Dear Everybody:

First, thanks so much to John Stith to taking over for me the last few days! I really appreciate it!

 

And second, wouldn’t you know while I was gone, I’d miss one of the best/worst stories of the summer? I mean, smuggling cowardly Trump in a food cart and leaving reporters and his own cabinet members to die! I used to think the Reflecting Pool was the best possible metaphor for his administration, but now I realize this is! Brave, brave Sir Robin…

 

Luckily, I didn’t miss the whole story! New revelations and responses are still happening by the minute:

–Air Force One has all sorts of defenses, but apparently what they were worried about was shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, which can’t be seen by radar.

–They also had the option of flying Air Force One with an escort of F-35 fighters.

–US officials described the old Air Force One Trump fled as “a decoy,” which means they knew exactly what they were doing.

–When I first heard about this I assumed he took his top advisers with him–Stephen Miller, Steven Cheung, Karoline Leavitt, his Cabinet members–but no, instead he took Pete Hegseth (talk about a captain abandoning his ship!), Dan Scavino (his former golf caddy), Walt Nauta (his personal valet and diaper changer and the guy who brings him Diet Cokes), and Natalie Harp, the pretty young thing who spends night and day with Trump printing out positive stories and posting garbage for him. (It is no coincidence that two days after this came out Karoline Leavitt resigned. And, no, the “I want to spend more time with my husband and children” excuse doesn’t cut it.)

–Trump “left behind” not only all the airplane crew and the journalists (no surprise) but also Stephen Miller and Susie Wiles and Steven Cheung and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. Trump is now claiming that he had to leave them behind to “ensure the line of succession,” but that makes no sense at all. Next in the line of succession were the vice president, the Speaker of the House, and the Head of the Senate, none of whom were on the plane.

–None of the White House officials left behind have been willing to respond when asked about being left behind. Reporters are hounding Stephen Miller, asking him about it, and he’s running away.

–Other presidents have switched planes for security reasons, but in all those cases, the people left aboard were told exactly what was going on and given the opportunity to get off the plane and find other transportation. Not only were these people not told Trump wasn’t on the plane, they weren’t informed about any threat at all.

–Meme: ” President Biden took a train to Kyiv as Russia was launching air strikes on Ukraine. Trump hid in a food cart to flee a war he started. They are not the same.”

–This makes Trump’s comments to the reporters on the trip home (after he got back on the plane in England) about how people were trying to kill him, “I’m number one on their list before you. But if I go, you go, right?” and how maybe they might want to consider some other line of work, far worse than it sounded then. (And it already sounded really bad.)

–And it now makes the story about the reporters being told to pull their shades down make sense. I didn’t see how it would make them any safer from attack to have the shades down, but now we know it was to keep those same reporters from accidentally seeing him get on the other plane.

–The photos of him and his chosen ones revealed something else–Natalie Harp, his human printer whose brother says is mentally unstable and unhealthily devoted to Trump–has now been entrusted with the nuclear “football.”

–Trump is now including the catering cart incident in his plea to the Supreme Court to allow his ballroom’s construction to continue. (National security, don’t you know? Though how exactly it would help if he was on a plane in Turkey, I don’t know.)

–He is also totally focused on finding out who leaked the story about the catering cart and is determined to punish them. He is reportedly “blowing a gasket.” Susie Wiles and Kash Patel started seizing phones almost immediately to find out who the leaker is.

 

And the comments just keep on coming:

–CNN: “You have but one life to give to Donald Trump.”

–Dem Senator Chris Coons: “My first question to those who are on the ‘leave behind’ decoy plane, would be, ‘do you realize the President just isn’t that into you?”

–Maddy67: “Those of his staff left aboard the decoy plane–even if they outwardly continue to support him, they will surely keep in mind that he placed them in mortal danger.”

–George Conway: “The safety and security of Team Diaper must always come first.”

–Calixtus: “Months ago the President started a war he said would be easily won but now he must rely on elaborate ruses to leave allied territory because the threat level is too high to fly on the world’s most secure plane.”

–steven Beschloss: “Put a sociopath in the White House and he’ll not think twice about using his own staff and other humans as decoys/potential collateral damage when he decides HIS safety could be at risk if he flies on the ill-equipped Qatari bribe/lux Air Force One. Not surprising, but utterly disgusting.”

–Heather Delaney Reese called it “a moment so indefensible that the Trump administration has been deliberately hiding it from the American people.”

–Michael Armstrong: “Remember, the coward who abandoned a threatened plane full of staff and reporters is the same guy who dodged the draft, claiming bone spurs. Typical…says a lot about the character of the jerk and his lack of ethics, caring, etc. And by the way, the Secretary of Defense who abandoned ship with him, is just as big a loser. Two of a kind who deserve his other.”

–Tom Nichols: “Imagine if something had actually happened to the decoy. Trump would later end up either having to lie or having to explain that he’d known that such a disaster was possible and that he’d sent Air Force personnel and several American civilians–possibly including two Cabinet secretaries–to their death to cover his own escape…The larger issue is that Trump likely wanted this story buried because it makes him look cowardly and puts the lie to all his happy talk about the war. Trump has crowed–as he did at the time in Turkey–that the Iranians are beaten and pleading for a deal. In truth, the Iranians might have been planning to blow the President of the United States and some of his top officials to smithereens.”

–Ken Wilson: “Anyone who has been on social media during the last few years has seen numerous photos by Trump of Trump piloting a jet fighter. Why didn’t they just give him a fighter jet and let him fight his way out of Turkey? That would have been the manly thing to do.”
–And several people have brought up another incident from way back in Trump’s Atlantic City casino days, when he was supposed to travel from Atlantic City to New York in a helicopter with three casino executives who worked for him, and Trump decided at the last minute to drive instead, and the helicopter crashed, killing all aboard. Trump later bragged about narrowly escaping death. (A number of people thought then, and still think, that it was a Mob hit orchestrated by Trump.)

 

The right tried, as usual, to spin it:

–Newsmax: “The media is freaking out over the President swapping planes in Turkey. Some are saying journalists’ lives were put in danger. What’s the White House reaction?” Kush Desai: “Leave it to the mainstream media to try to make the story about themselves.”

–Bill Grueskin: “The President was in grave danger if he stayed aboard Air Force One, but the staffers and journalists who were left aboard Air Force One were in no danger whatsoever.” (That would actually be true IF THE ENEMY KNEW TRUMP WAS NO LONGER ABOARD, but that was NOT the case.)

–And Trump? Trump is claiming no responsibility. The Secret Service did it. He had nothing to do with it. They just told him what to do. Because he’s a sociopath, he has no idea why anyone would be upset about this.

–Trump: “Well, it’s only up to Secret Service. I just follow what they’d like to do. So I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go on a different flight, a different plane. Equal safety, but they wanted me to do it. I do what they say.” Reporter: “Why did they want you to do that?” Second reporter: “What was the threat?” Trump: “I guess there was a threat out there. I didn’t really ask too much about it. I get a lot of threats.” (Sergeant Schultz: “I know nussing!”)

–Also Trump: Reporter: “Why was it too dangerous for you to fly on Air Force One, but not for the press?” Trump: “Well, I don’t know. I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk.” Reporter: “Why do you say that?” Trump: “Because that would be the plane they would be more likely to go for.” (IF THEY KNEW YOU WERE ON IT!)

–Interestingly, Trump hasn’t posted a word about this on his Truth Social account.

 

In economic news:

–Retail sales have fallen.6% since last year at this time.

–The South Korean bond market is breaking down, and US Treasury and Japanese bonds are both in trouble.

–US government debt is approaching $40 trillion dollars.

–Trump has drained the entire Strategic Petroleum Reserve to keep gas prices low. Carl Quintanilla: “The US basically has NO STRATEGIC PETROLEUM RESERVE ANYMORE.”

–And, worst of all, the author of THE BIG SHORT and the investor who predicted the 2008 crash, Michael Burry, says that Nvidia’s AI push has echoes of Enron.

–Trump: “The economy is doing unbelievably from the standpoint of Wall Street.”

 

In Epstein news:

–There’s been another new discovery about the Epstein files. Months before the FBI and DOJ announced that they were done releasing Epstein files, they had flagged a number of documents. Most of the flags were due to “classified information,” “foreign government information,” and “identities of victims and public figures,” but 16 of the documents were flagged simply, “POTUS (President of the United States.)” They have NOT ever been released.

–And in a truly wild development, it turns out that Hugh Hefner of Playboy fame called the FBI several times and tried to warn them about Epstein–and they did exactly nothing. (However you feel about Hefner’s hedonistic lifestyle, his women were not underage, and they worked for him willingly.)

–One of his Playmates told him about meeting Epstein when she was very young and how the next thing she knew she was naked and being held virtually hostage by Epstein. She asked Hefner for help notifying the authorities about what had happened to her, and he tried, but got no response at all from them.

 

In ICE news:

–As if shackling people, shutting them up in detention hell holes, and shooting them in the head wasn’t enough, ICE is now buying thousands of pairs of “shock gloves,” which will give painful electrical shocks to anyone who resists arrest.

–ICE agents will be given gloves that can deliver painful shocks–“conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.” (They sound just like what the Emperor did to Luke Skywalker!)

–Tom Homan’s defense of using them: “It’s another device to help someone be compliant when they’re not. You can’t have the first thing you go for be lethal force.” (I totally agree, but since when did “lethal force” become the first thing you go for?)

–New York Attorney General Tish James; “Electric gloves are illegal and maybe even unconstitutional.” Her office is researching the issue.

–Amanda Carpenter: “ICE is getting shock gloves. Because if ICE is physically putting their hands on you, that’s not good enough. Apparently, they need to shock you, too.”

 

In Cracks in the Dam news:

–A MAGA podcaster, Randy, has had a change of heart: “I used to like (Trump) until he started to show his Hitler colors…Trump has turned out to be a big piece of shit…He only wanted elected for revenge. He does not give a damn about the people in this country. He plays with his Iran like a child with a new toy.”

–A former MAGA guy in Ohio was interviewed by the press and said, “I’m not a big fan anymore. Like I said, he’s got money so he thinks he’s got all the power and thinks he can make the decision of going to war and he doesn ‘t feel the repercussions because of it like we do.”

 

In historical news:

–J. Bruce Ismay was the chairman and managing director of the White Star Line, and he decided to go along on the maiden voyage of the TITANIC to celebrate the thoroughly modern and luxurious ship’s first trip across the Atlantic. He was one of the people who suggested the captain about trying to set a speed record with the new ship.

–When the ship hit the iceberg mid-Atlantic and started to sink, Ismay is said to have helped load passengers into the lifeboats and then got into one of the last boats on the deck, Collapsible C, was lowered into the ocean, and watched the TITANIC go down. He was picked up, along with the other surviving passengers by the USS CARPATHIA in the wee hours of the morning.

–He was totally savaged in the press for his action in leaving the ship. Many compared him to Captain Smith, the ship’s engineer, and other ship’s officers, who had all been lost, and American journalist Ben Hecht wrote a scathing poem about him which ends: “To hold your place in the ghastly face of death on the sea at night, but to flee with the mob is an owner’s noble right.”

–He defended himself at the subsequent maritime hearings by saying he had only gotten into the boat after all the women on the deck had been seen safely into the boats but many, many women drowned–there just didn’t happen to be any on that part of the boat deck at the time–and he wasn’t just some random male passenger–he was the owner of the line. And a millionaire. (Think Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk surviving.) And 1500 “lesser” people died in the sinking.

–The British inquiry determined that he hadn’t done anything wrong, but the public wasn’t having any of it. He was vilified in the press, which called him “The Coward of the Titanic,” he resigned his position, fell into a “deep depression,” and he spent the rest of his life as a recluse. His wife forbade anyone from mentioning the TITANIC in his presence. His granddaughter wrote, “Having had the misfortune (one might say the misjudgment) to survive–a fact he recognized despairingly within hours–he withdrew into a silence in which his wife made herself complicit–imposing it on the family circle and thus ensuring that the subject of the TITANIC was as effectively frozen as the bodies recovered from the sea.”

–I personally believe he knew exactly what he’d done and how terrible it was. When one of the other survivors went to his cabin on the CARPATHIA to try to console him, “(Ismay) was staring straight ahead, shaking like a leaf. Even when I spoke to him, he paid absolutely no attention. I have never seen a man so completely wrecked.” (He, of course, was not a sociopath, and Air Force One was not blown to smithereens, but if it had been, and it turned out Trump and his bodyguard and Diet Coke fetcher and pretty human printer had all survived while journalists, the Air Force pilots and airplane staff, and many of Trump’s closest advisors and cabinet members hadn’t…)

 

In other news:

–Hawaii is under a hurricane watch. (It’s not usually in the path of hurricanes. Only two have made landfall in recent history.)

–Today marks the 91st anniversary of Social Security. (And it may well be the last, since Trump and his people are trying to get rid of it.)

–Trump has been formally asking NATO members to demonstrate their loyalty to him before deciding if the US will cut their military support to NATO.

–There’s still no sign of Mitch McConnell. Governor Andy Beshear has criticized him for not at least putting out a “proof of life” video”

–FeedAfterMidnight: “Just checking in. Where the fuck is Mitch?”

 

In good news:

–Kansas is defying Trump’s insane vaccine schedule and will “stick with the scientific evidence.”

–Colorado, California, Massachusetts, Illinois, and New York are requiring all public colleges and universities to provide abortion medication. Colorado’s law also applies to private colleges and universities.

–Planned Parenthood is offering abortions in the Missouri Ozarks for the first time in decades.

 

Best meme of the day, from the movie JAWS: “We’re gonna need a bigger catering cart.”

Best comment of the day, from Uncomfortable, on Trump’s threats to interfere with the election and declare martial law: “He can declare Martian law for all I care. I’m walking right past any armed goons and voting for every Democrat on the ballot. Trump is so finished, they’ll have to sneak him out of the White House in a catering truck.”

 

Keep calm and carry on,

Connie Willis