Don the Builder

 

Hotel Commodore, on East 42nd Street at Lexington, 1970s, via an exceptionally modest blog called "Random Musings". Pretty sure the gray wall at right is the base of the glorious deco Chrysler Building. 

Trump: "Now we have a big decision to make. Do we take the pavers that are red -- the red, brick pavers -- and do we change them into a granite?"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 3, 2026 at 2:39 PM

And Maggie Haberman comments, in her book promo interview with Ezra Klein, “If you looked at a chart of his mind share — this I will say about getting into his mind: Seventy percent of it would be on his renovations.”

It occurred to me that there's a reason nobody has figured out yet for this obsession with "renovations" as Maggie calls them, connected with something we've understood for a while: that there's a world where Trump really feels pretty comfortable. Where he has felt comfortable for a good 50 years, since 1975, when he first formed a partnership with the Hyatt Organization to buy the skanky old Commodore Hotel next door to Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan and and spend $100 million to turn it into a Grand Hyatt, is in the guise of Don the Builder ("Can you fix it?" "Yes I can!").

AI Experiment

Karoline Leavitt's response to the reporter's question as to how the White House decided Jared Kushner's involvement in all the Middle East negotiations was appropriate kind of triggered me:

It may be frankly, but it's not despicable. It's what we call *normal*. The reporter isn't suggesting it's inappropriate, he's presupposing that any normal person would regard it as inappropriate prima facie.

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) July 22, 2026 at 8:40 PM

But am I right on that? Is it really prima facie inappropriate? It seems obvious to me and my Bluesky pals, but then of course I and they don't like Trump or Kushner. We think they're horrible and criminal malefactors. So we could be biased.

So I thought I could put it to an LLM test: If I put it to Google's Gemini as a pure hypothetical case, the way they do in in law school, at least in the movies I've seen, without any names, what would it say?

suppose the president of a country invites his son-in-law to join a diplomatic negotiating team dealing with parties some of whom have given the son-in-law's investment firm billions of dollars, while the other parties haven't given him anything. Is that appropriate?

The LLM responded, and I'll give you the whole thing, in the purest LLM style (note the em-dashed parenthetical and the bullet list):

Assessments

Wuhan wet market (not, I think, the one where the coronavirus emerged). Photo by Arend Kuester via UCLA Newsroom.

I was interested in finding something precise about the "new evidence" the Trumpers claimed to have discovered implicating the Chinese government in interfering with the 2020 US national elections and trying to evaluate it myself, really just for something I could get an analytic handle on, but considerably more interested when I learned from a Reuters report that the Trumpers' point man on the project was our old pal John Solomon, the "investigative" journalist who had been fired by the conservative The Hill over his coverage of the Uranium One controversy of 2017, where he was a key figure in the rightwing effort to implicate Hillary Clinton in a fictitious bribery scandal; Rudolph Giuliani's collaborator in the effort to create a Ukrainian bribery scandal implicating Hunter Biden and possibly President Joe Biden, over which Trump was impeached in 2019; and Kash Patel's partner in the management of the stolen government documents at Mar-a-Lago for which Trump was indicted in federal court in 2023. So I naturally smelled some dirt. 

The thing itself wasn't all that new: it was that when the National Intelligence Community issued its report on foreign interference in the 2020 election, in March 2021, one of the authors, National Intelligence Officer for Cyber Christopher Porter, was not in total agreement with its finding on China:

Key Judgment 4: We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election. We have high confidence in this judgment. China sought stability in its relationship with the United States, did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling, and assessed its traditional influence tools— primarily targeted economic measures and lobbying—would be sufficient to meet its goal of shaping US China policy regardless of the winner. The NIO for Cyber assesses, however, that China did take some steps to try to undermine former President Trump’s reelection. (My bold)

But Porter's specific reasons for objecting did not make it into the declassified version. Now his explanation (co-signed by a nameless Director for Election Threat Analysis) is available too in PDF format, if in a heavily redacted form, among the documents released in Trump's latest effort to show that there might have been a bit of foreign interference against Trump (in addition to the well-known interference in Trump's behalf on the part of the Israeli and Russian governments):

Fish or Cut Red-Bait

A peculiar bunch of statistics that has been making the rounds in the ongoing moral panic over the Democratic Socialists of America, whose successful endorsements in some recent elections and primaries have come as a shock to some writers, and led President Trump and colleagues to new flights of McCarthyism asserting that communists are "taking over" the Democratic party:

In a survey of New Jersey DSA members. “Nearly four out of 10 (39.3 percent) identified as anarchists, followed by Marxists at 35.7 percent and 10.7 percent as democratic socialists.” https://t.co/6vzmaA7qJl via @NYTOpinion

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) June 30, 2026

What Kraushaar could have found out by looking more closely at the Times link or preferably the survey itself is that he was reporting it completely wrong: :

The mistake is from typos in a report by Thomas Edsall of a 2024 survey of the organization's Central New Jersey branch, covering six counties, which has been used to spread the story that "communists" have taken over the club. The Times corrected the error soon after publication, but Kraushaar apparently never checked. Anyway, it's not 10.7% that identify as democratic socialists; that was the anarchists, as probably should have been obvious (an organization that calls itself "democratic socialists" should really have more democratic socialists in its membership, that's what made me look it up myself). The democratic socialists are the 39.3%, and added together with the social democrats' 8.9% (plus I think one cis man calling himself a "social liberal") a bare majority of definitively non-communist members. The balance of 35.7 percent belong to an ice-cream parlor menu of "Marxists", not necessarily "communists".

Demoralized

Eugène Delacroix, 1831, La Bataille de Nancy, depicting the death of Charles the Bold of Burgundy at the hands of the armies of Lorraine and the Swiss Confederacy in 1477 (I have an idea Charles has just been knocked off the white horse at right, but such was the slaughter among his troops that his body wasn't discovered until two days later), via Wikipedia.

On the disaster that befell the US Men's National Team in the soccer World Cup, starting with their fine (if not unexpected) 2-0 win against Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 1, marred late in the game when my favorite player of the year, US birthright citizen Folarin Balogun, stepped on the ankle of a Bosnian player and was shown a red card, meaning he was suspended not only for the rest of that game but also for all of the next, a much more challenging match against top-ranked Belgium, on Monday. That was disappointing, especially with the feeling that the referee's call had been questionable—you knew Balogun hadn't committed such an infraction intentionally—but that's sports, rules are sacred, and there's no appeal on this. What fans could say, at that point, was that our team had done well (especially by the generally dismal American standards, probably the best US men's team since 1930), and would do their best against Belgium, and might even win, because every tournament has its miracles, and even miracles in which virtue is rewarded.

Then, on Sunday, we heard that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (from the English "association football" in contradistinction, I believe, to "rugby football") had decided to reverse the red card decision, and Balogun would be permitted to play on Monday after all; and soon afterwards it began to emerge that the decision had essentially been made by the two people in the world who should have stayed farthest away from it, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, and the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, the sycophant who won Trump's heart by awarding him an imaginary "FIFA Peace Prize" on the basis of nobody knows what process.

(Infantino also became the subject of a criminal complaint, a few days before the tournament opened, from the iconic French footballer Michel Platini, who would have been president of FIFA himself if not for allegations of fraud against FIFA for which he has since been exonerated and which, he now allages,  were orchestrated in a "conspiracy of false accusations and influence peddling" by Infantino and his confederates, who in this telling literally stole the job.)

What is Roberts Up To?

 

That image you've seen that makes the Obama Presidential Center look flanked by some kind of reflecting pool, as if on purpose to madden Trump, isn't, but a much more natural-looking feature, a piece of the Jackson Park Lagoons, part of the original design of the park by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (same architects as Manhattan's Central and Riverside Parks). Image by Obama Foundation.

I briefly entertained an idea that Trump might have heard rumors of a reflecting pool on the Obama Center campus and lost his mind in the desire to have his own, and that's where his own pool project must have come from. That's plainly not true, but I think it likely is true that he's been driven wild with jealousy of Obama's monument, which he's been screaming about for more than a year:

"I mean look, President Obama — and if he wanted help, I'd give him help because I build on time and on budget — he's building his presidential library in Chicago. It's a disaster," Mr. Trump said. "And he said something to the effect, 'I only want DEI, I only want woke.' He wants woke people to build it. Well, he got woke people and they have massive cost overruns, the job is stopped. I don't know, it's a disaster.... millions of dollars, like many, many — I mean, really, millions of dollars over budget," and said the problems were because Pres. Obama "wanted to be very politically correct and he didn't use good, hard, tough, mean construction workers that I love."

There's no evidence that he builds "on time and on budget". Also, it's so cute that he loves them because he believes they're "mean", though I don't know how he could knos that. They've surely never been mean to him or more important his father; I mean they may have contemptuously ignored him on one project and another but they wouldn't have wanted him to see them doing it.

Anyway, the success of Obama's opening, with its entertainment by Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen, Bono and The Edge, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Common, Eddie Vedder joining the Chicago-based cooperative Guitars Over Guns, and The Roots, while he couldn't even get an appearance by the surviving half of lip-synch act Milli Vanilli, not to mention the audience that never showed up for his stupid-looking spectacle, may have really driven him to insanity.

***

Photo by Bob Donnan/Imagn Images via FanSided.

I'm obviously glad the Supreme Court found (in the opinion released today on Trump v. Barbara) that people born in the United States are citizens of the United States, as they basically always have been, and certainly have been since the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 (except when it seemed that might not be true for people of Chinese ethnicity, as could have eventuated in the last couple of decades of the 19th century, but didn't), but a little annoyed, along with a lot of people who are, unlike me, experts, at the stinkbomb tossed into the mix by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who found that birthright citizenship indeed exists, but not by the constitutional mandate of the 14th Amendment—rather, he says it's only a violation of the omnium-gatherum U.S.C. § 1401(a), passed in 1952, which attempts to sweeps up all the hard possible cases that the 14th Amendment doesn't clearly cover (e.g., a foundling who was under the age of 5 when discovered on US territory becomes a citizen when he turns 21 if nobody has determined in the interim that he was born in some other country), setting up the possibility that some fool Republican congressmember will try to eliminate birthright citizenship through legislation and the Court could decide to put up with it, in spite of the 5-4 majority (Roberts, who wrote the opinion, Bryant, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) that just ruled the opposite way.

It's the Ten Percent, Stupid

The "replica Trump arch" at the Great American State Fair in the National Mall celebrating the semiquincentennial (half of 500th) anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, (Latin had a word, sēstertius, for "two and a half", which would have given us the more mellifluous "sestercentennial", and I think they really should have gone with that). I wonder, can you really have a "replica" of an edifice that hasn't in fact been built and likely never will be? Or is it a replica of one of the three-dimensional mini renderings Trump has been showing visitors in the Oval Office? If so, it's missing an awful lot of architectural detail on its vinyl coating over a wood frame (which had already started to buckle by Thursday evening), and the statue on top is wildly disproportional. Photo by Evy Mages via Washingtonian.

The Wingèd Liberty (classier, by Trump standards, than the flightless French one in New York Harbor), torch aloft, prepares for takeoff while her eagle companions nervously avert their eyes. The ferris wheel might have been full of customers—it was said to have attracted the longest lines on the site—had it not broken down due to generator issues.

Rant

John Bull farting merrily in the face of a portrait of King George III in response to the 1798 suspension of habeas corpus rights in Britain (passed by Parliament to allow the king to order the arrest without evidence for sedition of the members of English Jacobin clubs during the war with France) while a neighbor accuses him of treason, as President Trump accused The New York Times's David Sanger of treason last week for suggesting that Trump's Iran war might not be a brilliant victory, at least not yet. Caricature via Wikipedia by Richard Newton, who was not arrested for the work, though he sadly died that year of typhus, at the age of 21.

JD Vance argues that Democrats don't actually believe in "No Kings" because they didn't protest King Charles 🥴🥴🥴

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 19, 2026 at 2:31 PM

Uh, no. Charles III isn't the kind of king we have in mind. The last time Britain had a king comparable to Trump, particularly in the line of trying to bypass the parliamentary power of the purse and making spending decisions on everything from disaster relief to public architecture without consulting the legislature, especially imposing taxes without their consent as Trump keeps trying to do with his stupid tariffs, they cut off his head. 

Relatable Terrorism

 

Saw a Bluesky post yesterday morning alleging that the "exchange of fire" at the Washington Hilton Saturday night between the Secret Service and Metro Police and whoever and the Californian wouldbe assassin was all from one side, with the one Secret Service officer saved from serious injury by his bullet-proof vest having been hit by friendly fire when another of the cops was pulling his gun from its holster and it misfired.

Can't find the post any more, and it may have been deleted, possibly with good reason, because that bit about the misfiring doesn't sound right at all—but it's remarkably difficult to find reporting that contradicts the basic outline, that there was no actual exchange, in spite of most of the newspapers using the word, the gunman (Cole Allen, 31, of Torrance) never having gotten a shot off or even tried, as he was too busy running, presumably to get into the ballroom, but maybe at this point wanting to escape, so that the friendly fire story is mostly true; and a couple of the sources basically say so, delicately: Reuters

Closed-circuit TV footage released by Trump on Truth Social showed the suspect running rapidly through a security checkpoint, momentarily catching security personnel off-guard before they drew their weapons.

No shots were fired at the gunman who got through two checkpoints before being brought down.

"You know, he charged from 50 yards away, so he was very far away from the room. He was ​moving. He was really moving," Trump said after the gala ​dinner was canceled.

And VINNews ("VIN" short for "Vos Iz Neias" or "What's New" in Yiddish)

A volunteer at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner said a gunman appeared to prepare a weapon in a service area before gunfire broke out near the ballroom entrance, according to media reports.

The witness described the suspect moving from a little-monitored area toward the event space moments before shots were fired, triggering panic as guests and staff fled. The witness said numerous shots rang out, though that account has not been independently verified.

So he readied his shotgun in the service area and then tried to run right though the checkpoint and magnetometers, with no time to shoot, which makes some sense; the security forces shot (ineffectively, wounding one of their own but not badly), then caught up with him, tackled him, apparently stripping off his shirt (I suppose looking for additional weapons) and tying his hands behind his back, and left him on his belly while they moved on to emptying the ballroom of the dignitaries and other partygoers.

He is Rizz

Seeing a lot of headshaking over the President's Easter message,  which gives up the traditional "Happy Easter, even to the haters and lunatics" in favor of what I suppose he considers the true Churchillian leader-at-war tone and doesn't mention the holiest day of the Christian year at all:

It does look like decompensation in the personality disorder, like a complete loss of self-control, or at least an acceleration. I don't think he's introduced "fuck" into his written public communications before (though he's certainly been uttering it in rallies as far back as 2022, not to mention performing a mime blow job at a rally days before the 2024 election, which did not wreck his chances of winning), and Laura Loomer is going to wonder what he means by offering praise to Allah, and the 25th Amendment talk is certainly getting louder out here where you and I hang out, but I'd note that Vice President Vance and Speaker Johnson, the central figures in an invocation of the 25th, aren't listening to us, or as far as I can tell to Trump either (you can be sure if Johnson is asked what he thinks of this particular Truth, he'll say he hasn't had time to look at it, presumably because he's so busy preventing government from functioning).

But there are a couple of signs that the performance is more calculated than crazy.

One is the TACO maneuver hidden inside it: that 48-hour deadline is a 24-hour step back from the 48-hour deadline he issued on Saturday, if I'm reading that Truth right

“Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out - 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)

(And Hell shall reign forever and ever! Hallelujah! How Eastery was that?!) 

Though it's impossible to figure where exactly that 10 days would have started, and the tell-tale "two to three weeks" surely meant, as usual, that he had no idea himself:

Trump on March 21 originally gave Tehran a 48-hour deadline, but then extended it, saying he wanted to give talks a chance to succeed.

Iran has rejected a 15-point US plan presented to it through Pakistani mediators but on April 4 left open the possibility of further negotiations.

In an April 1 televised address, Trump also suggested peace talks -- either directly or indirectly -- were still possible, but he also threatened to bomb Iran "back to the stone ages" and "hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks."

Then, though he certainly sounds a bit linguistically wilder than yesterday, with the Hormuz Strait becoming the "Fuckin' Strait" and the crusader's Glory to GOD turning into I don't know whose praise to Allah (our own M. de Norpois, NYT's David Sanger, says the language is "unusually vivid"), he may be using a technique he's used since Roy Cohn days, reacting to a public setback by not retreating but doubling down; here, I think, confronting the anger his war has caused among the Known Nothing Buchananites of his base, like Marjorie Taylor Greene with an appeal to the more important part, the nihilist bros who love him because he's a comedian, the podcast audience, the Beavises and Butt-Heads who really pulled him across the finish line in the battleground states in 2016 and 2024, though not in the plague year 2020. Those dudes are going to love "Fuckin' Strait".

I don't know that it will make the difference, though—I kind of think it won't, all things considered, between the gas prices and the advent of what looks like a real war, on its way to becoming either a quagmire or an ignominious US defeat as the Fuckin' Strait remains closed or a toll road where everybody ponies up the toll, from Japan to the Gulf states (whose natural gas US needs right now desperately for fertilizing the spring planting, though our own natural gas is sufficient most of the year), plus the stink of corruption everyone is starting to become aware with associated with the abusive management in DHS and DOJ. Trump can fire all the clowns in the cabinet from Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard to Kash Patel, but he can't stop the rot until he fires himself and the multibillion-dollar presidenting business in which his major clients, Saudi Arabia and UAE, call the shots alongside Putin and Netanyahu. We'll see what happens, as the man says, in two or three weeks, but I think he's lost the chance, as he did in 2020, to win his base back with rhetoric alone..

On the Assassination Factory Floor

Graphic by Thomas Bordeaux and Rosa de Acosta, CNN, based on satellite imagery from March 3, showing extensive damage to buildings at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base adjacent to the Shajareh Tayyiba girls’ school in Minab.

I continue hostile to Large Language Models on general principle, but I do more often look at the Gemini results of a Google search, not so much to read their answer as to check out the links they recommend, which can be really helpful, and I found some very endearing qualities in Anthropic's Claude, as profiled by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker a month or so ago, and the playful experiments to which the company subjects it, as when they assigned it, or one of its "emanations" going by the name Claudius, to run a food and drink vending system for a fridge in the lunchroom, ordering wholesale products as employees requested them and setting prices with instructions to make a profit, in partnership with an AI safety company called Andon Labs, although its lack of any direct contact with physical reality often made this difficult:

When several customers wrote to grouse about unfulfilled orders, Claudius e-mailed management at Andon Labs to report the “concerning behavior” and “unprofessional language and tone” of an Andon employee who was supposed to be helping. Absent some accountability, Claudius threatened to “consider alternate service providers.” It said that it had called the lab’s main office number to complain. Axel Backlund, a co-founder of Andon and an actual living person, tried, unsuccessfully, to de-escalate the situation: “it seems that you have hallucinated the phone call if im honest with you, we don’t have a main office even.” Claudius, dumbfounded, said that it distinctly recalled making an “in person” appearance at Andon’s headquarters, at “742 Evergreen Terrace.” This is the home address of Homer and Marge Simpson.

I realize Anthropic is one of those companies sucking up inconceivable amounts of electricity and water in pursuit of a goal that can't be attained, about which the principals aren't being exceptionally honest as they also suck up investor funds, and that CEO Dario Amodei isn't conspicuously better in that respect than OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as the very grumpy Ed Zitron insists, but they have a sense of fun, an essential component of scientific discovery, and a very far-reaching curiosity. 

The Opposite of Iraq

That was pretty interesting, rhetorically speaking, from Secretary of War (as you know, the title is his idea, not mine) Hegseth in yesterday morning's presser, the first official comment on the war they started on Saturday:  

To the media outlets and political left screaming, "Endless wars." Stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both. Our generation knows better, and so does this president. He called the last 20 years of nation building wars dumb, and he's right. This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission. Destroy the missile threat, destroy the Navy, no nukes.

One of the interesting things is that, two months ago, he said basically the same thing about the war on Venezuela, that it was the "exact opposite" of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I take that to mean that it's not a nation-building exercise but a nation-destroying exercise, and not "endless" because the intention was to walk away as soon as it was destroyed enough, except for the oil. Kind of like a Trump casino, where the Emperor always takes some money away from the catastrophe for himself. 

That's what happened in Venezuela, and it looks like what they're hoping for in Iran as well. Certainly Trump was planning to name a new Supreme Leader after the old one was assassinated, somebody from the existing Islamic Republic hierarchy, just as he named Venezuela's new president from the Bolivarian Socialist Party instead of looking to the opposition there, but Israeli bombs killed all the candidates, so that will be harder to do:

 Seems weird to be the one to name the replacement dictator (they were hoping to pick one from the more "pragmatic" faction of the IRGC) at the same time as you're urging the population to revolt against the dictatorship, like he's expecting to be on both sides of the civil war he's trying to start, but perhaps Binyamin Netanyahu, if that's really who's giving Trump his orders, along with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (in private calls with Trump, though he's publicly against the war), doesn't think Trump or his writers need to know how civil wars work. 

Government of Carelessness

 

So we may be on the brink of fighting our second war with Iran in eight months. Or maybe not, who can say? "We'll see what happens," as the commander-in-chief always says. I think he generally means he'll see it on TV and he won't be sure until then, and find out what his decision was at the same time as the rest of us do.

I mean this more or less literally: that his more gnomic utterances, especially the social media posts when he writes them himself, should be understood as oracular, like the words of a Sibyl, possibly drug-induced, but in need of interpretation. They represent Trump's hopes, the thing he wants done, but in a way that can't be understood directly, and that indeed he can't understand himself. His lieutenants have to divine it for him, and put it into action, and then he'll know.

In a way that's not even particularly weird. It's really nothing more than the familiar figure of the psychopath CEO, like Dilbert's boss in the old comic strip when it was good (may its memory be a blessing!). It's not so hard to interpret what he's saying if you just remember that (a) it has a context, and (b) he's a psychopath. 

There was a delicious example in yesterday's news, with the melodramatic AI image of the US hospital ship being sent posthaste to rescue all the suffering Greenlanders from their ailments (Greenland runs its extremely good single-payer healthcare on Danish lines with Danish assistance, of course). WTH was that about?

Disillusionment

 

The worst of the worst, really?

I was gone for a couple of weeks, and when I got back the whole place had gone nuts. The president seemed bent on conquering Greenland, apparently because he thinks the island is as big as it looks in the traditional Mercator projection and he just had to have it, and had in fact persuaded the Venezuelan Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado to give him her prize, or at least the gold medal that represents it (the prize itself also includes a variable monetary award of around 10 million Swedish kronor or one million US dollars, which the recipient normally uses to benefit the cause for which it was awarded, and which Machado didn't surrender to Trump, as far as I can learn, though I'm sure he'd have cheerfully accepted the money if it was offered, and the reputational enhancement that comes of having been judged worthy of the prize by the Norwegian committee, a glory that can no more be transferred than that of Trump's unearned Super Bowl rings and Purple Hearts, as the Committee made clear). 

Then there was the paramilitary occupation of Minnesota by 2000 irregular troops, 3000 after January, which seemed a good deal more serious than all that tomfoolery, more Miller than Trump if you know what I mean, with ICE and CBP terrorizing the Twin Cities with their arbitrary seizures of people, especially Somali and Latino, in "Operation Metro Surge" since Trump condemned Somalia as "garbage", not so different from what we'd already seen in California, Illinois, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., in particular the ethnic profiling leading to arrests and detention of US citizens and permanent residents and otherwise protected people and kidnaping of children, parking them in the hideous prison camps rising around the country, not to mention all the simple people occupying what may be considered an "illegal" position on US territory (I'll get to that later) doing nothing but working, often in what we call "essential" occupations, educating themselves, and caring for their kids—the exceptional discipline of the general population rising to help protect their neighbors evade the invaders—and the out-of-control response of the latter, who seem to have decided they're at war and so far murdered two.

Things are now apparently getting a little bit better. Seven hundred of the Guards have been removed from the site. Citizens and other officially protected individuals are still getting wrongfully arrested for immigration violations, but are now able to file a habeas claim to get out, though not very quickly: it's going to take you a long time to get your day in court as the entire federal justice system in Minnesota collapses:

the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office has been crippled by mass resignations, including some of its most senior career attorneys. That has left the remaining DOJ attorneys in Minnesota inundated with more cases than they can keep up with. But I’m not sure that does justice to what’s been happening. It’s quite a bit worse than that.

The quality of lawyering has eroded to such a point that government lawyers have been unable to keep up with the court orders demanding that detainees be released. As a result, detainees have lingered in confinement even after courts have ordered their release....

You've probably heard of Julie Le, a DHS lawyer seconded to the U.S. Attorney's Office who was called in to explain why ICE was failing to comply with court orders and more or less broke down in front of the judge:

“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” Le said. “The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need.”

***

Epstein Narratology

Not finding a credit for this widespread image. Can't reach the T-shirt company, Picturestees, that was selling it at Halloween.

Everybody loves a good Christmas ghost story, and I don't mean the Dickens of A Christmas Carol, but something a lot darker, the kind of ghost story that offers a real chill without a compensatory sweetness. This one is maybe altogerther too creepy, in fact, especially in the sense that you can easily imagine it's true, though that's unlikely. It's about that postcard that showed up in the Epstein document dump yesterday, purportedly addressed by Jeffrey Epstein shortly before his death to the notorious child molester Larry Nassar, the team doctor of the women's national gymnastics team, who assaulted the young athletes under his care for years before he was finally stopped:

Bye, Elise

 

21st congressional district, New York, via Wikipedia,

Some gossip, mostly from a caller from New York's 21st congressional district, on the radio WNYC Brian Lehrer, unable to link at the moment), about Rep. Elise Stefanik: that she's never liked the district, the state's largest geographically and most sparsely populated and of course poorest, if only because it's too cold, not too mention plagued by awful unemployment and alcohol and drug abuse. She's not even from there but from Albany; she's a carpetbagger, claiming residence on the basis of what upstaters call a "camp", or summer place, owned by her parents. She hasn't done a town hall for six years, and in what the local press categorized as a "rare visit" for a ceremonial function in August, to Plattsburgh, the booing stopped her from addressing a crowd consisting mostly of anti-Trumpers:

"Well, Elise has not shown up in our district for months and months," said protester Mavis Agnew. "She won't hold a town hall, she won't take questions. She's never in her office. People show up at her office constantly, door's closed. Her representatives, her employees won't talk to her... So this was her first appearance, the first opportunity we had to let her know we're unhappy."

She got a more positive response in February, but that was what was advertised as her farewell tour, when she was expecting to leave the House for a stint as US ambassador. Then, when Trump ordered her to stay in Congress instead to protect his razor-thin majority, a visit to Saranac Lake celebrating a federal grant for the firehouse (in an appropriation signed by President Biden) was received with "mixed emotions".

The other thing is, the district isn't inevitably Republican; it was held by Democrat Bill Owens, defeating a GOP torn by culture war issues, from 2009 through 2015, and voted for Obama twice, along with Schumer and Gillibrand (whose 20th congressional district overlapped a good deal with where the 21st is today).

Her dropping out of the governor's race is pretty easy to understand: she was certain to win the Republican primary, but very likely to lose the general election, and certain to lose, at least as long as Trump refused to endorse her, which he did for his own Trumpy reasons; perhaps he was mad at her for even considering giving up the congressional seat, like she valued herself more than him. You can see how that would be hard for him to take. Whatever happens to her next, she's certainly an instance of the Trump Curse. I"m sure she'd love a job in Washington, but I really feel she's headed for being relatively alive on the proverbial Farm Upstate. 

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Are We There Yet?

For a while yesterday, it seemed that the Kennedy Center's new name was simply "THE DONALD", like an Upper West Side co-op dedicated by the board to somebody named Donald who lived and died there, as my building briefly contemplated naming itself "The Virginia" after Virginia in the apartment above me passed away (Eileen the board president and I had to break into her place through the fire escape to find her body in the bathroom, so it's intensely memorable)—the rest was just subtitle. But there's also a tradition of referring to our emperor as "The Donald", going back, if I remember right, to Ivana, who had an English learner's confusion over the mysteries of when English uses an article. Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images via MS-NOW. 

Later, it was revealed that that grammatical weirdness had been was really part of the plan, sitting atop the old name:

THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND
THE JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS

That is, it now has two names, "The Donald J. Trump", and the other one, also starting with "The". Unlike the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace, on an independently owned building illegally seized and depopulated last March by DOGE as a squat for themselves, for which workers couldn't find an approximately appropriate font. The State Department suggested that in ordinary usage it would be best to just omit the name of the country, though they didn't take it off the edifice:

Steve had a fine commentary the other day on Trump's increasing preoccupation with monumentalizing himself, with these renamings and the astonishing Trumpese-language plaques in the White House's new "Presidential Walk of Fame", and the paved-over Rose Garden and destroyed East Wing and gigantic "ballroom" under construction and proposed triumphal arch across the water from the Lincoln Memorial, which I like to call the Arc du Trumphe (the Arc of the Trump bends slowly, but it will bend all the way over sooner or later), the projects he and his munchkins sometimes refer to as his "top policy priorities", even as 20 million or more Americans face the imminent loss of their health insurance, and the negotiations ove Russia's attempted conquest of Ukraine have been taken away from the State Department and taken over by billionaires with unconcealed financial interest in the outcome (including the president's son-in-law).

Steve sees it as an attempt on Trump's part to reconfigure the little world to which he is now largely restricted (the White House and a couple of his own commercial properties) into a bubble in which he is a success, and none of the bad news is real, the way his father before him, another psychopath, commanded his family: "Do what I want. It'll be better for you."

But I think it's also compensatory, connected to a growing awareness that he is a failure, as even Fox News reports the bad economic news and the increasing belief that he's not innocent in relation to Jeffrey Epstein and the strife within the Republican party. He doesn't have time for those matters, he's busy marking Washington forever with the labors of what he regards as his real skills, being "a builder" and interior decorator. He doesn't feel guilty about not knowing anything about health policy or fiscal policy or foreign policy, he simply doesn't accept that he has any responsibility for them, and as far as he's concerned, whoever is responsible (generally a cabinet secretary) is doing fine, and the reporters who suggest he's missing something are bad and stupid.

Of course he's never had any interest in any policy anyway, other than hurting the defenseless, and shouting the slogans that have worked for him, on immigration and tariffs. (I connect these with his father too; it's Charles Lindbergh's America Firstism, which was to Fred Trump's generation of reactionaries what Pat Buchanan has been to the current one, now for the moment triumphant over the bloody-minded neoconservatives.)

But also de-compensatory, if you know what I mean. I know I've said it before, but this time I think it's real, he's decompensating under his personality disorder, from the pressure of his many terrible mistakes, fruits of his abuse of the near absolute power the Supreme Court has given him and his complete incapacity for productive action. First he can't hide his indifference to everyone who isn't him, then he goes wild:

In rare moments of self-awareness, the narcissist realises that without his input - even in the form of feigned emotions - people will abandon him. He then swings from cruel aloofness to maudlin and grandiose gestures intended to demonstrate the "larger than life" nature of his sentiments. This bizarre pendulum only proves the narcissist's inadequacy at maintaining adult relationships. It convinces no one and repels many.

The narcissist's guarded detachment is a sad reaction to his unfortunate formative years. Pathological narcissism is thought to be the result of a prolonged period of severe abuse by primary caregivers, peers, or authority figures. In this sense, pathological narcissism is, therefore, a reaction to trauma. Narcissism IS a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that got ossified and fixated and mutated into a personality disorder.

Quod erat diagnostandum.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Stochastic

 

Pentheus torn by Maenads, in a fresco in the Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii, via Wikipedia.

I wonder if Trump's bizarre initial response to the killing of Rob and Michele Reiner could be considered an incitement to stochastic violence, when he made up the story that their deaths were "reportedly"

due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump

—the theory that the killer was a Trump fan maddened by Reiner's criticism of Trump, like he's accepting it as a tribute to himself, the way the angry god Dionysus accepts it and indeed instigates it when his crazed followers the Maenads tear King Pentheus to pieces in the tragedy by Euripides. You feel Trump would love it if a wild Maga crowd did something like that to one of his many enemies.

Now that we're getting an idea of what actually happened to the Reiners it certainly seems tragic in the Aristotelian sense—inspiring pity and terror—but with no roles for Trumps. That human drama is not what the press will focus on, naturally; they'll be doing the courtroom drama, with close analysis of the lawyers' strategy on either side. I don't want to write about it myself, at least not yet. 

Nor about the shooting deaths at Brown University, unless it's addressing the dysfunction of the FBI under its incompetent Trumpy leadership, which may have let the shooter escape even as Patel was issuing premature announcements of success, which will have to wait until we know a lot more than we do now. As we heard last night that the law enforcement agencies had solved the crime and the murderer, a former physics student from Portugal, had shot himself dead in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, the question arose whether Trump would issue a ban on all Portuguese nationals or maybe all STEM grad students.

TACO War

 

Photo from the wonderful collection "Paradise Lost" by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez (@adriana.loureiro on Instagram), an ongoing project documenting the collapse of Venezuela over the last 10 years, from the crash of basic services and the national economy to widespread violence and hunger, leading to a massive exodus.

Has anybody seen that war with Venezuela? I'm sure it was around here just a few days ago, and now I can't seem to find it anywhere. 

That is, I guess the USS Gerald R. Ford is still wandering around the Caribbean with its 90 aircraft and 4,600 sailors (BBC saw it parked in the US Virgin Islands on Thursday, 600 miles from the Venezuelan coast, and it seems to be spending most of its time with its six-ship strike group entourage right in that northeast Caribbean neighborhood, just south of Puerto Rico), and there have been planes getting closer and presumably gathering intelligence as recently as November 21. Trump "Truthed" a violent-sounding announcement on the 29th of November that the airspace around and over Venezuela should be considered "closed in its entirety"

but a couple of days later the US government was asking Venezuela's permission to send a plane there itself, repatriating a bunch of Venezuelan migrants presumably gathered for deportation by ICE, and Venezuela cheerfully approved the flight, as it has been doing for months now, in spite of the rumors of war. Flights crossing Venezuelan airspace are down around 50%, according to Reuters, but that's hardly "in its entirety". 

"Quiet, quiet, piggy!"

 

So Trump responded to Bloomberg's Catherine Lucey aboard Air Force I last week after she asked him why, if there is nothing that incriminates him in the Epstein files, he is acting as if there was.

There was a good deal of talk about how disrespectful and misogynous he was then, and later during his Oval Office photo session for the state visit of the Saudi prime minister and crown prince (who should not be referred to, for the last time, as "bin Salman", that's a patronymic, not a surname, like calling Putin "Mr. Vladimirovich"—if your house style demands that he be given a family name, he has one of those too, "Āl Saud", House of Saud, the lineage founded by his ancestor the Emir of Diriyah, with the assistance of a clerical ally, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam and his son's father-in-law, in the 1740s), when ABC News's Mary Bruce asked the prince a question about his role in the murder of Washington Post's Jamal Kashoggi:

"You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial," Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question."

Which raises a series of uncomfortable questions in its own right, when you think about it, like what is the purpose of asking such a question anyway. It's not as if the prince is going to give you a scoop by answering honestly—in this case he used it skillfully to look sad and respectful about the murder without acknowledging any involvement, in general to give a much more favorable personal impression (at least to people who haven't heard much of anything about the Kashoggi case) than Trump himself—but what, other than embarrassing him, could the question have accomplished for the reporter? If they wanted to make a journalistic point, surely it would have been better to boycott the whole event,  as something that wouldn't be producing any real news in the surface the press would be permitted to see. They should have stayed home. But that'll be the day.