Literary Corner: The Weave

 

Socially distanced Biden campaign rally at UAW Region 1 headquarters, Warren, Michigan, September 9 2020. Photo by Patrick Semansky, AP, via USA Today.

Eight Circles and He Couldn't Fill Tbem Up

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

I mean you can do whatever you want. I said
I don't like that. Lo and behold I see
they went and then built a plant and now
they do their business with India. They probably
do it outside India, too. They built
a very big plant. Many countries do that.
All of a sudden you hear they're leaving Milwaukee
or leaving wherever they may be located.
It's very sad to see. And it's so simple,
This isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships
that land within 12 inches on the moon
where they want it to land or he gets the engines back.
That was the first I really saw. I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’
I saw engines about three or four years ago.
These things were coming. Cylinders, no wings,
no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly,
landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean,
someplace with a circle. Boom. Reminded me
of the Biden circles that he used to have, right?
He’d have eight circles and he couldn’t fill them up.
But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote.
I don’t know, I don’t know, couldn’t fill up the circles.
I always loved those circles. They were so beautiful.
That was so beautiful to look at. In fact, the person
that did them, that was the best thing about his —
the level of that circle was great. But they couldn’t
get people, so they used to have the press
stand in those circles because they couldn’t get
the people. Then I heard we lost. ‘Oh, we lost.’
No, we’re never going to let that happen again.
But we’ve been abused by other countries. We’ve been
abused by our own politicians, really, more than
other countries. I can’t blame them. We’ve been
abused by people that represent us in this country,
some of them stupid, some of them naive,
and some of them crooked, frankly.

From Trump's remarks at the Detroit Economic Club, October 10 2024. The opening bit is from a story Trump has been telling for years, about the injustice of India having a 100% tariff on motorcycles, which was meant, I think he believed, to harm the US motorcycle industry, as Washington Post's Annie Gowen wrote in 2018:

Literary Corner: Making the Hell's Angels Look Nice

 

Désiré Ntwayingabo, a refugee from the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo who settle in Dayton in 2010, and works there now for the city as a community engagement specialist, at a World Refugee Day event he and his team organized in June 2023, via Spectrum News 1 in Columbus.

From a fundraiser with Texas governor Greg Abbott  in Aspen,  Colorado, August 10, $25,000 to $500,000 a couple, of which The Guardian obtained a recording. For money like that, you get to hear the former president say "fuck". The first piece is about a party of 22 Congolese migrants to the United States he claims to have met at some point; the second his encounter with Helen Comperatore, widow of volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was killed in the first attempt to assassinate Trump on July 13.

Two Songs

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

 

I. I Hate to Use That Foul Language

We said, ‘Where do you come from?’
They said, ‘Prison’.
‘What did you do?’
‘None of your fucking business what we did.’

You know why? Because they’re murderers.
I hate to use that foul language.
These are the toughest people.
These people are coming in from Africa,
from the Middle East. They’re coming in
from all parts of Asia, the bad parts
the parts where they’re rough,

and the only thing good is
they make our criminals look extremely nice.
They make our Hell’s Angels look
like the nicest people on earth.

II. I'd Much Rather Have My Husband

So they’re going to get millions of dollars
but the woman, the wife, this beautiful woman,
I handed her the check –
we handed her the check–

and she said, ‘This is so nice,
and I appreciate it,
but I’d much rather have my husband.’
Now, I know some of the women
in this room wouldn’t say the same.

I know at least four couples.
There are four couples, Governor,
that I know and you’re not one of them.
At least four couples here
would have been thrilled, actually.

There is obviously no reason to think Trump has ever interacted with a large group of migrants from Congo, let alone that they told him they came to America "from prison", let alone addressed him so rudely. The idea of Congolese must come from the story of the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, accused of roasting and eating their neighbors' dogs and cats, for which Christopher Rufo found some video evidence, except it turned out that the migrants in question were not Haitian but Congolese, in Dayton rather than Springfield, and the video was an evident fake (sounds like a Radio Yerevan joke!).

All he's retained of the story is that there are Congolese somewhere in the US (there's a big community in Dayton in particular), which must have shocked him a lot, and he's made the rest up out of his congested head, probably mostly from the Mariel Boatlift from Cuba in 1980, the only time as far as I know when a foreign government really did "send them" to the States, and rumors flew that some of the boat people might be prisoners and mental patients, which was probably not true, though many of them were undesirable from President Castro's point of view, gay, ill-educated, political detainees, or Black. That was a time when a relatively young Trump was still capable of learning something—the wrong thing, of course—and the source of many things he thinks he knows now.

On Mrs. Comperatore, I can't find any evidence that he's ever presented her with a check, or met with her personally at all—he did speak with her on the phone at least once, and he may well have contributed to the gofundme, though he's not listed in the report of celebrities (Dana White, Ben Shapiro, Kid Rock) who did. On the joke about how some women would be pleased if their husbands got shot to death at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, four of whom were at the Aspen dinner, not including Mrs. Abbott, I have no words.

Literary Corner: Essay on Criticism

Drawing by JaysonZHahn/Medium.

 

Trump finally explained the Hannibal Lecter bit, and it's worse than you think.

[image or embed]

— Comfortably Numb (@numb.comfortab.ly) Sep 7, 2024 at 6:10 PM

The Poet Defends Himself Against His Critics

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

AND THEN THE PRESS WHEN I SAY DR HANNIBAL LECTER.
THE PRESS SAYS, OH, WHY DID HE MENTION THAT?
THEY ARE WISE GUYS BACK THERE? JUST WISE GUYS. THEY SAY
HE RAMBLED AND STARTED TALKING ABOUT
HANNIBAL LECTER. WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO?

THAT'S A REPRESENTATIVE OF PEOPLE THAT ARE
COMING INTO OUR COUNTRY. DR HANNIBAL LECTER,
HE WILL HAVE YOU FOR DINNER. YOU KNOW THAT
HE WILL HAVE YOU FOR DINNER. NO, BUT THIS
IS WHAT'S HAPPENED. THIS IS WHAT'S HAPPENING AT LEVELS
THAT NOBODY CAN EVEN IMAGINE. MILLIONS AND MILLIONS.

I love how the critics speak mostly in an easy dactylic pentameter in the first five lines, before Trump responds in his own choppily unmetered voice.

Dr. Lecter is just what your fancy-ass literature professors refer to as a metaphor. That is, not a "representative" like your congressman but a symbolic representation, of the millions and millions of Latin American lunatics, mental patients like Dr. Lecter, driven by their governments from the asylums of their own benighted countries and pushed to cross from Mexico into the USA to find asylums here. The liberals even admit this!

Not that they're really cannibals, exactly, that's a metaphor too, though they really are criminals. It means their rapacious consumption of all the generous benefits we give them is eating our lunch.* 

And finally, like Dr. Lecter, they don't exist, just like the benefits we don't give them. Their existence isn't the point! This is literature, people! The point is the emotions they give us! 

"True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story."

He's not rambling at all! He's weaving! As the fancy-ass literature professors in his own circle have told him.

*I think Hannibal's joke, the play on the ambiguity of "have for dinner", may be the first and even only piece of purely verbal humor Trump has ever understood, his first or only experience of what it's like to "get" it. That's surely why he's compelled to keep repeating it, in every speech.

Literary Corner: Oh Freedom

 

Music historian Linda Russell, via RecordOnLine, on campaign songs.

Two Songs

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

I. Take a Look at Bacon

You take a look at bacon
and some of these products –
and some people don’t eat bacon any more.
We are going to get the energy prices down.

When we get energy down, you know …
this was caused by their horrible energy – wind.
They want wind all over the place.
But when it doesn’t blow,
we have a little problem.

II. The Transgender Thing

But the transgender thing is incredible.
Think of it. Your kid goes to school
and comes home a few days later
with an operation. The school decides
what’s going to happen with your child

and you know many of these childs
fifteen years later say, what the hell happened?
Who did this to me? They say, who did this to me?
It’s incredible.

The price of bacon in 2023 was down 9% from its all-time high in 2022, year over year, and it's lower now than it was then. Brad DeLong, who I really, really trust, claims the price of bacon is at a historic low, matched only by the price in one weird interval 30 years ago:

The price of bacon relative to personal income per capita has only been noticeably lower than it is today for about a year in 1994-1995.

Literary Corner: Did Trump Close the Border?

 

Screenshot from Newsweek.

The former president responds to the Democratic candidate's acceptance speech, in a call to Fox News, which the network cut off after ten minutes, claiming they were out of time:

I Didn't Have a Bill

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Why didn’t she do the things
she’s complaining about?
She didn’t do any of it.
She could have done it
three and a half years ago.
She could do it tonight
by leaving the auditorium
and going to Washington, DC,
and closing the border.
She doesn’t need a bill.
I didn’t have a bill.
I closed the border.

It's almost endearing how he still hasn't found out what vice presidents are supposed to do for a living, even though he had one of his own for four years. 

Or is this something I've been missing? Did Pence use to pop over to the White House and issue executive orders while Trump was in the East Wing watching Fox & Friends? Or does he think Harris is already the president? He's often suggested in recent months that the presidency is a very slippery kind of identity, sometimes suggesting Barack Obama is still in office (and likely to be responsible for a nuclear war, because Putin doesn't respect him), sometimes hinting that he believes he's still president himself. 

Here's the passage from Harris's speech:

Pre-DNC Pep Talk

Trump "Freedom Cities" affordable housing proposal, via Raw Story.

By the way, I still think Biden would have won the election, when it came down to it. I still think there was a majority who would be happy to vote for him but told the polls they didn't want to because they'd heard he was unelectable, and were afraid if Biden was the candidate Trump would win. Fear of Trump won out.  But it certainly wouldn't have been as much fun as this looks likely to be. As Josh Marshall (gift link) is saying, it was going to be a slog, weary work, not happy. And now we're talking joy!

I also still think Biden made that happen, defeating the timid centrist plan to run Some White Dude chosen by some improvised set of reality-TV rules, with his endorsement of Kamala Harris as his successor minutes after he left the race (the centrist plan was specifically meant to exclude her, as too "controversial"). And it was clearly a great decision, as was his naming Harris in the first place, back in 2020. If anybody engineered a "coup" it was Biden himself, ensuring his post-neoliberal "legacy" by naming the candidate most representative of the Biden coalition and most likely to continue along his policy lines. As Harris has confirmed in her own naming of the most Biden-like of VP candidates, Tim Walz, the lovable non-rich white guy, mainline Christian, tell-it-like-it-is orator (Biden could easily have invented the "these guys are weird" line himself), simple but extremely sharp, with a genuine fund of out-of-country experience (in China, where he taught English for a while and used to bring his American high school students on trips every year) and an unshakable commitment to kindness and understanding. 

(I also should add, contra Peter Beinart's "Joe Biden Is Not a Hero", that I still think Biden has been doing everything he believes is possible to stop the killing in Gaza, and continues to work tirelessly at that at this late date. I think he's literally hoping to have the permanent ceasefire announced at the Democratic convention. Biden may well be wrong on the hopefulness of this approach, but I'm certain an arms embargo wouldn't have succeeded any better at stopping the killing, given the mood in Israel and the criminal intransigence of the prime minister and his party, intent on saving his own bacon; it would have left Netanyahu feeling even freer to ignore US entreaties. Meanwhile, as I type, FWIW, Blinken has just announced that Netanyahu and Gallant have accepted his "bridging proposal" for getting from here to there, though the details remain thin.) 

Literary Corner: Ripcord

Image via Kalson.

In Conclusion, America Has Always Been a Nation

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

.....But with voting, one of your most important things you can do, maybe in many ways, your most important, they don't want to approve voter ID. That's because they want to cheat, But until then Republicans must win, We have to win this election. Most important election ever. We want a landslide that's too big to rig. If you want to save America, get your friends, get your family, get everyone, you know, and vote, vote early vote, absentee, vote on election day, I don't care how but you have to get out and vote, And again, Christians get out and vote just this time, you won't have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, you won't have to vote any more. My beautiful Christians. I love you Christians, I'm a Christian. I love you. Get out. You've got to get out and vote in four years you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good. You're not going to have to vote. In conclusion, America has always been a nation, one built and sustained by Americans of faith. It was faith that led the Pilgrims to cross an ocean and settle this majestic continent. It was belief in our creator that led the patriots to defend their liberties in the war for independence. It was faith in America's God-given destiny that pushed the pioneers to journey west and it was trusting God that led generations of American believers to end slavery, defeat fascism and communism, and make this into the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world. But now we are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower, and its strength.......

This somewhat longer piece of the transcript than you may have seen before provides a lovely illustration of how Trump's strange rhetoric works like a parachute jump, with the teleprompter text, in this case clearly by Stephen Miller, serving as a kind of ripcord to break his free fall and float him safely to earth.

He's clearly exhausted at this point in the speech—he's been going on for nearly an hour—and he's tumbling into truly insane-sounding babble; there on the screen in front of him is the rescue message: "In conclusion..." and he leaps for it, almost coming to grief at the complicated grammar of Miller's first sentence ("America has always been a nation built and sustained..." breaking him after the first six words) but recovering quickly enough and finishing the peroration on how America will become great again on November 5 without serious mishaps.

I think people have been overinterpreting the apostrophe to the beautiful Christians here, by the way, when they tell us it's Trump confessing to his evil plan to cancel the 2028 elections, and maybe all future elections. He may have such plans, and JD Vance's monarchist mentor the former Mencius Moldbug certainly does, but that's not what Trump is talking about. 

To know that, you have to do something the political reporters aren't willing to do, which is to look above the particular soundbite to the speech as a whole. Trump's speeches, in the long, improvised solo riffs outside the frame Miller or another writer has provided for him, are chaotically disorganized, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a particular idea he wants to push forward—it's just that he can't put it together in a coherent way, because he's so distracted by his other obsessions.

In this case it's two things he's associating, that came up a bit before the halfway point: one fact, about the relatively low propensity of a big component of his base, Dominionist Christians and gun nuts, to show up at the polls ("And by the way, Christians have to vote, you know, I don't want to scold you, do you know that Christians do not vote proportionately? They don't vote like they should. They're not big voters") and one piece of paranoid fiction he's been retailing for at least eight years, that our elections are plagued by illegal or somehow just bad voting, because our laws on who gets to vote, after the 14th and 15th Amendments and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, are too lax in some way he's not really able to clarify, but when he says he's going to "fix" it, what he means is explained earlier in the speech ("But I say look, we got to fix our laws on voting. We have to start with voter ID"). The beautiful Christians must put themselves out now, even if it means indulging in the suspect early voting and absentee voting, precisely so he and Congress can change these "ridiculous" laws—

Christians are a group that's known not to vote very much. You have to go out at least this election. Just give us and get us into that beautiful White House, vote for your congressmen and -women, vote for your senators. We will change this country for the better, this country will be great again like never before. You've got to vote and I've said it before and I'll say it again. November 5th, which is a period really because you're allowed to vote early, they have early voting, late voting. Everything is so ridiculous. We should have one-day voting, paper ballots, voter ID, and certification of citizenship, and that's what we're striving for. But voting actually starts on September 6th in North Carolina, a great state. We're doing very well there....Then it's Pennsylvania toward the end of September and it's various states in September...

—and in 2028 beautiful Christians won't have to stress themselves out any more. That's the message Trump is trying to convey: please ignore all that stuff I told you about early voting, that is, I was right, but you should do it this year anyway, and if you do enough of it this year you won't have to do it again.

The program he's hoping to implement being very precisely the one proposed in this year's Republican platform, almost as if he was reading it off the teleprompter (as he may well have been)

We will implement measures to secure our Elections, including Voter ID, highly sophisticated paper ballots, proof of Citizenship, and same day Voting. We will not allow the Democrats to give Voting Rights to illegal Aliens.

(solving the imaginary problem of noncitizen voting, which almost never happens, but of course making huge trouble for the 10% of US citizens who have trouble proving their citizenship, who are of course mostly relatively poor, and therefore more likely to vote for Democrats). The standard Republican effort to reduce turnout.

This isn't, again, to suggest that no Republicans are plotting to overthrow the US electoral system altogether, as we know they are. Though they aren't the same as the ones working to overthrow it now, in case Democrats win in November: 

The campaign involves a powerful network of Republican lawyers and activist groups, working loosely in concert with the Republican National Committee. Many of the key players were active in Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

But unlike the chaotic and improvised challenge four years ago, the new drive includes a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.

Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.

What I think we need to understand is that Trump Republicans are working now not just on the "two-pronged" effort to plan for whether they win (Project 2025) or lose (January 6 redux) but on a whole layer cake of strategies, to which Trump himself is not entirely privy; he is personally too stupid to play a decisive role, though he is enough of a loose cannon that he might wreck their plans at any moment. You can't take anything he says seriously, let alone literally, though you should always look in what he says for evidence as to what the state of play is, as far as he's been allowed to see it by the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society and Claremont Institute and other intellectual stakeholders who are squirreling over the actual work. Trumpism is more than poor Trump, the grinning pumpkinface, their only representative of 2020s rizz. He himself is more like a kind of stochastic candidate—you never know what he'll come up with next—but it's never as interesting as it looks.

Literary Corner: Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

It’s a disgrace. Mother Teresa
could not beat those charges.
These charges are rigged.
The whole thing is rigged.
The country's a mess
between the borders
and fake elections and
you have a trial like this,
where the judge is so
conflicted he can’t breathe.
He’s got to do his job.
It's not for me,
that I can tell you.
It's a disgrace. And I
mean that. Mother Teresa
could not beat these charges.
But we'll see. We'll see how we do.
It’s a very disgraceful situation.

Actually, I've been trying to give some thought to this—to the idea of Mother Teresa, learning that adult film star Randy Jackhammer has been pitching a story to the National Enquirer, "My One-Night Stand With Mother Teresa", recounting their years-ago tryst, with some vivid detail, even anatomical. Which did not happen, as far as I know, but if it did. 

Literary Corner: Article II

 

To the tune of:

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H I got a law
called Article Two
Everyone says
It's the thing for a pres
that Article Two-Two-Two-Two-Two-Two
says I can do
what I wanna do
skeleton key
for the man that is me
my Article Two-Two-Two-Two-Two-Two

I don't have to worry
ever see a jury
I'm like a tsar
buy yourself a justice
someone who will trust us
hiya Sam Alito
everything's A-R-T
I-C-L-E-T-oh

oh what a law
a hullabaloo
I'll shoot a guy
just for rolling his eye
on Fifth Avenue
I'll get a big erection
when I cancel the election
thanks to Article Two-Two-Two-Two-Two-Two

Literary Corner: So Vicious, So Horrible, So Beautiful

 

Martin Sheen as General Lee cheered by the brigades under his direct command, the Army of Northern Virginia, played by unpaid Civil War reenactors, I'm unable to determine at which point in the story (but probably near the beginning, when these troops arrive in Pennsylvania), in Ronald F. Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg. It's part of the lore of the movie that the whole sequence is entirely spontaneous, not part of the script but improvised unbidden by the extras, filmed only because the camera operators realized something exceptional was happening and Sheen was responding in character, which he does, as you can see, really gorgeously.

Never Fight Uphill, Me Boys

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle
that was. It was so much, and so interesting,
and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful
in so many different ways—it represented
such a big portion of the success
of this country. Gettysburg, wow—
I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
to look and to watch. And the statement
of Robert E. Lee, who's no longer in favor—
did you ever notice it? He's no
longer in favor. "Never fight
uphill, me boys, never fight uphill!"
They were fighting uphill, he said.
Wow, that was a big mistake. He lost
his big general. "Never fight uphill,
me boys," but it was too late.

Literary Corner: For Our Sins

 

Image by Cowicide, December 2021.

Happy Easter Everyone!

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

Happy Easter to all, including crooked
and corrupt prosecutors and judges
that are doing everything possible
to interfere with the presidential
election of 2024, and put me in prison,
including those many people that I completely &
totally despise because they want to destroy
America, a now failing nation, like “deranged”
Jack Smith, who is evil and “sick,”
Mrs. Fani “Fauni” Wade, who said
she hardly knew the “special” prosecutor,
only to find that he spent years “loving” her,
long before the Georgia persecution
of President Trump began (and thereby making
the case against me null, void, and illegal!),
and lazy on violent crime Alvin Bragg who,
with crooked Joe’s DOJ thugs, unfairly working
in the D.A.’s office, illegally indicted me
on a case he never wanted to bring and
virtually all legal scholars say is a case
that should not be brought, is breaking the
law in doing so (Pomerantz!), was turned
down by all other law enforcement authorities,
and is not a crime. Happy Easter everyone!

As is traditional in his annual Easter messages, the former president (who has eloquently said of Easter that it is "just a very special— time for me. And it really represents family and get-together and—and something, you know, if you're a—a Christian"), takes time to reach out to folks he may have neglected for a while over the past year, especially those engaged in what he calls "election interference", by which he means trying to hold him to account for the various crimes he's committed over the past eight-odd years, which might, if he's convicted, make it harder for him to win another term, kind of like the 48 Russian athletes who had Olympic medals taken from them since 2008, just because they used performance-enhancing drugs. It really seems unfair, if you think about it, or even more if you don't think about it.

Literary Corner: So Vicious, So Horrible, So Beautiful

Martin Sheen as General Lee cheered by the brigades under his direct command, the Army of Northern Virginia, played by unpaid Civil War reenactors, I'm unable to determine at which point in the story (but probably near the beginning, when these troops arrive in Pennsylvania), in Ronald F. Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg. It's part of the lore of the movie that the whole sequence is entirely spontaneous, not part of the script but improvised unbidden by the extras, filmed only because the camera operators realized something exceptional was happening and Sheen was responding in kind, which he does, really gorgeously.

Never Fight Uphill, Me Boys

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle
that was. It was so much, and so interesting,
and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful
in so many different ways—it represented
such a big portion of the success
of this country. Gettysburg, wow—
I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
to look and to watch. And the statement
of Robert E. Lee, who's no longer in favor—
did you ever notice it? He's no
longer in favor. "Never fight
uphill, me boys, never fight uphill!"
They were fighting uphill, he said.
Wow, that was a big mistake. He lost
his big general. "Never fight uphill,
me boys," but it was too late.

Literary Corner: NATO as Protection Racket

 

NATO map by CBS News.

Until I Came Along

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

NATO was busted until I came along.

You don't pay your bills, you get no protection.
It's very simple. I said,
‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well,
if we don’t pay, are you still
going to protect us?’
I said, ‘Absolutely not.’

They couldn’t believe the answer.
One of the presidents of a big country
stood up and said, 'Well, sir,
if we don't pay and we're attacked
by Russia, will you protect us?'
'No, I would not protect you.
In fact, I would encourage them
to do whatever the hell they want.
You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.'

NATO actually does have bills, for its political headquarters and command structure in Brussels, which belong not to any specific country but to the organization as a whole, and various programs it runs, for a some €3.3 billion in 2023, or 0.3% of the members' total defense spending, and these are paid for with member contributions, on a sliding scale according to the wealth of the particular country: the two biggest being the US and Germany, at just over 16% each, with Britain and France coming next at 11% and 10% respectively, and so on, down to Montenegro, paying a bit under 0.03% of the budget.

It's not a whole lot of money, in reality, and NATO has never been busted, as Trump puts it. It's also not what Trump is talking about. But Trump does not know that. 

Literary Corner: God Made a Former

The "God Made Trump" video from January 2024, on the eve of the Iowa caucus. After "God Made a Farmer", the celebrated routine by radio commentator Paul Harvey (1918–2009), first presented at the 1978 Future Farmers of America convention. Here's my version:

And on the 8th Day, God looked down on his planned paradise, and said, "Paradise needs a parasite."

So God made a Former.

God said, "I need somebody ready to rise before dawn to watch Fox & Friends, grab a cheeseburger and post some tweets, wander into the Oval Office around 11:00 for more TV, call in some of his yes-men to tell him how great he is, post some more tweets, watch some more TV, post some more tweets, and still be ready after midnight to waddle down to the bar in the hotel he owns to enjoy the sound of the bribe money tinkling into the cash register."

So God made a Former.

"I need somebody strong enough to play 36 holes of golf every weekend day yet tender enough to put on his own makeup and style his unique hair;* somebody who screams at his subordinates and then threatens the press, and gets back to the East Wing hungry enough for two cheeseburgers and a fishwich before he settles down to compose a few more tweets and maybe a little leering or snatch-and-grab with the ladies in what Alyssa Farah Griffin described as 'countless pieces of what [she] considered impropriety in the White House that [she] brought to the chief of staff because [she] thought the way he engaged with women was dangerous,' and afterwards maybe ask for one of them to be brought back so he can look at her ass again." 

So God made a Former.

God said, "I need somebody who won't get all shook up by the deaths of soldiers (losers and suckers who 'knew what they were signing up for'), victims of mass shootings ('It's just horrible, so surprising to see it here, but we have to get over it'), and the casualties of a pandemic virus (most of them came from Blue states anyway, his son-in-law told him). I need somebody who can make standup shtik out of tragedy, federal crimes out of somebody's stolen dick pics, and innocence out of his own fraud indictment; somebody who can invent upwards of 7,000 lies a year, and not even get tired; somebody who can't be bothered to hide his own attachment to dictators and white supremacists but cheerfully calls others 'fascists' when they call him out for it."

So God made a Former. 

God said, "Give me a man who would go any length, spend any money, use any weapon, for retribution against those who dared to criticize him or speak out against his criminal behavior, but defend a flatterer to the end ('When Putin goes out and tells everybody -- and you talk about a relationship, but he says Donald Trump is going to win and Donald Trump is a genius, and then I have people saying you should disavow. I said, I'm going to disavow that?')."

So God made a Former.

It had to be somebody who'd neglect no opportunity to funnel taxpayer money into his failing businesses, no matter how small the gain; somebody who'd spend night and day begging for money for his alleged political purposes and then spend it all on his lawyers instead; somebody who'd kill to stay in the White House and then could never think of anything to do when he was there, other than watch more TV and post more tweets; somebody who'd give endless time to meeting with pastors and rabbis and clergymen of all kinds but was visibly uncomfortable and unfamiliar with how to behave in a religious institution and avoided them as much as he could; somebody who held his family together with bonds of greed and fear of losing out on the inheritance; somebody who would sigh and smile when his son said he wanted to spend his life "doing what Dad does," and reply, "Not as long as I'm alive, you won't! GTFOOH!"

So God made a Former.

*The authorized parody in the "Truth" video suggests that Trump's gentle arms are those of a trained obstetrician, and that he has delivered at least one of his own grandchildren, I just want to emphasize that.

Raucous Caucus

 Re-upping this from 9 months ago (just after the third ballot in Kevin McCarthy's Speaker race), with one incorrect prediction and one correct one

Drawing by Harry Bliss.

 

LOL

Things getting heated in House GOP meeting.

McCarthy swore in his speech, dropping a “god damnit.” And he made clear he would negotiate no more. McCarthy also said opponents came to him with “personal asks” last night.

Lauren boebert yelled in response to speech: “BULL SHIT”

— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) January 3, 2023

Then Boebert even got a chance to deliver a funny:

Literary Corner: Perfect

 

The Worthless Clause

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

I have a clause in there
that says, don't believe the statement,
go out and do your own work:
this statement is worthless.
It means nothing. Well,
they call it a "disclaimer"--
they call it "worthless clause" too,
because it makes the statement worthless.

I hate to be boring and tell you this.
When you have the worthless clause
on a piece of paper and the first--
literally the first page
you're reading about how
this is a worthless statement
from the standpoint of your using it
as a bank or whatever--
whoever may be using it, you tend
not to get overly excited about it.
I think it had very little impact,
if any impact on the banks.

Arranged from the text of Trump's sworn deposition in the case of People of New York State vs. Donald Trump et al., as quoted in Judge Arthur F. Engoron's response to motions on both sides for summary judgment, released, I guess, on Tuesday (granting it in part, as you probably know by now, to the people, and denying it to the Trump, who is now in the first phase of losing the right to do business in New York State, which will mean he and his children and his 500 LLCs and the Trump Organization also have to give up a lot of properties run from New York, including Mar-a-Lago, the Aberdeenshire golf club, and golf courses in Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and I don't know how many more, unless he manages to absorb them into a reconstituted Trump Organization in Delaware, which Attorney General James has been trying to stop him from doing), on Trump's poetic theory of the "worthless clause", actually a whole bunch of clauses, of boilerplate that the organization prefixes to its annual Statement of Financial Conditions, which is used by financial organizations to figure out how risky it is to work with them:

Accident

 

I had a nasty accident in the subway, pitching down a flight of stone steps and landing at the landing. I must have tripped, I guess, or had a shoe issue. Maybe I was wearing reading glasses and getting a false picture of things a ilttle under six feet away. I didn't exaxtly see it happen, though I did know it was happening (oh shit), and definitely lost consciousness for a good instant there.

I opened my eyes under rhe eyes of cops doing the things they are supposed to do, making an appraisal of the situation and a plan to get me out of there and noticing that I was screaming whenever they touched my left leg (fracture in the femur, right by the knee). They got me into an ambulance which got me to Bellevue, once the fabled East Side lunatic asylum, but a very civilized place nowadays, and I'm not about to make any complaints except maybe on the subject of Mayor Eric Adams, thanks to whom all my meals are mostly plant-based and entirely vegetarian, which is fine with me—far better than any hospital food I've had before, which is not to say good, exactly, but edible enough to ensure I don't starve—but maybe not the best political move Adams could have made.

At night, the hospital becomes a symphony of irritating electronic noises, from the random bleep or bleat to the occasional full-scale melodty. This became the subject for me of a non-lucid dream on the first bight. "Methought", as dream reporters used to say, I had the computer on and was following all those sounds as notifications. I actually told the  night nurse about this in the morning: "All those noises are on the imternet!" "You were dreaming," she said, correctly.

Literary Corner: Memorandum Opinion

 

Juan Gris, Still Life With a Guitar, 1913. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Memorandum Opinion Denying Defendant's Rule 59 Motion

by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan

The jury in this case did not
reach "a seriously erroneous result."

Its verdict is not
"a miscarriage of justice."

Mr. Trump's motion for for a new trial
on damages or remittitur (Dkt 204)
is denied. SO ORDERED.

Literary Corner: Vital Caselaw (of Which There Is Much)

 

You're welcome!

A No, No!

by Donald J. Trump. 45th President of the United States of America

Vital caselaw, of which there is much,
further confirms that the Presidential Records Act (PRA)
is the only statute which applies
to Presidents and their records.
These cases build on the Clinton Socks case
in making it clear that Presidents have
complete latitude and authority
when it comes to documents, as well as that
the PRA has no criminal enforcement mechanism.
Deranged Jack Smith knows this, but refuses
to even mention the words "Presidential Records Act'"
in his Scam Indictment of Biden's Political Opponent
(who is leading by a lot) in the middle of a Campaign —
a No, No!

Dream Piece, 2018

An early lucid dream, originally posted on July 4, 2018, re-upped.

Statue of Wilson in Tirana, Albania, via wikimpia.

Upstate, kept waking up before dawn to some extraordinary bird call, and then ended up sleeping until 8:00. Dreamed Trump decided to name Woodrow Wilson to the Supreme Court.

I was on 84th Street, at PS 9, only in the middle of a vast and empty parking lot with a statue of Wilson—you couldn't see anything else, not even the school itself, it was as big as Kansas—waiting for my wife, who was in there applying for a job, which is in itself bizarre, if she were looking for a job it wouldn't be at an elementary school. I had my phone and was looking at Twitter and gradually began to realize it was trending that Trump had picked Wilson.

My first thought was spitefully noting that he'd gone back on his pledge to stick to the Federalist Society list. The man never keeps his promises! Only then did I realize it was much worse than that. "But he's been dead since 1919!"

It may have been making this error or realizing it was an error—his stroke was in 1919 but he stayed alive till 1924—that woke me up. Happy Independence Day.