The sole, cold comfort we can all take right now is that Republicans are doing a wonderful job of slitting their own wrists, chewing at their own faces, getting out of dodge, tucking tail just the when the moment calls for a sheriff --- all by their little selves, bless their little cultified hearts!
Let's figure out ways to keep them in self-destruct mode faster than Lindsey Graham can grope his way toward a fainting couch.
I want this to be true. I live in Europe, my daughter will hold an EU passport, and I have chosen this continent precisely because it still runs on rules rather than whim. But this piece is a love letter, and love letters make poor strategy documents.
The flattering version omits the bill. Europe found its nerve because it had no choice, not because it discovered virtue. The defense buildup is real, but it is being funded by debt and by squeezing the same welfare states that produce those long life expectancies and happy populations the column celebrates. You cannot spend the peace dividend twice. Europe is now learning that its democratic resilience was always partly an American subsidy, and the invoice has arrived. That is a harder, more honest story than “undaunted.”
The same nationalism the piece congratulates Europe for resisting is polling first or second in France, runs Italy, and is climbing in Germany. Brussels held the line this cycle. The electorates underneath it are drifting toward exactly the model the column says Europe rejected.
Applebaum’s rule of law and separation of powers are not a European character trait. They are a fragile, contested settlement, and treating them as a finished achievement is how you lose them.
Salute the EU for stepping into the breach, fine. But a continent congratulating itself for being undaunted has stopped counting how many of its own voters are already on the other train.
It's true. Underneath the apparent unity lie a hundred fractures, some of which grow large indeed. Yet necessity has so often been the mother of invention -- Europe appears to be no exception. When Sweden and Finland both joined NATO after managing to stay out of the fray since 1949, it was proof of an inescapable urgency, particularly for Finland, with its hundreds of miles of shared boundary with You Know What.
My question -- is there time to repair Europe's many breaches all surfacing to the top? Do we have reason to be cautiously optimistic?
I'm glad you are still optimistic, however cautiously. If my beloved Europe sinks, I will not be sorry that I'm too old for it to matter much any more.
I agree. Poland was in the forefront of my mind as I read Jen’s tribute (much as I wanted it to be true)—and its disgusting treatment of Ukrainian truckers a few years ago, not to mention the issue of women’s rights. Thank heavens for Tusk! Now Bulgaria has joined the right-wing arm to offset Hungary’s return to the fold. Europeans see their fractured and fragile history more clearly than Americans, but we can agree that Putin’s aggression and Trump’s corruption have created a comforting degree of unification.
If we are to have a country worth leaving to children and grandchildren, then it will first need to undergo in 2028 the equivalent of Germany's de-Nazification process after World War Two -- with EVERY TRACE of Trump's evil impact uprooted and put to the torch, and all of his syncopates -- the richest as well as the poorest -- imprisoned for the rest of their equally evil lives. Even then, it will take more than a single generation to recover from all the harm this filth has caused, abroad as well as here at home.
… Do we have the prison space to house 70 million people? Never forget the voters who put him in power and support what he is doing as long as it doesn’t affect them personally.
A recent Harvard research piece on why young German men joined the Nazis showed that while the top reason was nationalism, the second reason was social belonging. If we want to stop the division in the US, and stop the support for neo-Naziism, we need to create a way for young men to BELONG. Less social isolation, more inclusion. Not sure how we would do that, but prison is not the answer, but another symptom of "thought police" syndrome.
Send them all to El Salvador. They can live and thrive with their favorite new dictator Bukele. He can host them in their favorite type of housing, in the CECOT housing development. Stephen Miller will be in charge of daily recreation and fun activities.
Voting for Trump, while stupid and evil, was not a statutory crime, so we don't need to worry about imprisoning so many at once. But as with the J6ers, many will go on to commit actual crimes which we can handle as they arise.
no prison time for MAGA voters (after all we ARE trying to return the US to function) but they should be prohibited from voting in ANY election for 20 years.
The confederacy is our Nazi equivalent, so we also need to ban ALL confederate statues and names from ALL federal property, and indeed everywhere outside of museums, battlefields, and cemeteries.
While we're doing away with fascism (if we can), let us also, as German and Japan were forced to do, end our militarization. I don't know how one safely destroys nuclear energy (as our unfit president claims he'll do with Iran's) but that's what's needed.
Bezos "more mature" this time comment about Trump is truly a comedy line.....unless "maturity" means decrepit, mentally and physically ill, senile and ancient in years. (I can throw stones; I am 78.). Your opening paragraph should be the lead summary of Trump. And now we must have a leadership paragraph of what WE will do when we take it all out of the radical right control. Both have to be used repeatedly. Pithy and powerful.
Carol, the other day when I read what Bezos (aka Bozo per Drumpf) said about the doddering dangerous lunatic in WH you cited, I thought he was joking. No one who hasn't had a lobotomy could possibly make that statement and actually mean it. Of course, he is one the most egregious oligarchs who bend over and say ahhh in homage to the deranged man-child (see the flop Melania documentary he spent over $75m to produce and market).
"There’s no evidence anywhere that Donald Trump is more disciplined, mature, stable or restrained. None. The evidence points entirely in the opposite direction. Every day. Every hour. Every midnight Truth Social tirade written in the cadence of a collapsing mind....
Mature? Disciplined? The man posts through the night like a psychiatric emergency with WiFi access.
He rages. He spirals. He threatens. He lies compulsively and pathologically. He praises violence. He speaks in the language of vengeance and blood. He drifts from delusion to delusion, while millions of Americans pretend not to notice the obvious because acknowledging reality would require courage.
Courage is precisely what’s absent from America’s gilded classes.
Bezos’s statement wasn’t analysis. It was positioning. It was the sound a billionaire makes when he decides power matters more than principle. When he calculates that proximity to authoritarianism is more profitable than resistance to it.
There was a time when American industrialists at least attempted to wrap themselves in the mythology of civic virtue. They built libraries. Universities. Museums. Some understood that immense wealth carried immense obligations to the republic that made their fortunes possible.
Today’s oligarchs build panic rooms and bend the knee."
Thank you for sharing the words of the great Steve Schmidt. He and Lawrence O'Donnell are the 2 people who can take down the lunatic in the WH better than just about anyone. I'm going to click on the link as soon as I have time.
Just like many sycophants, Bezos lies about Trump. If anything, both of them have become more crazed by the need for power, wealth and adulation. Bezos has always been a selfish bastard. His motivation is getting more lucrative government contracts. In reality, he likely thinks he’s smarter and can manipulate Trump with flattery.
Bezos's remark made me laugh so hard that if I'd been at my computer drinking coffee, I'd have a lot to clean up because it would be all over my computer screen! There is nothing mature about Trump's behavior. It is still, and always will be, that of a petulant toddler! What more can Bezos possibly want that Trump hasn't already delivered?
If we're lucky this is just more self-serving flattery from one wealthy dumbo about another. But I fear that now that Jeff has seen what little it takes to win an election, he may be thinking about a run at the top job. (After all, what else does he have to do?) Of course he'd first need to rid himself of Madame Bimbo, she of the defaced lips and artificial bosom.
The horror of what we are experiencing at the hands of the orange narcissist-felon (ONF) can be stated thus.
It is as if the ONF had a point-by-point 'to-do,' 'instruction list' or 'blueprint' of how to inflict maximum harm on the people of the U.S., its allies, the world, by every imaginable form of wanton ignorance, stupidity, cruelty or other vicious act.
Looking at his 'achievements,' and the actions of his cult-regime, it's hard to imagine a more complete job. His 'burn-it-all-down, make-me-rich' imperative, flouting the law, abandoning ethics, honor, conscience or morality, has caused global misery and death that will endure long after we and our children, maybe even our grandchildren, are dead.
He will go down in history as the single most destructive individual ever born.
Yet we witness it day by day, and watch his cult approve.
His mantra: "I will preen in my orange glory atop the steaming rubble, in my wonderfulness, slathered in gold, as my sycophants grovel at my feet."
God help us. But She won't. She as a Universe to manage. If She is as smart as we believe, She has given up on us.
the point-by-point to-do list is called Project 2025 - though I understand an update is in the works, if not actually published yet, to build on its implementation by the ONF - and his many enablers.
"He (Trump) will go down in history as the single most destructive individual ever born."
Germany suffered under a similar attack in the 1930 - 1940s decade. It and its people recovered, though it took years. We face many of the same challenges to rebuild.
What the MAGA cult wants, more than anything else, is for no person anywhere in the world to be better off than they are. They don’t care how many suffering how many die as long as they can look around and say “yeah who cares you’re not better off than I am “
Our present decline began when Mitch McConnell took offense at the election of a black man. Republicans gave permission to the country's latent racism and bigotry to come out of the shadows and rear its ugly head.
They whined about "woke". They never cared about woke, they couldn't even define it. What they wanted was basically to be allowed to be a$$holes whenever they wanted to be without having to face repercussions.
My fear is that the next Dem administration will decide they need to "heal" the country. To build bridges. You can't build bridges with people whose mindset is to first burn existing bridges.
What we need is swift and ruthless undoing of everything Trump has done. At the same time, swift and ruthless punishment of the members corrupt and criminal administration down to the most minor participant. "Swift" so the pain is still fresh in the country's mind. "Ruthless" because we learned the folly of a conciliatory attitude towards people who don't repent with Lincoln's treatment of the diseased Confederacy.
In the late 19th century, Russian Tsar Nicholas I referred to the Ottoman Empire as the "sick man of Europe" because of its failing economy, social unrest, political instability and general malaise. The term is now used to refer nations experiencing the same symptoms.
Thanks to the reckless actions of current regime/junta, the US has forfeited any right to be called the leader of the free world and has morphed into becoming the sick man of the planet. And here we are.
your last line -- "and here we are". is to the 2nd Trump as "protocols" were to COVID, the catch phrase of the time. Should be "... and yet here we are™"
I read this piece thinking about the upset among Senate Republicans that Trump is not supporting the honor of them continuing their careers as U.S. Senators. Finally, they are upset about something. And it reveals how out of touch they are. They expect to continue to lead when they have not been leading. They are not getting the reward they expected and they don’t deserve. This is the perverse justice of Trump’s retribution. Maybe now that they know they have nothing to lose, they will finally show they have leadership heart, brain, and courage, which we have been clambering for since the degenerate and criminal President Trump took office.
All true. But down here in Brazil, there will be a presidential election in October. Convicted ex president Jair Bolsonaro's first son Flavio is a candidate and is already angling for a White House meeting with Trump. He is continuing his father's anti-democracy, pro-corruption and authoritarian plans for Brazil. His brother Eduardo fled his elected post as Sao Paulo's federal congressman to become a fulltime mascot and right wing groupie living in Dallas and appears to spend all his time meddling in the politics of the country he fled. The Bolsonaros have ingratiated themselves into the MAGA movement and are surely favored by Trump for the same reason Trump favors Ken Paxton: he is partial to authoritarians with criminal tendencies, penchants for revenge and putting themselves up for sale.
JD Vance's comments are stunning in light of who he is married to and his mixed-race children. Does he think we don't notice that his wife is south Asian? I wonder what she really thinks of all this.
Not only has the rethug party killed satire (no skit on SNL, no matter how brilliant, could exceed the insanity of drumpf's ballroom, arch, pool, golden statue), but they've killed the English language as well. "Civilizational"?? What the hell is that and who makes up these cretinous word salads? If an nation is committing cultural and democratic suicide, Vance should look into drumpf's mirror.
"Civilisational"!!!?? That's so laden with fake gold that it doesn't hold up under its own weight. (Whichever version of AI is running this, it's not very I if it corrected "weight" to "wake".)
I am continually shocked at the percentage of Americans that think that there is ANYTHING about the Trump regime that is worthy of anything but horror and opprobrium …
“Pew found: Majorities of Black (66%), Hispanic (64%) and white adults (57%) say that the country’s best years are behind us, as do 53% of Asian adults. Frankly (Jen writes) their conclusion is not unreasonable.”
Really? I for one are flabbergasted that the %s are so low!
That struck me too, but then I remembered some in those demographics might be doing as well as they ever have in their personal lives, and perhaps some are just inveterate optimists!
These people are either blind or financially so well endowed that they aren't suffering the effects of Trump's version of "affordability". We are collectively facing rising prices on everything, cuts in social services, and curtailment of rights. How can anyone believe that this is a good direction?
Perhaps it isn't that this currently is a good direction, but simply a belief that we will come out the other side and achieve again - greater things for having lived through this bad time. What Obama used to describe as the "moral arc of the universe". The original being MLK Jr.'s quote, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
We don't actually KNOW that we are not still heading in this direction ultimately. Probably not in what's left of my lifetime, however.
Trump and his scam a minute, anti-American collaborarors are finally getting a public viewing. The sun is out. The voters are upset. Thank goodness this is finally happening. It's never too late. In a majoritarian based system, 34% approval rating and falling is a death spiral nightmare for incumbents. Let's hear from more of them. All Americans need to hear from leaders they trust that the Trump agenda is a massive scam.
I love your description of Jeff Bezos, who ruined my favorite newspaper of all time. But we already knew what he was when he pulled the endorsement of Kamala Harris and dropped $75 million on a documentary about a subject who would make watching rust form interesting by comparison.
Bezos then told a lie about his rocket company execs meeting with Trump before the Harris endorsement was spiked. He said the endorsement was not discussed with the top executives of one of his major companies. Total BS.
“We should be rooting (as the world rooted for Britain before the U.S. entered WWII) for the countries that bequeathed us Western civilization to prosper, innovate, and thrive.”
The population of Europe is about 665 million people. The Europeans are the leaders of the Free World as long as Trump and his Republicans control the American Government.
The sole, cold comfort we can all take right now is that Republicans are doing a wonderful job of slitting their own wrists, chewing at their own faces, getting out of dodge, tucking tail just the when the moment calls for a sheriff --- all by their little selves, bless their little cultified hearts!
Let's figure out ways to keep them in self-destruct mode faster than Lindsey Graham can grope his way toward a fainting couch.
34% of MAGA can elect president, controal the Congress and SCTUS. The reason is they are financed by 1% of ultra wealthy citizens.
I LOVE your comment. It is so true.
I want this to be true. I live in Europe, my daughter will hold an EU passport, and I have chosen this continent precisely because it still runs on rules rather than whim. But this piece is a love letter, and love letters make poor strategy documents.
The flattering version omits the bill. Europe found its nerve because it had no choice, not because it discovered virtue. The defense buildup is real, but it is being funded by debt and by squeezing the same welfare states that produce those long life expectancies and happy populations the column celebrates. You cannot spend the peace dividend twice. Europe is now learning that its democratic resilience was always partly an American subsidy, and the invoice has arrived. That is a harder, more honest story than “undaunted.”
The same nationalism the piece congratulates Europe for resisting is polling first or second in France, runs Italy, and is climbing in Germany. Brussels held the line this cycle. The electorates underneath it are drifting toward exactly the model the column says Europe rejected.
Applebaum’s rule of law and separation of powers are not a European character trait. They are a fragile, contested settlement, and treating them as a finished achievement is how you lose them.
Salute the EU for stepping into the breach, fine. But a continent congratulating itself for being undaunted has stopped counting how many of its own voters are already on the other train.
I will say though, I am cautiously optimistic.
Johan 🐌
The EU countries need only look at the mess Trump has made of the US to keep going on their liberal agenda. A real inspiration.
Exactly
also the mess was made by citizens
It's true. Underneath the apparent unity lie a hundred fractures, some of which grow large indeed. Yet necessity has so often been the mother of invention -- Europe appears to be no exception. When Sweden and Finland both joined NATO after managing to stay out of the fray since 1949, it was proof of an inescapable urgency, particularly for Finland, with its hundreds of miles of shared boundary with You Know What.
My question -- is there time to repair Europe's many breaches all surfacing to the top? Do we have reason to be cautiously optimistic?
I'm glad you are still optimistic, however cautiously. If my beloved Europe sinks, I will not be sorry that I'm too old for it to matter much any more.
I agree. Poland was in the forefront of my mind as I read Jen’s tribute (much as I wanted it to be true)—and its disgusting treatment of Ukrainian truckers a few years ago, not to mention the issue of women’s rights. Thank heavens for Tusk! Now Bulgaria has joined the right-wing arm to offset Hungary’s return to the fold. Europeans see their fractured and fragile history more clearly than Americans, but we can agree that Putin’s aggression and Trump’s corruption have created a comforting degree of unification.
If we are to have a country worth leaving to children and grandchildren, then it will first need to undergo in 2028 the equivalent of Germany's de-Nazification process after World War Two -- with EVERY TRACE of Trump's evil impact uprooted and put to the torch, and all of his syncopates -- the richest as well as the poorest -- imprisoned for the rest of their equally evil lives. Even then, it will take more than a single generation to recover from all the harm this filth has caused, abroad as well as here at home.
The re-institution of Nuremberg-type trials would be appropriate.
… Do we have the prison space to house 70 million people? Never forget the voters who put him in power and support what he is doing as long as it doesn’t affect them personally.
A recent Harvard research piece on why young German men joined the Nazis showed that while the top reason was nationalism, the second reason was social belonging. If we want to stop the division in the US, and stop the support for neo-Naziism, we need to create a way for young men to BELONG. Less social isolation, more inclusion. Not sure how we would do that, but prison is not the answer, but another symptom of "thought police" syndrome.
Send them all to El Salvador. They can live and thrive with their favorite new dictator Bukele. He can host them in their favorite type of housing, in the CECOT housing development. Stephen Miller will be in charge of daily recreation and fun activities.
Voting for Trump, while stupid and evil, was not a statutory crime, so we don't need to worry about imprisoning so many at once. But as with the J6ers, many will go on to commit actual crimes which we can handle as they arise.
Forget about prisons. Deport them all to Null Island instead.
no prison time for MAGA voters (after all we ARE trying to return the US to function) but they should be prohibited from voting in ANY election for 20 years.
Yes, felons lose their right to vote for a time.
The confederacy is our Nazi equivalent, so we also need to ban ALL confederate statues and names from ALL federal property, and indeed everywhere outside of museums, battlefields, and cemeteries.
While we're doing away with fascism (if we can), let us also, as German and Japan were forced to do, end our militarization. I don't know how one safely destroys nuclear energy (as our unfit president claims he'll do with Iran's) but that's what's needed.
Bezos "more mature" this time comment about Trump is truly a comedy line.....unless "maturity" means decrepit, mentally and physically ill, senile and ancient in years. (I can throw stones; I am 78.). Your opening paragraph should be the lead summary of Trump. And now we must have a leadership paragraph of what WE will do when we take it all out of the radical right control. Both have to be used repeatedly. Pithy and powerful.
Carol, the other day when I read what Bezos (aka Bozo per Drumpf) said about the doddering dangerous lunatic in WH you cited, I thought he was joking. No one who hasn't had a lobotomy could possibly make that statement and actually mean it. Of course, he is one the most egregious oligarchs who bend over and say ahhh in homage to the deranged man-child (see the flop Melania documentary he spent over $75m to produce and market).
Steve Schmidt has a blistering response to Bezos:
"There’s no evidence anywhere that Donald Trump is more disciplined, mature, stable or restrained. None. The evidence points entirely in the opposite direction. Every day. Every hour. Every midnight Truth Social tirade written in the cadence of a collapsing mind....
Mature? Disciplined? The man posts through the night like a psychiatric emergency with WiFi access.
He rages. He spirals. He threatens. He lies compulsively and pathologically. He praises violence. He speaks in the language of vengeance and blood. He drifts from delusion to delusion, while millions of Americans pretend not to notice the obvious because acknowledging reality would require courage.
Courage is precisely what’s absent from America’s gilded classes.
Bezos’s statement wasn’t analysis. It was positioning. It was the sound a billionaire makes when he decides power matters more than principle. When he calculates that proximity to authoritarianism is more profitable than resistance to it.
There was a time when American industrialists at least attempted to wrap themselves in the mythology of civic virtue. They built libraries. Universities. Museums. Some understood that immense wealth carried immense obligations to the republic that made their fortunes possible.
Today’s oligarchs build panic rooms and bend the knee."
https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/money-cant-buy-a-spine?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=email
It's disheartening.
That was well written, timely stated, and well deserved criticism of a man who has no business anywhere near the levers of government.
Thank you for sharing the words of the great Steve Schmidt. He and Lawrence O'Donnell are the 2 people who can take down the lunatic in the WH better than just about anyone. I'm going to click on the link as soon as I have time.
money makes people do and say stupid stuff
True that. Money and sycophancy.
Just like many sycophants, Bezos lies about Trump. If anything, both of them have become more crazed by the need for power, wealth and adulation. Bezos has always been a selfish bastard. His motivation is getting more lucrative government contracts. In reality, he likely thinks he’s smarter and can manipulate Trump with flattery.
Bezos's remark made me laugh so hard that if I'd been at my computer drinking coffee, I'd have a lot to clean up because it would be all over my computer screen! There is nothing mature about Trump's behavior. It is still, and always will be, that of a petulant toddler! What more can Bezos possibly want that Trump hasn't already delivered?
More free stuff delivered by Amazon to further fill his pockets?
He needs to make sure Trump keeps delivering it.
Ha! I think "more mature" was the obedient dog licking its master's hand. It really means, "Wow, he's got worse very fast!"
If we're lucky this is just more self-serving flattery from one wealthy dumbo about another. But I fear that now that Jeff has seen what little it takes to win an election, he may be thinking about a run at the top job. (After all, what else does he have to do?) Of course he'd first need to rid himself of Madame Bimbo, she of the defaced lips and artificial bosom.
The horror of what we are experiencing at the hands of the orange narcissist-felon (ONF) can be stated thus.
It is as if the ONF had a point-by-point 'to-do,' 'instruction list' or 'blueprint' of how to inflict maximum harm on the people of the U.S., its allies, the world, by every imaginable form of wanton ignorance, stupidity, cruelty or other vicious act.
Looking at his 'achievements,' and the actions of his cult-regime, it's hard to imagine a more complete job. His 'burn-it-all-down, make-me-rich' imperative, flouting the law, abandoning ethics, honor, conscience or morality, has caused global misery and death that will endure long after we and our children, maybe even our grandchildren, are dead.
He will go down in history as the single most destructive individual ever born.
Yet we witness it day by day, and watch his cult approve.
His mantra: "I will preen in my orange glory atop the steaming rubble, in my wonderfulness, slathered in gold, as my sycophants grovel at my feet."
God help us. But She won't. She as a Universe to manage. If She is as smart as we believe, She has given up on us.
the point-by-point to-do list is called Project 2025 - though I understand an update is in the works, if not actually published yet, to build on its implementation by the ONF - and his many enablers.
Yes, John (great first name!) and it was written in Hell.
j2
"He (Trump) will go down in history as the single most destructive individual ever born."
Germany suffered under a similar attack in the 1930 - 1940s decade. It and its people recovered, though it took years. We face many of the same challenges to rebuild.
um, God never gives up...we do
Either way, same result, Patricia. But remember Alexander Pope, in his faithful iambic pentameter: "Hope springs eternal in the human breast."
j2
What the MAGA cult wants, more than anything else, is for no person anywhere in the world to be better off than they are. They don’t care how many suffering how many die as long as they can look around and say “yeah who cares you’re not better off than I am “
Our present decline began when Mitch McConnell took offense at the election of a black man. Republicans gave permission to the country's latent racism and bigotry to come out of the shadows and rear its ugly head.
They whined about "woke". They never cared about woke, they couldn't even define it. What they wanted was basically to be allowed to be a$$holes whenever they wanted to be without having to face repercussions.
My fear is that the next Dem administration will decide they need to "heal" the country. To build bridges. You can't build bridges with people whose mindset is to first burn existing bridges.
What we need is swift and ruthless undoing of everything Trump has done. At the same time, swift and ruthless punishment of the members corrupt and criminal administration down to the most minor participant. "Swift" so the pain is still fresh in the country's mind. "Ruthless" because we learned the folly of a conciliatory attitude towards people who don't repent with Lincoln's treatment of the diseased Confederacy.
In the late 19th century, Russian Tsar Nicholas I referred to the Ottoman Empire as the "sick man of Europe" because of its failing economy, social unrest, political instability and general malaise. The term is now used to refer nations experiencing the same symptoms.
Thanks to the reckless actions of current regime/junta, the US has forfeited any right to be called the leader of the free world and has morphed into becoming the sick man of the planet. And here we are.
your last line -- "and here we are". is to the 2nd Trump as "protocols" were to COVID, the catch phrase of the time. Should be "... and yet here we are™"
The addition of "yet" is so perfect. Thanks for suggesting it.
I read this piece thinking about the upset among Senate Republicans that Trump is not supporting the honor of them continuing their careers as U.S. Senators. Finally, they are upset about something. And it reveals how out of touch they are. They expect to continue to lead when they have not been leading. They are not getting the reward they expected and they don’t deserve. This is the perverse justice of Trump’s retribution. Maybe now that they know they have nothing to lose, they will finally show they have leadership heart, brain, and courage, which we have been clambering for since the degenerate and criminal President Trump took office.
If we're lucky the Republicans in Congress will see that it's the voters and not the president whom they need to satisfy and are beholden to.
'Clamoring' rather than clambering for, though otherwise exactly right and well said.
All true. But down here in Brazil, there will be a presidential election in October. Convicted ex president Jair Bolsonaro's first son Flavio is a candidate and is already angling for a White House meeting with Trump. He is continuing his father's anti-democracy, pro-corruption and authoritarian plans for Brazil. His brother Eduardo fled his elected post as Sao Paulo's federal congressman to become a fulltime mascot and right wing groupie living in Dallas and appears to spend all his time meddling in the politics of the country he fled. The Bolsonaros have ingratiated themselves into the MAGA movement and are surely favored by Trump for the same reason Trump favors Ken Paxton: he is partial to authoritarians with criminal tendencies, penchants for revenge and putting themselves up for sale.
JD Vance's comments are stunning in light of who he is married to and his mixed-race children. Does he think we don't notice that his wife is south Asian? I wonder what she really thinks of all this.
Not only has the rethug party killed satire (no skit on SNL, no matter how brilliant, could exceed the insanity of drumpf's ballroom, arch, pool, golden statue), but they've killed the English language as well. "Civilizational"?? What the hell is that and who makes up these cretinous word salads? If an nation is committing cultural and democratic suicide, Vance should look into drumpf's mirror.
"Civilisational"!!!?? That's so laden with fake gold that it doesn't hold up under its own weight. (Whichever version of AI is running this, it's not very I if it corrected "weight" to "wake".)
I am continually shocked at the percentage of Americans that think that there is ANYTHING about the Trump regime that is worthy of anything but horror and opprobrium …
“Pew found: Majorities of Black (66%), Hispanic (64%) and white adults (57%) say that the country’s best years are behind us, as do 53% of Asian adults. Frankly (Jen writes) their conclusion is not unreasonable.”
Really? I for one are flabbergasted that the %s are so low!
That struck me too, but then I remembered some in those demographics might be doing as well as they ever have in their personal lives, and perhaps some are just inveterate optimists!
These people are either blind or financially so well endowed that they aren't suffering the effects of Trump's version of "affordability". We are collectively facing rising prices on everything, cuts in social services, and curtailment of rights. How can anyone believe that this is a good direction?
Perhaps it isn't that this currently is a good direction, but simply a belief that we will come out the other side and achieve again - greater things for having lived through this bad time. What Obama used to describe as the "moral arc of the universe". The original being MLK Jr.'s quote, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
We don't actually KNOW that we are not still heading in this direction ultimately. Probably not in what's left of my lifetime, however.
Trump and his scam a minute, anti-American collaborarors are finally getting a public viewing. The sun is out. The voters are upset. Thank goodness this is finally happening. It's never too late. In a majoritarian based system, 34% approval rating and falling is a death spiral nightmare for incumbents. Let's hear from more of them. All Americans need to hear from leaders they trust that the Trump agenda is a massive scam.
I love your description of Jeff Bezos, who ruined my favorite newspaper of all time. But we already knew what he was when he pulled the endorsement of Kamala Harris and dropped $75 million on a documentary about a subject who would make watching rust form interesting by comparison.
Bezos then told a lie about his rocket company execs meeting with Trump before the Harris endorsement was spiked. He said the endorsement was not discussed with the top executives of one of his major companies. Total BS.
Europe is standing up, and so is Canada…….thank god.
Illegitimi non carborundum, cubitis elatis
in other words, don't let the bastards get you down
don't forget the ending, *cubits elatis* = elbows up!
Thanks for the translation!
“We should be rooting (as the world rooted for Britain before the U.S. entered WWII) for the countries that bequeathed us Western civilization to prosper, innovate, and thrive.”
Exactly! America has gone off the rails.
The population of Europe is about 665 million people. The Europeans are the leaders of the Free World as long as Trump and his Republicans control the American Government.