Blood and Ash the Price We Will All Pay For This

Again, I woke up to war this year. This started around 2:14 AM EST (via Amir-Hussein Radjy at AP News):

Two residents reported hearing the sounds of strikes echoing across the capital. A resident in the area of Mehrabad airport reported the sounds of “two heavy explosions” shaking windows just over half an hour ago. In central Tehran near Vanak, another resident reported the sounds of “blasts and war” coming at almost the same moment.

The more comprehensive AP report by Brian Melley:

The U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday in a massive operation that President Donald Trump said killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei while targeting military capabilities and aiming to eliminate the threat of Tehran creating a nuclear weapon.

There was no comment on Khamenei by Tehran, while Trump urged Iranians to seize the moment and “take over.”

In counterattacks, Iran fired drones and missiles at Israel and aimed strikes at U.S. military installations in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar. Exchanges of fire continued into the night. Iranian state media, citing the Red Crescent, on Saturday evening said at least 201 people had been killed and more than 700 injured.

Iran has also been attacking civilian targets in Dubai and other parts of the Arabian Middle East. Iran is threatening to blockade the Strait of Hormuz if they haven't started already, something that can easily cut off a massive amount of oil needed for global energy needs, spiking gas prices here in the U.S. as well as other nations.

At the moment, it doesn't look like trump and his gung-ho war buddies are going to commit any troops to a ground invasion, contenting themselves with a massive bombing campaign alongside Israel to perform "decapitation strikes" to destabilize the regime. Essentially the same thing trump ordered when using the military to capture Venezuela's president a month ago.

Thing is, any serious attempt at regime change is going to NEED boots on the ground and an occupying force to rebuild things. trump may have captured Maduro but all that did was promote Venezuela's Vice President to the top job. If the US bombing did succeed in killing Khamenei - who was 86 and dying anyway - all we've done right now is promote another cleric to the Ayatollah job and that person is hiding in the deepest basement he can find.

And even then, our nation's track record at nation-building after war and occupation hasn't been all that great post World War II. We tried in Afghanistan and failed (trump made sure of that). We tried in Iraq and failed (lying us into war over fake WMDs made sure of that). The biggest - the most horrifying - argument in the halls of power in DC over trump's campaign against Iran is how there's no real plan involved. Tom Nichols at the Atlantic spells out the hazards:

To think about the possible courses of this war, we should start by clearly understanding three realities: First, Iran is a terrible regime that deserves to fall. The regime recently murdered thousands of its own citizens who were seeking freedom from their oppressive rule, and no one should be shedding tears for the mullahs hiding in their bunkers.

Second, “success” is not impossible—if by “success” we mean the fall of the ayatollahs and the rise of a better, more humane, pro-Western government that does not seek to destabilize the Middle East; dominate Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen; and eradicate Israel. But the path to that success is exceedingly narrow and mined with significant hazards. Destroying the regime’s capabilities is relatively easy, but nothing permanent—as Americans learned in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is achieved by bouncing rubble and piling up bodies. Destroying the regime itself is a far trickier business; dictatorships have a high pain tolerance, especially when the hapless citizens, not the leaders, bear the brunt of that pain.

Third, the president has not offered a strategy, or identified any conditions that would signal that U.S. goals have been achieved. Yes, he has vowed to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, but beyond that, he seems to be arguing for just inflicting military damage on the regime, on the assumption that enough ordnance on enough targets will weaken the grip of the ayatollahs. Once the theocrats are on the ropes, the thinking seems to go, the people of Iran will finish the job of regime change for us...

America twice had its hands full in Iraq, a nation of 37 million, even with the assistance of several countries. The U.S., France, and Britain managed to subdue tiny Libya, a nation of 7.5 million, and left its dictator to be raped and beaten in the streets. This time, conditions are different and more challenging: The target is two and a half times the size of Iraq, America has exactly one openly declared ally in this enterprise, no serious armed rebel force exists in Iran, and no coalition of nations is assembling to march into Tehran...

In short, the United States and Israel - both driven by neocon fantasies of purging the Middle East in blood and fire - are doubling down on the chaos thinking a shinier better world will emerge. That we will be - yet again - "greeted as liberators" even though we're destroying the village nation in order to save it us. This is in spite of the evidence that we're going in mostly alone, going into a territory and terrain far harsher than we've dealt with before, and with no real clue where the exit doors are when it's time to flee for our lives.

All of these problems were ones I'd pointed out back in 2019, during trump's first reign of error, when it was clear even then that going to war in Iran one way or another was a bad idea. Nothing had changed since then, except for trump's growing dementia, arrogance, and desperation to *win* at something to confirm his own self-worth at everyone else's expense.

Topping all of this is the fact trump's actions are illegal - he does not have authorization from Congress for this - and that we're already getting reports from Iran of high civilian casualties (aka war crimes). There is no other way to say this, America: WE are the bad guys here.

And GODDAMN every media pundit who proclaimed trump 'a dove' while defaming Hillary and Kamala as warmongers. You lied to yourselves as well as to the nation about who the real warmonger has been - and which party (hint, not the Democrats) has profited from these wars ever since 2001.

Without a clear agenda, without true and honest goals, without a sincere desire to do what is right for the poor suffering citizens of Iran - and the other lands that trump and his thugs would desecrate for their own greed and lust - this war that has begun poorly will end much worse, with more suffering and dismay than our own nation will be willing to bear.

Goddamn every one of you bastards who supported trump the last ten years, because the next ten years of blood and ash are the price we're all paying for your fear and rage. 

We Need To Admit What We're In Now

The anger remains potent even a day after ICE escalated the Republican War on America. (via Cheryl W. Thompson with NPR)

A man shot Saturday morning by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis has died, federal and local officials said.

The man was identified by state officials as Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and Minneapolis resident.

The incident marks the third shooting involving federal immigration agents in Minneapolis this month.

"Today, federal agents beat and then shot multiple times and killed 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a U.S. citizen, a Minneapolis resident, and a V.A. nurse," U.S. Sen. Tina Smith said in a news conference this afternoon. "Eyewitness video shows, once again, reckless, violent, and dangerous federal agents taking the life of a Minnesotan."

The anger stems from the near-immediate evidence from eyewitnesses and video recordings that Pretti wasn't even resisting the agents when they ganged up on him and shot him in the back (follow-up from Jennifer Ludden and Liz Baker with NPR):

Minnesota officials are pushing to ensure they can help investigate the shocking fatal shooting of 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti. After a late night court filing a federal judge granted them a temporary restraining order, ruling that no Homeland Security officer can destroy or alter evidence related to the death Saturday morning. Federal investigators have refused to allow access to the scene, despite the state obtaining a search warrant for public areas.

It's the second fatal shooting in Minneapolis by immigration agents this month, and once again Trump administration officials immediately defended the action as self-defense while blaming the victim — in this case claiming he was a "domestic terrorist" intending to "massacre" officers.

Multiple bystander videos and witness testimony contradict that. Pretti can be seen holding only a phone in his hand before at least six officers tackle him, pinning him face down on the ground and shooting him in the back, firing what sounds like 10 shots. One eyewitness said in a court document that Pretti was not even facing agents when they grabbed him. "It didn't look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help [a] woman up," they wrote.

Pretti was a U.S. citizen with no known criminal record. DHS says he was armed, and the city's police chief confirmed he had a lawful permit to carry. There has been no evidence that NPR has verified of Pretti brandishing his handgun at any time during the encounter with federal agents. One video appears to show an officer take away his gun just before another shoots him.

Even the so-called Second Amendment right to bear arms is meaningless against the Far Right culture war on everything America - civil rights, peace protests, protecting our communities and loved ones - ought to represent.

Even with trump's administration and every major figure in Homeland Security trying to demonize Pretti, they cannot lie their way out of this one. There's too much video evidence, and too many witnesses. And yet, they'll continue to lie and they'll continue to escalate the violence because this is what they want.

This is what decades - if not centuries when you consider this is all fallout from the first Civil War - of drum beating by the conservative wingnuts towards other Americans have led us to. Demonizing Blacks, demonizing women, demonizing Asians, demonizing gays and lesbians and trans, demonizing everyone not of "their" tribe. I keep saying this:

This Republican-pushed Culture War is one not based on facts: It is a war based on grievance of privileges lost (or about to lose), based on fear determined by racism and sexism towards ethnic minorities and women. It's a war based on fantasies derived from Atlas Shrugged and Turner Diaries, where "manly Christian men" rise up against emasculating Godless librul elites to destroy the corrupt world in order to build a new Utopia on the ashes of the old.

It's been going on since before Black Lives Matter, before Ferguson, before Obama's election triggered angry Whites, before the War on Terror, before Pat Buchanan's Culture War speech call to arms, before the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s pushed conservatism further into racist demagoguery. You can arguably trace all this rage and fear back to 1865 when the defeated Confederates refused to accept the freedom of Blacks and waged a terror campaign well through the Jim Crow Era. 

We can't hide from this fact anymore: We are at war.

We Americans are at war against each other, driven by racism, by fear, by ignorance, by the willingness of those corrupt powers in high places to turn our anxieties towards ourselves instead of them. The vast majority of Americans aren't like that, thankfully. But there are enough of them among the angry, the fear-driven, the ones who bought into the Far Right Narrative of "liberals are pinko commie traitors who aren't REAL Americans" to where violence in our own cities - not from protestors but from government thugs - is a given.

None of this needed to happen. Alas, it has. And now every American has to make the moral decision to stand with courage against the tyranny of trump and his lackeys... or let the violence drown us all.

Stay safe, America.

From Kingdom Come, illustrated by Alex Ross

This Was Horrifying the First Time

Update: thanks again to Steve in Manhattan for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Stay safe, everyone, and read up on how to wash out tear gas.

Back in the first term of the Darkest Timeline, we had a serious problem of trump's administration detaining entire families and separating the kids for maximum trauma. This was in 2018: 

Offensive above all is how - seemingly beginning under trump's misrule - the Border Patrol and ICE agents are intentionally splitting up families "in order to send a message". This message just happens to be "Hey, Mexico and Central America! The United States is now led by a group of rampaging assholes!"

'Cause only assholes would take a baby getting nursed by her mother.

The situation has gotten enough attention - especially after a reporter did a recent tour of a detention facility (converted from an empty Wal-Mart, how's THAT for symbolic?) - to where the DC Press Corps tried asking the White House Press Room about what was going on.

The answers they got? Shut up and don't question your government overlords...

And here we are deep into trump's second term as History's Greatest Monster, and he and his anti-immigrant allies like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem are back attacking families and children without any moral constraint. They have ICE and Border agents basically kidnapping children (via Sam Levin at the Guardian (US)):

Liam Ramos, a preschooler, and his father were taken into custody while in their driveway, the superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, said at a press conference on Wednesday. Liam, who had recently turned five, is one of four children in the school district who have been detained by federal immigration agents during the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in the region over the last two weeks, the district said.

Liam and his father had just arrived home when they were detained, according to Zena Stenvik, the superintendent, who said she drove to the home when she learned of the detentions.

When she arrived, Stenvik said the father’s car was still running and the father and son had already been apprehended. An agent had taken Liam out of the car, led the boy to his front door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in, “in order to see if anyone else was home – essentially using a five-year-old as bait”, the superintendent said in a statement.

Remember how trump and the Far Right described their anti-immigrant effort as "going after the bad hombres" like gangs and drug dealers and such? The truth of their anti-immigrant campaign is that they are going after families, working class people, those who came to this country legally and were following the rules to make new lives here.

The truth is that trump's racist regime is arresting five-year-olds. Does this child look like a ganger?

photo from Columbia Heights Public Schools
the school superintendent arrived at the scene and took the picture

And the agents tried to use the boy to bait more people to come out and get arrested by them. The sadists.

Stenvik said another adult living in the home was outside during the encounter and had pleaded to take care of Liam so the boy could avoid detention, but was denied. Liam’s older brother, a middle schooler, came home 20 minutes later to find his father and brother missing, Stenvik said. Two school principals from the district also arrived at the home to offer support.

Marc Prokosch, an attorney representing the family, said the family had an active asylum case and shared paperwork showing the father and son had arrived to the US at a port of entry, meaning an official crossing point.

“The family did everything they were supposed to in accordance with how the rules have been set out,” he said. “They did not come here illegally. They are not criminals.” He said there was no order of deportation against them and he believes the father and son have remained together in detention...

“Why detain a five-year-old? You cannot tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal,” Stenvik said.

It doesn't matter to Miller, Noem, trump, or anybody else eagerly volunteering to serve in the ICE brute squad. Liam Ramos, his father, and thousands of other migrants getting shipped off to detention camps are seen as criminals by the racist Far Right simply for existing.

And Liam isn't the only one. That Guardian article references a number of other children and teens getting grabbed and shipped off to god-knows-where. And even after the immediate outrage that Liam's "arrest" created, the ICE thugs doubled-down on their cruelty towards children (via Matt Lavietes with NBC News):

A 2-year-old girl and her father were taken by ICE on Thursday, according to a Minneapolis council member. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed it has detained the father, who was with a child at the time.

Elvis Joel Tipan-Echeverria and his 2-year-old daughter Chloe Renata Tipan Villacis were taken in south Minneapolis on their way home from the grocery store, Minneapolis City Council member Jason Chavez said on Instagram.

A spokesperson for DHS confirmed that Tipan-Echeverria was taken into custody and that he was driving with a child when he was stopped. The agency did not identify the child’s name, age or gender.

“A suspicious vehicle followed her father’s vehicle home, broke his window and kidnapped them,” Chavez wrote with the post. “No judicial warrant was provided.” In a brief interview with NBC News, he confirmed that they had been taken and added that he met with the father and daughter’s family on Thursday evening.

Why arrest a TWO YEAR OLD? Because they can. Because that two year old offends them just by being here. the Homeland Security spokespeople are claiming "no mother arrived to take care of the child" but the report suggests the mother wasn't even contacted. The agents didn't even try.

Never forget this fact with trump and his wingnut allies: The Cruelty Is the Point. The more vicious they can behave towards families and children, the more the wingnuts believe they can generate obedience through fear.

trump wants the round-up of families and children to continue. he WANTS violent confrontation with the groups in America - the ones defending not only the rights of immigrants but the rights of everyone - he despises to justify triggering the Insurrection Act and suspending all laws to his desire of being dictator. And the Republicans will back his play because - as their conservative ideology compels them - they want all the power for themselves.

As I was typing this, even more discouraging - and heartbreaking - news is coming out of Minneapolis. The downward spiral of state-sanctioned violence is getting worse.

Stay safe, people. But stand your ground as well. We cannot let these bastards win.

A Wounded Narcissist Leading Us to Ruin

If there's any solid evidence that the United States as a nation, as a global power, as a beacon of political stability is no more, the recent letter from donald trump to Norway's prime minister should be the big fucking clue we've finally gone over the cliffs (via Robbie Griffiths at NPR): 

President Trump says his controversial push for U.S. control of Greenland comes after he failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize last year, adding he no longer feels obliged to think only of peace.

In a message to Norway's prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre on Sunday night, Trump criticized the European country for not giving him the prize.

"Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America," Trump said in the message.

"The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland," Trump added. The message was reported by PBS NewsHour, and was later confirmed by Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre in a statement.

Gahr Støre said he received the message on Sunday in response to a text he and Finland's President Alexander Stubb had sent to Trump, in which they had conveyed opposition to Trump's proposed tariff increases on eight European countries over the recent Greenland dispute.

There are images floating around of a physical letter, but I fear they are mock-ups instead of the real thing so I'm not going to post it here. But given how too many reputable news outlets have verified the contents of that letter, we should expect the messaging is correct... and clear.

For all of trump's bluster that Greenland is necessary for America's national security, the truth is that trump wants Greenland to satisfy his own broken ego. The truth is that the current occupant of the White House - I refuse to identify him otherwise - is a bratty five-year-old throwing a tantrum and lashing out in anger towards everyone he feels has insulted him.

As Anne Applebaum clarifies at the Atlantic:

One could observe many things about this document. One is the childish grammar, including the strange capitalizations (“Complete and Total Control”). Another is the loose grasp of history. Donald Trump did not end eight wars. Greenland has been Danish territory for centuries. Its residents are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. There are many “written documents” establishing Danish sovereignty in Greenland, including some signed by the United States. In his second term, Trump has done nothing for NATO—an organization that the U.S. created and theoretically leads, and that has only ever been used in defense of American interests. If the European members of NATO have begun spending more on their own defense (budgets to which the U.S. never contributed), that’s because of the threat they feel from Russia.

Yet what matters isn’t the specific phrases, but the overall message: Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.

For the past year, American allies around the world have tried very hard to find a theory that explains Trump’s behavior. Isolationism, neo-imperialism, and patrimonialism are all words that have been thrown around. But in the end, the president himself defeats all attempts to describe a “Trump doctrine.” He is locked into a world of his own, determined to “win” every encounter, whether in an imaginary competition for the Nobel Peace Prize or a protest from the mother of small children objecting to his masked, armed paramilitary in Minneapolis. These contests matter more to him than any long-term strategy. And of course, the need to appear victorious matters much more than Americans’ prosperity and well-being...

This is nothing new, by the way. Any rational observer of trump's world-view since 2016 saw this kind of self-serving mania coming. I remember what Adam L. Silverman wrote back then, and how it applies now:

...More than that, however, is that the Trump Doctrine is really the animating force or theme of the entire Trump campaign. The other candidates had better treat Donald Trump fairly, the Republican National Committee better treat Donald Trump fairly, the Republican establishment better treat Donald Trump fairly, the media better treat Donald Trump fairly, the state level parties that handle the primaries and all the delegates chosen better treat Donald Trump fairly. And Donald Trump will make them treat him fairly! And the only candidate, nay the only person in America who can ensure that you are treated fairly is Donald Trump. And if he isn’t treated fairly or the US isn’t treated fairly, then he will get even...!

It's not that America gets treated fairly - by whatever measurement anyone would use - it's that TRUMP gets treated fairly. And trump's idea of fair treatment is "Give me everything you have and worship me like a god."

trump doesn't get a Nobel Peace Prize? he'll force the soccer organization FIFA to create a brand-new Peace Award in order to keep the planned 2026 World Cup in the U.S. going. Even if everyone else on the planet saw it as the ego-boosting it was and mocked the award. Try to get the actual award winner María Corina Machado to gift trump the physical award as though he won it? The Nobel committee will go public with the reminder that the Peace Prize once given cannot be traded away.

We've seen this ever since trump stormed the public stage back in the 1980s: Denied any public display of success, trump had / is / will lash out however he can.

And with the powers of the office at his disposal, lashing out is arguably the only sadistic enjoyment he can feel.

The problem with this kind of absolutist leadership - the sins of tyrants and mad kings - is that it alienates far too many allies our nation relies relied on to remain a superpower. trump and his handlers haven't really thought this through: trump's threats to tariff most of Europe can backlash with those nations pulling out their investments in US Bonds and other financial markers. We're seeing another drop in the value of the dollar. The calls to relocate the World Cup away from the United States are increasing.

Even if trump pulls back on the tariffs threat, if he does follow through on sending US armed forces to seize Greenland any time soon (gods help us, it might be this week depending on where these airborne troops go) it will not only trigger the collapse of NATO - which benefits only Putin - but also turn far too many nations against us at one time. The US had a hard enough time fighting a War on Terror on two fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Trigger this kind of war and we're counting at least eight nations - including the bordering Canada - cutting off our overseas bases, shutting down our logistic capabilities, and arguably going toe-to-toe on a battlefield in multiple locations.

The Far Right - and a lot of the Alpha Male wannabes in trump's world drooling at the fantasy of war - may think we have the world's greatest military and we can take all comers, but they're dragging the rest of the nation into a fight that most Americans - even other Republicans - don't want. Our military may be the best-trained, the best-supplied, the best period, but even we have limits on both manpower and resources. Fighting most of NATO - which may drag in Mexico and various South American nations already pissed at trump, and with the likelihood of our Asian allies like Japan and Philippines refusing to side with us - is not going to be easy.

Everything the United States did over the decades to rise to become a global superpower is getting demolished and firebombed into ash all because of one man's demented ego, this hollow man donald trump who struts upon the stage like an unsatisfied fool.

The only way this ends well is if someone in a position to do anything - a cowering Republican Congress, a military command structure wary of pulling a coup that would still harbinger an end to the constitutional order - steps up and forces trump to step down.

The odds of that happening are less than the odds that trump will drive us into a ruinous war.

Stay safe, everyone.

The Bully Circus

There was a time when Teddy Roosevelt declared the presidency as a kind of "bully pulpit," a means of preaching and advocating for issues that mattered. As Taegan Goddard notes at his Political Dictionary site:

The bully pulpit in Roosevelt’s mind wasn’t about pummeling legislators with presidential authority; rather, he believed the president could encourage the public to push their legislators on behalf of his agenda.

In these times, however, bullying means something darker. Under donald trump, the bullying is a means to treat people not in his circle of power with cruel, insulting, threatening, and aggressive actions.

trump's assaults on Venezuela - not only killing boat crews on dubious accusations, but also seizing oil tankers and running an illegal military operation to capture that nation's president - is but one example of the aggression trump wants to inflict on others.

Here at home, trump's pumped-up immigration police in ICE/Border Patrol under the aegis of "Homeland Security" are committing acts of violence and attempts at intimidation towards the cities of DC, Los Angeles, Portland OR, Chicago, and lately Minneapolis-St. Paul where the escalation has turned bloody (via Edith Olmsted at New Republic):

Following the news that Minnesota and the Twin Cities were suing to stop the Trump administration’s “Operation Metro Surge,” the president took to Truth Social to air his frustration with his besieged constituents.

“Do the people of Minnesota really want to live in a community in which there are thousands of already convicted murderers, drug dealers and addicts, rapists, violent released and escaped prisoners, dangerous people from foreign mental institutions and insane asylums, and other deadly criminals too dangerous to even mention,” Trump wrote. (note: trump is gaslighting again to fearmonger to his flock) 

He claimed that all the “patriots of ICE” wanted was to “remove” these individuals. But last week, the residents of Minneapolis saw something entirely different: an ICE agent senselessly killed a U.S. citizen, Renee Good, and was then defended by every level of government.

Good’s death sparked civil unrest in Minneapolis (and nationwide), as well as requests for federal immigration forces to take their leave. But the Trump administration has doubled down on its occupation, deploying roughly 1,000 more U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers.

Instead of toning down on the rhetoric - the agent who shot Good was caught on his own body cam calling her a "f-cking b-tch" - and violence towards our own communities, the government thugs are crowing and acting worse (from Ashley Vega at People (yes, they're covering this)):

A Minneapolis pastor said he was detained by ICE after heading toward protests near his church. Pastor Kenny Callaghan of All God’s Children MCC shared his account with Fox 9 Minneapolis, saying the encounter unfolded on the morning of Wednesday, Jan. 7.

Callaghan told the outlet he realized something was happening nearby when he heard whistles and car horns outside. He said he grabbed his own whistles and moved toward the commotion, only for the situation to escalate quickly.

He told Fox 9 he managed to take a few photos as the vehicle drove down Portland Avenue before pocketing his phone when he noticed agents surrounding a “brown-skinned woman.”

Callaghan said he joined in as a crowd chanted, “We are not afraid,” and tried to redirect attention toward himself, telling the agents to arrest him instead of the woman they were surrounding.

“Before I knew it, they were putting handcuffs on my arms and they asked me, ‘Are you afraid now?’ ” he recalled.

He said he answered, “No, I am not,” as agents continued detaining him. Callaghan told Fox 9 he was held in the SUV with two other detainees as agents returned multiple times to question him.

Callaghan said the message stayed the same during those check-ins, with agents repeatedly asking if he was afraid. He also said they asked for his ID and his phone while he remained in the back of the vehicle.

At one point, Callaghan said he asked whether he was under arrest and was left alone for a period of time afterward. He also told Fox 9 that an agent allegedly waved a gun in his face, and while fear flickered for a moment, it was quickly overtaken by outrage.

“And then they came back the last time and they said, ‘Are you afraid yet?’ ” he said. “And I said, ‘No.’”

Meanwhile, the ICE and Border thugs are firing tear gas canisters in nearly every crowd and sometimes right in people's faces.

This is what they want, what trump wants, what the Far Right has wanted for decades. They want the thrill and elation of making the rest of us terrified of them, of their authority and their potential for violence.

trump wants the violence to escalate: it will justify any plans he has of suspending the Constitution under "emergency powers" and make himself Dear Leader For Life. While the protesters will do everything proper and avoid conflict whenever possible, expect the armed and body-armored ICE gangs to reenact the worst of police violence that would make Chicago 1968 seem like a block party.

And this all happening here in the U.S. Outside our borders, trump is busy waving his big stick towards Iran (again), Syria, Cuba, and worst of all Denmark in a brazen attempt to seize Greenland from one of our NATO allies. If we do invade Greenland, it would break that alliance and drive Europe - already coping with a belligerent and desperate Russia - into chaos.

Instead of a bully pulpit, what we have is a bully circus. trump and his Far Right allies are running amok behaving like Alpha Male Wannabes, mistaking arrogance for leadership and violence for success. The problem is they don't show any genuine thought or planning into what they're actually doing. They kidnaped Maduro from Venezuela from the looks of things thinking it would immediately collapse that government. Instead, Maduro's party promoted his veep Delcy Rodríguez into acting presidency leaving trump on the outside threatening more attacks and demanding she bend to his will.

If trump thinks there won't be any consequences if he sends an invasion force into Greenland, he's ignoring the reality that the end of NATO would end our military presence across most of Europe: Our extensive overseas base network is a major reason why our logistics and military effectiveness is the best in the world, and if that goes so too goes our military dominance.

Instead of projecting themselves as Alpha Males, trump and his lackeys are posing as clowns... albeit clowns armed with assault weapons, flashbang grenades, and long-range missiles that can ruin anybody's day.

The world tonight is a circus of fear, stained with the blood of innocent lives and propped up by the violent fantasies of an aging, addled narcissist. 

Stay safe, America. Stay safe, people of Venezuela and Greenland and Iran and everywhere else trump is bullying us all.

Waking Up to A War

trump just dialed up international outrage to 11 during last night (via Carrie Kahn and Scott Neuman at NPR): 

President Trump claimed overnight that the United States carried out airstrikes in Venezuela and "captured" President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, following a series of explosions and fires reported around Caracas in the early hours of the morning.

In a post on Truth Social published early Saturday morning, Trump said the U.S. had "successfully carried out a large-scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro," adding that Maduro and his wife had been "captured" and flown out of the country. Trump said the operation was conducted "in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement" and announced a news conference for 11 a.m. EST at Mar-a-Lago.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a post on X that Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, have been indicted in the Southern District of New York on drug, arms and conspiracy charges...

The Venezuelan government swiftly accused the U.S. of launching what it called a "grave military aggression" against the country. In a statement posted on Telegram, the government said U.S. forces targeted civilian and military locations in Caracas as well as in the nearby states of Miranda, Aragua, and La Guaira, calling the attacks a "flagrant violation" of the United Nations Charter.

On state television, Venezuela's Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said government and military officials had been killed by U.S. strikes across Venezuela. She added the government does not know the whereabouts of President Maduro and his wife and demanded proof of life...

Many Venezuelans have been sharing videos — which NPR has not independently verified — showing multiple explosions across the metropolitan area, including near a military base close to the presidential palace, Miraflores.

This is a major escalation from the ongoing bombing strikes of various civilian boats over the past months where trump and his administration were claiming - but couldn't prove - as drug smugglers operating out of Venezuela.

This is a direct attack on another nation's soil, going against any number of treaties with our allies in the region if not the whole world. It's a legal gray area at best, at worst it's a signal to other dictators and warmongers - like say China towards Taiwan - that it's open season on anybody they want to "arrest".

This is a violation of our own Constitution, which specifically set the power to declare acts of war - and the capture of "enemy combatants" - to Congress under Article I Section 8:  To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water.

This is, above all, causing greater tension between a belligerent United States and the rest of Central and South America that trump keeping bullying. Colombia's president Gustav Pedro had earlier accused trump and his thugs of illegal strikes on his nation's fishermen, and is calling for an emergency UN session now to bring international pressure against the United States. Brazil's president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is on record that this attack "crosses an unacceptable line" violating Venezuela's sovereignty.

This is also yet another black mark on the United States' long and troubled history of meddling, interfering, outright destroying the rights and protections of our southern neighbors ever since the Monroe Doctrine gave us an excuse to do all that. 

This is also something a majority of Americans didn't want. Politico back in December reported on a Quinnipiac poll showing 63 percent didn't want any military action even as trump's administration beat the war drums and bombed fishing boats (via Gregory Svirnovskiy):

Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to military action in Venezuela, according to a Quinnipiac poll published on Wednesday amid an escalation of U.S. pressure on President Nicolás Maduro.

Sixty-three percent of respondents told Quinnipiac they are against military action against Caracas, which President Donald Trump has repeatedly declined to rule out, with just 25 percent expressing support. And 53 percent of respondents said they opposed the administration’s use of military strikes to kill alleged drug smugglers in international waters...

Americans also expressed concern with the president’s expanded executive authority, with 54 percent saying he has gone too far in wielding the power of the presidency, 37 percent saying he is handling it about right and 7 percent saying he has not been aggressive enough. The results were split along partisan lines: 96 percent of Democrats and only 11 percent of Republicans reported concerns regarding the president’s power.

If trump and his Republican buddies think that sparking an unwanted war is going to make most Americans line up and accept all the flag-waving and patriotic fervor, they're wrong. If anything this will divide the nation further, and spiral the Far Right demagogues into further anti-Latino hatred.

There are several reasons trump is doing is, not of them good (or lawful). This is trump doubling down on a questionable - and self-destructive - War On Drugs that's been in operation since the 1970s and solving nothing about our nation's drug habits; This is trump demonizing Latinos as criminals to justify escalating a mass deportation scheme that the courts keep finding as inhumane and illegal; This is trump seeking personal gratification as a "great military leader" to salve his wounded ego.

There is no sign that trump or his pro-war allies on this - Hegseth, Rubio, Miller, other chickenhawks among the GOP elite - have really thought out the long-term ramifications of this, of the global chaos this act of war will unleash and make worse.

Gods help us. Seriously. I know I keep saying this, but this is NOT GOING TO END WELL.

Playing Calvinball, Uh trumpball, With Kilmar Abrego Garcia's Life

I hadn't been following up on this case from April, as the situation surrounding it was in flux and under serious legal review. But a major step happened last week when the judge overseeing the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia ordered the man released from custody as well as ripping into trump's corrupted Justice Department for blatant lies and stonewalling (via Edith Olmsted at the New Republic): 

In a 31-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis granted Abrego Garcia’s request to be released from ICE custody. In her ruling, she torched the prosecutors’ efforts to deport Abrego Garcia to Liberia, after they claimed they could not deport him to the country of his choice, Costa Rica.

“This time, when the Court sought information about Liberia and Costa Rica so to fairly assess the validity of Abrego Garcia’s claims, Respondents did not just stonewall. They affirmatively misled the tribunal,” Xinis wrote.

“They announced that Liberia is the only viable removal option because Costa Rica ‘does not wish to receive him,’ … and that Costa Rica will no longer ‘accept the transfer’ of him,” she wrote. “But Costa Rica had never wavered in its commitment to receive Abrego Garcia, just as Abrego Garcia never wavered in his commitment to resettle there.”

Costa Rican officials had previously put in writing that they had no intention to remove Abrego Garcia back to El Salvador once he was in their custody—while Liberia had made no such assurances. Xinis wrote that the government’s continued lies made clear that Abrego Garcia’s lengthy detention was not for the basic purpose of a timely removal to the third country.

Xinis saw what a lot of others saw: there wasn't much legal foundation to what trump and his lawyers were doing in the first place.

Xinis also found that there was never any order for Abrego Garcia’s removal in the first place. “Indeed, Respondents twice sponsored the testimony of ICE officials whose job it is to effectuate removal orders, and who candidly admitted to having never seen one for Abrego Garcia,” she wrote.

Instead, the government argued that the court should take an October 10 “withholding decision” as evidence that an original order existed—but Xinis didn’t buy it. “The October 10 withholding decision is unambiguously not an order of removal,” she wrote.

Continued detention without a removal order violates Abrego Garcia’s rights under the Immigration and Nationality Act, as well as due process.

Of course, given the bullying and vengeful mindset of trump and his entire administration, DOJ lawyers tried to pull a runaround to Xinis' ruling by manufacturing a last-minute "removal order" from an immigration judge as though it would supersede the original order six years ago (something even enraging Andrew C McCarthy over at the National Review (yeah, I know!)):

In a nutshell, after months of playing “hide the ball” (or is it, “hide the lack of a ball”?) about whether there exists an order of removal authorizing Abrego’s detention and deportation, the Trump Justice Department has attempted to cure the absence of an order by what appears to be a blatantly illegal process: To wit, without notice to Abrego, the DOJ went ex parte to a DOJ immigration judge who lacks jurisdiction over the case, but who nevertheless dutifully issued a “sua sponte order correcting scrivener’s error” order, under which everyone is now supposed to pretend — Abracadabra! — that there was an order of removal all along.

I'm not a lawyer but I know a couple of them via Ta-Nehisi's Horde. Every single one of them were screaming (Upper Case Text) in the chat channels "THAT'S NOT WHAT A SCRIVENER'S ERROR DOES!" Along with their utter disgust at how trump's people are idiots with the legal system. Meanwhile:

The entire labyrinthine Abrego litigation — featuring immigration removal actions, habeas corpus claims, and a criminal prosecution that have collectively burdened the DOJ’s immigration tribunals, the district courts of Maryland and Tennessee, the Fourth Circuit, and the Supreme Court — has been pursued by the Trump DOJ on the premise that there was an order of removal, that had been issued in 2019 conterminously with IJ Jones’s order of withholding of removal to El Salvador.

The assumption was that the order of removal authorized Abrego’s expulsion from the United States, and that the order of withholding of removal was just a caveat that Abrego, a Salvadoran, could not be repatriated to his native country. That caveat was in place because (a) Abrego had convinced Jones that he reasonably feared persecution in El Salvador, (b) the DOJ, in the first Trump administration, did not appeal that dubious ruling (it allowed Abrego to be released to live and work in Maryland), and (c) the current Trump DOJ did not (as far as is publicly known) attempt to get the caveat removed based on, among other things, changed conditions in El Salvador...

But as Judge Xinis found, no order of removal was ever issued. The court asked the government to produce it for months; prosecutors neither produced it nor provided a straightforward explanation for its absence from the record – to say nothing of an explanation why, in the absence of the order, they would suddenly arrest Abrego without notice six years after releasing him and then controversially send him to a notorious counterterrorism prison in El Salvador — the one country to which it was explicitly forbidden to deport him...

Yet, as Xinis concluded, if there is no order of removal, then the case Abrego filed against the government cannot properly be deemed a removal proceeding. Rather, it is a habeas proceeding – a challenge claiming that, in the absence of a removal order, the government’s detention and removal of Abrego are illegal. While Xinis would have no jurisdiction to act in a removal proceeding under immigration law, federal district courts do have jurisdiction over habeas and related claims...

To repeat what I argued Friday, that’s an offer (Garcia agreeing to deport to Costa Rica) the DOJ should have leapt at. It would have drawn the curtain on this sorry saga. Instead, the DOJ tried to use Abrego’s desire to go to Costa Rica as leverage in plea negotiations in connection with the dubious criminal prosecution the DOJ brought in Tennessee. The DOJ’s refusal was also vindictive: The Abrego case has been an embarrassment, so rather than accommodate the Costa Rica transfer and end it, Abrego was kept in custody while the administration unsuccessfully tried to arrange his removal to African countries – which didn’t want to take Abrego and to which he didn’t want to go.

In any event, once the DOJ lost the case on Thursday, when Xinis ordered Abrego’s release, Attorney General Bondi and her subordinates apparently decided it was futile to continue resisting a concession that there never was a removal order. But rather than just beginning a new removal proceeding — for which there is a basis since there is no doubt that Abrego entered the country illegally and never obtained lawful status — the DOJ opted for chicanery.

On Thursday evening, without giving notice to Abrego’s counsel, prosecutors went to the aforementioned IJ Phillip Taylor. At a little after 7 p.m., Taylor issued an “Order of the Immigration Judge” with the subheading “Immigration Court’s Sua Sponte Order Correcting Scrivener’s Error...”

Essentially, Taylor has tried to insert a previously absent order of removal into the 2019 document (the order of withholding of removal), label the prior absence a “scrivener’s error” (i.e., a mere clerical mistake of negligible substantive importance), and backdate the whole thing by six years (the “nunc pro tunc” provision, as if what was not there had been there all along.

Perhaps most hilarious is the assertion that this was done “sua sponte” (i.e., of the judge’s own accord). It’s as if IJ Taylor just happened to be sitting in his office on a Thursday evening, thinking about IJ Jones’s six-year-old orders (as I guess IJs are wont to do), and suddenly decided, on his own, to correct what seemed to him to be a clerical error — as opposed to being induced by Trump DOJ officials to make a substantive addition to an order, the absence of which had caused them to lose a high-profile case earlier in the day...

The following Friday, Xinis reinforced her order to release Abrego Garcia and warned the federal government to not arrest him under any pretense. One hopes that when hearings resume during the work week that Xinis shreds the Justice Department lawyers for this circus and starts issuing sanctions and contempt charges.

Out of all of the immigration battles being waged in the United States right now - the mass deportation roundups, the violations of civil rights committed by ICE and Border Patrol goons, the decimation of an honest migrant workforce that's contributing to a growing economic recession - this one person's legal fight is representative of trump and the Far Right's entire war. But it's a little bit more because of one thing: trump made this personal.

Out of the hundreds of Latino - and African, and Asian, and non-White - men - and women and children(!) - getting detained, trump himself seemed to focus on Abrego Garcia as his perfect poster child of "criminal gang-related" stuff he and his staff want to paint in broad strokes across that entire population. By late April as the case gained national attention - and warnings from legal experts that the Justice and Homeland departments were on thin ice with this one - trump went on a media offensive that was offensive (via Julia Conley at Common Dreams):

The White House’s public response on Friday to an image of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father who the Trump administration sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador last month, was to mock the migrant and the U.S. senator who successfully urged Salvadoran President Nayim Bukele to allow a visit with him—and critics said officials may come to regret that decision.

“I suspect this is going to show up in a variety of court pleadings,” said former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, who is now a law professor. “Whoever thought this was cute at the time may be less giddy when this becomes evidence of intent to disobey a court order...”

The story headline read, “Senator Meets With Wrongly Deported Maryland Man in El Salvador”—but the White House crossed out the word “wrongly,” replaced “Maryland Man” with “MS-13 Illegal Alien,” and scrawled, “who’s never coming back” on the article about the father and sheet metal worker.

The digital graffiti was shared with the White House’s 1.6 million followers even though, as software engineer and writer Lakshya Jain said, “the White House admitted in court that they deported the wrong guy.”

Journalist David Leavitt added that the White House had given a federal court “more evidence of contempt,” two days after Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. warned that there was “probable cause... to find the government in criminal contempt”—punishable by fines or prison time...

The administration has also flouted the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling last week that found the White House must facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. Officials have admitted he was sent to El Salvador due to an “administrative error.” Although officials including Vice President JD Vance have called him a “convicted” gang member and Bukele repeatedly called him a “terrorist” in the White House earlier this week, Abrego Garcia has not been convicted of any crimes...

trump even took the time on social media to display a photo - later proved manufactured - of Abrego Garcia's "tattoos" as proof he was a major MS-13 gang leader. The whole thing was fake (via Louis Jacobson at PolitiFact):

"This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such ‘a fine and innocent person,’" Trump’s post says. "They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles."

The figures M, S, 1 and 3 and the words below the symbols don’t appear in other photographs of Abrego Garcia’s hand, including the one taken by Salvadoran government officials (and shared on X by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele) when Abrego Garcia met with Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., on April 17.

We asked the White House whether "MS-13" is tattooed on Abrego Garcia’s hand or whether the photo had been altered, perhaps to show that each of the pictorial tattoos represented one of those letters or numbers. The White House did not respond to our inquiry.

Several gang crime experts urged caution about assuming that any of the tattoos provide proof of MS-13 ties. MS-13 experts said the tattoos’ iconography was unfamiliar, and that those symbols have common meanings in mainstream tattooing...

Marijuana leaves, crosses and skulls are widely used as tattoos by people who do not belong to gangs. Gang crime experts said they did not stand out to them as MS-13 markers.

"I don’t believe a ‘dangerous individual’ would have such anodyne and farcically generic tattoos on his hand," said Liliana Castañeda Rossmann, a California State University San Marcos emerita professor of communication and author of the book "Transcending Gangs: Latinas Story Their Experience."

Sean Kennedy, a former federal public defender in California and now a Loyola Law School professor, said that in his experience representing and interacting with current and former MS-13 members, "The tattoos in the photo don't look familiar to me."

This is a burden on Abrego Garcia, not that he's facing legal challenges and deportation, but that trump has targeted Abrego Garcia for his racist ire.

Always remember: trump never admits to being in the wrong, he never will admit he lost anything (a legal challenge, a fight, an election, etc). In that, trump will blame others, he will claim he really won but his victory was "stolen," he will claim "vindication" even as he's forced to pay his victims in legal settlements. trump can never lose, ergo everyone else must.

This means that trump will never admit he was wrong regarding Abrego Garcia's situation. trump will double down on the lies and gaslighting, and he will enforce his underlings to do the same. he will insist the Justice Department pursue "every avenue" - i.e. manufacture any evidence - to ensure this one man gets convicted as a gang member criminal.

trump's DOJ lawyers are going to play fast, loose, and false with the legal system to twist reality to fit trump's fantasies. But the legal system - for all its faults - doesn't work like that. trump's going to run out of lawyers to do his bidding before he will shatter the American judiciary against his will.

In the meantime, here's hoping Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his family can rest - even for a brief moment - in the middle of this chaos.

The Price of Arrogance Is the Blood of Others

"They're not confessing."
"They're bragging."
-- from The Big Short movie

Update: Many thanks to Steve in Manhattan for including this article at Crooks & Liars Mike's Blog Round-Up! I'd like to say Io Saturnalia but this is not a festive time is it. /rage

It's been reported earlier how our United States military is committing war crimes in the Caribbean by bombing civilian fishing boats claiming they're drug smuggling as part of trump's - and Hegseth's - desire to turn the War on Drugs into a hot war against half of Central and South America.

The horror of what they're doing came into sharper focus this weekend when the Washington Post picked up on how the decision-making into those boat strikes went, including the point where Hegseth pushed to "kill them all" including any survivors (via Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima, there is a paywall):

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.

What's at issue here are both the constitutional ideal of due process and the right of criminal suspects to face their charges in courts of law, and also the international laws protecting civilians from questionable military strikes. Summarily killing these boaters - and in spite of the analysts vibes, there's no viable proof they are smuggling drugs - increases the likelihood our nation is killing innocent people.

We're witnessing an escalation of war being pushed by unserious people obsessed - yet again - with body counts and the appearance of "rugged manly leadership". Hegseth and trump's behavior throughout this nightmare has gotten to the point where the partisan sides of the Senate are joining forces to condemn what's happening (via Jacob Wendler at Politico):

Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) — both of whom sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — said Sunday that, if accurate, such orders would rise to the level of war crimes.

“If that reporting is true, it’s a clear violation of the DOD’s own laws of war, as well as international laws about the way you treat people who are in that circumstance. And so this rises to the level of a war crime if it’s true,” Kaine said in an interview with CBS’ Nancy Cordes on “Face the Nation...”

Bipartisan leadership of the Armed Services Committees in both chambers vowed to probe the matter, with Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) promising “vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances” on Friday.

Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) told Cordes on Sunday that “if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that would be an illegal act,” and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said on ABC’s “This Week” that “if it was as if the article said, that is a violation of the law of war.”

All of this is happening because a Far Right Supreme Court gave their seal of approval to the Unitary Executive theory where presidents can wield extensive and unstoppable powers to do whatever they want. They've granted these powers to a bullying, gaslighting sociopath in trump who's allowing the sociopaths among his lackeys to indulge in acts of cruelty towards everyone they fear and hate.

The arrogance of Hegseth is how he views the entire idea of War: That rather than play by rules and regulations designed to reduce risk of civilian casualties and even loss of our own troops to reckless acts, Hegseth prefers to grant soldiers full license to use excessive force (meaning "kill 'em all" and declare victory).

Hegseth is the kind of person who wouldn't have seen the ethical conflict surrounding My Lai. The need to avoid more bloodshed in war is meaningless to him. The concept of maintaining order through soft power is alien to the likes of him. He wants a body count and he wants to revel in it.

Hegseth's desire to "strike fast, strike hard, kill them all" echoes in the trumpian agenda of inflicting that firepower on our own communities, be it hunting down immigrants or threatening "woke" cities with occupation while militarizing our police into thugs.

The cruelty remains the point. Not only as policy but as an attempt to keep themselves in power through brutality and lawless indulgence.

This arrogance will turn allies into enemies soon enough. And the downward spiral into violence will speed up some more.

Gods help us.

The Downward Spiral of an Unwell Mind

Update: Many thanks to Tengrain for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Stay safe this Thanksgiving season and remember to avoid turkey drops around the Cincinnati metro...

As a follow-up to the earlier observations about the overwhelming Blue Wave election cycle a few weeks back, there's been more stories in a number of Beltway Media outlets about donald trump's overall behavior since then.

None of it looks good. (via Elyse Wanshel at HuffPost)

On Thursday’s episode of Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker’s podcast, the comedians compared the president to his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, while discussing Trump’s cognitive state.

“You think he’s getting dementia?” McCusker asked his co-host Gillis about Trump.

“I mean, I don’t know. He just seems a little slower than usual,” Gillis responded. “There’s speculation that T-Dog might be rocking Biden brains,” McCusker added.

“He’s definitely not at Biden brains yet,” Gillis replied. “But he’s circling the drain...”

The comedians’ remarks about Trump were prompted amid a longer conversation regarding the president telling Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey to be “quiet, piggy” onboard Air Force One earlier this week. Trump said this to Lucey after she asked him a question about the Jeffrey Epstein files...

Regarding trump's insulting behavior last Friday, Rachel Leingang at The Guardian noted how the response outpaced the mainstream media's tepid underplaying of it:

It wasn’t the first time – not even the hundredth time – the US president has attacked the media. And it’s hard for any storyline to break through the administration’s “flood the zone” strategy, much less one like this. Nothing seems to stick. But the “quiet, piggy” clip has taken off, several days after the admonishment occurred on Air Force One last Friday, and without much help from the media itself...

Trump is going through a string of losses: Democrats dominating in off-year elections, having to reverse course on the Epstein files, Republicans refusing to get rid of the filibuster to end the shutdown, a faltering economy. There’s a possibility that he’s losing his air of impenetrability, and his grip on the right could maybe, just maybe, be loosening.

The anger he displayed in the clip could be a sign of someone on the back foot, overreacting to a question Bloomberg correspondent Catherine Lucey was asking about why Trump was fighting against releasing the Epstein files “if there’s nothing incriminating in the files”. The files related to the child sexual abuser released so far by Congress show that Epstein communicated regularly, and derogatorily, about women with a host of prominent friends...

It's not so much that trump was losing control of keeping the Epstein scandal under a tighter wrap. It's not so much that trump is walking back some of his beloved tariffs as their impact on goods worsened the economy for most Americans. It's not so much that trump is angry with the legal system pushing back against his deportation agenda, against his eagerness to deploy troops into our own cities, and against his attempts to charge his perceived enemies - such as former FBI Director James Comey - that are falling apart due to prosecutorial screw-ups (serving his whims, no less). 

It's that there's this unsettling realization that everything in TrumpWorld (tm) is falling apart, and breaking into pieces faster than anyone thought it would (via Kyle Cheney at Politico):

But the extraordinary rebukes and headwinds the president is now facing — much of it from within his own party — are revealing a GOP beginning to reckon with a post-Trump future. That dynamic crystallized after voters surged to the polls to support Democratic candidates for statewide races in New Jersey, Virginia, Georgia and Pennsylvania, shattering expectations of close contests and signaling that even Trump can’t defy political gravity forever.

Trump has spent the days since recycling old grievances, berating members of his own party and choosing sides in a burgeoning intra-MAGA debate about antisemitism and bigotry within the GOP coalition...

A year ago, the idea that a Republican-led Congress would vote overwhelmingly in favor of anything Trump opposed would have been fanciful. Enter the Epstein files.

Trump’s coalition has long viewed the FBI’s trove of records related to the late convicted sex offender and disgraced international power broker to be a holy grail of sorts, one that could shed light on a grander sex trafficking conspiracy implicating world leaders and politicians. But Trump, a longtime associate of Epstein’s until they fell out more than a decade ago, spent the summer leaning on congressional Republicans to cease their search for records. Trump has denied wrongdoing and no evidence has suggested he took part in Epstein’s trafficking operation...

The problems with trump's denials are 1) There is too much physical and eyewitness evidence that showed trump and Epstein close enough for trump to be aware of - and revel in - the shocking number of young girls in those circles; 2) trump himself expressed far too often an "appreciation" for young women that included allegations he spied on Miss Teen contestants in their dressing rooms; and 3) the reality now established that Mr. "Grab 'Em By the Pussy" is a court-confirmed sexual predator with dozens of other sexual assault claims still out there.

That trump used the Epstein scandal in the 2024 campaign to attack Democrats was just another brazen Deflection strategy that the Far Right have perfected: Accuse the Democrats of committing those crimes you yourself are committing, and turn that weakness into a strength. But trump promised to "expose the truth" about Epstein's sex trafficking of girls to the one group - his own QAnon conspiracy base - he shouldn't have, and they wanted trump to fulfill that once he got back into the White House. Problem was, trump's solution wasn't to release more documents but rehash the ones already released and pretend that was it... which only made things look worse for him and his lackeys for "covering up".

trump's attempts to control that narrative - one that kept painting him and his Republican allies as "pro-Sex Offender" - kept failing, because once his gaslighting fails he's got nothing else to go by:

What happened next was perhaps the most stinging intra-party rebuke of Trump’s presidency. Trump tried and failed to pressure Republican lawmakers to pull the plug on a vote demanding the Justice Department turn over the full library of Epstein files. An intense pressure campaign against Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) in particular went nowhere.

The fallout also claimed the relationship of Trump and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose refusal to flinch led Trump to brand her a “traitor” and attempt to turn his coalition against her. Greene has responded by saying Trump’s attacks have endangered her life...

While trump's press people are defending him for "his honesty and transparency" nobody's going to forget how trump fought this for months. And no amount of scrubbing the files before release is going to hide the reality that trump and Epstein were two peas in the same vulgar pod.

Trump’s inability to cajole Congress into his preferred course of action on the Epstein files came at virtually the same time the president and his allies failed to move Indiana Republicans to redraw their congressional boundaries to net Republicans another seat in the 2026 midterms.

Trump had been pressing for a Hoosier redistricting measure for months, but state GOP leaders signaled they simply lacked the votes to make it a reality, drawing a threat from Trump to endorse some Republicans’ primary challengers. Countermeasures by Democrats in Virginia and California could make Trump’s nationwide push a wash.

It's not helping trump that the earlier successful attempt to gerrymander Texas - on trump's public orders - is falling apart in the courts as well. trump's inability to win in the courts is hurting him on other key issues like his beloved tariffs policy:

Trump has long proclaimed that wielding tariffs against foreign governments is the key to negotiating favorable trade deals. Never mind that business and Republican orthodoxy has long considered tariffs as a backdoor tax on Americans.

But the Supreme Court appeared skeptical of Trump’s approach, with justices he appointed sharply questioning whether the president can leverage emergency powers to tariff foreign governments at will. By all accounts, the argument was a drubbing for Trump’s side. And the president seemed to discover that reality when he vented at the court in a pair of Truth Social posts last week.

It’s folly to predict how the high court will rule, even when the justices send clear signals during the arguments. But Trump appears to be bracing for defeat that could have devastating consequences for his economic agenda. His administration has repeatedly emphasized the centrality of tariffs to the recent spate of trade deals he’s made around the world.

trump arguably can craft economic / trade deals across the globe without the threat or use of tariffs anyway. What's hurting him is how he worships the idea of tariffs: trump genuinely believes tariffs can work, and that he needs them as tools to bully / enforce his will upon others. Of any potential legal defeats trump is facing in the White House, this could well be the one that angers him the most.

It's that anger - that rage trump carries with a scowl and a sneer, always driven by slights imagined and real, the willingness to lash out in public without concern or civility, the open cruelty towards those he views (Women, Blacks, poor) his lessers - that's troubling. trump's never had much self-control over his Id, his narcissistic drive to humiliate others, even during his first tenure as President National Destroyer of Norms and the Rule of Law. Five years later, he's gotten older and gotten worse (via Tom Nichols at the Atlantic):

Presidents often lose control over their agenda, or the policy process, or pieces of legislation. Sometimes, they even lose control of their party. But Donald Trump seems to have lost control over the one thing every person, and especially those with immense power, should always maintain control over: himself. Yesterday the president called for the arrest and execution of elected American officials for the crime—as he sees it—of fidelity to the Constitution.

It would be easy merely to note, yet again, that the president is a depraved man and a menace to the American system of government. As remarkable as it is to say it, however, the outbursts of this past week are different, and were likely triggered by Trump’s panic over the release of files about his former friend, the dead sex offender Jeffery Epstein. No one should treat this new phase in the president’s aggression against democracy as just another episode in the Trump reality show...

The president was already showing strain before his attack on the legislators. Last Friday, he lashed out at a female journalist who asked about the Epstein files, calling her “piggy.” (Trump seems to revel in getting away with speaking to women as president in ways that would land him on the sidewalk back in Queens.) On Tuesday, as he sat next to the Saudi crown prince, a man credibly accused by U.S. intelligence of murdering an American journalist, he lashed out at yet another female reporter: He called Mary Bruce of ABC “insubordinate”—a rather telling choice of words—and threatened to use the FCC to attack her network. Tuesday, of course, was the day the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House by a vote of 427–1. The next day, it passed the Senate by unanimous consent, and a humiliated Trump signed the bill into law.

Yesterday, Trump seemed to lose the last bit of his grip on his emotions as he fired off a fusillade of Truth Social posts. (“Trump must not have slept well Wednesday night,” Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger of The Bulwark observed today.) “This is really bad,” the president wrote, “and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???”

“Lock them up” is a favorite Trump chant, but he did not end with this classic demand. He went on: “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand - We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.” The charge, according to the chief executive? “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He also reposted a comment that said: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”

Anyone with a basic understanding of U.S. history would remember George Washington never hanged political opponents: when he was rebuffed by the Senate the one time he visited Congress, Washington merely stormed out and swore to never go back. But this is trump raging at us today: Terrible at history, and desperate to lie that other great figures in history would do what he'd want to do.

Trump’s posts risk putting the lives of American lawmakers in danger, and he almost certainly knows it. Many people who have publicly criticized the president have found themselves getting death threats from his most fervid followers. (Like many Trump-critical writers, I started getting them years ago.) As Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former MAGA doyenne from Georgia whom Trump has now marked as a heretic, wrote on X last week, “A hot bed of threats against me are being fueled and egged on by the most powerful man in the world.” Senator Elissa Slotkin revealed that she is now traveling with a security detail because of what she called “a huge spike” in threats that came to her office after Trump’s eruption yesterday.

This is the same trump who stirred up MAGA supporters to riot at the Capitol on January 6th, the event that trump and his lackeys would like to erase from history, but an act of violence that trump himself would love to revisit on the nation again and again.

A lot of this turns back on that earlier observation from the podcast bros openly wondering "is trump falling into dementia?" It's a serious concern, and it's one a lot of Biden supporters shouted back at the media when they went after Joe for his slowed delivery of speeches and lapse of memory. trump wasn't that much younger than Biden, and in spite of all the public announcements that trump is the "fittest smartest human being of all time" (uh, no) a lot of people could see by 2024 he'd gotten more unsteady on his feet and more prone to brain farts on stage.

There's been more speculation than usual in the past few months that there's serious health concerns: a questionable MRI exam six months after getting one; a missing weekend where trump came back with odd bruising on his hands; trump wandering away during a visit to Japan; falling asleep during an Oval Office presentation, during which someone else collapsed and trump failed to take notice of it at all.

Far be it to speculate or cast rumors, but there is too much growing evidence that trump's questionable lifelong habits - and time itself - is racing up to claim his ticket. It doesn't help that a number of actions trump is ordering on the hurry - such as bulldozing down the East Wing to build his own ballroom, or the insistence of getting a Peace Prize in spite of his bullying tactics, or the release of a new dollar coin (which historically never worked out for Americans) with HIS face on it - a blatant middle finger to the unwritten rule to avoid putting a living person on American money - are obvious clues that he wants to enjoy all of this - fake symbols of his "greatness" - before he no longer can.

You can feel a sense of panic, of things not going well behind the scenes, with this administration this time around. More than just the level of idiocy and ineptitude from the actions they've taken to break the Constitution and the nation for their own interests.

It doesn't help that as I'm typing this, trump's Defense Dept (fuck the name change, Pete) is staging naval and air maneuvers off the coast of Venezuela. They're making more public calls to strike drug cartel locations - not just Venezuela but also Mexico - as part of an "anti-terrorist" campaign that they can't prove. Like as though trump wants a military victory and another half-assed parade before his mind gives out altogether.

And nobody in a position to do anything about it - not the Democrats because they're out of power, but the Republicans in Congress and in the Cabinet - will lift a finger, because they dare not face the rage of a rabid MAGA base. They're perfectly content to let this farce play out, and carve out whatever they can get in the ensuing chaos.

Stay safe, America. Keep protesting in the streets against trump's war on anyone dark-skinned. But be ready for the craziness to hit DEFCON-1 sooner than expected.