Oh darn, Trump fucked around and found out.
The European Union’s legislative body on Wednesday halted work on the formal approval and implementation of the trade deal it reached last summer with President Donald Trump.
“Given the continued and escalating threats, including tariff threats, against Greenland and Denmark, and their European allies, we have been left with no alternative but to suspend work” on the deal, said Bernd Lange, the chairman of the European Parliament’s international trade committee.
Wait that’s not supposed to happen. Everybody is supposed to say “we bow before your superior wisdom Sir” – not “ok then no trade deal for you, Donny from Queens.”
On Thursday, leaders of the 27 E.U. countries will meet to discuss their coordinated response to Trump’s Greenland threats.
This may include a package of retaliatory tariffs worth nearly $110 billion, which would impact a wide range of U.S. exports, from Boeing airplanes to soybeans to Kentucky bourbon.
Another potential retaliatory measure would be to deploy the bloc’s “Anti-Coercion Instrument,” a policy option sometimes referred to as the E.U.’s trade “bazooka.”
The ACI would allow the European Commission to target nearly any U.S. goods or services in Europe with a wide range of restrictions and barriers.
Go for it. Turn the heat up. Burn him.
Trump is on a calling-other-people-stupid roll.
Trump on Tuesday accused Britain of “an act of great stupidity” for agreeing to end British sovereignty over the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, in a blow to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s attempts to cultivate the president.
…
In a post on Truth Social on Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump abruptly reversed that position and argued that the decision strengthened the case for the United States to acquire Greenland.
“Shockingly, our “brilliant” NATO Ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia, the site of a vital U.S. Military Base, to Mauritius, and to do so FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER,” he wrote.
He added: “The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY, and is another in a very long line of National Security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired.”
It’s odd/funny/bizarre that he does that, when stupidity is such a conspicuous and large aspect of what he is and does and is known for. Maybe that’s why he does it – if he calls other people stupid then that makes him not stupid himself. Stupid of him to think that.
It’s a taboo word, of course. I’m violating the taboo whenever I call him stupid, which I do often, despite knowing it’s taboo. It’s taboo for good reasons, but at the same time, it’s a very important part of what’s so wrong about Trump that he is so weak in the intellect yet feels entirely qualified for the job he has. To put it crudely (and tabooly) he’s stupid enough to think he’s not stupid.
Trump calls other people stupid.
“If they don’t get this done, they are stupid,” Trump says of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia reaching a peace deal. Trump, who is now speaking with Borge Brende, the World Economic Forum president, then caveats, “I don’t want to insult anyone,” prompting one person in the crowd to cackle.
Only one?
Many of President Trump’s comments about energy in his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, were not grounded in reality…And China and the United States get a similar share of their electricity from wind turbines — about 10 percent as of 2024, according to data from the research firm Ember Energy and the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In his speech, Trump claimed China sells turbines “to the stupid people that buy them, but they don’t use them themselves.”
Glass houses; stones.
We are sooooooo tired of having to point out the glaringly obvious problem.
Banning biological males who identify as transgender from being placed in female prisons would violate their human rights, the Scottish Government will argue in court.
Not banning men from being placed in female prisons would violate women’s human rights you obtuse clueless head in the sand lunatics.
The campaign group For Women Scotland (FWS) has launched a legal challenge seeking to overturn existing prison guidance in Scotland, with a hearing due to begin at the Court of Session on February 3.
Current rules allow trans people to be placed in a prison matching their gender identity if it is considered safe to do so. This does not include those with a history of violence against women and girls, or who are judged to present a risk.
If it is considered safe to do so by whom???
Clearly, by people who are not going to be in those prisons, and so don’t need to worry about the men who don’t wear “RAPIST” badges but are in reality not risk-free if housed in a women’s prison.
FWS argues this is unlawful as ministers are statutorily obliged to provide women-only prison accommodation. It previously won a landmark Supreme Court fight against the Scottish Government over the legal definition of a woman under equality law, which judges ruled is based on biological sex.
…
In advance of the latest case, the Government has published its note of argument, which argues the position on prisons put forward by FWS contains “fundamental errors” and the Equality Act 2010 “does not mandate sex segregation”.
So the Government is perfectly happy to force women to take their chances.
Susan Smith, a co-director of FWS, said it was “depressing, but not
unsurprising, that in page after page referencing human rights, the Scottish Government has, apparently, not considered that women are also human and also have rights”She added: “Article 3 [of the ECHR] protects everyone from torture, inhuman treatment, or degrading punishment, yet women in, or recently released from, prison tell us the same stories of violation of boundaries and physical or mental abuse from the men they are locked up with.”
It’s almost as if a lot of men really don’t like or respect women. It’s almost as if all of us have grown up in a culture that sees women as contemptible, weak, sly, rebellious, and rapeable.
MSP Tess White said it “beggars belief that SNP ministers are still arguing that male-bodied criminals can be housed in women’s prisons”.
See above.
The Magic Ten Orders yet again.
The ten orders suck. They’re not just theocratic, they’re bad. Don’t steal; don’t kill; don’t lie. Well no shit; can you not come up with a little more than that? Be compassionate? Don’t hurt others? Be generous? Try to make your part of the world a little better? Can’t you come up with some affirmative suggestions instead of just the most basic don’ts plus a ton of godbothering nonsense?
No, you can’t, so get that crap out of the schools.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, who was in the courtroom for the debate, said, “I like our chances.” Asked what he would say to parents who don’t want their children taught the Ten Commandments, he said he would “advise parents like that they find some moral code.”
“You either read the Ten Commandments or your child is going to learn the criminal code,” he said.
Absolutely wrong. The ten are not even close to being a moral code. They are as minimal as they could possibly be on the moral front, and the rest is just monotheistic bullying. There’s not a word about generosity or compassion or helping others. Landry is the one who needs to learn something about morality.
Before Tuesday’s hearing, Texas state Rep. Candy Noble, a Republican and one of the authors of her state’s Ten Commandments law, urged the 5th Circuit judges to back it.
“Returning the Ten Commandments to our Texas classrooms gives our school children an understanding that the Ten Commandments were foundational to America’s educational and judicial systems,” Noble said in a statement.
Nonsense. They’re too minimal and empty to be foundational to anything, as well as being too theocratic to be tolerable to 99 percent of people.
Originally a comment by maddog on mostly white.
“We didn’t introduce this fight about sports. This was picked by the other side,” said AJ Hikes, executive director of strategy and culture at the ACLU . . . .
The hell you say! Women and girls were not the ones who introduced the bizarre and dangerous notion that men and boys should be able to shove their way into sports for women and girls, so long as the guys say the magic incantation, “I identify as a woman/girl.” This was a fight picked by men and boys to bully and Lord it over women/girls, to steal their places, steal their victories, literally beat up on them, as well as to satisfy the men’s/boys’ sex perversions by invading the women’s/girls’ private spaces. It’s all very angry, very hateful, very rapey toward women and girls.
You poisoned the well by parasitizing the gay rights movement, and bending the LGB victories and good will to your own purposes, to preempt and prevent any discussion or examination of your dangerous dogmas. You mercilessly bullied and harassed any dissenters from the lie that men/boys could be women/girls. You usurped the power, the machinery, and the money-raising capabilities of successful and established LGB organizations to implant your ideology at the highest institutional levels — you captured the corporate and governmental leadership — to impose your doctrines from above, with no examination or vettng of your claims. The hell you didn’t “introduce” or “pick” this fight; you absolutely did, after having done your best to cut the legs out from under any opposition beforehand. You picked the fight, and it was never a fair fight. It was the old-fashioned boys picking on the girls from the very beginning, only with most people cheering you on this time. Misogyny-coated misogynists, with misogyny filling.
Powerful ratiocination.
As the US supreme court heard arguments on Tuesday for a case that could determine whether transgender children can participate in school sports – and potentially impact LGBTQ+ civil rights protections more broadly – competing groups of activists rallied in Washington DC.
First lie. The issue is not whether “trans” children can participate, it’s whether boys can and should play in girls-only sports. If they can’t, they can still participate in boys-only sports. That is participating. It’s not fair to let them ruin sports for girls on the pretext that anything else is preventing them from playing at all. Journalism really needs to stop lying about this.
On one side was a multiracial mix of hundreds of people rallying for trans rights and in support of Becky Pepper-Jackson, a track and field athlete from West Virginia and the plaintiff in the West Virginia v BPJ case before the supreme court.
On the other side was an equally large crowd, mostly white, that was calling on the supreme court to “protect women’s sports” by upholding laws in West Virginia and Idaho that prohibit trans youth from participating in sports programs aligned with their gender identity.
Geddit? Clear enough? Pointed enough? The people who think boys should not ruin girls’ sports are racisssssst.
In many ways, the scene looked like other DC rallies over trans and queer rights over the past decade. Trans advocates and their allies danced to remixes of songs by the pop star Chappell Roan, while those opposing trans rights at one point held a prayer for the legal team representing West Virginia.
Geddit? Trans people are cool and fun. People who think girls should still be allowed to have their own sports are god-botherers and boring. The hip side to take is the one that doesn’t give a shit about girls.
“We didn’t introduce this fight about sports. This was picked by the other side,” said AJ Hikes, executive director of strategy and culture at the ACLU, one of the groups representing Pepper-Jackson, the plaintiff in one of the supreme court cases and the only known trans teen in West Virginia subject to the state ban. “This hyper-focus on sports is yet another example that we have of the ways that they are trying to erase trans and non-binary people from public life.”
This lie is yet another lie. I for one don’t much care about sports as such, but I’m aware that lots of people do and that it’s an area of life where which sex people are does make a huge and important difference. I do care much about fairness to girls and women. I’m not trying to “erase” trans and non-binary people but I am pointing out that those labels are new, and peculiar, and based on the lie that people can change sex.
“This is about power, and it’s about control,” said Chris Mosier, an internationally ranked triathlete who came out as trans in 2010. He said he worries about a broad supreme court ruling that could open the door to more restrictions on trans rights in schools and erode existing LGBTQ+ protections.
But, again, what are “trans rights” and how do we know and what do we do when they erase women’s rights and girls’ rights? Is there really a “right” for men to play in women’s sports? Not in my book.
The Times on Trump’s Davos Show:
Andrew here. I am in Davos, Switzerland, at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. President Trump is expected to speak here on Wednesday.
The mood: trepidation, for those who are being honest. I attended several events last night, where some C.E.O.s openly questioned the president, using words like “wild” and “bizarre.” Yet many of them are planning to attend a reception in his honor, with some even joking about the best way to praise him in person. “Tread lightly,” one C.E.O. said. Contrast that with a number of international politicians wringing their hands over the growing tensions about Greenland.
Contrast what? It sounds to me like the same thing. They all recognize that Trump is a dangerous moron, and they react with both dismay and jokes.
Already, the U.S. delegation has made clear that it’s not particularly interested in the event’s longtime goal of improving the world through international cooperation and commerce.
President Trump said he would hold a meeting to discuss what many see as his increasingly bellicose efforts to take Greenland from Denmark — but has reiterated that he still wants the semiautonomous territory. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent brushed aside potential European responses to Trump’s possible trade war over the island.
It’s easy to “brush them aside” when they haven’t happened yet.
Trump’s latest entertainment is creating a “board of peace” that is inclooosive of all the neighborhood warmongers. Countries that don’t join get punished.
Trump has confirmed he invited Vladimir Putin to join a US-proposed Gaza “Board of Peace”.
The board is part of Trump’s 20-point plan to end the Israel-Hamas war and expected to temporarily oversee the running of Gaza and manage its reconstruction.
On Monday, the Kremlin said the Russian president had received the offer. Neither Moscow nor Trump has said whether Putin had accepted.
Washington has asked various world leaders to sit on the board. On Monday, Trump threatened 200% tariffs on French wine after President Emmanuel Macron declined to join.
Well don’t stop there. Put also 200% tariffs on croissants and escargots and pain chocolat and ratatouille and daube de boeuf à la provençale.
The White House’s offer to Putin comes as Russia [has] yet to accept a US-backed peace deal aimed at ending its four-year assault on Ukraine.
Oh that’s ok, it’s just high spirits.
Trump responded to Macron’s decision to decline membership by threatening a 200% tariff on French wine and champagne imports. “He’ll join, but he doesn’t have to join,” Trump added.
He doesn’t have to join but we will punish him if he doesn’t.
In response, a source close to President Macron told the BBC: “Threats to use tariffs to influence our foreign policies are unacceptable and ineffective.”
But they’re fun for Trump.
Other leaders have cautiously responded to the invitations to join the Board of Peace. Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a Trump ally, have accepted roles on the board.
Well that will be a huge help.
Another thing, that I didn’t pay enough attention to. (It’s like reading Hamlet. There’s always something you missed – some theme or repeated metaphor or word with multiple meanings and overtones – so that it expands like one of those paper flower things, except that it never stops. In Hamlet, that is. In Trump it’s just a bit of stupidity or venality you didn’t notice fully enough the first few times around.)
Why did he send his idiotic letter to multiple ambassadors?
What was the plan? They were going to text each other and hastily put together a rebellion of the ambassadors and keep at it until Norway gave in and handed over the prize in a big silver-paper box with a red bow on top?
Or maybe he was hoping to form a clique. It would be like high school only better. His clique would sit at the best table and nobody else would be allowed to sit there, ever. He would be the boss of the clique. He would humiliate all the kids with glasses or acne or a brain.
Pretty much. I’m guessing he thought the ambassadors would all totally see his point, and they would call each other up and discuss it and decide to tell Norway it has to give Trump the Nobel or they won’t do any ambassing any more. It will be like a strike but with luxury restaurant dinners.
And another thing. I just can’t let go of this one, can I.
What could possibly be more uncool, more gross, more not in the spirit of the thing, more tacky, than telling the world that you think you should have won a big major famous global prize? You’re not even supposed to say you’d like to win, let alone screaming like a giant baby with a wasp up his ass because you didn’t, and let alone times a billion saying that you should have won it because you deserve it more than 8.3 billion people.
This is of course even more true when you are a murderous megalomaniac who has caused many deaths.
I wonder what he means by this bit:
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
What’s the logic? How is that not a non sequitur? Not to mention based on a false premise?
It wasn’t Norway that “decided” not to give him a prize, it was the Nobel committee. Except it didn’t have to “decide” anything because it never considered him for the prize. Ok I don’t actually know that for a fact, but why would it? Why of all people in the world to elevate as a force for peace would anyone pick out Donald Trump? He’s been trying to get people killed ever since the Central Park Five got his condign attention. He loves violence. He’s had a lot of people murdered over the past year, and been the origin of more deaths, such as that of Renee Good. His whole attitude to life and people is the antitheses of peaceable or peace-promoting. He’s angry, he’s a bully, he’s rude, he’s mean, he’s competitive, he cheats, he’s ruthless. He’s not a peacemaker.
That’s just one of the speed bumps in that particular road.
Great god almighty.
This is one time when a post on TwitX is the actual source: the news outlets quote it as the source so I might as well start there.
NEW:
@potus letter to @jonasgahrstore links @NobelPrize to Greenland, reiterates threats, and is forwarded by the NSC staff to multiple European ambassadors in Washington. I obtained the text from multiple officials:
Dear Ambassador:
President Trump has asked that the following message, shared with Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, be forwarded to your [named head of government/state]
“Dear Jonas: 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. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”
There aren’t enough swears in the whole world.
Note the starting assumption that Norway (not the government of Norway but Norway itself) decided not to give Trump the peace prize – which rests on the prior assumption that it ever crossed “Norway’s” mind to award him any prize at all, let alone a peace prize. Note the mind-numbingly weird assumption that Trump was ever an obvious candidate for a peace prize or any other kind of Nobel prize.
Note that Trump frankly says he was “thinking purely of Peace” in hopes of a tangible reward. Note that he frankly says now in the absence of the award he’ll stop – in short, note that he’s brazenly saying he decides what to do based on what’s in it for him. Note that he admits that until now he was not thinking about what is good and proper for the United States of America.
Note that he asks why Denmark gets to own Greenland. Note that he does not ask why the US gets to own North and South Dakota, or Alaska, or Florida, or Hawaii, or, really, any part of the united states.
Never elect a toddler as head of state. It doesn’t go well.
Hand it over or I’ll shoot the kid.
In a Truth Social post this weekend, President Trump gave an ultimatum to Europe: If they didn’t allow “the Complete and Total purchase” of Greenland, he would slap tariffs on a group of European countries, 10 percent in February, and then 25 percent in June.
European leaders responded that they would not be bullied.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain called the ultimatum “completely wrong.” President Emmanuel Macron of France went so far as to say Europe should retaliate with the strongest trade tool at its disposable: activating a regulation that could restrict the access of American companies to the E.U. market.
Within hours of the post, members of the European Parliament announced that they would freeze the ratification of Europe’s trade deal with Trump. European leaders are set to hold an extraordinary meeting in the coming days to try to agree on a response to Trump’s threats.
Maybe someone could have a meeting with him, try to appease him? It just might work.
Trump argues that the U.S. needs to control Greenland as a bulwark against Chinese and Russian ambitions in the Arctic. But the U.S. already has the right to expand its military presence in Greenland under a 1951 agreement with Denmark.
Whatever. Trump wants to control Greenland because he’s a wants to control kind of guy. To put it in the vernacular, he’s a bully, and he’s thrilled that he gets to take his bullying hobby to the world stage. He’s having a blast. This is like breaking the glasses of a million nerds at a time.
The process is the punishment. This is the conclusion every woman will draw from the experience of the Darlington Memorial Hospital nurses who were humiliated and degraded by their employer just because they didn’t want a man, known as “Rose” Henderson, to use the women’s changing room, where he could watch them undress.
On Friday an employment tribunal upheld the nurses’ complaints of discrimination and harassment, which is a victory and should be celebrated. But it is obscene this tribunal was necessary, and future generations will look upon cases like this with the same horrified bewilderment with which we look back on witch trials.
Or perhaps not quite the same because even more so because this is now. This is not the fucking 17th century when people believed a lot of wacko things, this is the 21st century when we know how to put an exploratory tool on Mars and how to put people on a space station that orbits the earth, to name just a couple of examples of humans knowing more now than they did 5 centuries ago. To put it another way: how dare they? How dare they not only pretend to believe that a man who says he’s a woman is therefore a woman, but also punish real women for saying a man is not a woman? How dare they stick this ludicrous reality-denying ideology in the middle of a human world that knows better?
Mind you, the US is just as bad, to judge from a senate committee hearing about abortion medication last week, in which an obstetrician-gynaecologist, Dr Nisha Verma, was asked if men could get pregnant and refused to answer what she described as a “polarising” question. It would be very interesting to learn how and why this anti-science lunacy took such hold in the UK and US medical establishment, and whether biology is even taught in medical schools any more, or if it is deemed just too polarising these days.
What exactly, one wonders, did Dr Nisha Verma learn in the process of becoming an obstetrician-gynaecologist? I mean, were there classes on how to make a man look pregnant? Were their classes on how to deliver a baby born to a man? What??? What can the content have been?
When another nurse, Bethany Hutchison, was interviewed on Woman’s Hour in 2024, she was scolded by the presenter for referring to Rose as a man: “You use the word ‘male’ but what you mean is a trans woman colleague.”
The presenter of Woman’s Hour. That presenter rebuked a woman for referring to a man as a man. Women must bend the knee one way or another. If feminism gets in the way it must be turned inside out so that it becomes all about men.
The Darlington nurses won their tribunal, but it took a 16-day hearing, almost 4,500 pages of evidence and years of being bullied. How many other women will take the risk to stand up for themselves, especially when the outcome is still far from guaranteed? The NHS nurse — yes, another nurse — Jennifer Melle is still waiting to hear if she can work again after she was suspended from St Helier Hospital in Surrey because she refused to refer to, and I swear I’m not making this up, a convicted male paedophile as “she”. The convicted paedophile attacked her and racially abused her, and somehow Melle was seen as the one in the wrong.
A witchfinder-general would be an improvement at this point.
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Hand it over or else.
I remember from history classes that during hard times in absolutist monarchies, it was common, for those petitioning for the redress of grievances, to blame harmful conditions and bad policies on a rotten apple or two among the king’s counsellors, rather than the king himself, as complaining about the former was, sometimes, somewhat less dangerous than the latter.
Same in Mao’s China where the disastrous effects of things like the “Great Leap Forward” were always blamed on unfaithful underlings who abused the chairman’s trust and good intentions for their own self-serving ends. The more people were made to suffer as a direct consequence of the chairman’s policies, the more that very same suffering would be blamed on a failure to realize those very same policies fully enough. On the same note, when several leading members of the People’s Temple defected, a few years before the infamous Jonestown massacre, most of them still couldn’t bring themselves to identify Jim Jones himself as the main source of the horrific abuses going on inside the cult, but blamed everything on the self-serving actions of unfaithful, mostly female, staff-members who were actually among the saddest victims of Jones’ reign of terror.
As we can read In Peter Pomerantsev’s biography of British propagandist Sefton Delmer, Joseph Goebbels’ main rival during WW2, there are some practical lessons to be learned from all this. Delmer dismissed the prevailing approach of trying to appeal to the better angels of the German people’s nature as preaching to the choir and a waste of time. Rather than seeing the Nazis as innocent victims brainwashed by propaganda, Delmer thought propaganda was effective because people actually enjoyed it and wanted it – because it gave them permission to be their worst selves as well as (you know what’s coming), an identity (ugh!), a community (double-ugh!) to belong to etc. Instead of appealing to any higher ideals, Delmer’s focus was on driving a wedge between the Nazi party (“Die Parteikommune”) and the individual (especially in the military). While “Der Führer” himself was already treated as a sacred figure and pretty much untouchable at this point, the local party officials, the SS, the Gestapo etc., could be attacked and portrayed as corrupt and decadent traitors engaging in a life of luxury and outrageous sexual depravity while the heroic soldiers were fighting and dying for the Fatherland on the front. To make the attacks appear to come from the inside the German army, Delmer created the character known as “Der Chef” (supposedly a disgruntled military officer; in reality a pre-internet “sock-puppet” and a “troll”) who was hosting one of Germany’s most popular radio stations (actually broadcast from London) at the time.
Interestingly, Delmer’s goal was not to make Germans outraged by the corruption but to encourage them to be corrupt themselves, neglect their duties, sabotage military equipment, feign illness to escape combat etc. People were supposed to think “If our leaders can be that corrupt and self-serving, why not me?”. Incidentally, Russian corruption has been exceptionally useful to the Ukrainians in the current war, diverting vast amounts of money and resources away from the War effort and into the pockets of unfaithful servants.
To bring it back to Trump, it has been suggested that Marjorie Taylor Green’s defection has been more devastating to the MAGA movement than anything Democrats could possibly have said or done, precisely because she was able to attack Trump in MAGA terms, as not being MAGA enough. Realistically though, hardcore MAGA-supporters are probably not going to start abandoning Trump in droves for any reason at this point. Like Hitler, he is already close to untouchable. But Trump is not going to live forever, and Vance, Miller, Hegseth, Bondi etc. may still be vulnerable. Sefton Delmer may have a thing or two teach us in this respect.
Originally a comment by Your name’s not Bruce? on Hand it over or else.
This is a nightmare. How much farther into madness must Trump (and America) plunge before somebody calls for the invocation of the 25th Amendment? I wonder if Putin has the Epstein files, and this is what he’s been holding over Trump all of this time? Putin is the biggest beneficiary if Trump immolates NATO from within. It says nothing good about the United States (or our species) that the fate of billions of people hinges on the psychopathology of one man and his handlers, both American and foreign.
I remember from history classes that during hard times in absolutist monarchies, it was common, for those petitioning for the redress of grievances, to blame harmful conditions and bad policies on a rotten apple or two among the king’s counsellors, rather than the king himself, as complaining about the former was, sometimes, somewhat less dangerous than the latter. I think there’s more than enough rotten to go ’round, but who’s really driving this bus of lunacy?
I really don’t understand what’s going on. I know that I’m probably hopelessly naive about all of this. I can’t truly believe that it is all clumsy, blind, blundering, that there’s nobody guiding and controlling it, even if that guidance and control is malevolent and foreign. It actually makes a perverse kind of sense, more so than if this is the result of pure stupidity and toxic narcissism. How does anyone in Trump’s inner circle benefit from encouraging this kind of brinksmanship and extortion of America’s allies? Are some of them in Putin’s pocket as well? How can none of them see that this plays into the hands of both Russia and China? I know that Trump has surrounded himself with talentless sycophants who know fuck all about anything, but Jesus fucking Christ Almighty, doesn’t anyone know how to tell him “No”? Trump is so easily goaded, manipulated, and fickle, it’s not beyond the admittedly limited capabilities of those around him. Can’t they see that they’re going to go down with him if he crashes everything? Are there no adults in the room? If there actually are individuals or “forces” in his cabinet reining him in, they’re doing a piss-poor job of it.
I know that Vance is probably waiting until he can serve two full terms himself before he pulls the plug on Trump. Vance can only do that if he serves less than two years as Trump’s replacement, so he might sit tight and wait for another year and a bit before finally organizing an internal coup because Trump has “gone too far.” But at this rate, with the combination of internal and external chaos, there might not be much more left for Vance to be president of.
