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 🥴🥴🥴

[image or embed]

— 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. 

Third Thoughts: Narratology

I hope I'm not getting repetitive here, but it's driving me nuts the way the journalists keep losing the thread and getting themselves manipulated from a significant development

The potentially incendiary whistleblower complaint that reportedly involves President Trump, also at least partially centers on Ukraine, the Washington Post and the New York Times reported Thursday evening.

While the contents of the complaint are still largely shrouded in mystery, multiple reports indicate that the complaint focuses on President Trump and an apparent “promise” he made during a phone call with a foreign leader. (Nicole Lafond/TPM; my bold)

to a completely unwarranted formulation

The DNI whistleblower case Josh has been tracking blew up Thursday night, as Giuliani gave an interview on CNN during which he admitted that he asked Ukrainian officials to look into Biden before quickly denying that he ever said such a thing. This bombshell comes amidst news that Trump made a promise to the Ukrainian president so alarming that it triggered the whistleblower’s complaint. (TPM staff; their bold)

There is no witness claiming that Volodymyr Zelensky is the foreign leader to whom Trump "made a promise". To the extent that anything about this story is true, and I suppose a lot of it is, that doesn't even make any sense.

What we know about the Giuliani strand is that

A Second Thought

Photo by George Marks/Retrofile/Getty Images via Vanity Fair.

Re yesterday's post. Not my thought, but that of some Twitter persons, which I can elaborate:

And then Sept 12, after Schiff asked for the whistleblower report, the aid to Ukraine was unfrozen by the White House.https://t.co/1n7tUeGaj0

— KC Murphy 🍑 (@klcmurphy) September 19, 2019

The Trump-Putin mystery call was 31 July. It was almost a month later, 28 August, that Politico reported the White House "seriously thinking" about refusing to renew its military aid program to Ukraine, which expires at the end of September, just after Trump's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weekend with the G7 in Biarritz:

A Thought

Photo by Grigory Dukor/Reuters via Al Jazeera.

What did Trump say to a foreign leader on the phone to a "foreign leader" a couple of months or so ago that

included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Well, our source, the Washington Post, takes us through a list of Trump's contacts with foreign leaders in the weeks before the complaint was filed on 12 August that includes exactly one phone call:

Maybe he wasn't committing treason on TV, but that doesn't mean he's not being vile

Updated below: There's a lot wrong with this post, too much to fix by editing.

Harry Langdon in Mack Sennett's Picking Peaches (1924). Via.

So Donald Trump is publicly inviting Russian intelligence to hack the computer files of the former secretary of state:

Donald J. Trump said Wednesday that he hoped Russia had hacked Hillary Clinton’s email, essentially encouraging an adversarial foreign power to cyberspy on a secretary of state’s correspondence.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said, staring directly into the cameras during a news conference. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Which sounds remarkably like what we usually refer to as treason. I want to argue that what he's really doing isn't so much treason as a classic McCarthy trick, sneaking a very nasty lie into the discussion by packing it into his presuppositions, where it can poison our minds without being noticed, in seeding the conversation with the story of those "30,000 emails that are missing".

Because they AREN'T MISSING, and haven't been missing, certainly not since FBI INVESTIGATORS RECOVERED THEM ALL LAST SEPTEMBER after Clinton turned the equipment over to the agency in August.  And there aren't 30,000 of them, but actually two or three thousand, together with some mails from Huma Abedin. Now the investigation is finished, and they're being sent in batches to the State Department, which is processing them for release to the public, starting last Thursday.

Of course there are surrogates out to say he's merely joking: