's a difference between suffering personal consequences for what you post on social media and the government demanding you be silenced, I'd argue that the government has a responsibility to come in and tell, say, a university that fired someone because a couple of trolls got a screenshot of single thing a professor wrote on Instagram that it's violating that professor's First Amendment rights. (I'm pretty sure that public universities, which are government institutions, will have this come up in lawsuits.)

Instead, what we're getting is everyone on the right cheering on the mass censorship of anyone who would dare suggest that Charlie Kirk said the things that he actually did say, which were awful and violent and degrading. But none of that matters because this is an opportunity for the totalitarian right to use this to force its demented control over the speech and actions of the country. It is, to put it simply, a chance to outlaw much of what the left says and stands for. It's a low-rent version of Naomi Klein's idea of the shock doctrine in action: using a "crisis" in order advance a harmful political agenda. Usually, it involves natural disasters or a terrorist attack. This wasn't the latter, but they're trying to make it into one and respond accordingly.

Look, I know that what's happened to Jimmy Kimmel pales in comparison to what the US government is doing to migrants (or what we're funding in Gaza, for that matter). Kimmel is a wealthy man with all kinds of resources at his disposal, and I'm hoping that he tells ABC, Disney, Trump, Sinclair, and everyone else to go fuck themselves as they try to force him to apologize to Kirk's widow (which would be weird since he didn't insult Kirk), give her money, and donate to Kirk's hate group (fuck you, that's what it is when you're on the receiving end of the hate), Turning Point USA. I'm hoping that he says he wants to sue the Trump administration and goes for it. Hell, Disney is a big damn, wealthy corporation run by rich pukes who, of course, want to protect the bottom line for their investors because that's all the morality capitalism can muster. 

But surely they have to know that it's never going to be enough for these monsters in the White House. ABC paid Trump off and had George Stephanopoulos apologize for saying that Trump raped E. Jean Carroll, which, you know, he did. It wasn't enough. Kimmel didn't say a damn thing about Kirk's politics and even sent out sympathies to Kirk's family and expressed horror over the shooting. It still wasn't enough. There is no satiating them, there is no end point, and they will always, always, always find another way to extort and threaten and blackball and punish. People with the means to do something need to fucking well do something. As I and many others have said, what's the use in having "fuck you" money if you don't occasionally say, "Fuck you"? It's not even that big an ask. George Soros just gave $10 million for the redistricting effort in California. The money's there. Whatever a lawsuit would cost will be far, far less than the next round of extortion.

Meanwhile, the rest of us without deep pockets or portfolios that would allows us to retire are left to wonder how we can react to this. I have friends in red states who feel like they're risking their jobs if they express an opinion on Facebook that isn't "Charlie Kirk is the awesomest human ever and I will bless him every night in my prayers which I definitely say before bed." I wanted to write something savage about the whole situation, but I didn't because I didn't want to wonder if I'd become the next target of Libs of Suck My Cock or whatever (sorry - I'm not going cold turkey). 

That's the way this works. It starts with Jimmy Kimmel and some professors and other workers, and it causes fear in others in media, entertainment, and anyone who writes or posts. That's of a piece with how this administration wants to spread fear, whether by picking up people in the country legally for protesting the war in Gaza or drone-murdering a boatload of Venezuelans or by deporting migrant children in the middle of the night or deporting migrant adults to countries they have no ties to or sending masked goons out to terrorize communities. It's the same with detention facilities and defunding universities and suing law firms. Fear and compliance are their tools. The counter to that is courage and protest and refusal, but that is far easier said than done.

We need some leaders here on this, but, sadly, we are bereft of them. There's a line that's been haunting me from Tony Kushner's  A Bright Room Called Day, a frighteningly prescient play about artists facing the rise of Hitler in Germany. A character comments on how he and his circle are not ready for what's coming, "This age wanted heroes. It got us instead." Maybe Kimmel can be that hero. Maybe AOC, who delivered a hell of a speech on who Charlie Kirk really was while most Democrats just meekly acquiesced to a vote on an official day of remembrance. Hell, maybe it's you or me. Just know that this fight is gonna be hard and it's gonna end up hurting a lot of us as they contort all the tools of the government to serve themselves and wreck the rest of the country. You should be scared now. But not too scared to act.

Well, Shit, I Guess I Gotta Write Something About Charlie Kirk

Before yesterday afternoon, I was debating what to write about today. The legitimately fucked-up birthday letters to Jeffrey Epstein were a strong possibility because they do a good job of revealing one of my favorite facts: ultra-rich people are often incredibly stupid and have no taste whatsoever. Like there's not a good joke in the whole batch. It's all just smug, wink-wink, boy, Jeff sure loves to fuck young chicks and, hey, here's a lifetime of sexual assaults written off like boys-will-be-boys shenanigans. There's an air of desperation, too, like they all really liked being in this club and are begging for the cool dude at the top to pat them on the head. And that's before you get to the rape and sex-trafficking. Surely, those who participated in this parade of horrors need to be prosecuted and buried in prison cells, up to and especially including Donald fucking Trump and, if needed, Bill Clinton.

I totally could have done that pretty easily, but I took a pass. 

I was absolutely sure I was going to write on the budget deadline coming up and how Democrats need to leverage the little power they have now, right fucking now, in order to extract something from the Republican brutes who behave like hungry jackals rampaging through the savanna. Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate are negotiating a pretty fucking low price on Democratic complicity in a budget resolution that will allow the Trump administration to continue to wreck lives, consolidate power, and get his party to coalesce around a metastasizing fascism whose end is, frankly, the suppression if not elimination of the Democratic Party. Yes, subsidies for people who get their policies from the Affordable Care Act are important, as they keep insisting, but it's pretty thin gruel. That's like negotiating over the price of a car and saying, "If you give me a pine-scented air freshener, I'll pay the sticker." The ask should be restoring all Medicaid and Medicare funding, forcing the president to release all funds that Congress had budgeted and he rescinded, ending the immigration torture camps, and more. Fucking fight to win, even if you're gonna lose. Sometimes it's more noble to get punched in the face than cower in a fetal curl, crying, "Don't hit me." 

Unfortunately, I had to move on from that because Charlie Kirk died.

It would have been a no-brainer to write about the United States straight up drone murdering a boatload of Venezuelans by claiming they were gang members importing drugs, which is fucking deranged even if it's true. We have a goddamn Coast Guard that can stop boats and apprehend the suspects. They do it all the time. Then everyone stands in front of piles of perfectly good cocaine or meth or fentanyl about to go to waste, like they just bagged the biggest crocodile in the Nile. You could get Vice President JD "The 'D' is for 'douche'" Vance to use his patented shit-gobbling smirk while posing with the haul or the suspects instead of sending him out to act like a sassy bitch on X defending the obvious crime. And now that we know that not only was the boat turning around when it was hit, and not only do we not have any proof that it was carrying drugs and not, say, migrants, and not only has the Venezuelan government said the people on boat were not the supposed terrorists in Tren de Aragua, but we hit the boat "multiple times" in order to kill everyone on it. There is no scenario here where we're not the bad guys. 

Yeah, I could have gone on about that, but, you know, Kirk was murdered.

Hell, I could have written about the batshit insane story of the South Korean workers who were in the US completely legally but were rounded up, shackled, and detained by ICE while setting up a Hyundai plant in Georgia that would provide thousands of jobs for the state. I could have gone on quite a bit about the bugnuts Trump-fellating GOP congressional candidate who called in a "tip" about the plant and has pretty much fucked the state and possibly a good chunk of the American auto industry which depends on relationships with South Korea. I could have also gone into what we're learning about the subhuman conditions in which we're holding people in detention. I could have tied that and the boat story into something about the end of due process in this goddamned country. I could have added in about the racist cuntmites on the Supreme Court making it legal for ICE or the cops to stop anyone who looks Hispanic and ask them to prove right then and there that they're citizens or face being imprisoned in horrific detention facilities. I would have had all kinds of names for the justices, like John "Bitchface" Roberts.

I might have spent my time writing about a hundred other important things that touch the lives of so many people, so many nightmares ongoing now, so much awful shit, the disgraceful and embarrassing and dangerous things being done in our name by our government and by governments in red states, like the attempts to destroy universities over false antisemitism accusations, cheered on and enabled by sad, greedy fucks who never even went to college but pretend that they have insight when they really are fucking idiotic losers who attracted rich fascist pukes to give them tons of money to spread their hate or we would have never heard of them, like...well, you know.

I thought about writing on this 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks about how we're in as much danger as we were before then because of the rank incompetence of our supposed security leaders in DC, like Kash "Always Looks Like Someone Told Him He Got Syphilis From the Donkey He Fucked" Patel, and the fucktastrophe of mass firings across every agency that was created to prevent this shit. But now, apparently, it doesn't matter if it's all dismantled and instead of dealing with real threats, the entire security apparatus is devoted to making sure that migrant families are tortured before deportation. 

But, of course, I can't write about any of that because someone shot Charlie Kirk and killed him. So I'm obligated to say something about him. And what I'll say is this: over the years on this blog I have written virtually nothing about Charlie Kirk because fuck him and fuck Turning Point USA. He objectively, intentionally made life worse for millions of people and he's not worth wasting my time on. I stand by that. 

And now I've written something about Charlie Kirk, like a good pundit should.

Why It Matters If Trump Is Dead or Incapacitated Beyond Who Is President

Let's be completely honest: There are lots of people we'd like to see die. And we're not saying we want to kill them. There's a wide, wide gulf between wishing someone stopped existing and putting in the time and effort to make that happen. I'll put it this way: I'd love to eat a piece of a really great chocolate cake, but I'm not gonna spend months learning how to bake one and ice it properly. But if someone puts a slice of a cake they made in front of me? Hell, yeah, I'll gobble that up and compliment the baker. 

We don't even necessarily want most of our hopefully-soon-dying humans to die horribly. I mean, I don't give a shit if, say, Pete Hegseth falls into a wood chipper feet first or if too much coke stops his heart and he drops before he knows what's happening. I'd like Alex Jones to spend a few years homeless and begging to blow drunk dudes for their "protein shakes" before he has a stroke that leaves him unable to speak or move for years and no one has the decency to let him die. Don't get me started on Stephen Miller. But, again, it's all chocolate cake. Gimme a big ol' chunk of it, but I'm not cooking.

When it comes to Donald Trump, you'd think I want him to suffer. You'd think I'd want him to shit out his insides on live television as he begs for someone to help him, his orange glaze melting off his sweaty, pasty face while his wisps of hair become greasy strings against his bald head. You'd think I'd want him to be left alone in a room of women who Jeffrey Epstein trafficked when they were girls, each of them holding a straight razor. And while I don't not want those things, mostly, I just want him gone. Done. Gone or done.

For a brief, gleeful period of time this past weekend, speculation was running rampant that the absolutely thinkable had happened. Because he hadn't appeared in public for a couple of days or made one of his screaming mimi calls to some nutzoid right-wing outlet, over on BlueSky and Threads and, I assume, X (because fuck X), people were thinking that it meant Trump had fucking died. The thoughts and prayers of the hopeful varied from tentative "what if" to full-bore "pleasepleaseplease." You can say it's ghoulish or morally wrong or whatever weak-ass sentiment you want to put out there and pretend you're better than those of us who think it's actually more moral to hope that someone who is actively hurting millions of people is gone. But, goddamn, it was a beautiful few hours, like it was possible we'd get through this nightmare.

Now that Trump seems to have lumbered around a bit in front of distant cameras that can't get a real focus on him as some kind of fucked-up proof-of-life, the talk has shifted to whether or not he's had a stroke or a series of mini-strokes. We've been here before where Trump's obvious decline has been attributed to his failing heart or decaying brain. On top of that, we've had lumpy bearded skink J.D. Vance say, with little prompting, that he's ready to take over the presidency should he need to.

And that's the obvious reason it matters whether or not Trump's mobile and coherent enough to pretend to still be president. We can have all kinds of arguments over whether or not Vance would be worse than Trump (I lean on the side of him being more easily controlled and thus less chaotic, but I totally get believing he'd be a complete fucking nightmare - Trump but with a lifespan). But that's not why I think Trump being dead or incapacitated matters so much to so many of us.

Since he lost (no, really, he fucking well lost) in 2020, the speculating punditocracy has wondered if the MAGA (or Trumpist, if you prefer) movement could continue without Trump. The discussion has been around whether or not all this can possibly still go on once Trump is out of the picture, mostly as in not being able to run for president again in 2028, although, you know, that's still to be determined. And if there's one thing we learned after 2020, it's that Trump's presence as a figurehead of the MAGA movement looms large because he can still endorse and bitch endlessly online and at his rallies of the damned. So he'll be there whether or not he's trying to dare the Supreme Court to prevent him from having a third term (or if he just ends elections altogether and stays in power).

That's why, to my mind, the real question is what happens when Trump is really gone, as in not there. I genuinely believe, as I've said before, that this whole thing falls apart without Trump, and everyone around him knows that. If they thought this was sustainable without Trump, they wouldn't be rushing to kiss his ass endlessly and prop him up like a decaying stuffed walrus. The problem with a cult of personality is that without the personality, there is no cult. As I wrote when Trump announced back in 2015 (when I was right about him wrecking the GOP field but wrong about whether he would beat Clinton), "many voters simply will overlook [his many faults and fuckups] because he's the most goddamned entertaining clown in the circus, the only candidate they know, and his pop culture status has given him the aura of earthy wisdom instead of nonsensical shit-tossing." Also, "the voters are fucking dumbasses."

Yes, Trump tapped into their racism, ignited their religious fervor, and fed their fears like they're starving puppies, but the devotion has always been to Trump. You think that all those voters who like the funny TV man are gonna get their asses of their couches to go rally for Vance? This has always been about Trump over everything else. They'll buy his shit, they'll vote for who he endorses, and they'll give up their health and safety for him. They'll turn against their family and neighbors, they'll plaster their houses and cars with memes portraying him as a superhero or Rambo, they'll hate who he tells them to hate and love who he tells them to love, but once he's not there to do it, there is no one take his place. Not his terrible children. Not any of the Fox "news" troglodytes he's elevated. And certainly not any of the politicians who have latched onto him like desperate remoras on the side of a lumbering whale shark. 

You can call me blindly optimistic, even deluded. You can say that he's unleashed something in Americans that will never go away. Yeah, it takes a while for a poison to get out of your system, and it can leave you permanently damaged. But you're alive. It'll take a long time to completely extricate ourselves from his filthy grip - hell, I don't expect to live to see us fully recover - but that starts with him just being fucking gone.

(Note: I don't expect Trump's 2 p.m. "announcement" today to have anything to do with this. It'll be some shitty action, like renaming the Department of Defense to "Department of War" or maybe he'll say we're invading Chicago or Venezuela or maybe he'll say they're arresting Democrats. He'll slur his way through it, perhaps even in a pretape, before disappearing again.)

A Poem for the Laborers

"New American" 

by Huascar Medina 

Don’t call me immigrant

I am the New American 

striving in New America

as a New American

I am not your invader

not an animal

nor criminal

I am a just person

just striving 

in a New America

In New America I am

a full-time student 

overtime worker

volunteering in my free time

if I plan enough ahead for free time

if I can even afford the free time

if my free time is approved

I work hard in New America

3rd shift warehouse 

2nd shift my house

always on call

no days off

freelance for life

4 jobs a week

blue and white collar

Don’t call me immigrant

I am the New American 

surviving in New America

as a New American

I am not your invader

not an animal

nor criminal

I am a just person

just surviving

in a New America

This is New America

student loans for all

high rent 

higher utilities 

low pay

rising healthcare costs

the cost of living

—deadly

no living wage

living enraged 

my cousins encaged 

for wanting to live in

a safer part of

New America

Don’t call me immigrant

I am the New American 

living in New America

as a New American

I am not your invader

not an animal

nor criminal

I am a just person

just living

in a New America

Strong and proud

able to withstand 

the distance I have traveled

the distance from my family 

the distance between us

the distance of our dialects

the distance in our churches

the distance in our homes

the distance between my ancestors

and my grandchildren

the distance from the streets

to the dorm rooms

the distance from the field

to the corner office suite

Don’t call me immigrant

I am the New American 

dreaming of New America

as a New American

I am not your invader

not an animal

nor criminal

I am a just person

just dreaming 

of a New America

Old America

don’t be afraid

we are all America

North America

Central America

South America

We are all Americans

We all strive in Americas

We all survive in Americas

We all live in Americas

They are all the same America

We all dream of a greater America

I want you to be paid a living wage

live in affordable housing

without college debt

or medical debt

or credit card debt

or national debt

I want no more racism

I am speaking of a New America

I am part of New America

whether you like it or not

so join me, please

Where the Hell Have I Been?

I know, I know, I fucking know that I haven't posted here. But I'm busy, goddamnit. I'm in Scotland at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a (mostly) non-political show I wrote and directed, Midnight in Nashville. It's about a country singer who was popular in the early 2000s but she shot and killed her abusive husband and went to prison for 20 years. Now she's out and she has one night in a recording studio to make a comeback album. We've been getting some fine, enthusiastic audiences. We're waiting for the big reviews to come out, so that's all kinds of fun.

Anyways, it's madness here, and I've seen some great stuff, including a new stand-up set by the amazing Sam Jay, who goes all in wrecking the American political crisis. But that's left me almost no time to post shit here, although I'm blue-balled because there's so much I wanna say.

I'll give writing a new post a try, but I'm off to annoy tourists with flyers for the show. If you know anyone here in this insanity, tell 'em to get their asses over to the Zoo Playground at 8:15 p.m. every night except Monday for the show.

Hey, Democrats: It's Okay to Be Outraged That a Rapist Might Have Committed More Rapes

You need to start from one assertion: Donald Trump is a rapist. A jury said it was more likely than not that he sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, and the judge in the case made it clear that it's only a quirk in New York State law that prevented the jury from using the r-word. In the way any person would understand "rape," it was rape. And that makes Donald Trump a rapist. When you start by saying that, everything else becomes so much easier to understand. 

What I mean is that it would honestly be surprising if Trump wasn't one of the "clients" of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. I'm not going to review the accumulation of accusations, confessions, and video evidence that show just what a sleazy, grabby, rapey shitheel Trump was and is. You can check all that out pretty easily and you likely have heard about or seen much of it. 

The fact that Democrats don't constantly highlight that Trump is a rapist is political and moral malpractice. It was barely mentioned in the 2024 election, and it should have been the beginning of any conversation about Trump. Now, Democrats should react to any interaction with Trump in the way any non-rapist would react to being in the same room with a known rapist. They should treat Republican members of Congress like you would treat someone who is covering up for a rapist. If you say that norms or traditions don't allow you to act that way, then you have no understanding that a norm only works if everyone involved is adhering to it. Otherwise, you're just a sucker. And whatever bullshit social contract made Democrats the standard bearers of eternal comity, that shit was broken when Republicans made a rapist their leader and got him elected president again. 

One of the things that has bugged the hell out of me around the whole Epstein files affair/scandal/cover-up is that too few people are behaving like what's at stake here is whether or not the rapist president committed more rapes, whether he raped children, and whether he provided aid and comfort to the scuzzy fuck who procured the girls for Trump and others to rape. At the very least, it's worth knowing if Trump was aware of the awful shit that Jeffrey Epstein was doing and didn't tell anyone. Trump said that they had a falling out over some cheap property they were each trying to buy in Palm Beach, FL, in 2004 and never spoke again. We know that Epstein was being a fucking monster during the time that he and Trump were friends. We know that Epstein committed multiple rapes in his Florida mansion and that Trump knew about Epstein's fondness for women "on the younger side." But, like I said, that's a rabbit hole you can go down. I wanna talk the politics of this moment.

Republicans have taken the position that Trump didn't rape Carroll, didn't rape or assault any of the women who have accused him, and didn't rape girls provided by Epstein. That is, frankly, an objectively repulsive position, especially because, again, a judge and jury declared Trump a rapist in the civil suit and, just last month, a federal appeals court upheld the verdict. The GOP has decided that its everyone else's problem and we all just have to deal with it when it comes to there being a rapist leading us.

To a large extent, until recently, Democrats have simply accepted that framing and, as usual, let the GOP dictate the rhetorical parameters and the terms of doing business in DC. The Epstein files fuck-up by Trump gives Democrats a chance to reframe things and present them in the way they should have been presented all along: the president is a rapist who might have committed more rapes, including the rapes of children. If you don't want all the facts to come out about it, then you are covering up for a rapist. And what the fuck is wrong with you if you do that, Mike Johnson? What the fuck are you so worried about? Hammer them constantly about their complicity with a rapist. The Democrats' revulsion should be visceral, visible, and intense. Let voters know that, at long last, there is some shit you will not eat. Trump's closeness to Epstein is their problem and they have to figure out how to deal with it. Some Democrats are getting on board with this strategy, but they need to go harder. On an interview show, you can say when asked about anything, "Well, the president is a rapist, and we always need to start with that."

To any Democrats who think that this is somehow not the issue that voters care about, that voters want "kitchen table" issues discussed going into the midterms, that it's a distraction, as former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi stupidly said last week, I'd say give me a fucking break. This is a righteous, necessary battle. There are real people, victims, here, women whose lives were fucked up by the actions of these rapists, including the rapist president. It's as fucking kitchen table as it gets in that it's the kind of thing that people actually talk about around the kitchen table. You shout out to Americans that the vile Attorney General had 1000 FBI agents scouring the Epstein files for any mention of Trump and that shit will go viral because what the fucking fuck. (Odious blow-up doll Pam Bondi is scrambling, and it's kind of delicious.)

And anyone who says that Democrats don't want the Epstein stuff out there because it might implicate Democrats like Bill Clinton doesn't fucking understand Democrats. We have no problem tossing someone to the wolves. Ask Anthony Weiner. Ask Andrew Cuomo. Ask Al Franken. We're ruthless when it comes to wrongdoing being revealed. You mean if we sacrifice Bill Clinton, we might get rid of Trump? Fuck, yeah, that's a fair trade. 

The corporate media is already declaring that Trump has surfed his way through this wave of scandal and come out dry on the other side again. But it sure doesn't seem that way, with Tucker Carlson breaking with Trump, with MAGA drones at each other's throats (and some saying others have "Epstein Derangement Syndrome," which, yeah, get a new fucking phrase, assholes), with Bondi wanting to question imprisoned Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, maybe even offering a pardon if she can bail Trump out by saying he was never involved. And Trump himself is throwing every fucking piece of red meat to the slavering MAGA hordes to try to get them off his scene. The latest is arresting Barack Obama for completely made-up bullshit about how Russia helped Trump win in 2016. 

In the end, like at the start, Trump is a rapist. Everything flows from there. I think that the best case scenario is that Trump’s a rapist who covered up for other rapists. The worst case scenario is horrific. Democrats should be acting like it's the worst case and what they do and say should reflect the disgust and outrage they should have.