Dear Everybody:
Trump’s dementia/madness is once again front and center as he ranted and raved at another rally:
–The entire speech was nuts, but I’ll start with the worst thing he said–and the thing that made all the headlines today–first. Trump, starting out talking about oil prices: “With the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay. They can take out a city. Let them…let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay.” (The audience cheered wildly at the thought of the two blue cities being destroyed.)
–When Trump was asked today to clarify what he meant by his statement, he just walked away and refused to answer.
–Allison Gill (MuellerSheWrote): “An American president is encouraging an enemy to destroy American cities. This is treason, though he will claim we are not at war.”
–Governor Newsom called the speech dangerous–if not treasonous. “Putting a target on two of our biggest cities and one of America’s largest naval hubs. I am directing the State Thraet Assessment Center to actively monitor the situation in the event that foreign actors interpret the President’s remarks as an invitation to target California.”
–Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called the president’s remarks “dangerous” and said the president should be focused on protecting Americans rather than encouraging attacks on US cities, and San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said in an official statement that “President Trump should retract these remarks and apologize to the people of San Diego. A President does not get to decide which American communities are worth protecting.”
–Doug Proffitt: “THAT’S TREASON!!!! That’s absolutely the DEFINITION OF TREASON! He’s literally CALLING for an attack by an enemy that HE MADE on an American city!”
–Bjorn Ankre: “This is ACTUALLY the worst unhinged thing I’ve heard that man say in his rallies.”
–Cramps: “This statement alone should subject Trump to removal from office!”
–Sioux: “He’s a ‘clear and present danger.’ 25th Amendment please…”
–noGOP: “Expect a false flag operation coming soon!”
–Jonathan Lemire had another theory: “We know President Trump has no filter. He’s blurting something out of nowhere about LA or San Diego. Is it possible that he received some sort of briefing that there’s a threat against one of those cities, and he’s now just saying that? Or at the very least, this is now yet another moment of where there is no bottom.”
–Jennifer Rubin: “The Mob boss mentality, lack of logical connections between sentence fragments, self-contradictions, and elementary school level vocabulary in a froth of vicious anger reflect a deeply unwell mind.”
–What Trump said sounds even more ominous in light of what he said to Tucker Carlson when Tucker interviewed Trump about the war. Trump talked about Israel taking over the entire Middle East region and destroying Iran. When Tucker Carlson expressed worries about the innocent people who would be killed, Trump said, “In the end, we all die anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”
Other deranged stuff Trump said and did:
–He opened his jacket and displayed his front. (No idea why he did this. If it was to prove he is wearing some sort of medical equipment, the protrusion has been from his rear end, so it didn’t prove anything.
–He was standing funny again, pitched sharply forward from the waist and with his legs awry.
–He bragged about crowd size, even though he’s downsized from arenas to high school gyms and the cameras never cut away to show the crowd because they’re still half-empty.
–He got a bunch of names confused. He was there to promote Jim Pillen and trash his Democratic challenger Lynne Walz, but he got confused and said, “The worst governor in history–Jim Walz.” (The governor of Minnesota is Tim Walz.)
–he called the video screens “telerons,” said he had no idea what red dye was even though he was signing an executive order making it legal, and walked the wrong way off stage after his speech.
–Trump: “I cut a lot of grass.”
–Trump: “You need to be a student at the top of your class at MIT to turn on a lawnmower nowadays, you know? But I got rid of all that stuff. Now you can have a lawnmower!” (One of the most disturbing things is that his audience cheered wildly at this statement and every other thing he said, especially about blowing up Los Angeles and San Diego. It’s definitely a cult!”
–Trump on Iran: “We did it one night with those beautiful B-2 bombers. They left Missouri. They flew both ways, 37 hours. They were refueling. We have the greatest tankers. We have the greatest military in the world. They went from Missouri and then at one o’clock in the morning, with no moon, dark as can be, these unbelievable machines led by the most incredible pilots in the world, they unloaded every single bomb, went right down air chutes into this, uh, drug factories, really. That’s what they were doing. They were nuclear and drugs. They were doing drugs, but they were doing the nuclear. These drug factories/nuclear factories were hit so hard.”
–(Note: In his dementia, Ronald Reagan used to confuse things he’d done in the war with scenes from movies, and that’s what this sounds like: 30 SECONDS OVER TOKYO plus that money shot of the bomb hitting the USS Arizona in PEARL HARBOR. And what the heck is this stuff about drug factories “doing the nuclear?”)
–George Conway: “He’s mentally ill and incompetent in every sense of the word.”
And then there was the thing with Natalie:
–Halfway through the rally, Trump called Natalie Harp up on stage to bring him an executive order to sign (he’s now signing them at rallies) and stand there beaming at him while he did. Then he handed it back to her, and she pranced off-stage, still beaming.
–As she pranced off-stage, he watched her admiringly for a lo-o-ong minute, and then said, “She reminds me of THE PRICE IS RIGHT. This perfect person comes up, hands it, walks off. We should go on television with this show. Right?”
–Derek Cressman: “Where’s Melania”
–Willie Geist: “A penny for the thoughts of the first lady.”
–Jo-Jo from Jerz: “He’s fucking disgusting. And she’s fucking psycho.”
–Sofia B. Kinzinger: “As women across the country have spent the past week in horror trying to process the Cornell case…here we have our president parading his assistant–a young woman–onstage to troll the press.”
–JennX: “Not to mention the fact that he is a married man actually traveling with this young woman, while his wife, the First Lady of the United States, is nowhere to be found.”
–The troubling thing about this whole thing is that, whether he’s trolling the press or not, he’s making her ever more front and center. I think before the food cart/plane transfer thing, hardly anybody but us political junkies knew who Natalie Harp was, and that even after that, most of the country didn’t know her from Adam. But now he’s going out of his way to make her connection to him more and more obvious. Why? And is it his idea or hers?
And speaking of Cornell:
–Not only has NY State Attorney Letitia Janes been named as an independent prosecutor to investigate the Cornell case, but now ex-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates has also been brought in to review the school’s handling of the sex assault claims. Trump hates Yates, too–he fired her after she directed DOJ attorneys to not defend the constitutionality of Trump’s refugee and immigration ban.
–The right wing seems to have decided to take the side of the Cornell 7. They are actively trying to identify and harass the victim, and Megyn Kelly (who was sexually harassed by Roger Ailes at Fox News) has been posting horrible things about the victim.
–Megyn Kelly: “No one will even consider the possibility that this woman made a decision to get it on with four men total, not seven, and enjoyed it, because I’m just going to be honest. She’s not the most attractive gal, she’s extremely beefy in like her arms and her legs…we hold the men to account for their bad behavior, but the women, none of it–or in this case, woman.”
–She said because the victim waited three weeks to notify the police, she cannot be believed. (Note: Megyn Kelly waited over ten years to speak out about her attacker.)
–Megyn Kelly: “She possibly enjoyed being admired. This is probably a first for her. She’s probably thrilled to be so admired because she clearly didn’t grow up the incredibly beautiful one. I’m not trying to be insulting. (Really????) Why can’t we account for that possibility–that the girl who was never the most sought after suddenly had four guys who wanted to have sex with her, and she counted this, yeah, in her inebriated state, as a win, and liked the feeling of being sexy and desired and wanted? It happens. Sorry, it does. And that’s why she kept saying yes. Why do we have to go right to, ‘She’s a victim.’”
In Trump’s propaganda ads news:
–The blowback has been so great from both Democrats and Republicans for those taxpayer-funded ads which Trump calls public service announcements, but which are clearly propaganda ads promoting Trump and Republicans, that Trump announced today he will pay for the ads through one of his super PACS.
–Trump: “The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great USA and paying for them with USA money. This is a rather standard thing to do (no, it’s not) but rather than doing that, although nothing will make them happy, I have decided to do the Patriotic Ads, among others, and pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc.”
–The problem is that that’s illegal, too–it’s against the law for PACs to coordinate in any way with the candidate they’re promoting. Former Dem Senator Claire McCaskill: “He’s controlling his PAC, and that’s illegal. You can’t do that…under the law it’s very important that you cannot direct what they do. So even though he’s reversed course because a few Republicans finally had enough courage to speak up, he is still in blatant violation of US law…”
–There’s another problem–Trump gave the impression that he would pay the taxpayers back the more than $5.5 million dollars for the ads he’s already run, but he made clear no, he has no intention of reimbursing the taxpayers (or more specifically the honored veterans fund he stole the money from.)
–The New York Times reported that “White House officials said Trump’s super PAC did not plan to repay the government for the more than $10 million dollars taxpayers had already spent on the ad.”
In Iran War news:
–In spite of Trump’s claims that the Strait of Hormuz is now open and as much oil is moving through it as before the war, the reality is that Iran is still sinking ships. On the third, they struck a crude tanker, on the fourth, they hit two more, and twelve tankers have been hit in the past seven days.
–Several tankers turned around after being warned they would be sunk by Iran.
–The Strait of Bab el-Mandeb is currently a battlefield. On Sunday the Saudis launched an offensive to take it back from Houthi control. They claimed they had made progress, but the Houthis denied they had made any gains.
–The Houthis struck the Aramco refinery in Jeddah.
–The war continued to spread–to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the Black Sea, where a Roumanian ship was sunk by drone strikes. The attack was possibly by Russia.
–The US pulled all its B-1s out of a UK base because of warnings from Iran.
–Brandon Feedman: “US forces are retreating. That’s what this means. ‘Pulled out and returned to their home stations in the US as potential Iranian threats raise base security concerns’ is a fancy way of saying the Iranian military has the US military in retreat. This is unbelievably embarrassing.”
In Epstein news:
–Kash Patel says he can’t release the Epstein redaction-training videos featuring agents because assignments to cases are not by choice. HOWEVER, he just got through firing every single agent who worked on a Trump-related case, even though they had no choice in what cases they were assigned to either.
–Michael Wolff says that in an interview he held with Jeffrey Epstein, Epstein refused to release photos of Trump with young women at his home because he feared for his life. Epstein: “I may be a pedophile, but I don’t have a death wish.”
–Michael Wolff: “Epstein was full of basically dangerous information about this man who he thought would become president, then did become president.”
–Former Prince Andrew has legally challenged the Epstein-linked search warrants used in his arrest.
In They’re All Perverts, including the Republican Candidates, news:
–Royce White, a Republican candidate for the Senate, has been ordered to stay away from his wife and one of his children.
In promising news:
–Mail-in ballots are going out in Colorado–we got ours yesterday and have heard from other people they’ve gotten theirs. Even though figuring out who to vote for was a snap (straight Democratic ticket), there are lots of issues to read over, so we will get them in tomorrow.
–Public Notice: “The fact is Democrats are ready to crawl across broken glass and over fields swarming with velociraptors to defeat the bloated fascist oligarch and his corrupt minions. And Democratic politicians are responding to these incentives by focusing their ire on the crime boss president…”
–Journalist Sally Quinn: “It’s already starting to dawn on the MAGA minions that the morning after is going to be a doozy.”
In scientific news:
–Scientists have found what they think might be the oldest animal who ever lived. It was a quahog clam pulled from the seabed off Iceland and was 507 years old. Unfortunately, it had been killed by fishermen. It was born during the Ming Dynasty, so they named it Ming.
–You can see it here: https://museum.wales/blog/2122/Meet-Ming-the-clam—the-oldest-animal-in-the-world/
In other news:
–There was a lab accident in Russia which supposedly resulted in the death of the lab worker by pneumonic plague. (It’s like the bubonic plague, only it’s spread through coughing and sneezing, like a cold, and therefore much more contagious than the bubonic, which is spread by fleas.) I say supposedly because there are a lot of things that are fishy about Russia’s story, how it was handled, etc. Stay tuned…
–Trump named Beni Rae Harmony as his new press secretary to replace Karoline Leavitt, who’s now working at Fox News. A photo immediately surfaced of her and her husband wearing “Fuck Joe Biden” T-shirts and toting scoped sniper’s rifles.
–The family of a Texas woman who died after being denied an abortion is suing Ken Paxton.
In good news:
–A federal judge ordered Trump to turn over thousands of internal USAID records to the Washington Sun, who sued to get them.
–A federal judge threw out a DOJ lawsuit against a Michigan county after one of its lawyers admitted he had no case supporting his argument to force the local government to do Trump’s bidding and cooperate with ICE.
–A federal judge dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit challenging California’s trans-inclusive school sports policies.
Best meme of the day: “There are two types of Trump supporters: 1) Billionaires. 2) Idiots. Check your bank account to see which one you are.”
Best comment of the day, from Papa OMG: “They try to overwhelm and distract and exhaust us. It’s not working, and they are failing and freaking out, throwing more bullshit every day. Keep the pressure on them. They will pop.”
Best comment of the day, from Will Bunch: “The madness has been a slow train coming, but it’s starting to accelerate, and may soon run off the rails.”
Keep calm and carry on,
Connie Willis
