Hit By the Shrapnel

Zaphod: Could be. I’m a pretty dangerous dude when I’m cornered.
Ford: Yeah. You go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel.
-- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams

donald trump gave a speech to the nation last night.

Well, not so much a speech as it was a full-tilt rant by an aging, rapacious, gaslighting freak.

I didn't watch it - I cannot handle that whining voice of his - but there were others who sacrificed their time and their brain cells to document the atrocity. And what they have to report is that it was a total disaster for a panicking and desperate trump (via Tom Sullivan at Digby's Hullabaloo): 

Criminal, murderous, and far less intelligent than Hans, the president of the United States Wednesday night delivered a jaw-dropping, ideological speech most notable for the red-alert pace of it. I haven’t spoken that fast since my first grade-school book report...

“Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” Trump began. Nevertheless, whatever economic stress you feel, whatever grocery store sticker shock you experience, he didn’t do it, nobody saw him do it, you can’t prove anything.

America under Joe Biden, was “laughed at from all over the world. But they’re not laughing anymore,” Trump said, reprising one of his 40-year-old greatest-hit complaints. The world in fact “alternates between laughing and crying. Neither in a good way,” responded Ron Filipkowski.

“At times he seemed to be yelling,” reports The New York Times, “almost as if he didn’t believe he had to take the time to convince his audience of how well his first 11 months had gone.” The speech “included a long list of exaggerations and misleading statements” and no mention of consumers’ affordability concerns Trump has described as a Democratic “con job...”

It was a Gish gallop of lies that CNN’s Ana Navarro described as the “wah, wah, wah” teacher voice from Charlie Brown cartoons. CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, no stranger to rapid-fire debunking, had a go at Trump’s fictions and too little airtime to touch on them all...

Sullivan also gave a quick quote from Tom Nichols over at the Atlantic, but we need to read more of what Nichols observed:

The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.

When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address. He was clearly working from a prepared text, but it sounded like one he’d written—or dictated angrily—himself, because it was full of bizarre howlers that even Trump’s second-rate speech-writing shop would probably have avoided, such as his assertion that inflation when he took office was the worst it had been in 48 years... He read the speech quickly, his voice rising in frustration as he hurled one lie after another into the camera.

We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns? Shut up, you fools, the economy is doing fine. (And if it isn’t, it’s not his fault—it’s Joe Biden’s.) Foreign-policy jitters? Zip it, you wimps, America is strong and respected.

In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy.

There were concerns - rumors among the Far Right media types - that trump was going to use this speech to declare open war on Venezuela, as a follow-up to his orders to blockade and seize any more oil tankers. Instead, trump spent the speech rehashing old grievances, demanding our fealty and fear, and posing himself as a strong bully instead of a desperate crook drenching in flop sweat.

trump may be panicking over the current poll numbers that have him sinking to historic lows, especially on economic issues that can doom a party's midterm chances. he may be panicking over the reality that the congressional order to release a trove of Epstein documents - that can expose even more unsettling scandals tying trump to a known child sex trafficker - is due to happen this Friday. trump may be panicking over the reality that his unpopular tariffs could well be overturned by a Supreme Court who will bend to the needs of the corporations over that of trump's fantasies.

We could also be witnessing the mental breakdown of an unwell, aging, dementia-addled sociopath who needs to feel powerful and in control of everything around him, even though he's not.

The more trump panics, the more likely he's going to lash out in painful and dangerous ways.

Stay safe, people. We are going to deal with even nastier shit from this administration soon.