Because we need it – something nice for a change.

Of course he has.

Trump has decided he’s going to the last-minute global gathering of the nation’s top generals in Quantico, Virginia, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered last week.

It’s getting all this press attention, so of course he’s not going to let Hegseth hog the camera.

Trump’s appearance not only upstages Hegseth’s plans but adds new security concerns to the massive and nearly unprecedented military event.

But it’s the upstaging that’s the funniest.

Notice went out to offices around the Pentagon that the decision will “significantly change the security posture” of the speech, set for Tuesday morning.

Yeh, all that brass and the Secretary of Defense are expendable but the prezzy has to have all the bells and whistles.

H/t What a Maroon

David Lammy continues to ignore women.

David Lammy has been accused of ignoring women’s rights as he comes under pressure to remove transgender prisoners from a female jail.

The newly appointed Justice Secretary – an outspoken supporter of trans rights whose recent comments to concerned voters can be revealed today – has been urged to shut down a special unit inside HMP Downview in light of the Supreme Court ruling on biological sex.

He has been told by the local MP that E Wing, which currently houses five biological males who have legally changed sex, represents a ‘clear breach’ of the provisions for single-sex spaces in the Equality Act.

What the Daily Mail for some reason fails to make clear is that Downview is a women’s prison. It’s because it’s a women’s prison that the five males shouldn’t be there.

It comes after inspectors found that there is no longer one-to-one supervision of the trans inmates when they mix with female prisoners for education, religious services or social visits in the Surrey prison.

Good grief, what a waste of resources to assign handlers to male inmates so that they can “mix with” female inmates.

Rebecca Paul, Conservative MP for Reigate, told the Mail: ‘I welcome David Lammy to his new role as Justice Secretary, and I implore him to do the lawful and responsible thing and remove all biological males from women’s prisons. We are a heartbeat away from a terrible tragedy.

Why does she welcome him to his role when he’s allowing men to threaten women in women’s prisons? He’s doing a bad job, so why welcome him? I know, diplomacy, etiquette, conventions, yadda yadda, but that’s part of why we get stuck in this endless god damn loop. We mustn’t be rude to the poor dear man in a dress, so women just have to put up with him, it’s the polite thing to do.

This newspaper can also reveal that when asked recently if he accepted the Supreme Court judgment on single-sex spaces – which ruled that the definition of a woman is based on biological sex – Mr Lammy replied instead: ‘I strongly believe that trans people’s safety and wellbeing must be protected.’

Which is to say he strongly believes that men should be pampered at the expense of women.

Helen Joyce of women’s rights charity Sex Matters said: ‘David Lammy’s response to his constituents on the Supreme Court ruling demonstrates a serious blind spot on women’s sex-based rights.

‘It is deeply concerning that the new Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary, who is responsible for prisons, repeatedly emphasises support for trans-identifying people without any acknowledgement that the trans lobby’s demand for gender self-identification means the destruction of women’s rights.’

Also he apparently never says the same thing about women – never bothers to emphasize support for women. He seems to view and treat women as the enemy – the privileged domineering powerful enemy.

Dirty dirty dirty.

The FBI has fired agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, three people familiar with the matter said Friday.

The bureau last spring had reassigned the agents but has since fired them, said the people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss personnel matters with The Associated Press.

The number of FBI employees terminated was not immediately clear, but two people said it was roughly 20.

So FBI agents should not object to the use of excessive force in arrests? They should support lethal violence from law enforcement? Is that really a good idea in the long run?

The photographs at issue showed a group of agents taking the knee during one of the demonstrations following the May 2020 killing of Floyd, a death that led to a national reckoning over policing and racial injustice and sparked widespread anger after millions of people saw video of the arrest. The kneeling had angered some in the FBI but was also understood as a possible de-escalation tactic during a period of protests.

And/or a possible disavowal of excessive force in policing. Are they supposed to approve of excessive force?

The FBI Agents Association confirmed in a statement late Friday that more than a dozen agents had been fired, including military veterans with additional statutory protections, and condemned the move as unlawful. It called on Congress to investigate and said the firings were another indication of FBI Director Kash Patel’s disregard for the legal rights of bureau employees.

…

The firings come amid a broader personnel purge at the bureau as Patel works to reshape the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency. Five agents and top-level executives were known to have been summarily fired last month in a wave of ousters that current and former officials say has contributed to declining morale.

One of those, Steve Jensen, helped oversee investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Another, Brian Driscoll, served as acting FBI director in the early days of the Trump administration and resisted Justice Department demands to supply the names of agents who investigated Jan. 6.

A third, Chris Meyer, was incorrectly rumored on social media to have participated in the investigation into President Donald Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. A fourth, Walter Giardina, participated in high-profile investigations like the one into Trump adviser Peter Navarro.

Trump systematically kneecapping everyone who might stop him.

Trump is firing people for upholding the law.

Donald Trump fired a top federal prosecutor in Sacramento just hours after she warned immigration agents they could not indiscriminately detain people in her district, according to documents reviewed by the New York Times.

Because, of course, Trump wants to detain people indiscriminately.

Beckwith had received a phone call from Gregory Bovino, who leads the Border Patrol’s unit in El Centro, a border city 600 miles south of Sacramento. Bovino was planning an immigration raid in Sacramento and asked Beckwith who in her office to contact if his officers were assaulted, the Times reported, citing Beckwith.

600 miles is a lot of miles. One has to wonder why a Border Patrol unit on the actual border is planning a raid 600 miles from said border. Maybe that’s what they do, I don’t know, but Beckwith apparently didn’t think so.

She informed Bovino that agents were not allowed to indiscriminately stop people in her district, north of Bakersfield, per a federal court order issued in April that prevents the agency from detaining people without reasonable suspicion. The US supreme court overturned a similar court order issued in Los Angeles earlier this month.

The Supreme Court is totally down with detaining people at will. There will be fewer but better Trumpier Californians.

In a 10.57am email on 15 July, Beckwith repeated her message, telling Bovino she expected “compliance with court orders and the constitution”. Less than six hours later, her work computer and cellphone no longer functioning, she received a letter to her personal email account notifying her that she had been terminated.

Two days later, Bovino proceeded with his immigration raid at a Sacramento Home Depot.

The dragon is out of the cage and coming for all of us, slowly but surely. It’s immigrants now and it will be his critics in a few months or weeks. It will be all of us who don’t kiss the ring.

Originally a comment by Pliny on Trump’s impression.

DATELINE PORTLAND

(Your man in the streets Pliny)

Large numbers of people out in the streets – and parks, and by the river, and on the river. Lots of families apparently using children as human shields.

Smoke rising from many backyard barbeques.

Coffee shops fomenting with – patrons

Biggest thing about ICE is the video showing them pepper spraying peaceful protestors who were not interfering w operations.

Many Portlanders fear that military will not bring enough trash bags like in DC. Some areas could use their help.

Also having troops in town has raised fears that it’s just what we need – more people living in tents…

From War-torn Portland

In Portlandia the streets are not running with blood.

A visit to downtown Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, hours after Donald Trump falsely declared the city “war ravaged” to justify the deployment of federal troops, made it plain the US president’s impression of the city, apparently shaped by misleading conservative media reports, is entirely divorced from reality.

There were just four protesters outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in an outlying residential neighborhood that the president had claimed was “under siege” by antifascists and “other domestic terrorists”. Jack Dickinson, 26, wore a chicken costume draped in an American flag and held a sign that read “Portland Will Outlive Him”. Passing motorists honked in appreciation.

Well…um…he could be wearing a chicken costume in order to smuggle in pamphlets on human rights. It’s possible.

“There’s no justification, no reason for the national guard or military to be using ‘full force’ on people,” Dickinson said, “but they have this narrative about Portland that’s been helped by selectively edited videos to set themselves up for a crackdown.”

The Ice field office, which the city of Portland recently accused of illegally using for detentions, is also attractive to protesters because it sits directly next to a Tesla dealership. Another protester held up a sign that read “Tesla Funds Fascism/Stop Buying Teslas”.

There’s your terrorism right there. Telling people not to buy something is the worst crime on the books.

Jeez I go offline for a few hours and all hell breaks loose.

President Donald Trump has ordered the deployment of US troops to Portland, Oregon, authorising use of “full force” if needed, to suppress protests targeting immigration detention centres.

But we’re allowed to protest. It’s called a right.

Trump said he was “directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland”.

Mushbrain draft-dodger pretends protesters are great big scary sojers and he alone can stop them.

And Hegseth is Secretary of Defense. His job is not to help Trump unleash the military on protesters.

The announcement drew pushback from Democratic lawmakers, who said there was no need for federal troops to be deployed to the city.

O reason not the need – our basest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous. Trump needs to deploy federal troops to a city full of lefties because he’s a flabby lazy makeup-slathered couch potato who wants to feel all steely-man-like.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Portland has been targeted by protesters since early June, sometimes leading to violent clashes.

As of 8 September, the US Attorney’s Office had brought federal charges against 26 people for crimes including arson, assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest. On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that demonstrators had “repeatedly attacked and laid siege to an ICE processing centre” in Portland.

In a post on the social media platform X, the department stated that several individuals had been arrested and charged with federal offences. “Rose City Antifa, a recently designated domestic terrorist organization, illegally doxed ICE officers. They published their home address online and on public flyers. Individuals associated with Antifa also sent death threats to DHS personnel,” DHS wrote on X.

Yes well that’s no good, but it’s still not an actual war.

Earlier this week, Trump signed an order formally designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organisation. Antifa, short for “anti-fascist”, is a loosely organised movement of primarily far-left activists.

Legal experts have pointed out that there is no legal mechanism in the US that would formally establish any group as a domestic terror organisation. Such efforts, they said, could face constitutional challenges under the First Amendment, which protects free speech and assembly.

Yes but Trump doesn’t care and he’ll just do whatever he wants.

It turns out Hegseth is summoning the top brass from all over the planet to his office because he’s making a moooovie.

New details are leaking about why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called top military officials from around the world for an in-person meeting in Virginia next week.

The former Fox News personality, now a top Trump official, reportedly wants to make a video of his brief speech. Hegseth will be addressing military standards and the “warrior ethos,” multiple people familiar with the planned event told The Washington Post.

One has to wonder why he couldn’t have done the usual online meeting type of thing, rather than spending millions (to say nothing of the risks) to make the brass watch him perform for the cameras.

A White House official separately told CNN that the meeting is meant to be a show of force, demonstrating what the military looks like under Trump.

In the speech, Hegseth will reportedly discuss the Trump administration’s reinvention of the Defense Department as the “Department of War” and address new readiness, fitness, and grooming standards.

Grooming standards. Yes that’s a very sufficient reason to summon the top brass from all over the planet. Teach them how to look like Fox News talking heads.

As it was put to CNN, the “guys with the stars on their shoulders make for a better audience from an optics standpoint.”

An even more sensible adult reason.

The gathering, which is scheduled to take place Tuesday, was described as a “pep rally.” But bringing hundreds of generals to Quantico, including those stationed abroad, could prove extremely expensive.

So what! It’s not his money!

Hegseth has remained largely tight-lipped about the upcoming meeting, but appeared to address some concerns about it on Friday morning with a sarcastic post on X.

The defense secretary wrote “Cool story, General” in response to a tweet from retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges about Adolf Hitler gathering Nazi generals in 1935 and them being “required to swear a personal oath to the Führer.”

When no reason was given as to why Hegseth was ordering top generals to gather, multiple retired military officials raised questions.

The not-retired ones of course can’t.

A man of wisdom.

Trump said Saturday that he was directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “provide all necessary Troops” to Portland, Oregon.

In a post on Truth Social, the president wrote that the troops would “protect War ravaged Portland” and protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities that he claimed are “under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists.”

Yes, it’s World War 4 out here on the left coast.

The president has repeatedly spoken negatively about [trashed] Portland, including saying on Thursday that “anarchy” is taking place in the West Coast city.

Yeah there are no laws here, we just run over each other with our tanks.

“You go out to Portland, people die out there. Many people have died over the years in Portland. Portland is, I don’t know how anybody lives there. It’s amazing, but it’s, it’s anarchy out there. That’s what they want. They want anarchy,” Trump said during remarks in the Oval Office on Thursday.

It’s shocking, isn’t it. Many people have died in Portland. Compare that to your Los Angeles or San Diego, where nobody dies.

Last week, in separate comments in the Oval Office, the president said people in Portland are “out of control.”

“Have you seen Portland at all? If you take a look what’s happening in Portland. It’s, it has been going on for years. Just people out of control, crazy. We’re going to stop that very soon,” Trump said.

Can you be just a little more precise Mister P? Out of control how? Crazy how? Stop what?

The president has long been outspoken about his negative views toward Portland, a city that he declared in his first term to be an “anarchist jurisdiction.”

Hey you know what? I resent that! What about Seattle?! We’re every bit as anarchist and out of control and crazy as Portland, and we have huge bodies of water on two sides, and we have mountains on those two sides, and we have Mount Rainier.

Portland. Honestly. We’re much cooler.

Gender news from Texas:

LUBBOCK — In a first for Texas higher education, the Texas Tech University System has ordered faculty across its five universities to limit classroom discussion of transgender and nonbinary identities, but gave little guidance on how academic endeavors or instruction should proceed.

What guidance is needed? Trans and nonbinareee idenninies are not academic endeavors or instruction. They’re political/ideological as opposed to epistemic or academic, so banishing them makes room for academic endeavors as opposed to hindering them. If students were insisting on talking about football or ballet in physics classes and faculty were cheering them on rather than teaching physics, the bosses would be within their rights to say stick to physics in physics classes. It doesn’t take any particular guidance to figure out how academic endeavors or instruction should proceed in that scenario. The usual way is how they should proceed.

The vague directive rattled Texas Tech students and professors, many of whom expressed fear that they will face academic or professional repercussions for pushing back. Free speech groups quickly characterized the unclear limits as unconstitutional censorship. 

Really? It’s an attack on free speech for universities to teach the advertised subject matter? I’m assuming that the order to limit classroom discussion of transgender and nonbinary identities applies to classes in subjects other than trans ideology. If the class is a trans ideology class it’s a different story, but it seems unlikely that all or most Texas Tech classes are trans ideology classes. The Tech part must get in somewhere.

And LGBTQ+ advocates said the move will only further marginalize already-vulnerable trans and nonbinary students and faculty.

No it won’t. It doesn’t “marginalize” people to talk about other things. It doesn’t “marginalize” people for tertiary education to focus on specific subject matter instead of chatting about personal idenninies. It doesn’t “marginalize” people to stop talking about themselves for the length of a college class.

“Everyone is terrified,” said a professor at the flagship Tech campus in Lubbock, who asked not to be named over fear of losing their job.

Terrified of what? Being told to limit discussion of irrelevant subjects is not a death threat.

Texas Tech Chancellor Tedd Mitchell late Thursday said that when faculty are acting as employees and instructors, they must follow President Donald Trump’s executive order recognizing only male and female genders as assigned at birth, Gov. Greg Abbott’s letter directing state agencies to “reject woke gender ideologies” and House Bill 229 requiring a strict binary definition of gender for the collection of vital statistics.

Oh honestly. I don’t see how Trump’s EO has anything to do with it at all. Surely teaching the advertised subject matter is a basic expectation. The liberal arts are more squishy that way, because they can be said to apply to almost anything, but a tech school?

“This is an egregious attack on academic freedom,” said Chloe Kempf, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Texas. “The bottom line is that the Constitution requires — and Texans deserve — free and open learning environments in institutes of higher education.”

So students at a tech school can sign up for tech classes only to find that they all use class time to chat about social issues instead of their purported subject? Because that’s their civil liberty?

Cringecringecringe

Donald Trump’s trip to Windsor last week was a history lesson, albeit one from which the president drew worrying conclusions. He has been raving about all of the things he learnt while in the castle, but one name stood out in particular. “William the Conqueror… that’s the coolest name I ever heard,” the commander-in-chief ominously told the American Cornerstone Institute. “He was known for winning wars,” Trump added, proving that there are no flies on him, but he also said he’d asked the current King “Why don’t we call you Charles the Conqueror?” The sovereign and sometime biscuit-maker told Trump that this wasn’t really his style.

He was unfamiliar with the name William the Conqueror. CRIIIIIIIIINGE

Oh my god. Seriously?

CNN:

Pete Hegseth’s surprise gathering of hundreds of generals and admirals in Virginia next week is being called so he can describe the administration’s reinvention of the Department of Defense as the “Department of War” and outline new standards for military personnel, according to half a dozen people familiar with the planning.

Are you SERIOUS???

He could do that with technology. There is no reason to gather them all in one room as if it were 1820.

It is reckless, expensive, pointless, grotesque, dangerous, boneheaded to gather them all in one room, so Pete from the television gathers them all in one room.

It’s as if the planet is slowly but steadily forming itself into a plank and we’re all going to be forced to walk it, not over a period of decades but all at once.

“It’s meant to be a show of force of what the new military now looks like under the president,” a White House official told CNN.

The meeting is expected to resemble “a pep rally” where Hegseth will underscore the importance of the “warrior ethos” and outline a new vision for the US military, said three of the sources. He is expected to discuss new readiness, fitness and grooming standards the officers are expected to adhere to and enforce.

Grooming?????

All that money and time and risk to scream at them about how they cut their hair?????

“It’s about getting the horses into the stable and whipping them into shape,” said a defense official familiar with the planning. “And the guys with the stars on their shoulders make for a better audience from an optics standpoint. This is a showcase for Hegseth to tell them: get on board, or potentially have your career shortened.”

Excuse me, defense official, but Hegseth doesn’t need a “showcase” at a cost of however many millions it will take to stuff all the brass from all over the planet into one room.

Hegseth’s team is planning on recording his speech and releasing it publicly later, three of the sources said, and the White House is planning to amplify it, the White House official said.

As of Friday, there were no plans for Hegseth to make a major national security-related announcement as part of the meeting, all of the sources said, making it even more surprising that he has ordered the officers to attend in person and leave their posts for what will essentially be a major speech.

To put it much much much too mildly.

The original idea for the unprecedented gathering of generals and admirals was Hegseth’s, the White House official and one of the sources familiar with the planning said. Hegseth later let the White House know about the plans, but Trump himself knew very little about the details when he was asked about it in the Oval Office on Thursday, the White House official said.

The hundreds of generals and flag officers who were invited were also not told why they were ordered to drop everything and travel to Virginia, CNN has reported. One of the sources, a defense official, told CNN that it has been made very clear to the general and flag officers summoned by Hegseth that if they can’t attend, they will need to provide an extremely good reason for their absence.

Ah well there’s a hint at why he’s doing this. It’s because he can. It’s because he’s a jumped-up little shit who can’t believe his luck in getting to scream at people who are better than he is. “Annn I made them all come back annn I didn’t let them say no, Daddy!!”

Unbelievable.

Timothy Snyder writes:

My historian colleagues might correct me, but I do not think anyone at least in recent history has done what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is about to do: put all of the American generals and admirals from around the world into a single room (next week, in Virginia) just to say something to them.

There is no practical reason to do this: he has easier and more secure ways to communicate with the commanders. And there are obvious risks: the entire armed forces of the United States, spread around the world, will be without its leaders. Given that the government could well shut down the next day, the separation of commanders from their command might be indefinite.

And if Hegseth has his way, those generals and admirals will all be in one site, announced in advance, which means that the entirety of the American command structure will be more vulnerable, physically, than in any conceivable military scenario, including nuclear war. There is no scenario other than this one in which they would all be in the same place at the same time.

First thing I thought and then said yesterday when I saw the headlines. That’s not how this works. You never put all the top brass in one place, let alone doing that with noisy public fanfare. Is Trump just telling his whole crew to find out what the usual procedure is and then do the opposite? Across the board? Without any thought about why it’s the usual procedure?

So why might Secretary Hegseth do such an extraordinary thing? Only four solutions to the puzzle come to mind.

1. He has some trivial thing to say and does not understand the risks.
2. He wishes to endanger the lives of the generals and admirals.
3. He will stage a purge, perhaps involving a loyalty oath or something similar that requires personal presence.
4. He will tell the commanders that henceforth their assignment will be to oppress American citizens (“homeland defense”). This could be combined with the third scenario: those who refuse will be fired.

The first one doesn’t make any sense even in Trumper terms. If it’s trivial they wouldn’t blow all that money to get everyone in the same physical room. And really even having something important to say still doesn’t make any sense, for the same reason. Communication doesn’t require physical proximity these days so it can’t be that.

Maybe the idea is that the something to say is so profound and urgent and important that it has to be in person, so that the Magic can have its full effect. Can they be that dumb? Oh yes.

On the other hand Hegseth’s previous job was saying stuff on tv, which is the opposite of saying it in person, so is it likely that he thinks you can’t get a point across unless you’re in te Real Presence?

I think the closest is 3. I suspect it’s an all hands meeting to hear the message that Trump is never to be questioned or disobeyed, and it has to be in person because that’s more intimidating.

Except, is it? Really? In this case? Some dork from Fox News laying down the law to every single top brass person in the military? They don’t get there by being either stupid or weak, I’m guessing.

Whatever it is, it isn’t good.

Peak crazy.

Registered sex offender Richard Cox was back in an Arlington, Virginia, courtroom Thursday for a lengthy preliminary hearing.

Cox is accused of exposing himself to multiple women and children in Arlington Public Schools’ girls’ locker rooms. Those facilities have pools that are open to the public outside of school hours.

A dozen witnesses testified in the preliminary hearing for the Cox case, including women who said they saw him naked in the women’s locker rooms in Arlington County‘s Wakefield High School, Washington Liberty High School, and Barcroft Sports and Fitness Center.

One witness said when she and her five-year-old daughter went into the girls’ locker room after swim class, Cox – who identifies as a woman but is still physically male – was standing naked in a shower stall with the curtain open, touching himself.

Aka masturbating. Yes that’s definitely something you want a five-year-old girl to see. It’s definitely fine to force that sight onto non-consenting women and girls including girls as young as 5. Nothing wrong with that at all. He is being his Whole Self. He is living his womanhood.

On another occasion, a woman and her five and six-year-old daughters were at Barcroft Sports and Fitness Center for a gymnastics class, and when they went into the girls’ locker room, Cox was in there naked.

Arlington County and Arlington Public Schools allow people to use locker rooms and bathrooms of their choice based on their chosen gender identity, and they allowed Cox to use the women’s locker rooms.

Because the revolting sleazy man is all-important and his female victims are so much incidental trash by the side of the road.

Arlington County and Arlington Public Schools allow people to use locker rooms and bathrooms of their choice based on their chosen gender identity, and they allowed Cox to use the women’s locker rooms. A 17-year-old lifeguard who worked at one of the Arlington pools said she witnessed Cox naked in a school locker room, as did other women who testified.

In court Thursday morning, Cox repeatedly insisted he is a woman, and insisted the judge order the prosecutor to stop misgendering him and to use female pronouns.

And a pony.

David Frum says the monster will devour all of us if we let him.

The charges against Comey are not just about the president’s abuse of his power for personal retribution. They represent a test of the president’s plans for the future.

Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump and his top aides have spoken of their plans to bring cases against people who give money to anti-Trump causes. “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country,” Trump said on September 10.

In real life, there is no known evidence that any organization funded Kirk’s assassin. But there are donors to left-wing causes that Trump wants to defund. In the White House today, the president signed an order to investigate those donors. He cited the liberal donors Reid Hoffman and George Soros as potential targets. In April, Trump ordered an investigation of ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform.

I somehow missed the moment where it became illegal to be to the left of donaldtrump.

Trump faces a very immediate problem. He and his family have already amassed an enormous fortune in the first nine months of his second term, in great part from gifts and deals with foreign powers. That behavior is likely to be investigated if Trump’s party loses control of either house of Congress in November 2026. Trump’s bad economic management has put that control at extreme risk. His overall approval numbers have dropped to the very low 40s; his economic management, to the mid-30s. Grocery prices are up, and electricity prices are rising even faster. If honest congressional elections were held today, the Republicans’ two-seat margin in the House of Representatives would vanish. The protective screens for Trump’s self-enrichment would vanish with it.

So his move on Comey, Frum explains, is “another step in a forward-looking plot to shred the rule of law in order to pervert the next election and protect his corruption from accountability.”

It’s remarkable how much a person can achieve by having no scruples of any kind.

Maggie Haberman on Trump’s Revenge:

In the span of a few hours on Thursday, President Trump went from claiming no knowledge of a possible indictment of the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey to celebrating it as “JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” In reality, Mr. Trump had handpicked the prosecutor — previously one of his own personal lawyers — in an effort to ensure it happened.

It was a landmark moment in Mr. Trump’s retribution campaign, one that put on full display the relentlessness of his efforts to use the criminal justice system to get back at those he feels persecuted him. 

…

Throughout his first term, Mr. Trump — under investigation himself for possible ties between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russians seeking to influence the outcome of the race — sought to instigate investigations into his perceived enemies.

Mr. Trump’s zeal prompted his White House counsel at the time, Donald F. McGahn II, to write a memo explaining what the president could and could not do. “Strong constitutional norms of nonpolitical law enforcement should also guide your decision making and may caution against involvement in a specific matter,” Mr. McGahn wrote.

Yeah, Mr. McGahn might as well have written a poem in Urdu. Trump does not understand the words “constitutional” and “norms” and “should” and “nonpolitical” and “caution”.

In his second term, backed by a new cast of advisers who say he has the ability to direct investigations, Mr. Trump has abandoned any pretense of adhering to such advice. He publicly pressed his attorney general for the prosecution of Mr. Comey and other foes, fired a federal prosecutor who balked at carrying out his will, and installed an ally to do his bidding over the objections of career prosecutors who concluded the evidence against Mr. Comey was too weak to warrant charging him.

In short he is doing what dictators do and no one is stopping him.

Mr. Comey was high on Mr. Trump’s list of retribution targets, but the list is long.

Mr. Trump also has sought mortgage fraud charges against Letitia James, the New York attorney general, who successfully brought a civil fraud case against Mr. Trump and his company.

Mr. Trump may now put more pressure on his prosecutors to charge Ms. James, as well as Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, who while serving in the House was a leading force in investigating Mr. Trump.

The prosecutors should quit or force Trump to fire them rather than obey. I’m not holding my breath.

Getting an indictment is relatively easy for prosecutors, who have a lot of sway over grand juries. Winning at trial is much harder, and in the Comey case, many factors could make it challenging for the government to secure a conviction.

Line prosecutors in Virginia who had initially reviewed the evidence in the Comey case put in a memo why they thought the effort to convict him was too weak to take to court. The grand jury on Thursday rejected one of the three counts presented to it. And Mr. Trump’s string of invective about Mr. Comey and his repeated references to his own criminal cases provide a lot of evidence for possible defense motions about a vindictive prosecution.

Still, Mr. Trump has always understood that even absent a conviction, defendants face a reputational cost in a criminal case, not to mention the financial penalty in the form of legal bills.

In short he’s already won and he will win more as the case proceeds even if Comey is acquitted in the end.

Busy day in Trump world. Summoning all the military top brass for a meeting, and now indicting Comey.

Former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted by a federal grand jury, an extraordinary escalation in President Donald Trump’s effort to prosecute his political enemies.

Comey, a longtime adversary of the president, is now the first senior government official to face federal charges in one of Trump’s largest grievances: the 2016 investigation into whether his first presidential campaign colluded with Russia. He has been charged with giving false statements and obstruction of a congressional proceeding, the Justice Department said in a statement.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a post on X, “No one is above the law.”

Oh really? Your boss is.

At the White House Thursday, Trump said, “They’re going to make a determination. I’m not making that determination. I think I’d be allowed to get involved if I want, but I don’t really choose to do so.”

He’s not “allowed to get involved” in the sense that the norms and rules and laws permit him to get involved, but of course he means no one would have the guts to stop him, so if he decides to, he will. That’s where we are. He does whatever he can get away with, and that means pretty much anything he decides to do, because nobody who can stop him is willing to stop him.

Robert Reich did a public Facebook post yesterday that I find intensely annoying.

Friends,

I can’t tell you exactly how I know but after sixty years in and around politics I’ve developed a sixth sense, and my sixth sense tells me the tide is now turning on Trump.

This past week did it.

On Monday, he sued the Times in a lawsuit that, as CNN put it, read “like a pro-Trump op-ed, with page after page of gushing praise for the president.”

On Tuesday, he accused reporter Jonathan Karl and his employer, ABC News, of engaging in hate speech against him, and warned that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, might go after them.

And so on for each day of the week – Trump did bad damaging things.

On Sunday, at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, he said that he disagreed with Kirk’s supposed leniency toward his ideological foes, adding: “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

You could almost feel the great sleeping giant of America open an eye and frown, then blink both eyes and sit up and stretch, and then roar “what the hell is going on here?”

Oh give me a break. Maybe he could, but like hell the rest of us could. I couldn’t feel any such damn thing, and I’m pretty confident that no such damn thing happened. Metaphors are fun but this is serious business.

According to Strength in Numbers, the Disney boycott quickly became four times as large as any boycott over the last five years.

Disney’s stock dipped about 3.5 percent and continued to trade lower in subsequent days — a loss in market value amounting to some $4 billion.

Even Ted Cruz — Ted Cruz! — began issuing grave warnings about censorship.

By then the giant was roaring and stomping.

No it wasn’t! Much of the giant just loves what Trump is doing. Robert Reich’s magic intuition isn’t going to change that.

I’m old enough to have witnessed the great sleeping giant of America awaken before.

…

It roared again after tens of thousands of young Americans were killed in the jungles of Vietnam, finally bringing to an end one of the nation’s costliest, deadliest, and stupidest wars.

It roared again at Richard Nixon after Nixon was heard on tape plotting the coverup of Watergate — then being forced to exit the White House by helicopter on his way back to California.

It is starting to roar again now — at the sociopathic occupant of the Oval Office who won’t tolerate criticism, who in one wild week revealed his utter contempt for the freedom of Americans to criticize him, to write or speak negatively about him, even to joke about him.

Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I’ve seen a lot. I know the signs. The sleeping giant always remains asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some action so disrespectful of the common good, some brutality so noisy, that he has no choice but to awaken.

And when he does, the good sense of the American people causes him to put an end to whatever it was that awakened him.

What do you think?

I think it’s ridiculous.

Good god. This is deranged, and reckless, and outright dangerous. We’re in a car driven by suicidal lunatics.

Hundreds of US generals and admirals around the globe have been called to Virginia for a meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth next Tuesday, several US officials told CNN, though the reason for the meeting is unclear.

What?

Fox News personality orders top military brass to gather in one place and does not make the order a secret. What could possibly go wrong?

The meeting is expected to be held at the military installation in Quantico, Virginia, multiple officials said, adding that no one seems to know what the meeting is about, including the general and flag officers themselves, or why it was suddenly added to the calendar.

One source familiar said they’d heard theories ranging from a group physical fitness test, to receiving a briefing on the state of the Defense Department, to a mass firing of officers, but regardless of the reason the sudden convening of so many senior military officers is highly unusual.

Surely for obvious reasons.

Some officials also voiced security concerns about having so many high-ranking officers in one place at the same time. A congressional aide told CNN that unless Hegseth planned to announce “a major new military campaign or a complete overhaul of the military command structure, I can’t imagine a good reason for this.”

Or even then. He could announce things to all the high-ranking officers remotely, so what can possibly be the point of ordering them all to gather in one spot like kindergarteners after recess?

The meeting comes as the Trump administration has fired a slew of high-profile general and flag officers since taking office in January, in many instances due to Hegseth’s campaign against diversity-related issues, but often also for unspecified reasons. Hegseth also ordered the Defense Department in May to cut the number of four-star generals and admirals by at least 20%.

Putin must be pissing himself laughing.

Before taking on the role of defense secretary, Hegseth repeatedly voiced disdain for much of the military’s currently serving general and flag officer corps. In a podcast appearance last summer, Hegseth said a third of the military’s senior officers are “actively complicit” in what he argued is a move towards politicization of the military. In a second podcast, he said senior officers are “playing by all the wrong rules” to cater to “idealogues in Washington, DC.”

Well he must know what he’s talking about because…um…remind me why?