I hope my piece did not convey an abundance of hope. If the best we can hope for is Trump's incompetence and some kind of internal MAGA holy war, that's not great for the rest of us.
On point. You can add to this that the ambitions of the various players will pit them against each other directly. Little or nothing has been heard from Vance since Musk came into ascendency. Elon has predicted that his plan to cut government "waste" will cause a lot of pain - that won't make Trump happy since being unpopular is something his narcissism makes intolerable to the point that he has to hallucinate facts; throwing former friends under the bus is a feature, not a bug (animal themed cliche?) with him, though each new crop thinks it's going to be the exception. Senators are by definition ambitious and jealous of their power as mini-Presidents. Everyone hates Matt Gaetz (assuming that he is not a red herring (another atc)). Moreover, Trump no longer has coattails, though they turned out to be pretty short. Eventually, it will all unravel, particularly as Trump becomes more and more impaired. In the meantime, a lot of people will get hurt.
Thanks, Frank. It's important not to forget that last sentence. This is going to be horrific for a lot of people. Americans. We need to protect as many as we can.
Keep in mind, in this Leo needs Trump and Trump needs Leo theory; Trump’s self-involved personality, soaked in paranoid grievance, always leads him to discard any who have have been of service and move to the next. He’ll tire of Musks drive for power. Trump’s native racism will eventually dump Vivek. Unfortunately, our Representative Democracy seems to be hanging on simply hoping Trump’s incompetence and personality will prevail.
Good point, Dean. It's a sad state of affairs, and it does not bode well for the US. Team Opus Dei was all over the trump Administration post-J6 especially. They know how to play him better than most. A trump-Musk schism is inevitable, too, and THAT will cause unthinkable collateral damage...
it’s not gonna be easy for the new administration to destroy America. Federal government officials, who I call the.’ estate.’ Are pledged to defend the constitution and follow law.
And regarding using the army to round up and in prison illegal there is the law of posse comitatus.The Posse Comitatus Act disallows the use of federal troops as a police force unless Congress overrides it, or the use of force is “expressly authorized by the Constitution.”
I call the existing government officials the “fifth estate.“ they and the courts will put brakes on Trump‘s more outrageous ideas.
Thanks, Bill. I agree, and I hope hope hope the Fifth Estate is up to the task.
At the NYC event we did, Steven Beschloss noted the head of the Fed announcing that Trump had no authority to fire him. "I would not have thought Jerome Powell would be the face of the resistance," he said, or words to that effect. It will be interesting to see who stands tall and who capitulates.
I've heard military sources say '...they will follow legal orders.' Which directly implies they will not follow illegal orders. They are a serious variable in this...
I don’t have your optimism about Leo and Wheland being lawyers and not criminals. Maybe their catholic beliefs between good and evil wins the day? I’m just hoping for the best, preparing for the worst. NP is on her re-imagination of her legacy tour🖕 I’m pissed and I know that Leo is coming for same sex marriage. Greg I really appreciate you trying to turn some hopium into this hell scape .
The very first Twitter live I did was right after the Mueller Report dropped, and I was screaming to impeach the guy. NP did not. That was a catastrophic error in judgment. I tend to give her more of a pass, as she was one of the few people willing to stand up to him in those early years, but to your point, her legacy is cooked after this.
Hopium is in short supply. I guess it's because Trump cracked down on all the migrant gangs bringing it in across the border? ; )
The best I can come up with is in the original photo, you can see the pretender for being the next secretary of health and human services who said he never eats processed food, is pictured with a plate of processed foods from McDonald's.
Anyone who is familiar with the comic book series Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis will recognize the stark contrast of this absurd reality. I say it's way worse. Great piece as always. Cheers Greg ❤️
There was a lot of chatter between 2020 and now about the falling out between Leo and Donald. Who knows if that will hold up in his second term, but having Lenny’s $$$ arrayed against you - and your potential judicial nominees - is probably not the position he wants to find himself in. One thing Donald’s corporate overlords love is the rule of law - so long as the rules only apply to others, of course. The WaPo ran this back in the spring. https://wapo.st/3YZwePx (🎁)
The thing that kills me is that if the people he were choosing were of less odious character, there are actually a couple of decent ideas percolating in the brains of these cranks. RFK Jr. has terrible ideas about most things, but he is in to something regarding all the shit in our food. He’s also on to something regarding chronic illness and getting to the bottom of what’s causing Americans to be so sick. Matt Gaetz is a horrible person in pretty much every area of life but he’s a fierce supporter of Lina Khan and net antitrust crusading. I don’t have anything good to say about the others because they’re total shit - especially Tulsi. Putting her in a position where she has access to ALL the intel in the possession of the federal government is almost as terrifying as the fact that Donald will have it too. I don’t know anything about the rest of them.
Should we start taking wagers on how long it takes Elon to thoroughly piss every off?
Thanks for all of this. There was an op-ed in either WP or NYT that said that RFK has some good ideas and that's what makes him dangerous. Gaetz, ditto. If Brain Worm shuts down the infectious disease research and fucks with the vaccines, that's going to kill a lot more people than what they put in Big Macs to make them so delicious, alas.
I like to think the heads of the various IC agencies will know how to play Tulsi. Ric Grenell had that job and we survived. It could be a powerful position in the right hands, or a glorified PR job for a dipshit. Tulsi is the latter, of course. But I don't like the idea of her being anywhere near anything classified...although the same is true of Donald.
To your point, Eric Hobsbawm on the Robespierre era of the French Revolution:
The Terror [was] first and foremost the only effective method of preserving their country. This the Jacobin Republic did, and its achievement was superhuman. In June 1793 sixty out of the eighty departments of France were in revolt against Paris; the armies of the German princes were invading France from the north and east; the British attacked from the south and west : the country was helpless and bankrupt. Fourteen months later all France was under firm control, the invaders had been expelled, the French armies in turn occupied Belgium and were about to enter on twenty years of almost unbroken and effortless military triumph….the choice was simple : either The Terror with all its defects…or the destruction of the Revolution, the disintegration of the national state, and probably—was there not the example of Poland?—the disappearance of the country….could the Revolution which had virtually created the terms ‘nation’ and ‘patriotism’ in their modern senses, abandon the ‘grande nation’? (ibid, p. 90-91)
I am completely out of fucks to give whether MAGA has a schism or not. All of these Masters of the Universe should have thought through the possibilities when they were propping up the Orange Messiah so he'd get a second term. Too bad, so sad. THIS IS WHAT THEY VOTED FOR. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. I don't care about their "issues." Self-preservation is the name of the game now, and people better start thinking that way because no schism is going to stop the MAGA mob in any of its forms. Honestly, they can all literally die in a fire, and I wouldn't shed a tear. Sorry to be such a Debbie Downer, but as I watch all of these freaks being nominated for Directors and Secretaries in the government, and Trump's plans to recess-appoint them, I don't see any glimmers of hope. Not now, maybe later.
Biden and Harris are both playing nice with Trump, and I don't understand that either. While his fans blanket the internet with threats of violence and retribution, Biden is shaking hands with him in the Oval and WELCOMING him back to the White House. Harris is nowhere to be seen. What the actual FUCK is going on? Biden is trying to hold up our established norms for a man that will do nothing but skirt them for four years. In any kind of normal timeline that would make Biden look like the bigger man, the REAL patriot, but with this guy and all he means for the United States, it just makes him look weak -- sort of like Merrick Garland. Ugh, I just can't anymore. Someone put me into a four-year coma!
Thanks, Steve. If the droughts continue, you may get your wish about them dying in a fire... ; )
I don't understand Harris's absence. This is a replay of 2016, where Obama checked out entirely and went windsurfing while HRC lost herself in a dark wood, like she wanted to wake up and have Virgil give her a tour of hell. I really thought Biden was more up to the task, given that his entire legacy hinges on what Trump does. And where is Kamala? She's the VP, she has wide popular support, she is in office for two months and will probably not be the nominee in 28 (if we have an election in 28)...what does she have to lose by speaking up? Does their silence portend something more awful than we are currently imagining?
If I recall my scripture, the next time Jehovah gets enough of this shit, he's going to cleanse the earth with fire. I always took that to mean nuclear holocaust, but I dunno.
Looks to me like Biden has early Parkinson's. My brother-in-law died of it. I've seen that stiffness before. He had to have known that was coming when he decided to run for a second term.
Further, it's occurred to me Uncle Joe may have deliberately held off precisely to avoid an open convention where a herd of cats may well have destroyed the place. If anyone knows his party, Joe does.
Just read it. Astounding; just the scope of this. The Casey recount should be interesting. There will also be a recount over a Superior Court judgeship in NC as the Democrat holds a fewer than 700 votes lead over the republican. Thing is, NC historically is a ticket-splitting state but it does seem odd that people voted for trump yet moved the other way to fill the top four offices with Democrats and give the lower chamber of the legislature a one seat Democratic majority. Even writing this seems weird though.
Actually, a commenter in another substack corrected me, saying basically it is not true. I fell for it in my desperation. This is what the commenter replied to my post:
I want to believe it, but it reminds me of 2016, where people we'd never heard of emerged out of the blue claiming to have inside knowledge of [insert obscure topic here].
Also -- and this is even more depressing -- even if he's right, who will act on it? Merrick Garland? That stupid asshole didn't even indict Matt Gaetz for a crime he did with Joel Greenberg that got Joel Greenberg convicted.
I would love for that to be right and some authorities to act on it, but I would encourage you to assume that none of that will happen, and plan accordingly. Don't get me wrong; if it's real and results in Trump fucking off, no one would be happier than me. But I've been burned too many times with tales of some savior swooping in to save the day.
I was a software developer for 30 years. I have believed since 2000 that this is a relatively simple operation to pull off given our wacky Electoral College system wherein a handful of states determine the election. With the 2 richest men on earth...Musk and Putin...managing the project, it would not only be possible but incredibly cheap to do. Certainly nothing as difficult and expensive as getting a rocket to launch and then land successfully.
Great Photoshop — or was it AI? 🤷🏻♂️
Never AI, always Photoshop! I wanted to remove Junior's French fry container, but it was too hard.
Ask me for help, Greg. I've been using Photoshop since version 1.0.
We're doomed. Leo is a bright spot.
I was just about to post your very words,!
The depression lingers…
Like a dark dark cloud.
I hope my piece did not convey an abundance of hope. If the best we can hope for is Trump's incompetence and some kind of internal MAGA holy war, that's not great for the rest of us.
On point. You can add to this that the ambitions of the various players will pit them against each other directly. Little or nothing has been heard from Vance since Musk came into ascendency. Elon has predicted that his plan to cut government "waste" will cause a lot of pain - that won't make Trump happy since being unpopular is something his narcissism makes intolerable to the point that he has to hallucinate facts; throwing former friends under the bus is a feature, not a bug (animal themed cliche?) with him, though each new crop thinks it's going to be the exception. Senators are by definition ambitious and jealous of their power as mini-Presidents. Everyone hates Matt Gaetz (assuming that he is not a red herring (another atc)). Moreover, Trump no longer has coattails, though they turned out to be pretty short. Eventually, it will all unravel, particularly as Trump becomes more and more impaired. In the meantime, a lot of people will get hurt.
Thanks, Frank. It's important not to forget that last sentence. This is going to be horrific for a lot of people. Americans. We need to protect as many as we can.
Keep in mind, in this Leo needs Trump and Trump needs Leo theory; Trump’s self-involved personality, soaked in paranoid grievance, always leads him to discard any who have have been of service and move to the next. He’ll tire of Musks drive for power. Trump’s native racism will eventually dump Vivek. Unfortunately, our Representative Democracy seems to be hanging on simply hoping Trump’s incompetence and personality will prevail.
Good point, Dean. It's a sad state of affairs, and it does not bode well for the US. Team Opus Dei was all over the trump Administration post-J6 especially. They know how to play him better than most. A trump-Musk schism is inevitable, too, and THAT will cause unthinkable collateral damage...
it’s not gonna be easy for the new administration to destroy America. Federal government officials, who I call the.’ estate.’ Are pledged to defend the constitution and follow law.
And regarding using the army to round up and in prison illegal there is the law of posse comitatus.The Posse Comitatus Act disallows the use of federal troops as a police force unless Congress overrides it, or the use of force is “expressly authorized by the Constitution.”
I call the existing government officials the “fifth estate.“ they and the courts will put brakes on Trump‘s more outrageous ideas.
Thanks, Bill. I agree, and I hope hope hope the Fifth Estate is up to the task.
At the NYC event we did, Steven Beschloss noted the head of the Fed announcing that Trump had no authority to fire him. "I would not have thought Jerome Powell would be the face of the resistance," he said, or words to that effect. It will be interesting to see who stands tall and who capitulates.
I've heard military sources say '...they will follow legal orders.' Which directly implies they will not follow illegal orders. They are a serious variable in this...
I wish I had your confidence.
trump’s outrageous impulses will encounter a lot of pushback from the fifth estate and the courts. Billserle.com
I don’t have your optimism about Leo and Wheland being lawyers and not criminals. Maybe their catholic beliefs between good and evil wins the day? I’m just hoping for the best, preparing for the worst. NP is on her re-imagination of her legacy tour🖕 I’m pissed and I know that Leo is coming for same sex marriage. Greg I really appreciate you trying to turn some hopium into this hell scape .
The very first Twitter live I did was right after the Mueller Report dropped, and I was screaming to impeach the guy. NP did not. That was a catastrophic error in judgment. I tend to give her more of a pass, as she was one of the few people willing to stand up to him in those early years, but to your point, her legacy is cooked after this.
Hopium is in short supply. I guess it's because Trump cracked down on all the migrant gangs bringing it in across the border? ; )
The best I can come up with is in the original photo, you can see the pretender for being the next secretary of health and human services who said he never eats processed food, is pictured with a plate of processed foods from McDonald's.
The Brain Worm wants what the Brain Worm wants.
It’s TUESDAY🎉
Anyone who is familiar with the comic book series Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis will recognize the stark contrast of this absurd reality. I say it's way worse. Great piece as always. Cheers Greg ❤️
Helenbirdart.com
Oh, I have to check that out. Thanks, Helen!
This is going to end badly - for someone.
There was a lot of chatter between 2020 and now about the falling out between Leo and Donald. Who knows if that will hold up in his second term, but having Lenny’s $$$ arrayed against you - and your potential judicial nominees - is probably not the position he wants to find himself in. One thing Donald’s corporate overlords love is the rule of law - so long as the rules only apply to others, of course. The WaPo ran this back in the spring. https://wapo.st/3YZwePx (🎁)
The thing that kills me is that if the people he were choosing were of less odious character, there are actually a couple of decent ideas percolating in the brains of these cranks. RFK Jr. has terrible ideas about most things, but he is in to something regarding all the shit in our food. He’s also on to something regarding chronic illness and getting to the bottom of what’s causing Americans to be so sick. Matt Gaetz is a horrible person in pretty much every area of life but he’s a fierce supporter of Lina Khan and net antitrust crusading. I don’t have anything good to say about the others because they’re total shit - especially Tulsi. Putting her in a position where she has access to ALL the intel in the possession of the federal government is almost as terrifying as the fact that Donald will have it too. I don’t know anything about the rest of them.
Should we start taking wagers on how long it takes Elon to thoroughly piss every off?
Thanks for all of this. There was an op-ed in either WP or NYT that said that RFK has some good ideas and that's what makes him dangerous. Gaetz, ditto. If Brain Worm shuts down the infectious disease research and fucks with the vaccines, that's going to kill a lot more people than what they put in Big Macs to make them so delicious, alas.
I like to think the heads of the various IC agencies will know how to play Tulsi. Ric Grenell had that job and we survived. It could be a powerful position in the right hands, or a glorified PR job for a dipshit. Tulsi is the latter, of course. But I don't like the idea of her being anywhere near anything classified...although the same is true of Donald.
No wagers, Elon has ALREADy done that lol
Seasons change. It won't be winter forever. Time to dust off your copy of the Tao Te Ching.
To your point, Eric Hobsbawm on the Robespierre era of the French Revolution:
The Terror [was] first and foremost the only effective method of preserving their country. This the Jacobin Republic did, and its achievement was superhuman. In June 1793 sixty out of the eighty departments of France were in revolt against Paris; the armies of the German princes were invading France from the north and east; the British attacked from the south and west : the country was helpless and bankrupt. Fourteen months later all France was under firm control, the invaders had been expelled, the French armies in turn occupied Belgium and were about to enter on twenty years of almost unbroken and effortless military triumph….the choice was simple : either The Terror with all its defects…or the destruction of the Revolution, the disintegration of the national state, and probably—was there not the example of Poland?—the disappearance of the country….could the Revolution which had virtually created the terms ‘nation’ and ‘patriotism’ in their modern senses, abandon the ‘grande nation’? (ibid, p. 90-91)
"the amphibian equivalent of Eric Trump"
OMG! Snort, cackle, laugh, titter, tee-hee, squeal, gasp, gag, choke, wheeze, hoot, hee-hee, ho-ho, ha-ha, guffaw, holler, howl, spit, lol, giggle, chortle, cough, lol, lulz, roflmao, :)
Oh, Sharon, it's been a while since I elicited one of those from you!
: )
I'm trying to distract myself from the horror by blanketing the earth with antique New Orleans coffee labels. Makes sense to me.
I am completely out of fucks to give whether MAGA has a schism or not. All of these Masters of the Universe should have thought through the possibilities when they were propping up the Orange Messiah so he'd get a second term. Too bad, so sad. THIS IS WHAT THEY VOTED FOR. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. I don't care about their "issues." Self-preservation is the name of the game now, and people better start thinking that way because no schism is going to stop the MAGA mob in any of its forms. Honestly, they can all literally die in a fire, and I wouldn't shed a tear. Sorry to be such a Debbie Downer, but as I watch all of these freaks being nominated for Directors and Secretaries in the government, and Trump's plans to recess-appoint them, I don't see any glimmers of hope. Not now, maybe later.
Biden and Harris are both playing nice with Trump, and I don't understand that either. While his fans blanket the internet with threats of violence and retribution, Biden is shaking hands with him in the Oval and WELCOMING him back to the White House. Harris is nowhere to be seen. What the actual FUCK is going on? Biden is trying to hold up our established norms for a man that will do nothing but skirt them for four years. In any kind of normal timeline that would make Biden look like the bigger man, the REAL patriot, but with this guy and all he means for the United States, it just makes him look weak -- sort of like Merrick Garland. Ugh, I just can't anymore. Someone put me into a four-year coma!
Spot on! Trump is shredding the Constitution and Biden is trying to piece it back together. Time for if they go low we go lower.
LB: "When they go low...bury them!"
Always a favorite of mine.
I'm with you.
Thanks, Steve. If the droughts continue, you may get your wish about them dying in a fire... ; )
I don't understand Harris's absence. This is a replay of 2016, where Obama checked out entirely and went windsurfing while HRC lost herself in a dark wood, like she wanted to wake up and have Virgil give her a tour of hell. I really thought Biden was more up to the task, given that his entire legacy hinges on what Trump does. And where is Kamala? She's the VP, she has wide popular support, she is in office for two months and will probably not be the nominee in 28 (if we have an election in 28)...what does she have to lose by speaking up? Does their silence portend something more awful than we are currently imagining?
Yes, coma please.
If I recall my scripture, the next time Jehovah gets enough of this shit, he's going to cleanse the earth with fire. I always took that to mean nuclear holocaust, but I dunno.
Looks to me like Biden has early Parkinson's. My brother-in-law died of it. I've seen that stiffness before. He had to have known that was coming when he decided to run for a second term.
Further, it's occurred to me Uncle Joe may have deliberately held off precisely to avoid an open convention where a herd of cats may well have destroyed the place. If anyone knows his party, Joe does.
I'm in a self-induced coma, Steve. As I said, distracting myself with ancient commercial art.
I just read this comment in Joyce Vance's substack. What do you all think?
https://open.substack.com/pub/spoonamore/p/duty-to-warn-letter-to-vp-harris?r=1nic41&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Just read it. Astounding; just the scope of this. The Casey recount should be interesting. There will also be a recount over a Superior Court judgeship in NC as the Democrat holds a fewer than 700 votes lead over the republican. Thing is, NC historically is a ticket-splitting state but it does seem odd that people voted for trump yet moved the other way to fill the top four offices with Democrats and give the lower chamber of the legislature a one seat Democratic majority. Even writing this seems weird though.
Actually, a commenter in another substack corrected me, saying basically it is not true. I fell for it in my desperation. This is what the commenter replied to my post:
https://www.usermag.co/p/metas-threads-overrun-with-liberal-election-fraud-conspiracies
I just read it. I think there should be a hand recount of all the bullet ballots in the swing states.
I don’t understand why Kamala conceded so quickly, and why Biden is acting like all is well…
So much of this is a puzzlement.
I want to believe it, but it reminds me of 2016, where people we'd never heard of emerged out of the blue claiming to have inside knowledge of [insert obscure topic here].
Also -- and this is even more depressing -- even if he's right, who will act on it? Merrick Garland? That stupid asshole didn't even indict Matt Gaetz for a crime he did with Joel Greenberg that got Joel Greenberg convicted.
I would love for that to be right and some authorities to act on it, but I would encourage you to assume that none of that will happen, and plan accordingly. Don't get me wrong; if it's real and results in Trump fucking off, no one would be happier than me. But I've been burned too many times with tales of some savior swooping in to save the day.
Yep, that only happens in movies.
I was a software developer for 30 years. I have believed since 2000 that this is a relatively simple operation to pull off given our wacky Electoral College system wherein a handful of states determine the election. With the 2 richest men on earth...Musk and Putin...managing the project, it would not only be possible but incredibly cheap to do. Certainly nothing as difficult and expensive as getting a rocket to launch and then land successfully.
Theory of Everything, BECAUSE THEY CAN. At least until they or someone else decides they can't.
[nods sadly]