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.

The Road to Dictatorship

 

That thing about "Speaker" Mike Johnson proposing to release more video from the January 6 insurrection, but only with some of the faces of the rioters blurred out "because we don't want them to be retaliated against and we don't want them to be charged by the DOJ," is that that completely obviates the purpose Republicans claimed to have for releasing them, which was supposed to be for "transparency".

Actually, let's just come out and say it, the official reason for demanding the public release of the videos was the purported evidence they would probably have of who the "real" villains of January 6 were—not the 688 simple folks who have been convicted of crimes committed in the affair, 587 of them pleading guilty, but the masterminds of "antifa" and/or the FBI who secretly organized the thing. Which, of course, never happened, so there wouldn't be any evidence on the videos that it did. The object of Gaetz and Biggs and Gohmert and Greene and all those Republicans demanding the release of the videos was not, in fact, to get them released (against the advice of Capitol security, which feared making them generally available would reveal too much about the arrangements in the building, such as the locations of security cameras), but to nourish the paranoid belief that the 688 criminal convicts (or however many there are now) had been entrapped by the Deep State/Communist/Fascist conspiracy, by making it look as if the Capitol authorities were holding stuff back.

They're Not the Same

 

Rare sighting of ocelot mother and kitten near Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge in South Texas, via MySanAntonio.

So, the latest Biden-is-the-same-as-Trump story, on the subject of wall-building:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Thursday defended his administration’s decision to waive 26 federal laws in South Texas to allow for construction of roughly 20 miles of additional border wall, saying he had no choice but to use the Trump-era funding for the barrier to stop illegal migration from Mexico.

Asked if he thought such walls work, he said flatly, “No.”

The new construction was announced in June, but the funds were appropriated in 2019 before the Democratic president took office. Biden said he tried to get lawmakers to redirect the money but Congress refused, and the law requires the funding to be used as approved and the construction to be completed in 2023.

Leading to frenzied denunciations of the president on the platform formerly known as Twitter for breaking his campaign promise not to engage in any wall building on the southern border:

And Then There Were None

Still from Robin and Marian (Richard Lester, 1976).

2/ clear that the bottom has fallen out of DeSantis’s campaign. Given how badly he’s doing there’s a good chance he won’t even run. Unless Trump dies there’s every reason to think he’ll be the gop nominee and there won’t even be much of a primary campaign at all in early 2024. pic.twitter.com/CajhxyJ33O

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 16, 2023

Welp.

The Haley story is from today's Washington Post, and not quite as interesting as it may at first sound. The story is that she has three fundraising committees, a regular presidential campaign committee, a "leadership PAC" from before she got into the presidential race, and a "joint committee"; the joint committee donated almost $3 million of its $4.4 million haul to the other two, and Haley's people counted that money twice when they reported to the press that they'd raised over $11 million in their first six weeks when they'd actually raised more like $8.3 million, and effectively $6.8 million, since the leadership PAC money can't be used for the campaign.

The Emperor's New Dog-Whistle

Yesterday's discussion has gotten very "interesting" from the standpoint of our pugnacious new friend Alfredo, but my understanding of what's interesting is different from his, and I'm bowing out of it after one last word, suggested this morning at Roy's place: the last word being "n****r-lover".

The progress from “n****r-lover” to “woke” as the favored pejorative of bigots could make for a book-length study; but I will say the earlier, cruder version had this much going for it: It didn’t come with a bunch of alleged intellectuals trying to explain it.

Except I don't think it needs a book. Rather, the progress involved is pretty simple: "woke" means "n****r-lover" with deniability. That is, it is "n****r-lover" for those who would like to deny that they're the kind of person who uses "n****r-lover". With the scent of Black English Vernacular (as I noted somewhere in the comments) giving it a Trumpy kind of pungency (like Trump's use of "nationalist"—"but I'm not supposed to use that word"—when he wants to confess, with deniability, that he's a Nazi). Much more satisfyingly vulgar than the whiny old standby "politically correct".

Narratology: White Whale

Narratology really starting to come into its own, as the Special Counsel picks up on the stuff I've been telling you, and the Mar-a-Lago documents case merges with the case of Trump's effort to incriminate the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller investigations, as I've been saying it should; according to The Independent and the great Murray Waas:

Investigators working for Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith have reportedly questioned multiple ex-Trump administration officials about the fate of a large tranche of classified documents pertaining to the FBI probe into Russia’s campaign of interference in the 2016 election.

A report by Murray Waas, a freelance investigative reporter and former National Journal staff writer, wrote on Wednesday that “at least three” figures in Mr Trump’s inner circle have been pressed by prosecutors on whether Mr Trump took “thousands of pages” of documents from the White House — including many bearing classification markings — with an eye towards making them public in attempt to discredit the Justice Department’s probe into alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian Federation.

I'd hope the three or more figures would include Cassidy Hutchinson, who witnessed the process, on the cooperative side. We've known something about these documents for a long time—Trump started claiming he had already declassified a stash of documents on the subject as early as a Tweet of October 2020—

“I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!”

 —which, like so many Trump statements, was more aspiration than fact; it wasn't, in fact, until January 19 2021, the day before the Biden inauguration, that, with some documents in hand, in a "binder" he'd received from the Justice Department on December 30, he finally issued a memorandum to the attorney general, DNI, and DCI directing them to declassify it, with the redactions demanded by the FBI. I don't think it's been reported whether they obeyed this order, but it also seems certain that at least one copy of those materials, probably without redactions and with intact classification markings, was among the stuff stolen and sent to Trump's Palm Beach club that day, along with at least one copy of the classified stuff stolen from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence by Chairman Nunes and Chief of Staff Meadows that the staff had made so many photocopies of on the same day. 

What I'm saying is that Jack Smith seems to have come to the same conclusion as I did on a motive for at least some of the Mar-a-Lago document theft—his long quest to avenge himself on the FBI and everyone who exposed his collusion with Russian intelligence in the 2016 election, and (taking it, as I always do, just a notch farther than the reported story) that will be the basis on which Trump is indicted in this case. As, I think, I've been telling you.

Not only that, but also this week is the wonderful reporting in The New York Times by Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner that shows former attorney general Billy Barr pushing special counsel John Durham on the same quest to incriminate the FBI and others over the Crossfire Hurricane and Robert Mueller investigations in the face of the fact that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing to begin with, and of course practically none squeezed out after millions of dollars and years of effort (one minor deception in the filing of the third renewal request on the surveillance order against Carter Page, discovered not by the special counsel but the FBI inspector general. Corroborating what I've been telling you since October 2019  at least, including anticipations of this week's stories in

• that snipe hunt for evidence in Italy where Barr and Durham came up dry, in October 2019, and the switch to a criminal investigation, of which I wrote at the time

"It's about Trump, and the idée fixe of Trump's increasing paranoia: that he must get to his enemies by using their weapons, of saying "bad things" and getting "dirt". Investigate them all! Lock them up! And its failure so far, which has been accelerating in recent weeks, as Barr's meta-investigation falls apart. "

• the pressure on inspector general Horowitz to come up with the stuff in April 2020, with a nod to John Solomon's participation in the effort going back to August 2019

"My [i.e., Solomon's] reporting, including interviews with four dozen U.S. officials over the last several months, actually identifies a much larger collection of documents — about a dozen all together — that, when declassified, would show more completely how a routine counterintelligence probe was hijacked to turn the most awesome spy powers in America against a presidential nominee in what was essentially a political dirty trick orchestrated by Democrats"

• the use of Russian intelligence disinformation to hint at a bogus case against Hillary Clinton "to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service" in October 2020 (with a guest appearance by the big binder mentioned above, delivered by DNI John Ratcliffe to Barr's DOJ)

It's always seemed me that this was one big story, starring mad Trump as Captain Ahab after the white whale of the FBI, and all Trump's henchmen from Solomon and Patel back to Bully Barr as the Pequod's doomed crew (Cassie Hutchinson is Ishmael, alone escaped to tell thee?), only it's not a ship but a criminal outfit. And now the news narrative is finally coalescing to my point, under Jack Smith's guidance. I think there could be a lot of indictments, though sadly not of Barr and Durham, who are in some ways the most reprehensible of all (committing some of the exact same crimes of which they falsely allowed Hillary Clinton, together with Comey, McCabe, Mueller, and others, to be accused), and it's looking as if I've had pretty good instincts on this up to now.

Point of Personal Privilege

 

"Photo op raid"—I can't tell whether they've really forgotten that the FBI's seizure of the stolen materials at Mar-a-Lago was carried out with the usual FBI discretion, and the reason we learned about it was Trump's immediate howls of preemptive rage; it was his publicity, not theirs. Or that they released the photo (documenting the proceedings with photos is part of their standard procedure) in self-defense, against the Republican insistence that Trump's theft of presidential documents was nothing but eccentric billionaire souvenir collecting, showing that, no, some of these documents were definitely not souvenirs, through media like TMZ.

Literary Corner: Wild Spewing

 

Jean Tinguely, 1970, Débricollage. Tate Gallery, London.

PEACEFULLY & PATRIOTICALLY

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

They say that the Unselect Committee of Democrats, Misfits, and Thugs,
without any representation from Republicans in good standing,
is getting ready to recommend Criminal Charges
to the highly partisan, political, and Corrupt ‘Justice’ Department
for the ‘PEACEFULLY & PATRIOTICLY’ speech I made on January 6th
This speech and my actions were mild & loving,
especially when compared to Democrats wild spewing of HATE.
Why didn’t they investigate massive Election Fraud
or send in the Troops? SCAM!

OK, in the first place, as the Select Committee made plain, the "PEACEFULLY & PATRIOTICLY" speech is the least of it. 

The Capitol insurrection goes back to weeks earlier and all the tweets Trump sent starting December 19: 

Literary Corner: Meat Mountain

 

Revelation

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

So, with the revelation
of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD
& DECEPTION in working closely
with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, 
& the Democrat Party, do you throw
the Presidential Election Results of 2020
OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or
do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud
of this type and magnitude allows for the
termination of all rules, regulations, and articles,
even those found in the Constitution. Our great
"Founders" did not want, and would not condone,
False & Fraudulent Elections!

Sir, this is an Arby's, and today's Meat Mountain is penis.

Namely, the prodigal penis of presidents' progeny (sing it in rolling hexameters, Muse, and lubriciously!), of which somebody (I assume connected with Rudy Giuliani) posted a photo on Twitter during the 2020 presidential campaign. Intrepid journalist Matt Taibbi has discovered (actually no, he didn't discover anything; the assignment editor, Mr. Musk, gave him the relevant documents) that the Biden campaign asked Twitter to pull the picture, and Twitter obliged, after some earnest in-house debate, on the grounds that Twitter rules forbid the publication of hacked material, which seems like as good a reason as any.

Apparently Retired Emperor Trump believes this was the decisive moment of the whole campaign—deprived of a chance to look at that cockshot, America's voters, or at least the Twitter users, lost their ability to make a decision and stumbled blindly into voting for Biden instead, with the deplorable results we all know (I see he's slipped back into admitting he didn't get as many votes as Biden, that's nice). That's the massive and widespread fraud and deception we're talking about, the collusion between Democrats and Big Tech, violating Giuliani's freedom of speech, invalidating the whole election, and abrogating the Constitution. 

And apparently Taibbi and his assignment editor, Mr. Musk, believe it too, though they don't seem to offer any clear ideas on who would throw out the 2020 election and reinstall Trump in the White House—former Vice President Pence? General Mike Flynn? Maybe the House can elect Trump Speaker in January and then Biden and Harris can resign so Trump becomes president automatically. I'm sure everybody will agree with that, and Biden owes it to us, since it's all his fault. It's what the "Founders" would want, scare quotes and all. Biden's always talking about unifying the country, why doesn't he do something?

Narratology: The Former President is Rubber and the Rest of Us Are Glue

 

Jordan writes in comments, in response to some material I won't repost here that I was saving for a sequel to the "Minions" post:

Apologies for being thick-headed but I just want to make sure I get this. You're saying

1) Trump has his narcissistic injury of believing that the "deep state" (or whatever Nixonian fantasy he has of the forces aligned against him) wanted to prevent his election by inventing "Russia, Russia, Russia";

2) The main goal of his first term therefore was to vanquish and punish his enemies; to "win" (beyond merely getting elected anyway; to really show everyone);

3) To this end he directed investigations into the FBI and Congress;

4) Upon leaving office he took the documents — the evidence of his investigation into his enemies' investigation — because (and here's where I get confused):

4a) Trump believed the documents did exonerate him (they proved that "Russia, Russia, Russia" was a hoax and a vendetta);

4b) Trump believed the documents did not exonerate him;

4c) Trump started with #4a and switched to #4b (or the other way around) so that, like Lindell, the material that he first believed he was empowered by — that would let him "win" — was revealed as material that would sink him;

4d) Some alternative combination of elements that is less rational;

5) So now, he has no choice but to keep stonewalling while helplessly watching the walls close in, retreating into the feral stance he gets into when he's really cornered (the stance from which he orders his followers to get violent).

Is this basically it? If so, there's still the deeper mystery of why Trump believes that "Russia, Russia, Russia" is a hoax — if he does in fact "believe" this — or if it's more that he knows he did it all, committed all the crimes, but so does everyone on the international stage, so his being singled out (merely because he was running for President) was nevertheless a vendetta...meaning, like a mafioso, he knows he's guilty but still believes that those investigating him are being unfair. Right?

Close. I think you're making it a lot more complicated than necessary. Let me take it starting from where you finish:

Literary Corner: Make a Federal Case of It

 

Matthew Broderick as Professor Harold Hill tries out The Think System.

NY vs. Trump and his spawn and their businesses seems to me to have pretty much everything I could have wanted: over 200 specific acts of fraud committed in the valuations of Trump properties for his annual financial statements between 2011 and 2021 (yes, including during the presidency), generally in order to get better credit terms, some of them just spectacularly off, the demand for $250 million in damages, plus wiping all their New York businesses—should the state win its case, Trumps will be forbidden to operate a business in the state for the next five years—and federal criminal referrals in New York's Southern District and the Internal Revenue Service.

That last especially cheers me, because the publicity over the past year or so has been so dominated by Trump's overvaluing his properties to get loans, and hardly anybody has been talking about how he undervalues them in order to cheat on his taxes. But it turns out AG Letitia James wasn't ignoring it at all; in fact she was making a federal case of it, which is what it's supposed to be. Whether IRS is going to prosecute them or not (he's been fighting them for something like the past 12 years to stop them from collecting a $70-million refund he didn't deserve) I don't know, but the case needs to be out there.

Meanwhile, in another federal case, I'm intrigued by the lyricism and haunting ambiguity of Trump's answer to a a TV question from Sean Hannity ("What was your process to declassify?"):

Shamelessness Is Their Superpower

In which the old Emperor shows more of a sense of shame than you'll ever see from Chris Christie, or Marquito Rubio, or the entire Roberts court.

Didn't everybody see this coming if RvW was overturned? I mean, I know a lot of people thought it would never happen -- Wrong! -- but the consensus was that it would be an electoral disaster.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) September 12, 2022

Kilgore in July https://t.co/Yf3bUBqvEs to Bump last week https://t.co/yyBSsS9CuJ chanting "don't get your hopes up"

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 12, 2022

Narratology: Twelve More Boxes

Emptywheel's got a convenient list of documents the FBI might have been seeking in Palm Beach:

• The transcript of the “perfect phone call” with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other documents pertaining to his first impeachment
• Notes on his meetings with other foreign leaders, especially Vladimir Putin and Saudi royals, including Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki
• Information surrounding the Jamal Khashoggi execution (and other materials that make Jared Kushner’s current ties to Mohammed bin Salman suspect)
• Policy discussions surrounding Qatar, which tie to other influence peddling investigations (for which Barrack asked specifically)
• Intelligence reports on Russian influence operations
• Details pertaining to security efforts in the lead-up to and during January 6
• Intelligence reports adjacent to Trump’s false claims of election fraud (for example, pertaining to Venezuelan spying)
• Highly sensitive NSA documents pertaining to a specific foreign country that Mike Ellis was trying to hoard as boxes were being packed in January 2021

I wouldn't have been able to do such a good job, but I'm embarrassed I didn't try to do it at all. It brings into excellent focus an idea that has been trying to worm itself through my brain since last May or so—that the "highly classified" material concealed in the basement storage room at Mar-a-Lago includes direct evidence of Trump committing crimes, like above all the records—memcons—of those Trump-Putin phone calls, of which Politico wrote, back in February 2021,

Memcons, including Trump’s calls with Putin, are considered presidential records, and were not expunged before the 45th president left office, one former Trump White House official said. They were transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration at the end of Trump’s term, as is customary.

“Of course we didn’t delete anything and they would be in NARA and accessible,” the official said.

Except, as we know now, stuff that the archivists were expecting to find turned out not to be in NARA and accessible at all, which is how it was discovered that Trump had stolen it and was keeping it in Florida.

Literary Corner: Tragic Event

 

A Tragic Event

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

I think they had
a tragic event
in Buffalo.

Tragic event
in Buffalo with
numerous people being killed.

In 18 months in Afghanistan,
we lost nobody.

No, agreed, it's not funny.

I might as well note that, if he's really trying to brag about how he managed the US war against Afghanistan better than President Biden is managing the race war Trump is busy fomenting in New York State and elsewhere in the US, it wouldn't be true at all. The Trump administration was prosecuting a was in Afghanistan for all 48 months. Though the toll of dead American military was greatly reduced for its last 11 months, after the administration negotiated the surrender to the Taliban in February 2020 (leaving the Biden administration to carry the surrender terms out in August 2021, when the Taliban were unable to prevent their Qa'eda enemies from killing another 13 American soldiers), and included no further combat deaths, but I have no idea what "18 months" he would be talking about.

Via Wikipedia.

While the last year of stochastic terrorism on US soil under the Trump administration included 22 murders:

• Of the 7,750 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against persons in 2020, 53.1% were for intimidation, 27.9% were for simple assault, and 17.9% were for aggravated assault. Twenty-two (22) murders and 21 rapes were reported as hate crimes. The remaining 32 hate crime offenses were reported in the category of other.
• Of the 3,147 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against property, most (74.1%) were acts of destruction/damage/vandalism. Robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, arson, and other offenses accounted for the remaining 25.9% of crimes against property.

That's following up on the 51 hate crime murders reported in 2019, including the killing of 22 in an El Paso Walmart in February in "response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas" (an imaginary invasion that was a big element of Trump's 2016 election campaign). 

Official statistics aren't out yet for 2021, but my impression is in spite of the horrific spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans and African Americans, there really have been fewer fatalities since President Biden took office (eight deaths last year from the Atlanta serial killer who claimed to be driven not by hate but by "sex addiction", three awful murders of women in New York City this year so far before Saturday's white nationalist massacre of 10 in Buffalo). It's idiotic trying to keep score anyway (remembering the times Norway and New Zealand jumped to the top of the world list), but I can't seem to help myself, sorry.

DOING SOMETHING

 

Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. Not just because he and Mrs. Meadows seem to be inveterate committers of voter fraud, or his text conversations with Mrs. Virginia Thomas, but especially because he was clearly one of the people using one of those burner phones during the seven hours when the official White House phone logs went dark on January 6. Photo by Patrick Semansky/AP via NPR (which has the voter fraud story if you need a link for that).

Redhand writes,

the failure fault line runs directly through Merrick Garland's office. It's hard not to feel despair when the chief individual charged with combating criminality threatening our own Government lacks the courage to do his job. I believe the news that Justice Dept. expands Jan. 6 probe to look at rally prep, financing about as much as I do the Putin regime's claims that they are curtailing military activities around Kiev.

Actually, for me, that's one of the few bright and hopeful spots, and that WaPo story is one of the reasons, though I think they got the story wrong when they suggested that the development (subpoenas to White House officials who contributed to planning the January 6 rally) is some kind of new and surprising development. Especially because I predicted it a couple of months ago, around the time of the arrest of Stewart Rhodes and the other Oath Keeper defendants.

That's when I learned that there was a special grand jury working all the January 6 cases, methodically working its way up the chain up from Viking Boy in the Wagnerian headdress to somebody senior enough that he didn't enter the Capitol himself but rather directed it, by phone, from outside.

Literary Corner: Potato-in-Chief

Convinced Putin gave Trump this present just to force him to be photographed grasping an object with both hands, which always makes him look like somebody who has trouble using two hands at a time. Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images via NPR.

The brethren are pretty flummoxed by the Retired Emperor coming out to tell everybody, in an interview with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton (surely that's a bluegrass duo) about how "smart" and "savvy" it is of President Putin to go through with this invasion of territory he already controls and what a "genius" he is, making him sound like the bought-and-paid-for Russian asset we've been telling you he is for the past six years.

Of course that's unpossible! There must be some other explanation, of which my current favorite is the view that Trump's peculiar enthusiasms are irrelevant, since they had no effect on his foreign policy, which he had nothing to do with:

This view of Trump's "toughness" with Russia is identical to the one Trump's clowns kept putting out for four years. The focus of the White House was in fact to find every possible way of avoiding Congressionally mandated sanctions https://t.co/oEHXLlza0n https://t.co/oEHXLlza0n

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) February 23, 2022

Squirreled

Squirrel stash, North Dakota, September 2021. Photo by Bill Fischer/Facebook via Driving.

This crazy story by Roger Sollenberger in Daily Beast about one of the organs of the Trump fundraising machine goes back to early August, but it didn't seem to have any legs, and Sollenberger is now trying to push it on Twitter, which seems a little pathetic, but hear me out:

America First Policies, a nonprofit which does not have to disclose its donors, was the core of a pro-Trump dark money network, with an organizational scheme that seems confusing by design....

According to IRS records first obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, America First Policies filed to change its name to America First Works in October. But on Friday, a spokesperson for America First Works told The Daily Beast it wasn’t a name change—America First Policies had been “sold” to America First Works “in a private deal” earlier this year, he said.

For the Record: Apotheosis

 

I can't seem to find anything about the source of this image, but I can't let it go.

Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen

 

Former U.S. president Donald Trump launches 'TRUTH' social media platform

Says some of the more measured coverage, from Reuters. Well, not exactly. Actually, it's that he will launch it, as soon as the company that's going to create it exists, after the finalization of a merger between the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) and a company called Digital World Acquisition Corp, a "special acquisition company", the singular purpose of which is to buy TMTG for $293 million and list it on NASDAQ. Unless some shareholder in the acquisition company, run by former investment banker Patrick Orlando decides to take their shares back, and Orlando's track record in setting up special acquisition companies or SPACS is not a long or hope-inspiring one:

Orlando, who has worked at Deutsche Bank and BT Capital Markets, has launched at least four SPACs and has plans for two more, according to his firm's website and regulatory filings.

But none of the SPACs have completed a deal yet. A China-based SPAC that Orlando led failed last month to complete a merger with Giga Energy Inc that would have valued the transportation solutions provider at $7.3 billion, because it could not deliver the cash required, according to regulatory filings.

My bold. Also, TMTG, or as Trump Jr. called it yesterday in a Fox News interview,

For the Record: A Very Sad Thing, supplement

 

Chris Cillizza, CNN opinionist, covered the Trump interview with Hugh Hewitt that we dealt with as a Literary Corner piece. He covered more of the story than I did, but did a shockingly bad job of it:

Cillizza is baffled in part because he's an idiot who doesn't do his homework. For example, the story of the Trump-Baradar phone call isn't news; it was well reported at the time, first by the Taliban, then State Department, then Trump himself. https://t.co/bWuvaLRkqF

— Wiggles of Weimar (@Yastreblyansky) August 28, 2021