My Play Midnight in Nashville to Premiere in London on August 26

So, hey, remember when I went dark for like a month last year? That's because I wrote and directed a play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Now that play, Midnight in Nashville, is running for a couple of weeks in London (the one in England!) from August 26 to September 7 at the Glitch theatre near Waterloo station. All shows at 7 p.m. Same awesome two actors from Edinburgh (who happen to be American), new director, revised show. 

Here's all the skinny from the press release:

Meet Marcy Aurora, a honky-tonk angel who was headed to the heights of country music fame when she committed a murder she doesn’t regret. Out of prison after 20 years, Marcy is in an all-night recording session in a studio in Nashville, trying to lay down the tracks for a new album, pissed off at a nosy reporter, wrestling with memories of her incarceration, and fighting with Colleen, the sound engineer, about what her real voice is now.

Midnight in Nashville stars Kentucky-born, London-based actor and singer Biz Lyon as Marcy and features Catherine Mieses as Colleen, with Lyon singing and playing live original and old folk and blues songs. It’s directed by Alex Stroming, who last year helmed an acclaimed production of Scenes with girls at the Golden Goose Theatre. 

The show debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2025, where it was named one of the nine shows to see by the Edinburgh Reporter while The List gave it four stars and talked about its “brutal honesty”: “The everyday heartache of Lee Papa’s new play could be set to a million country numbers.” Another reviewer praised it for being about “a middle-aged woman defiantly finding her way back into the world… and that’s a tale that has resonance beyond its time and place.” Check out our Instagram page to see how enthusiastic our audiences were, too. (And follow it, too.)

You can buy your tickets by clicking right here. And here's a cool interview Biz and I did with the blog The Theatre Reviewer.

If you're a reviewer, hit me up to get you in. Previews August 26-27 with an August 28 opening.

I'll be there for the whole run, so if you happen to make it to the show, grab me (at least semi-appropriately) to say, "Hi." 

The Other Trump Administration Speech from Last Week That Tells Us We're All Fucked

Sure, we are rightly aghast at President Donald "Dumpster Load" Trump's simpering whine of a speech last Thursday about totally fake election interference, setting up both an excuse when Republicans likely have their voluminous asses handed to them in November and a justification for all the fuckery they're going to attempt to mess with the election or to overturn it after the fact. We can get into the absolutely weird shit about how the 2020 election was "stolen" because people hid things from Trump, but that's the kind of self-evident confession of incompetence that is like saying you wrecked my car because you got a text from me and glanced at the phone. No, bitch, you were driving. It's all on you.

But the speech, also delivered last Thursday, that really galled the living shit out of me was not Trump's dull, deranged, slurred complaints about non-existent Chinese infiltration of our voting. It was instead Secretary of State Marco "Smells like armpit sweat on polyester" Rubio's sneery attack on alleged left-wing "extremism" and "terrorism" at the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism held by the federal government in DC. Rubio's speech (if by "speech," you mean, "a Mad Libs-style pile of anti-left hyperbole that would give Pinochet's corpse an erection") was both a greatest hits of the conspiratorial bullshit spouted on conservative podcasts and an open threat to any progressive groups who would dare to protest Our Orange God.

After reviewing how counterterrorism was focused on Islamic groups, Rubio mocked those who deny a "resurgence" of terrorism from the left "by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions." In other words, by the experts in the field. Then he offered, "A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil.  It is.  But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary – well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism" without giving any examples of a Marxist revolutionary bomb planter. Rubio built more straw men than a scarecrow factory.

Rubio really said, "It is why during those George Floyd – so-called George Floyd – riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through American great – America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror." 

Let's put aside the snide "so-called George Floyd" because fuck Rubio, and let's put aside the violence by police against peaceful protesters at Black Lives Matter marches, which led to lawsuits and payouts. Instead, let's put up another number: 14,000. That's how many arrests were made by overzealous cops, flooding city jails. And the Trump administration had the federal government make arrests and took over cases for the very small number (no more than 300) of people who were arrested for more than things like trespassing. In fact, most people were released without charge. In other words, the country wasn't nearly brought to its knees and cities did not burn down. But that lie has become the truth for the MAGA right.

The real fucked part of the speech is that, after mentioning a couple of recent violent incidents (including one that involved a clash between an ultra-right and ultra-left group in France), Rubio concentrated on left-wing violence from the past, like from 40 or 50 years ago or more. He had to go there because the examples now are so scant. He mentioned the Shining Path in Peru, Castro's guerrilla forces, and the Red Brigades in Italy. Turning to the United States, he brought up the Weather Underground and other groups from the 1960s and 70s. Then he really said, "In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil, a rate of nearly five a day.  The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists.  Between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left." Those bombings were mostly of property, and the groups were protesting the Vietnam War and the fact that the federal government was in open warfare against its citizens, but, sure, fuck it. Yeah, it was violence from the left. And it was a long goddamn time ago. And it ignores that lots of violence by the right, like the KKK and neo-Nazis, was overlooked in favor of scaremongering about hippies by Richard Nixon.

Look, no one is denying that there is violence from the left, especially in Europe (mostly in Italy and Greece). But Rubio is using that as a way to completely discredit any protest against the Trump fascist regime, leaving out any and all right-wing violence, which is rampant in the United States. He didn't mention January 6, he didn't mention any of the Nazi and racist groups, or, more precisely, he didn't mention right-wing extremists because that's the MAGA movement. That's the GOP base.

Still, even when we talk about "leftist extremism" in the US, we're not talking about an arson attack on the power grid, like in Berlin (and that is still under investigation). Look at where he went next: "Americans have seen what those numbers mean – an all-out assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes.  A transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like, 'Where is your God now?'  A health care executive executed in cold blood in the streets.  Multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president.  And the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation, a man who happened also to be a husband and the father of two young children, shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students."

The number of lies here is stunning. Where is this "all-out assault" on ICE officers? And the sniper attack (singular) ended up killing detainees. The shooter at the Catholic church in Minneapolis was a racist, antisemitic gun nut who, yes, was transgender. but was far from a liberal. We know very little about Trump's wannabe assassins, but at least one of them thought Trump wasn't crazy racist enough and one was angry about Trump raping kids with Jeffrey Epstein. As for Charlie Kirk, fuck that guy. In Hell. Next to Lindsey Graham. Or with Lindsey Graham's femur.

Rubio is promising that the administration is going to be naming more groups as "terrorist organizations" and going after their funding, which they claim comes from foreign governments. The ideological criteria is broad: "This is what radical leftism is.  It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time.  They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist." Except it's not illegal to believe any of those things. You can be a communist in the United States. It's allowed. Or it used to be. 

And the net is going to get wider and wider and "communist" is going to mean "wants health care for everyone," and this effort is going to work hand-in-hand with the voter suppression efforts, one being used as an excuse for the enforcement of the other. Rubio teed it all up: the coming pretext to destroy everyone on the left.

You didn't hear about Rubio's speech because it was followed by a completely batshit insane speech from White House Deputy of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, who looks like Nosferatu fucked a blob fish. Miller jacked off into a Nazi flag and made everyone sniff it. That's his preferred rhetorical style.

The White Working Class Voter Lie

Whenever I hear some shrunken-soul member of the supposed left-wing pundit class opine about how Democrats need to "appeal to white working class voters," I think, "What the fuck are Democrats doing that shouldn't appeal to them?" Of course, the answer is that they need to be a little more racist, a little more homo/transphobic, a little less "woke" (whatever the fuck they think that means), a little more, well, Republican. Oh, and Democrats need to find "authentic" voices, candidates who speak like voters do, who come from their background, who "understand" them. 

That's where I call "bullshit" on the whole thing. Because what white working class voters have shown us in the past decade is that they don't give a damn where a candidate or a leader comes from. They don't fucking care if someone is, say, a pampered, inarticulate billionaire. They don't fucking care if it's some elite-educated, privileged prickmite. You can't look at Donald Trump's wins and think, "Well, obviously, we need to get some farmers or steel mill workers to run for office because that's what voters want." Or, if you do, you're fucking weird. That's like seeing some dude fuck a pig and decide he really would prefer a human so you decide to set him up on a date and he leaves the date early and go fuck another pig because he's a pig fucker and you're an idiot for thinking otherwise.

See, Democrats already elected a working class hero. You know who that is? It's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Yeah, AOC comes from a background that should make consultants drool. Not only did she work as a bartender to survive after college, her father died when she was young and her mother worked as a house cleaner and school bus driver to avoid the bank from foreclosing on the small house they had been able to afford. How has she been received by the gatekeepers of the white working class on the Republican side? With nonstop mocking for having been a bartender, with endless vitriol about her legitimacy and devotion to workers, with, you know, the usual gleefully cruel racism and sexism that any non-white woman is going to get in this cursed age. 

When everyone was rushing to anoint former Maine Democratic senate candidate Graham Platner as a new avatar of working class authenticity, it was a joke (not least because, unlike AOC, Platner was not from a working class background). It showed that racism and sexism bled over to the left, too, because, apparently, the only way to get white working class voters is with a white man. The Democratic Party is filthy with working class politicians, like Aaron Ford, the AG of Nevada who is running for governor. A single dad who needed food stamps and housing assistance, Ford is the real deal. However, he is Black. The consultants who gave us Platner have made their disdain for non-white voters plain, which maybe works for Maine, I guess. 

My own opinion of Platner until the rape allegations was "Fine, whatever, if this is who Maine wants, I don't care, just beat Susan Collins and get back the Senate, vote blue no matter who." Sure, I liked his platform; it was great to hear someone say all the right things about wealth disparity, health care, corruption, and more. But the defense of his Nazi tattoo and the old sexist and violent Reddit comments was dumb. The dude fucked up repeatedly, but, again, sure, Maine's gotta do what Maine's gotta do. But once it became clear that he went from creepy to criminal, then fuck your precious politics. And still, he was defended. The idea that credible rape allegations might not be a deal breaker for some is pathetic. 

Stop defending Platner. It wasn't an AIPAC plot or Deep State attack or whatever other conspiracy bullshit his remaining supporters are clinging to. You just look like a perverse moron. There are plenty of potential candidates who haven't been accused of rape (or don't have a Nazi tattoo). You know how fucking hard it was for Jenny Racicot to speak out? You know the shit she's likely being dragged through by Platner stans and followers of the media whores who love him. You think she's putting herself through that for kicks? 

The point here, though, is not just about Platner. It's not even about the real working class candidates and elected officials out there. It's that the whole idea that somehow there is some innate need to run those candidates in order for Democrats to succeed. That's a fucking lie. We are told all the time that pampered pricks are men of the people. We heard that about George W. Bush. We heard it about Donald Trump. The truth about them couldn't be further from the image. Jesus, Platner wasn't even winning the voters he was engineered to win.

What Democratic consultants with any brains should do is deal in reality. Sure, Democrats, no matter what class they come from, give more of a shit about the poor and working class than Republicans, who couldn't give a fuck less but sure love to pretend. But if white working class voters think it's more important suck billionaire cock, then fuck 'em. Get the candidate who is going to unify everyone else (and some of those precious white working class people will jump on board because they're not all stupid). Jesus, look at Jon Ossoff. Privileged upbringing, man of the people. It's not that fucking hard. 

No One Hates America More Than Donald Trump

In some ways, President Donald Trump has finally achieved his goal of returning to the New York City of the 1980s when a freewheeling Trump did whatever he wanted, was invited on the big talk shows, was a regular at the great restaurants. But not that part. No, what he has done in Washington, D.C. is recreate the Manhattan of his younger years, when the city was still a wreck, still in its post-1970s hangover, with decaying buildings and toxic air and filth coating the place, where the wealthy might do something like rebuild a ice skating rink rather than help the unhoused and the poverty-stricken and where the same wealthy ignored regulations and unions to build whatever monuments to their egos they desired. It's not just the "greed is good"/Wolf of Wall Street days or a president constantly talking about the threat of "communism" that I'm talking about. It's not just the ethos of the time. It's the actual physical, lived existence of people during that era in the years after Reagan set the rich free from a tax burden that forced them to participate in society, all of these pompous, self-mythologizing hedonists who could now say they loved the country that made them rich while doing everything to demonstrate how much they hate it and everyone here who is not them.

For, truly, if you look at what Trump has conjured in DC, especially in the area of the Capitol, the joint reeks of the urban decay that he would ride and walk past every day in NYC in the 80s. The White House is a construction pit and will be for the foreseeable future. The front lawn is torn up from his stupid UFC thunderdome fight. The Reflecting Pool is still green with algae. Trump has slashed the budget on things that benefit the people, like medical research and food safety and health care and more, to pay for new gilding on statues and monuments and events to celebrate himself. The big "state fair" is a scene of desperately small attendance, un-air conditioned promotional booths, overpriced food, a single ride (a ferris wheel with enclosed seats enclosed in glass pods, perfect for slowly cooking), and a decaying small version of the monument Trump plans to build. I've been to parking lot fairs with more pizzazz and fun. He's attempting to build his golden arch and take over a public park and golf course to build a private one, including possibly plowing down a row of DC's beloved cherry trees, while ignoring any laws or regulations that he is required to follow, much like he wrecked the East Wing of the White House before anyone knew what was happening, much like how he approached his building career in the 1980s.

And that right there is a perfect encapsulation of the contempt with which this president holds the country, its constitution, its institutions, its people, and its traditions. Sure, there are times when unjust laws demand civil disobedience so that those without legislative power can exert people and protest power to spur change. But if you're the president of the United States, you can work to change laws you disagree with, not merely disregard them. You just cast them aside if you think that you are above them, and if you think that, you think you're a king. And if you think you're a king, you hate the United States, a country designed specifically to create a place where kings cannot rule. 

Yet time and again, Trump's actions are those of a wannabe king. While other presidents have tried to exert power, Trump has simply skipped over trying and done it, whether it's something other presidents have done (and not been held to account for) in starting a war without the consent of Congress or something completely unprecedented, like casting aside any worry about corruption and doing everything possible to make himself and his odious family wealthier, to an extent unheard of in the modern age, and, for now, anyone who might hold him accountable is just refusing to. A corollary to this post would be "No One Hates the Constitution More Than the Conservatives on the Supreme Court" or "No One Hates America More Than Mike Johnson."

We have had presidents and politicians who have demonized groups of people in the United States, but I can't think of one who so openly despised not just that people oppose him but that they are allowed to express that opposition. This outright refusal to agree to the American compact on acceptance of dissent was on full display during his speech on Friday at Mount Rushmore. What was supposed to be a celebration of the 250th anniversary of our founding turned into another dark recitation of fake threats and doom. Trump said, despite paying lip service to the First Amendment, "In America, we do not need anyone's permission to say what we think and to live as we please," and then, less than ten minutes after, during a rant about a supposed rise in "communism" in the country (which is a bastardization of "Democratic Socialist"), he said, "You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. As for those who peddle Marx's lies about our heritage, who tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors. They're doing something much worse than slandering our past, they are slandering and attacking our future. Not gonna let that happen. They're trying to tear down the great American character to destroy the people who declared independence, who crossed to Delaware, who settled the west and conquered the skies."

Putting aside that history is complex and that, yes, we do live on stolen land, and that, yes, many of the Founders were oppressors (as in "owned slaves"), in the United States, you are allowed to believe in Marx just like you're allowed to believe in Adam Smith or, even, Donald Trump. You can, in fact, be a communist (of which there are very few) and a patriot. Indeed, the way these supposed "communists" are gaining power is through the very legal system of our elections. They got elected by voters. What's un-American, what's not "patriotic" is to declare that what you're going to do with Americans who are using their free speech to profess Marxist beliefs is "send them into exile. We will send them quickly away and we will continue to build our country bigger and better and stronger than ever before." What does that even mean? Is he going to round us all up and send us to African countries with Ebola? And that was before he started talking about how Republicans should be the only party elected for 100 years. 

There is no United States for Trump. There is only him, and his every action as president demonstrates that. His arrogance and his insistence that we only talk about the accomplishments of the country and not our flaws is spitting in the face of our history and the struggles of all kinds of people here. His self-aggrandizement is an embarrassment, with his mad cries that he's not loved enough. His hatred of immigrants, women, protesters, the media that doesn't fawn over him, Democrats, non-white people, Muslims, all of it is deeply at odds with the concept of the United States. His insistence that there is only one way to love this flawed experiment of a nation and that is to love him and every horrible thing he does is anti-American. You only believe that if you hate this country, hate its founding, hate its history. He hates that he still faces legal peril when he leaves office no matter how much he tries to make it go away. He hates that the country might hold him to account. 

America's very existence is anathema to what he thinks about himself and the world, and thus it must be destroyed and remade in his image, even as he lies that he is the last defender of some order that died a long time ago, not even the 1980s. More like the 1880s. No one hate this country more than Donald Trump. There is no difference between him and people like Osama bin Laden, except bin Laden actually had a belief system. 

If you watch him speak tonight at the Fourth of July gathering he's centered around himself, know that he is slurring and slurping with disdain for nearly every single one of us, putting out visions of nightmare futures and lying about the present. He'll talk about our founders with the blithering ignorance of someone who despises being told he doesn't know everything. He hates this country, he hates you, he hates me, and he'll do everything he can to let us know how much. And then he'll do his little dance that tells us all to kiss his ass while he continues to drag us all down.

The best way to celebrate our Independence Day is to hate him back. Trust me: John Adams and Ben Franklin would be right there with you.

(Note: Look, I'm not saying our leaders have been perfect up until Trump. Far from it. We have had presidents who criminalized dissent and protest. We've had presidents who have ignored the law. We have had presidents who have enriched themselves. But we've rarely had someone who does all of it, all the terrible things.)

Democrats, Shut the Fuck Up and Vote for the Democratic Nominee

When three Democratic candidates supported by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat, won their Democratic primaries last week, the reaction of the center and right of the Democratic Party was, at least in the telling of political media, a deranged fucking freak-out. Driven, as such things are, by nutzoid conservative media declaring, in essence, that the savage Hottentots have overrun the civilized colonists and are eating the women and raping the dogs, supposed moderate after supposed moderate lined up to say that Democratic voters are idiots for supporting someone who believes the same things they do on issues like taxes, health care, and, yes, the alleged third rail, Israel, and that the party faces ruin for going so radically left. 

It behooves us to pause for a moment to consider that barely any actual radical leftists exist in the United States. Radical leftists would be calling for the execution of oil executives and the bombing of fossil fuel producing sites. They would go full communist and demand the seizure and redistribution of wealth, as well as state or worker takeover of industries, depending on which flavor of commie they are. It would be an army of Luigi Mangiones or people who believe similar things about the failure of capitalism to address the needs of humanity. That's extremism. 

You know what's not extremist? New York's Brad Lander's platform. Lander defeated incumbent Congressman Dan Goldman, with Goldman's support for Israel being a major factor in his loss. Lander wants to pass a bill ending support for Israel as long as the country is violating international law, which, sorry, sure doesn't seem out-there unless you don't give a shit about such things. On other issues, Lander proposes sane, left-of-center policies that enjoy majority support in the country, like implementing Medicare for All, raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and abolishing ICE. 

If you look at the supposedly most radical of the trio of Mamdani-backed candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who defeated incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, you get...someone who pretty much backs the same everyday liberal policies that Lander (and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC and many others) backs. Wanna know some of her crazy ideas? "Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour" and "Establish free universal childcare and Pre-K" and "Prohibit Congress members from trading stocks." Wacky, no? She has some things that are pie-in-the-sky policies to shoot for, like guaranteed minimum income and "Create a four-day 32-hour work week with no loss in pay." But, again, none of this is outside of left-wing of the Democratic Party conversation. If Chevalier had said, "Nationalize the auto companies" and "take away children and raise them in communes," then maybe it would have been justified for carbuncle of doom James Carville to go on Fox "news," for fuck's sake, and say that Democrats should not "seat her as a member of the Democratic Party." 

As for her old tweets that have considerably more actually far left viewpoints, who the fuck cares? Man, it's Twitter. Everyone shits the bed on Twitter. Everyone says fucked up things to piss people off. And even if they really believe it, it doesn't mean a candidate is gonna run on the wildest things they believe (even if, truth be told, I agree with Chevalier on a bunch of it). She shit on Democrats as much as she shit on the right. Jesus fuck, Trump is executing people without charge, arrest, or trial, and we're wasting time talking about if a candidate still believes her grad school political theory or if she meant it when she said, "Defund the police." Fuck off, John Fetterman. 

You know what's not real, though? The freakout I mentioned at the top. Even in the Politico article I linked to titled, "Centrist Democrats are freaking out about progressives’ winning streak," the actual freak out is less screaming and running through the streets naked except for a stuffed Care Bear stuck on your dick (we've all been there, right?), and more, "Oh, I guess we need to adjust our perspective for the next election."  The article has quotes from "centrists" who say things like, "Yeah, those Democratic socialists sure have been getting well-organized. We should do that more." It's also got quotes from progressives saying that centrism hasn't been working and that's why voters want people who, as I said, believe what they believe. (And the article notes all the establishment Democrats who did win their primaries, which also makes a shit fit over progressive wins seem dumb.)

At the end of the day, Democratic voters (or, you know, all voters) need to do what's right, and that's shut the fuck up and vote for the Democratic nominee. That's all you have. Democratic nominee or more destruction. If you're a "moderate" (which I think just means you support Israel and don't want to tax rich people quite as much), shut the fuck up and vote for the progressive nominee, even if it's a Democratic socialist, because you have no other choice, you simpering genocide-enablers. If you're a Democratic socialist or liberal populist, shut the fuck up and vote for the moderate nominee. And, yeah, that might mean you have to suck it up on Israel because you have no other fucking choice, you fucking smug nihilists.

As for centrist elected Democrats, stop giving fuel to the right-wing fire about supposedly "communist" candidates. Welcome the left and let them drag the party back to what it's supposed to be: a place that seeks to make sure everyone gets a shot and treats people with compassion and care, not Republican-lite, not trying to compromise with crazed fascists or doing Stephen Miller's work for him. And stop being assholes who act all cozy with the same Republicans who cheer on the torture of migrants and the denial of rights to women and LGBTQ+ people. Maybe these alleged wild and woolly leftists can lead the party to its soul again. 

Remember: The Republican Congress Is Also Responsible for the Reflecting Pool Debacle (and Everything Else)

Donald Trump never wants anything "fixed." He wants it remade in his image. It doesn't matter if what he's doing to something helps it or not. What matters is he can slap his shitty name on it and pretend it's his. It's even better when he can take something someone else built or had dedicated to them and take credit after doing nothing or very little or just fucking it up completely. I think a lot about the time in 1996 that Trump just showed up at the ribbon-cutting for a nursery school for kids with HIV. He hadn't given a goddamn nickel, but he bullied his way in and sat in the front row so he could be in all the photos and pretend he was a decent human being when he was just 250 pounds of shit in an ill-fitting suit. (Lower weight because he was thinner in the 90s.) Does nothing, takes credit. 

Of course, that was when Trump was a loser CEO of a constantly bankrupt or near-bankrupt company with no shareholders, no one to be responsible to except the greed of himself, his shitty children, and the few employees he actually gave enough of a shit about to pay off for being accomplices to all his crimes. And no one to hold him to account unless they got through his layers of lawyers and goons and frivolous lawsuits and threats.  

That's not the case with the presidency. The way shit is supposed to work is that the Congress is supposed to step in and say, "No, fuck you, you can't do that and we won't fund it." Congressional committees are supposed to dig into it when the White House just wantonly does crimes. Yeah, it wouldn't matter if they made referrals to the Justice Department for prosecution because the DOJ now exists as Trump's spooge cloth, but that's not the point. When the next funding bill comes up, you specify that you're not spending money on it. Power of the pursestrings, motherfuckers. If Congress does nothing about disastrous shit when it could do something, then it owns the disasters. 

And under current Republican leadership in the House and, for the most part, in the Senate, the position of the Congress has been prone, supine, or recumbent, just fucking laying there to be stepped over, stomped on, ignored, or, if necessary, fucked by Trump and his Executive Branch minions. As Trump is justifiably blamed for debacle after debacle, for fuck-up after fuck-up, we cannot lose sight of the fact that every single Republican (save the occasional Massie or Murkowski vote) needs to be blamed, too. 

Take, for instance, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Sure, it needed updates because that's how shit works when you've gotta take care of a pool. Equipment fails, conditions change, and other things happen where you gotta do repairs to keep it pretty. But Trump had to fuck with it and pretend like he knew anything at all about what he was doing. You know he wanted it painted "American Flag Blue," which is dumb and embarrassing and grotesque like this entire era we're damned to live through. You know he gave the no-bid contract to whatever corrupt cartoon character most recently greased the skids. He broke at least three laws by barreling ahead without required bidding on the project and without required environmental and historic preservation reviews, and, without congressional action to halt it, an outside group has sued. But Trump now argues that suit is moot because the project is "complete" (even though it is far from complete). So crimes be damned, right? 

Congress owns the green algae and the peeling paint because Republicans let Trump get away with it. However, none of the articles I've read about this incredibly symbolic failure mention that the House and Senate abdicated their responsibility and thus are accessories to the crimes here. They are covered in toxic slime and paint sludge as much as Trump is. 

The same goes for every law, big and small, cavalierly broken by Trump and his mobster administration. Republicans in Congress let Trump take over the power of the purse; they said nothing as he ignored laws on bidding for contracts and more for his concentration camps; they let him tear down a third of the White House without even a head shake; they do nothing about the constant execution of people who have been charged with no crimes, let alone convicted; they let all of the human rights abuses, all of the civil rights abuses, all of the war crimes, all of the reaming of the rule of law happen; they let all his plainly illegal executive orders stand without a word; a few barely squeaked out a protest about the Iran war, but that was primarily Democrats voting for it. Congress has a goddamn job, and it's not to be Trump's penis koozie. 

And here's the thing: Mike Johnson or John Thune could have said, "Hey, we're gonna agree to all this shit. But just follow the law." It sucks, but at least a fig leaf is better than standing naked for the world to laugh at your little dong. But they didn't. So it's all on them, too, and campaigns and coverage need to make their inaction as important as Trump's actions. Because, see, he thinks he's making everything in his image, but every single thing he's done also reflects back on them, too. Every failure, every disgrace, every nightmare, every death, every crime is theirs, too. Hang it all on them until it breaks their political necks.

On Immigration, Embrace What They Hate, Democrats

My political theory is simple: most people are fucking idiots. They have the attention span of sugar-filled toddlers given free rein in a wrecked Toys R Us who, after they are done screaming for a while, fall asleep on the pile of moldy dolls they stacked up. They don't care if their rampage hurts them or anyone else as long as they get to rampage, and when they wake up from their naps, they are ready for the next rampage.

The job of politicians is to harness that disruptive energy and focus it on issues that matter. The problem, of course, is who is doing the harnessing and what are their issues. See, one way to read the rise and inevitable fall of Donald Trump is that he injected himself into the US electoral bloodstream and it was a jolt of newness for many voters (yeah, I know, we all knew who he was and what a piece of shit he has always been, but remember: most people are fucking idiots), and idiot voters who had backed Barack Obama's Hope and Change were tired of needing to give a shit about other people and loved being told they could be shitty again. See, the problem is that newness only lasts for so long and you have to evolve and offer something new again. Trump has not done that. He repeats the same shit endlessly, his grievances have never shifted, and his execution of his ideas has been utter garbage.

On the other end of the spectrum on this idea is the fast rise of progressive Democratic candidates in places where they haven't previously made in-roads. You know this is new because some candidates endorsed by traditional, moderate Democrats are losing primaries. Not all, and certainly the establishment hasn't lost all its influence, but there's a real thirst out there for those who are talking about populist ideas in ways that are not trying to appeal to some mythical Republican who wants to walk away from Trump and his MAGA cretin army. 

In other words, voters are craving someone to show them a different way to see the world, perhaps even a better way to see it. That's why the payoff is so slim when Democrats give credence to Republican madness on issues like immigration, LGBTQ rights, education, and, well, pretty much everything. You don't have to hand it to the GOP. You don't have to pretend that they have a point when they pretty fucking clearly do not. 

So there is a plain opening here for Democrats who speak about immigration not through a lens of deportation and criminality but by concentrating on the good of immigrants to the country, the necessity of continued population expansion, and the foundational American aspect of a constant influx of people from around the world. After 10 years of Trump's savagery about and towards immigrants and anyone who supports them, with all the energy that it takes to constantly hate and desire to punish them, it's a fucking relief to hear that you don't have to keep hating, that you can, in fact, accept and even love the vast majority of immigrants who just want to make their lives and thus all of our lives better. There's a huge swath of the population that's begging for that message, unmitigated by nods to "enforcement" of border laws and how many people have been deported, offering a counternarrative to the parade of grotesque crimes committed by migrants, as if no white people commit them, too. 

The same could be said for other issues, like the treatment of transgender kids and adults. That's why it's so disappointing when, say, Texas Senate nominee James "Hot Women Like Compassionate Dudes" Talarico said in an interview that he agrees that children should not get gender reassignment surgery. You know how many kids under 18 get that operation on their genitals? Virtually none, and it's usually for medical necessity. The number receiving top surgery is extraordinarily low, too.  There is no reason to say anything other than "I trust parents and doctors" when asked "Do you support trans mutilization of children?" or whatever President Fucko says. 

But let me focus here on immigration. I'm in the UK right now, and parts of the country are losing their fucking minds over an immigrant from Sudan attacking a white man in Belfast with a knife, on top of an earlier crime from December where a young white man was stabbed to death by a Sikh man, both born in the UK. The killer in that case was sentence to life in prison on June 1. Racist fucknuts, led by the worst pieces of shit like Nigel Farage, Elon Musk, and his hate buddy, Tommy Robinson, have been calling for violence against immigrants and non-whites, and shit got real in Belfast where homes and cars were burned down and people had to flee for their lives. Other outbreaks of bullshit happened in Scotland and elsewhere. They were smaller incidents, but thank fuck the World Cup is starting so that these assholes can focus their savagery away from families and onto the teams of other countries. By the way, there were over 500 violent knife crimes in the last year in NI, but no one had a race riot when Seamus shanked Liam over a broken shillelagh or whatever the fuck they do there. 

And while it's good to hear condemnation coming from Labour politicians and others, it's frankly galling that Prime Minister Keir Starmer and most of the party has spent the better part of two years trying to out-asshole the right on immigration into the UK. The same goes for Democrats in the US who still think bragging about how many people were deported under President Obama is a strategy to convince voters who are totally cool with concentration camps to vote for Dems. In case you don't remember, most Democrats were actually pissed about Obama's mass deportations back in the 2010s.

This isn't that fucking complicated. Democrats don't have to make "border security" the top item in their discussion of immigration policy because no matter what, the GOP is going to say they want open borders. Instead, make the case that immigration is who we are. Make it so that immigrants are celebrated, even if they came here and stayed without going through the absolutely insane immigration system we have. Not to solely focus on Talarico, but on this count, he's got one of the more immigrant-positive sets of policies. 

By offering this alternative to the bullshit the right keeps forcing on Americans, Democrats can say that we all get to chill the fuck out. Goddamn, don't you want to chill out over people who are your neighbors and co-workers and the people who works really friggin' hard? 

What's happening in the UK right now is what the racist dickscabs who work for the Trump administration and run Congress and ejaculate hate all over Twitter/X want to happen in the US. Hell, it's the policy of ICE to do everything short of burn down the homes of undocumented migrants. 

But voters love it when you offer an easier path. Shit, just tell them that the taxes paid by the undocumented will help save Social Security. Greed is always the greatest motivator.

Getting My Mind Around Trump's IRS Deal (Part 2: Lemme Tell You About Real Weaponization)

When the White House announced that a deal had been reached between the Internal Revenue Service and noted rapist of children and adults Donald Trump over Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the agency for a leak of his tax returns by a now-convicted IRS contractor, the layers of fuckery were thick. The idea of the deal is madness: a $1.8 billion...sorry, a $1.776 billion slush fund with no oversight beyond a Trump-approved committee is going to dole out cash to anyone Trump says was a "victim" of "lawfare" and "weaponization" of...fuck, I don't know, Congress? The justice system?...including, potentially, the deranged cretins who tried to overthrow the government and murder members of Congress and Mike Pence on January 6, 2021. 

I can't get my head around the idea that the president sued his own government and then came up with a deal that, for a moment, got the case dismissed and closed because everyone at the IRS and Justice Department knew that no judge or jury on earth would see this as anything other than a giant asshole being as assholish as humanly possible. 

But let's take a second and talk about this whole idea of "lawfare" and "weaponization." After all, it is an "Anti-Weaponization Fund" that's supposed to come out of the deal. And Trump and Republican spoogebags run around saying "weaponization" as another of their shorthand words and phrases that are meaningless unless you're up to your tits in MAGA bullshit, like "transgender for everyone." To them, the arrest and prosecution of people like the J6ers or cold sore aficionado Steve Bannon or anyone else Trump pardoned is something that demands reparations. Said a Justice Department official, "It is no secret that many were victims of the weaponization of the past administration...This type of lawfare should never occur again, under any administration."

Except you can bet that Leticia James or Kilmar Abrego Garcia or E. Jean Carroll or anyone being held without charge or trial in an ICE concentration camp won't get any claims approved by the Trump-humpers on this committee that will pretend to control the fund.

You wanna know what real "lawfare and weaponization" looks like? Oh, sweet children of America, let me take you back to the 1990s for another lesson in how Republicans have been motherfuckers busily fucking mothers for decades. See, when Bill Clinton was elected president, defeating an incumbent Republican and bringing the Reagan/Bush era of destroying the government to an end (I know Reagan's dickishness seems quaint compared to Trump's, but every conflagration starts with a flame), Republicans lost their goddamn minds and decided to make it their mission to destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton. And one way they did that was by congressional investigations and by berating Clinton into getting a special counsel appointed. 

Without going into all the details, which you can read about ad nauseam, the burgeoning right-wing media, driven at the time by talk radio, and the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1994 midterms led to a period where every time Bill or Hillary Clinton or anyone in their orbit farted too loudly, some goddamned congressional committee would have hearings or odious taint sniffer Ken Starr would expand his investigation. They would subpoena every staffer or appointee even tangentially involved in Filegate, Travelgate, Whitewater, and anything else, and they would question them under oath. That meant these low-paid employees would need to hire lawyers so they didn't accidentally fuck themselves over, and it caused deep financial hardship and, in some cases, bankruptcy. 

And here's the thing: Republicans fucking well knew that's what they were doing. They fucking well knew they were destroying careers and families and lives over utter bullshit. No one was convicted of any crimes in connection to any of these "scandals" except for a couple of the Clintons' business partners in the failed real estate deal in Arkansas that was (no, really, kids, look it up) the reason the Whitewater investigation happened. You understand that? Republicans deliberately ruined people because they wanted to hurt the Clintons and it was all for nothing. 

That's some fucking lawfare. That's motherfucking weaponization. That's who Republicans are and always have been. And Trump is doing the exact same thing by siccing the Justice Department on anyone who ever crossed him or anyone who might try to stop him from fucking the nation or the world up even worse. 

Compare those Clinton staffers to the J6ers, who were tried and convicted of serious shit. No one who worked in the White House travel office in the 1990s beat a cop with a flagpole. Hell, let's update that and say that no one sitting at Delaney Hall in Newark on a hunger strike against maggoty food and abuse ever did that either. None of them cheered on an insurrection or allowed foreign infiltration of the highest levels of our government (looking at you, Michael Flynn). The idea that anyone who Trump might bless with millions of dollars deserves anything is repulsive, repugnant, reprehensible, and Republican. They are the weapons in weaponization.

Of course, there's also a pretty good chance that Trump just says he's the biggest victim and awards himself most or all the money because he's a greedy, aggrieved cuntmite. It is, as many have noted, the most corrupt thing any president has ever done, on top of the previously discussed elimination of any current audits of himself or anyone or anything close to him. And smarmy fuckworm and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has aided and abetted this criminality and deserves every punishment that should come his way in some hoped-for future.

Fortunately, even some Senate Republicans are queasy about the fund and want to find a way to stop it. And the federal judge who closed the case, responding to documents filed by 35 former judges in a giant "What the fucking fuck is this shit?" effort, has put a stay on any movement to make the slush fund real and is reopening the case she had closed because, indeed, "What the fucking fuck is this shit?"

It's something everyone in the country should be asking all the time.

Getting My Head Around Trump's IRS Settlement (Part 1)

If you spend a decent chunk of your precious life closely following and chronicling the often egregious fuckery of American politicians, you get used to a certain level of madness and stomach-turning betrayals of Everything We Stand For. You stare dead-eyed monsters in the face and call them out for being vicious, vile vacuums of humanity. You dare to load your mind with the myriad ways that decent and indecent people end up fucking everyone over. Shit that would surprise others is just another day for you. "Oh, we were lied into another war? Sounds like us."

Lemme put it this way: you might have heard about ballmaxxing and been shocked by it, as in "Holy fuck, you mean there's a thing where men inject fluid into their nutsack to make it look huge?" Yeah, that's weird. And it was weird back in 2009 when I wrote about the practice then called "scrotal infusion" and said that it's an apt metaphor for the Bush administration. I'm not gonna explain. Click and read, motherfuckers, click and read. So, really, my response to the current ballmaxxing discourse is a muted sigh.

Now, if you told me that there's something called "bombballing" where men decide to surgically fill their scrotums with small explosives and try to fuck intensely so one of them blows up because they'll cum so hard it makes them shit themselves, then I'd likely have more of a "Whoa. Ouch. What the fucking fuck?" reaction.  

What I'm trying to say here is that so much of what is done by President Donald Trump, who answers the question "What if an overgrown Oompa-Loompa, but on bath salts?", enrages me, but it's not breaking my brain because mostly I think, "Of course. It's Donald fucking Trump. What did you expect? Grace and dignity?" But this motherfucking IRS "settlement" (in that it's not a "settlement" because no court anywhere would ever sign off on this corrupt garbage) is bombballing to me. 

Start with the unfathomably indecent addendum, where Trump, his family, their companies, and anyone or anything tangentially related to those ("without limitation") are given a free ticket on any federal tax crimes they've done because the United States is "FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims, counterclaims, causes of action, appeals, or requests for any relief, including injunctive relief, monetary relief, damages, examinations or similar or related reviews, appeals, debt relief, costs, attorney's fees, expenses, and/or interest, whether presently known or unknown, that - as of the Effective Date of the Settlement Agreement - have been or could have been asserted by Defendants [the IRS]."

Look at that shit, force fucked into existence by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is so devoid of a soul that the Devil didn't even bother to buy it. What blows my mind here is the idea that any crimes already committed by Trump, by Eric, by fucking Jared, by Barron's friends cannot be investigated, audited, or prosecuted by the IRS forever. That's telling the law to go fuck itself sideways with a chainsaw. That's taking the Constitution, wiping your ass with it, and using it to set a pile of American flags on fire so you can cook some bald eagles. It's the kind of deal that supervillains dream of and then laugh about because it's utterly impossible for it to be real. But that's how fucked our government is right now. That's the deal that it made with itself for no reason other than Donald fucking Trump wanted it.

It's the ultimate expression of the Trump grievance machine, where everyone is out to get him and his shitty family, where he's merely an innocent victim of "lawfare" and "weaponization" of the law, terms that are completely devoid of meaning when Trump himself sued CBS for editing an interview in a way he didn't like and sues everyone all the time for the merest slight. He's a sue-happy bitch, and some judge should slap the shit out of him and his attorneys for filing frivolous lawsuits. 

Gonna stop here for today. I'll do more this week on the monetary side of things, which is really about who has free speech in this devolved nation. But this is beyond any scandal we've ever seen. And any elected official who is okay with it needs to be whipped into the political hinterlands. 

(Note: An earlier version of this said that it included future crimes, which someone with actual legal expertise told me was wrong. I'm still stuck on the idea that anything that may "arise out of...Lawfare and/or Weaponization" is included, and that's where I thought it absolved the bastards of all tax shenanigans from here to eternity. And, frankly, if this idiotic addendum stands and some criming should happen, I'm betting Blanche or another dickbag lawyer might try to weasel out of it using this. But I could be totally wrong, so, yeah, I corrected.)

A Poem for Memorial Day

"Asking for a Friend" by Abby E. Murray

Is there a way to tell

the commander’s wife

you’re a pacifist

and it’s possible

to trust your spouse

but mourn his work

because the death

he’s delivered

through the cracks

of thatched rooftops

is more than a fracture

beneath his skin

and the flag is a reminder

and gravel is a reminder

and pins and ribbons

and coins and the smell

of diesel and buildings

without doors are a reminder

and you won’t secure

the gold battalion crest

over your left breast

no matter how many

times she tells you

it’s like a sweetheart pin

and the last thing

you want when

your father is found

dead in his duplex

is an email asking when

she can drop off

some meatballs in sauce

and you can’t stop

swaddling your brain

in yesterday’s Times

to see what city has fallen

as if they topple

rather than burn

and you refuse to stop

reading and doubting

until no one makes sense

and every deployment

is a Talking Heads song

and every morning

is an invitation to dance

in a pill bottle

and you’re not interested

in keeping busy

and you don’t want

more group texts

and you don’t want

your daughter learning

to shoot a rifle

with the other kids

who aim at a silhouette

of someone’s son

tied to a haystack

and you don’t want

to host a dress swap

before the gala

and you don’t want

a souvenir photo

with the bald eagle

and every time

the commander says

let’s thank our ladies

you want to toss the table

champagne flutes and all

and watch all the favors

you’ve done to prompt

his gratitude go flying

because you’ve tried to say

war is necessary

but the words are like

spiders in the shower

they have every right

to be there and yet

you are crawling up

the side of yourself

trying to get clean

without howling

and you don’t want

to call them our boys

and you don’t want

to be called household 6 

or a rock or a pillar

and the only commanders

you trust are the ones

who seem pained

by the movement

of their own bones

given to them

by their mothers

freely and without

any mental reservation

and it’s against your beliefs

to say things are fine

when the satellites

click and blink above us

unwilling to share

which target needs water

and which needs bread

and if anyone knows

a way to say this

without provoking

the commander’s wife

to roll a wide stone

over your spouse

and his career

let’s meet soon

I’ll buy you a beer

(Murray is the editor of Collateral, a journal that publishes works about "the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone.")

In Foreign Policy, Trump Learns That White Doesn't Make Right

Racists try really fucking hard to mask their ignorance and fear with all kinds of bullshit ways of saying racist things and enacting racist policies (when in a position to do that). Because when all you've got is "white makes right," you've gotta fill it out with all kinds of utterly dull comments about the superiority of the Greeks or Romans or other Europeans (not you, Albanians, and they're a little dicey on Spaniards. Oh,  and the less said about Jews, the better), and then you just sound pathetic because white people have been as savage and stupid and destructive as any group of humans. Just because you've got Shakespeare doesn't mean you don't have a penchant for slaughtering each other over stupid shit or because you've got insane leaders.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that Donald Trump is sold to racists as some kind of pinnacle of the innate superiority of whiteness, and it's kind of hilarious that he's so fucking dumb and so fucking blind to his own flaws that he just keeps punching himself under his gut in his tiny ballsack every single time he attempts to assert his illusionary white superiority over non-white leadership in other countries. 

The thing about Trump and all the idiots, greedy pricks, and hangers-on who enable him is that they think that their whiteness is a superpower when, really, it's their tragic flaw. 

What we've seen in the last several months is a display about the inevitable doom of whiteness in the modern world. Defense Secretary and someone with resting "I'm gonna roofie a chick" face Pete Hegseth fired experienced leadership in the military and also fired any white man who thought that non-white men and women in general shouldn't be fired or denied promotions just because they're not white men. Fuck you for being an ally, General.

These stupid shits didn't realize that diversity, equity, and inclusion isn't about elevating people who don't deserve it. It's about making sure that you don't avoid hiring qualified people because of your own unconscious biases or conscious bigotry. DEI is just a shorthand way of saying, "Hey, you white douche, don't be a fucking asshole." But, of course, Hegseth is only a fucking asshole. It's the only aspect of his personality that still exists. 

Of course, Hegseth's fuckery (and inexperience) affected the war with Iran. Add to that the State Department getting DOGEd in the ass by Elon Musk and his brigade of pasty incels, who culled the joint of diplomats with expertise in Near and Middle East affairs. Yeah, who needed those pinheads?

What Trump and Hegseth thought was that Iran would just crumble under a US/Israel bombardment and be done within days. They really had the colonial mindset about the East (Near, Middle, Far) that has fucked over the white West repeatedly, from Vietnam to Afghanistan (for the USSR and, to an extent, the US) to Iraq and a thousand other examples. It's the shit that Edward Said wrote about, the white rapists' view of the East as, essentially, an easily fuckable woman. And no matter how many times the East cuts the nuts off a rapist, the next rapist goes back thinking they're totally gonna overpower a country this time. That's easier to attempt when you've gotten rid of everyone around you who says, "This is a terrible fucking idea and you're gonna end up with your sack removed."

So, yeah, Trump might, as he's threatened again, commit genocide in Iran, but that just shows how weak he is and what absolute nonsense this belief in the superiority of whiteness is. Jesus, they thought they could send Jared "Bitch Eyes" Kushner to negotiate peace and that Iran would bow down. What these dumb motherfuckers have learned is that other countries have actually competent leaders who have an understanding of what makes their enemies weak. In the case of Iran, you have religious zealots who will mass slaughter their own people and who gave in once on its nuclear ambitions with the JCPOA, only to see our troglodyte president rip up the deal. You'd have to be an irrational idiot to believe anything Trump says has any permanence, and the Iranian leadership may be irrational, but they're not idiots. The war is a rank failure, and Trump has dicked over the entire globe, except for Russia and, frankly, Iran, and Iran knows it.

That same stench of filled diaper and pit sweat failure hangs over Trump's shambolic bumblefuck in China. He thought he could charm and cajole Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Xi played Trump like an erhu, getting himself and China elevated to an equal superpower in the world economy. Trump spent his time acting like a bumpkin child, embarrassingly overpraising both China and Xi, prostrating himself by hinting that he'd bail on Taiwan and prostituting US corporations like a louche pimp with a syphilitic line-up. Again, Trump was dealing with a leader who, despite being an absolute monster in many ways, lives in the real world, with investment in alternate energy and high functioning infrastructure (at least in the cities). Xi even shit on the US to Trump's stupid face, and Trump just grinned like the moron that he is. 

There's your avatar of white racial superiority, completely steamrolled by non-white leaders. Non-Western nations won't bow down; the racists were completely fucking wrong. And unless you are determined to completely eliminate those countries and people, then your racist ass needs to accept that this is the world we live in. We can be part of it, with immigration and free trade and maybe a bit of humility, or we'll be told to go fuck ourselves out of existence.

Trump Sets His Idiot Hordes on Justices Gorsuch and Barrett Over Birthright Citizenship

Over on Truth Toilet, President Donald Trump, who should be put in a room with a bear, a lion, a shark, and a squirrel and then asked if he can tell the difference, posted a long attack on the Supreme Court. Or, really, on two justices he appointed, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. He starts, "I 'Love' Justice Neil Gorsuch! He’s a really smart and good man, but he voted against me, and our Country, on Tariffs, a devastating move. How do I reconcile this? So bad, and hurtful to our Country. I have, likewise, always liked and respected Amy Coney Barrett, but the same thing with her. They were appointed by me, and yet have hurt our Country so badly!" 

Trump has no concept of how government functions. He didn't give a fuck that there are agencies and departments (like Justice) that are supposed to be able act independently from the president, only adhering to the law and the Constitution that they, you know, like him, took a vow to uphold. He has never given a fuck that he doesn't own the government and all its buildings, that he's the employee of the citizens of the United States and not our CEO. So he decided to contort it all in his image. He has force-fucked all the areas of the executive branch repeatedly until they have simply collapsed and just lets him have his way with them. And even though the Supreme Court and other courts have given him wide latitude to commit crimes without any kind of consequences, it's not enough. Time to rape the Judicial Branch because it won't just lay back all the time and take it.

In one of the truly fucked up things Trump has said, not just this weekend (although it's tempting to time limit it) but in his entire cursed presidency, he continued his Truth Toilet dump about Gorsuch and Barrett, "They have to do the right thing, but it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to 'almost' the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court." Take that fuckery in and let it marinate for a couple of moments. The president of the United States is demanding that judges he appoint do his bidding. In other words, fuck the law, fuck the Constitution, fuck any oaths, fuck ethics, fuck it all. Trump is the country and the country is Trump and there is no in-between. 

What becomes clear as the post goes on is that Trump has been given a heads up that Gorsuch and Barrett are voting against him in the case of Trump v. Barbara. That's the birthright citizenship case, which asks if Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship violates the 14th Amendment, which it clearly does and it's stupid we're even talking about it but four justices are cocks about it. So it looks like Trump knows he's gonna lose.

I'm not making this up about Trump knowing. He says it: "I choose people to help our Country, not to hurt it, and now, based on what I witnessed recently by being the first President in History to attend a Supreme Court session (Which fact was not even recognized or acknowledged, out of respect for the position of President, by the Court — Something which did not go unnoticed by the Fake News Media!), they will be ruling against us on Birthright Citizenship, making us the only Country in the World that practices this unsustainable, unsafe, and incredibly costly DISASTER. I don’t want loyalty, but I do want and expect it for our Country." Putting aside the lie that he keeps repeating about the number of countries that have birthright citizenship (it's 33, which I've been led to believe is more than zero), how do you state that so plainly unless you were told what the decision would be? 

Because no decision is set until it's released, what else is clear is that Trump is trying to intimidate Gorsuch and Barrett into changing their votes on the case by being so personal in his hurt and so specific in his attacks. He is setting his idiot hordes on them for death threats and doxxing and other bullshit. Trump only knows rape and gangsterism. It's how he's lived his whole life. If he can't fuck it or make money from it, then he will punish it. So now the two justices must suffer unless they wise up. He knows that it just takes a word from him and the hordes will swarm them.

(Quick aside, if it's just Gorsuch and Barrett among the conservatives who support the plain text of the 14th Amendment, that's so unbelievably fucked that it's kind of stomach-churning that the entire Constitution is hanging on by a 5-4 fraying thread.)

Also, it seems like Trump was butthurt that the justices didn't pause their hearing on the case to recognize that he was in the courtroom. Motherfucker, the president isn't the boss of the Supreme Court. I know that the legislative branch controlled by the GOP has decided that it's just there to be a cum dump for Trump. But the branches are allegedly coequal. One is not in charge of the other. Sonia Sotomayor didn't walk into the Oval Office, slap Putin's dick out of Trump's mouth, and demand he pay attention to her. 

The post finishes with "Well, maybe Neil, and Amy, just had a really bad day, but our Country can only handle so many decisions of that magnitude before it breaks down, and cracks!!! Sometimes decisions have to be allowed to use Good, Strong, Common Sense as a guide. A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America!" Let us pause to consider a grown man, a senior citizen, the president, no less, punctuating something with three exclamation points like an enraged tween who didn't get Olivia Rodrigo tickets. More importantly, somehow, for over a century, the country was functioning just fine without his arbitrary tariffs and with birthright citizenship. But, fuck, let's just pretend it was all a giant shitstorm prior to the brilliant Donald Trump recognizing that what we really needed was to raise prices on everything and decimate the working class. 

Trump's weekend rants are usually deserving of eyerolls. But he's working the refs here, and underlying everything is always a threat. Let's not be naive and think that this is anything else.

(Note: I left out the part where Trump once again goes through all the ways he claims he won a "landslide" in 2024. He did not. Not even close. He counts the number of counties he won. Land is not people. Land doesn't vote.)

(Note 2: I don't play the game of whether or not Trump wrote this. I don't give a fuck who tapped it into the Toilet. It's under his name. That's all that matters.)

The Conservative Supreme Court Majority Stops Pretending It's Not Racist and Republicans Gladly Follow Suit

Last week, the New York Times (motto: "The people eating at red state diners are fucking sick of us") reported on the failure of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to find cases of discrimination against white men. Oh, they're trying to find 'em because that's what the racists in White House are demanding. Based on nothing more than aggrieved dickheads in the manosphere and other fact-free sources, the EEOC back in December said it was shifting to a "conservative view" of what racism is, meaning that it's white people, especially men, who are the victims. So they put out the call for whiny white twatmites to file cases with the agency, and, well, "staff in several districts said they were struggling to find complaints with merit. And they said they were pressed by their superiors to look for reasons to keep those cases alive, even when evidence was weak."

Lemme bottom line it: there is virtually no demonstrable discrimination against white men in the workplace (or anywhere else) unless you assert that the act of hiring non-white people and women is discrimination. The attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs is a sham, especially since DEI programs help everyone (like white men with disabilities, for instance). And they are not illegal, despite what the Trump administration keeps saying as if it can force-fuck the idea into being.

But it's an item of faith on the right (and has been for decades) that traditional civil rights enforcement is all about harming white people. Or, if you see yourself as a more enlightened racist asshole, you might say, "It was once necessary, but it's not anymore because racism is over." Of course, you'd have to ignore the fact that Black Americans earn 36% less than white Americans, and that this disparity holds true across jobs at all levels. Oh, and the Black unemployment rate is nearly double the white one. I mean, fuck, just look at the Trump Administration and you can see the bleaching of the national identity. Any time there's a cabinet meeting, it's like a Klan rally. Add in how law enforcement and the courts treat non-white people, and, well, you gotta lie pretty hard to say racism is dead.

This flawed thinking is behind the Supreme Court's fucked but inevitable decision in Callais v. Louisiana, which ripped the guts out of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act "which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation." The decision invalidated a congressional district map that gave Louisiana two majority Black districts after a federal court decision told the state in 2024 that it had to create the map with the 2 districts or the court would make do it for the state. After putting the case on hold in 2024, the savage conservative majority on the Supreme Court took it on for the sole purpose of killing the VRA. In a heavy legalese decision, Justice Samuel "YouTube right-wingers made me even crazier" Alito said, in essence, a map that considers race is racist so you can stop considering race and just make maps that have majority white people since they elect Republicans and that's totally not racist. In other words, the majority's decision is racist bullshit. 

Never to be outdone on racism, Justice Clarence "No one hates Black people more than me" Thomas said in a concurrence that while Alito pretended that he wasn't killing Section 2, he would have double-tapped it.

So Louisiana, a state that is one-third Black and has six seats in the House of Representatives (see how math works?), will now redraw the map for November's election to completely eliminate the two majority Black districts. The only way to do that is to carve up New Orleans, a city that is 55% Black, and the only reason you wouldn't have a New Orleans district is to prevent a Black person (who will likely be a Democrat) from being elected. The same goes for Baton Rouge, another majority Black city. Rational division of the state would give its two most populous cities a district each. But Republicans aren't looking to draw maps fairly. They are going to carve up those cities and Shreveport (third largest, also majority Black) and combine them with white suburbs and rural parishes and deliberately dilute the color out of them. And the Supreme Court will not call that "racist."

And lemme tell you: Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is a motherfucker of insatiable appetites. He will fuck mothers as often and as viciously as he can, and he's cheered on by the shit show at the fuck factory that is the Louisiana legislature. So, yeah, fuck early voting that has already gotten under way in all other races. Landry is declaring a state of emergency (no, really), calling back the legislature to redo the map, and suspending voting for the primaries for congressional seats to get it done, even though a couple hundred thousand absentee ballots have gone out, including to troops overseas, and, Jesus fuck, what a clusterfuck just to be racist as quickly and intensely as possible. Other red states are likely going to join in, and lawsuits are sprouting like weeds, as they should be, to choke this effort out.

This is the country the racists want, where we're always scrambling to make shit more racist. And the racists are in charge, and they are aggrieved like toddlers who were just told they can't have their fifth cookie. It's never enough. You'd think the fact that all these white people got elected and run the courts and everything would prove that some kind of racism against whites isn't actually real. But reality always fucks things up for them even as they fuck up reality.

Random Observations on Another Weird Attempted "Assassination"

1. The quotation marks around "assassination" in the title are not because I believe in any of the conspiracy bullshit about the attempt by Cole Tomas Allen to kill someone at the White House Correspondents' Dinner last night. It's comforting to think that our enemies are so competent that they can stage shootings with ease any time they think it might bolster Donald Trump's low approval ratings. But always remember: the more people needed for a conspiracy means the less likely a conspiracy is real. No, the reason for implying it was a so-called assassination attempt is because Allen never got anywhere near close enough to actually attempt to kill Trump or a member of his administration. Even Trump said this. Allen made it to the metal detectors near the stairs leading to the Hilton ballroom. Besides, we live in the goddamn United States. We're never far away from someone shooting a gun. It's what we are debased enough to call "freedom."

2. However, if I were inclined towards conspiracies, it sure as fuck seems like the real reason would be to get Trump's goddamn golden ballroom/Hitler bunker built. Probably that's more "never let a crisis go to waste" than anything else. But, still, it's fucking weird how the quickly coordinated reaction on the right was that the violence meant that courts and historical preservation groups and Democrats and, well, most of the general public should back the fuck off and let the ballroom be finished. Sen. Tim Sheehy, a Republican scumfucker from Montana, said he's introducing legislation to approve the ballroom construction. They are fucking shameless. 

2a. What's the point here in saying that events like this should take place in the fortress ballroom? The WHCD is not a White House-sponsored thing. Trump was a guest of the association running the dinner. The implication is that Trump will rent out the ballroom like the White House is another one of his shitty hotels (and there's no doubt that he'd keep at least a taste of that money, if not the whole thing). The entire effort, the unrelenting push for and hype about the ballroom, is not simply unseemly. It's shady. It's skeevy. It's got grift and graft written all over it, and, you know, we're at war in a sinking economy and how the fuck is this even a thing.

2b. And fuck John Fetterman again and forever for jumping on the ballroom bandwagon. 

2c. Trump keeps saying that presidents have been wanting a giant-ass ballroom for "150 years." I don't recall any president in my lifetime mentioning it at all. Was Chester Arthur hot for one? Or Grover Cleveland, non-consecutively? And Teddy Roosevelt did whatever the fuck he wanted to the White House. If he wanted a ballroom, he'd have had one fucking well built.

2d. Maybe someone could spend a few minutes talking about how gun control would make the president and everyone else safer. Maybe spare a thought or two for all the people fucking shot and killed in mass shootings recently. Maybe think about how to make life easier for kids at schools so they don't have to worry about getting slaughtered in their classrooms. Maybe stop to consider how, in a country flooded with guns, this shit was inevitable.

3. The shooter's "manifesto" (if by "manifesto," you mean, "a friendly letter that is weirdly well thought-out") was pretty fucking clear about what he thought of Trump. He said, "I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes." And of the attendees at the dinner, "[M]ost people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit." I'm not handing it to Allen or excusing his violence, but I will say that a fuck of a lot of people really and truly believe this about Trump (me included). And by the Department of Justice refusing to release the Epstein files, by refusing to name anyone else involved, by never investigating the allegations against Trump, then it's pretty easy and logical to reach the conclusion that something is being hidden. This isn't conspiracy thinking. There's tons of evidence, with witnesses and victims who have gone on the record, under oath, to law enforcement and Congress. Again, I'm not supporting violence, but, again, in a country filled to the tits with guns and people who think, not without cause, that the president is a pedophile? It's frankly surprising that there isn't more violence trying to get the answers. 

4. I'm not saying everyone who attended deserved to think they were going to die. (I'm not saying no one deserved to think that, either.) Save for the White House press pool, which is there to write about events as news, if you went to the dinner, you were taking part in a complete whitewashing of Trump's disdain for you, and, after Allen was captured, you were laughing with the targets of the shooter, taking selfies for your Instas, making dramatic TikToks about your trauma. You were giving aid and comfort to the people who want you imprisoned if you dare to speak against them. If you believe in signs that maybe you should do things differently in the future, dear, sweet, profit-driven, craven media whores and your corporate pimps, this would be it. God, don't fucking take a mulligan and try to do the dinner again.

4a. And fuck off if you're saying that Democrats and progressive media figures should "turn down the rhetoric" against Trump or whatever the fuck. Clarence Thomas recently gave a speech where he implied that progressives should be killed or kicked out of the country. Stephen Miller regularly rails against Americans who oppose the administration, calling them "traitors" and implying they need to be executed. Trump and his cabal of crypto cons and cockscabs are murdering people without trial, imprisoning families for months for no reason, trying to strip Americans of citizenship, murdering protesters, and threatening genocide. It's impossible to reach that level of actual violence with rhetoric. 

4b. Man, that was a shitty mentalist.

5. As Will Bunch wrote, this is our country now. We are so numb to gun violence that we roll our eyes at someone even getting somewhat close to being able to make an assassination attempt. We are numb to the constant barrage of hatefulness. We are so bereft of anything approaching a unifying leader that the media is willing to treat Trump with kid gloves if he pretends for a few minutes to not be an inflamed asshole. In the two days prior to last night's events, Trump made racist attacks on Hakeem Jeffries and Candace Owen, reposted calls for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to be arrested, celebrated committing more war crimes, and that's just to start. We don't have to pretend that a motherfucker isn't a motherfucker just because someone wanted to kill him. 

A Short Exegesis on Jesus Trump

We can tell a great deal about President Donald Trump from the "art" he hangs on his walls or posts on social media. Mostly, what it says is "I have absolutely no taste, and if you put my face on it, it's awesome." His recent repost, later deleted, was, as I'm sure you've seen by now, an AI-generated image featuring Trump as Jesus Christ, ostensibly there to heal someone who looks like Jeffrey Epstein but probably is not Jeffrey Epstein because you wouldn't heal someone you had killed. Then you have to kill them all over again and who knows if you can get the timing of the cameras being off just right a second time.

Yes, this upset many "Christians," who apparently had no issue with an adulterer and rapist who shits on the poor until he defiled the image of Christ, which is totally how Jesus would have reacted. But this image deserves a bit more discussion before it gets flushed down the memory hole, and, unfortunately, that means I need to post it.

As with most things Trump, this is really about his dick. Or, more precisely, this is about his semen, or, in this case, his Jesus jizz. Trump is obviously ejaculating - that's the burst of light coming from his groin area - and he's cumming on the head of the elderly man because nothing gives him more pleasure than watching people die. In fact, Trump's rubbing the jizz into the man's head not because he think it will comfort the man, but because Trump thinks it's hilarious to get some spunk on the dude. Notice the little smile. Trump's left hand holds some extra semen, likely because he accidentally brushed his hand against his cock during orgasm and he's wondering where to wipe it. Probably the soldier because Trump thinks that will show how much he supports the troops.

The two females on the sides stare at his prick, the one on the left looking concerned, as if she recognizes that it's probably not good for the urethra to spew glowing jizz. The one on the right, in the nurse's uniform, looks unfazed. As a medical professional, she has seen all kinds of jizz. However, the age of the two females is concerning. Both definitely look like teenagers. The nurse seems 13 and the praying girl seems 16, both well within Trump's age range for sexually abusing children. 

In fact, one way to see this image is as a representation of Trump's sex crimes, with the men looking on in quiet awe and appreciation because they themselves wish to fuck underage girls. The white-bearded man with a hat that says, "Petunia" is ready to drink more Trump cum because he's downed so much of it already the last ten years. Now, the heavenly figures could be seen as Democrats pursuing him, but you'd think even AI would know that demons come from hell. No, I think the floating men in outfits ranging from dimestore devil to early 20th-century diver actually represent right-wing media giving approval for Trump jizzing on an old man and making girls on their knees watch his dick. 

As for the fireworks and eagles and jets, those were sent out by Stephen Miller in order to announce a Trump orgasm. If Trump had his way, it would be a national holiday every time he achieved one, but since he can't just declare that (yet), he has free rein to make the military scramble some fighters. Those aren't chemtrails. They're cumtrails.

So, frankly, I was shocked when Trump gave in to demands by Mike Johnson and others to take down the image. What more perfect way is there to represent how he sees himself and how most of the MAGA cretins see him, even if some are mildly protesting. Most, by the way, are saying you can't take a joke if you find this offensive. They worship him. He may as well cut out the other savior.

Now, if they follow through on the rest of the Jesus stuff, that'll be worth orgasming over.

It Should Be a Bigger Story That the President of the United States Is Fucking Insane

I have the feeling we'll remember where we were when we saw or heard about rapist and President Donald Trump's Easter morning dropping in his Truth Toilet. I saw it embedded as an image on BlueSky and my first thought was "No way that's real." So I went over to Truth Toilet, where I maintain a secret stall to spy on the bastards, and, as we know now, I saw that, yup, that shit was real. Here's what it said, in case you didn't see it in all its glory (and I won't link to it because fuck Truth Toilet): "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Now, yes, this is a threat of war crimes to force Iran to allow cargo ships and oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz without being attacked, something that wasn't an issue until the United States started bombing Iran. But look at the psychopathic rage there from Trump (or whoever was writing this for him, but it's posted in his name, so, fuck it, yeah, Trump). You can see him wailing and gnashing about his stupid, worthless war not going the way he was told it would go by those hanging onto the hairs on his nutsack, like savage racist moron Pete Hegseth and evil, greedy worm Jared Kushner. And then to end it with "Praise be to Allah"? Putting aside that it's fucking Easter, one of the holiest days in his supposed Christian faith, it just seems like an extra dickish thing to add after saying he's going to mass murder Muslims and then force those not killed to live in misery. 

Look, we know that Trump is an extravagant, inveterate, unapologetic liar. We also know that he's a giant piece of shit, a miserable fuck who treats everyone as terrible as he feels. But liars and pieces of shit at least have one foot in reality. The real key to understanding how and why we are where we are as a nation (and as a world) is to acknowledge that Trump is fucking insane and to demand more reporting on that fact. Instead, we get some combination of glossing over his madness, dismissing it as just his personality, and rolling one's eyes as if he's a child. None of these reactions has ever worked, and his madness has gotten worse. 

Let's not go through all the ways and times that Trump has acted or expressed something insane. That would be like going through a porn star's oeuvre to see all the places he has jizzed on another human being. Just accept that it's everywhere and move on to the next point.  Instead, let's focus in on that last line there, the "Praise be to Allah," and not for the weird slide into Islam's DMs. 

As his war failure (and let's be clear: the war is a failure and was always going to be a failure) causes him to spiral, as events that he has no control over once again take over his administration (like Covid in his first cursed term), he has gotten more and more freaky about spouting religious shit, desperately humping Jesus for clout with the evangelicals and support from the crazed Christian nationalists who have turned this shambles into a Holy War. On Saturday, for instance, he ended one Truth Toilet dropping about blowing up Iran with "Glory be to GOD!" which is just embarrassing and weird on top of being worrying. 

Meanwhile, at a Holy Week event, he gave a speech that wasn't supposed to be posted and kept making comparisons between himself and Jesus and random religious shit. "On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem as crowds welcomed him with praise, honoring him as king. They call me king now, do you believe it? No, king. I'm such a king I can't get a ballroom approved," he said, interrupting the build up to the crucifixion. He continued, "And Thursday, the disciples gathered with Jesus as their teacher and stood in fear as he was arrested and betrayed. He was really betrayed. We know the feeling. Many of the people in this room know that feeling. Many of the people in this room went through hell." In case you're keeping track, Trump's saying that the legal difficulties of the pedophiles and thieves gathered for lunch are analogous to Christ's torture.

Then he started to riff, saying, "I've often said that to be a great nation, you have to have religion. I believe that's so strongly. You have to have religion and you have to have God. That's why this Easter we are bringing back religion to America. We have when I started, you know, if you think about it so we went through four years of purgatory." After a few minutes of this, after comparing the supposed growth of Christianity to the growth in Nvidia stocks, after blathering about how he brought back Christmas when no one was talking about Christmas anymore, he shifted to trans women in sports and imitated a trans woman boxing and mocked other trans women and, no, really, this fucking happened. 

Donald Trump is a fundamentally broken man. He was never stable or sane, and his need for wealth and desire to wield his power have taken on a mania. Like so many broken men in leadership before, he believes he is the thing that he's leading. He sees himself as the United States, that what's good for him is what's good for Americans, and that if you claim otherwise, you are his enemy and the country's enemy and the country needs to destroy you. But on top of that, he might really believe (and he is told this repeatedly by the deranged and/or grifting religious leaders who surround him and lay hands on him) that he is God's instrument on earth and that everything he does is sanctified through his connection to an invisible sky wizard who looked out for him to prevent him from being assassinated. No, I don't think Trump's a religious zealot. But he has said he's worried about his soul after death, and that's driven him even crazier as he seems to actually be thinking about whether or not he's going to Hell (and, to be sure, for those of us who are atheists, this is all psycho shit). Or who knows what he's really thinking? That's what it means to have such severe mental decay, to be delusional on top of being narcissistic. 

This is unsustainable. Democrats need to be asking every day why Republicans won't remove him from office. Fuck it - come at it from a compassionate direction: Why won't they make an obviously sick and crazed man get help? Don't Republicans care about him? The president of the United States, who is threatening an apocalypse against a country that didn't attack us or even legitimately threaten us, is fucking insane. The world demands that that be the biggest goddamn story anywhere. The nation needs leaders to make it end before he sits in his ballroom bunker and blows the whole goddamn earth up. He never should have been president. That he is is a crime against humanity. That he could be removed and isn't is an epic tragedy.