Another Trump Derangement Syndrome incident Monday:

NPR reports:

A 60-year-old man has been arrested in Maryland following allegations that he assaulted a group of three young adults who were hanging flyers in support of George Floyd and an end to racial injustice.

The confrontation drew widespread outrage when video of the encounter was posted online. Authorities with the Maryland-National Capital Park Police said Friday that Anthony Brennan III of Kensingston, Md., has been charged with second-degree assault in relation to the Monday incident.

…

Police say the incident occurred along the Capital Crescent Trail, which runs from the Georgetown neighborhood in Washington, D.C. through Bethesda, Md., a nearby affluent suburb.

Authorities in Maryland began asking for help identifying the cyclist on Tuesday, leading to hundreds of tips.

Brennan has since expressed remorse for the attack through his attorneys, according to media reports. The website DCist reports that Brennan says he is “sick with remorse for the pain and fear I caused the victims.”

Not sure I believe the remorse, but anyway – the Trump poison spreads day in and day out. Princess Ivanka should dedicate herself to fixing that problem instead of giving vacuous pep talks while impersonating a dress dummy.

Princess Ivanka is having an angry.

Oh no, did somebody cancel her? From what? Who wants to hear her in the first place?

The people of Wichita, maybe.

Ivanka Trump has hit out at complained about “cancel culture and viewpoint discrimination” after plans for her to give a virtual commencement speech to students in Kansas were canceled amid criticism of Donald Trump’s response to anti-police brutality protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.

The really interesting question here is why was she asked in the first place? Really, why?

She’s a talentless ignorant opportunist. She sells clothes and jewelry, and profits off her criminal father’s presidency. How is any of that a reason to invite her to say things to students?

Meanwhile she has an absolutely stomach-turning InspirAtional talk of some kind, in which she tries to come across as serious and thoughtful not at all like a Barbie doll and instead…

…well, doesn’t.

Notice there’s a god damn White House logo in the top right corner, so this is some kind of official White House something or other – this pontificating robot in 5 pounds of makeup and snowy white princess dress is speaking in her capacity as a ???? in the current administration.

Notice that the man she works for is not all that dedicated to “listening to one another” – and neither is the man she’s married to, who also has an illegal and corrupt “job” in the White House.

She cites “the philosopher Joseph Campbell” – except he wasn’t a philosopher, he was a professor of comparative literature. He talked a lot of deepities, but deepities don’t a philosopher make.

Now Barr is trying to pretend he wasn’t actually involved in that whole thing. He was there and all, but he wasn’t, like, saying go spray that person and that one and that one. He did ask who will rid him of this turbulent crowd, but he didn’t say how. He was just musing aloud, really. Expressing the wistful hopes and dreams of a loyal public servant.

Attorney General William P. Barr sought to dissociate himself Friday from police’s move earlier this week to push back a crowd of largely peaceful demonstrators using horses and gas, claiming that he did not give the “tactical” order for law enforcement on the scene to move in.

He’s a civilian, ok? He doesn’t give the tactical orders. None of it was his fault!

“I’m not involved in giving tactical commands like that,” Barr told the Associated Press. “I was frustrated and I was also worried that as the crowd grew, it was going to be harder and harder to do. So my attitude was get it done, but I didn’t say, ‘Go do it.’ ”

Mmmmm. His attitude was – what does that mean? He had a look on his face that meant “get it done”? Or he actually said “get it done” but did not say “go do it”? His body posture said “get it done” but his clothes did not say “go do it”?

At his own news conference Thursday, Barr said he had decided to extend the perimeter early Monday morning, and later, around 2 p.m., met with law enforcement agencies to lay out a plan for doing so. He said that officials could not get units in place soon enough to execute the plan before demonstrators arrived, but he did not address what happened in the minutes before police made their move.

And none of that in any way suggests “Go do it.” Obviously. It’s all just a general expression of mood, with no trace of orders or instructions or commands.

A video of the incident shows Barr conferring with officials on the ground, and about 24 minutes later, police making an aggressive move on the crowd. The Associated Press reported that Barr “said it was a Park Police tactical commander — an official he never spoke to — who gave the order for the law enforcement agencies to move in and clear the protesters.

And the two were completely unconnected! Barr was talking to the officials about golf, and not at all about violently pushing protesters out of Lafayette Park.

“They told me they were about to make the announcement and I think they stretched the announcements over 20 minutes. During the time I was there, I would periodically hear announcements,” Barr told the Associated Press. “They had the Park Police mounted unit ready, so it was just a matter of execution. So, I didn’t just say to them, ‘Go.’ ”

Oh thank god. Thank god thank god thank god. Barr didn’t just say to them, “Go.” That changes everything.

Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, claimed there was “no contradiction” between Barr’s and other officials’ comments — though her statement did not address McEnany and the Justice Department official saying specifically that Barr had told those on scene to take action.

“Earlier in the day, the Attorney General had approved and adopted a plan to move the perimeter in response to the violence that had occurred over the weekend. Subsequently, he checked in with federal law enforcement officials on the ground in Lafayette Square to see how it was proceeding,” Kupec said.

So, in other words, he said to remove the protesters in the morning, but he didn’t say it again in the afternoon. He is OFF THE HOOK.

Trump took a little jaunt to Maine yesterday.

President Donald Trump traveled to Maine Friday to tour a facility that makes medical swabs used for coronavirus testing, but the swabs manufactured in the background during his visit will ultimately be thrown in the trash, the company said.   

So they’re Potemkin swabs? What’s the point?

Puritan Medical Products said it will have to discard the swabs, a company spokeswoman told USA TODAY in response to questions about the visit.   

It is not clear why the swabs will be scrapped, or how many.The company described its manufacturing plans for Friday as “limited” – but the disruption comes as public health officials in Maine and other states have complained that a shortage of swabs has hampered their ability to massively scale up coronavirus testing.

Workers in white lab coats, hair nets and plastic booties worked at machines making swabs while the president walked through the room. Trump, who did not wear a mask for the visit, stopped at one point to talk with some of the workers. 

Ah. Trump did not wear a mask. Perhaps that’s why all the swabs will be thrown out.

Nearly a third of Maine nursing homes reported last month they had no nasal swabs to collect specimens, the Portland Press Herald reported. Nearly 61% of those that responded to a Maine Medical Directors Association survey said they had seven or fewer at their disposal.

National shortages of swabs was part of what severely hampered early coronavirus testing efforts. The Trump administration used the Korean War-era Defense Production Act to increase production, which Trump is expected to tout on Friday. Puritan, which received millions of dollars from the federal government to double production, is one of only two companies that make the kind of swabs needed in coronavirus testing.

So naturally Trump went there and disrupted production. Helpful.

Trump decided today would be an awesome day to forbid kneeling.

You can protest some things, but not the flag – Trump forbids it.

Too bad there’s a Supreme Court ruling saying yes you can.

But also…kneeling? Really, dude? Now?

Well, remember, it’s George Floyd’s great day.

So unidentified unidentifiable heavily armed soldiers are in the streets in Washington DC, the seat of the US government. Nothing to worry about there, for sure.

On Trump’s order, about 4,500 national guard troops from around the country were flown to Washington early this week, and a wide assortment of special units from the Bureau of Prisons, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the FBI and the US Marshal’s Service. 

In total, 7,600 soldiers and officers were deployed in Washington, including 1,700 active duty troops in reserve in bases around the capital, according to Bloomberg News.

7,600. That’s rather a lot.

Several of those units – including military police, United States park police and Secret Service – were involved in violent scenes on Tuesday when officers fired teargas and rubber bullets to clear peaceful protesters from outside the White House.

So that the pussy-grabber could walk up the road a piece and wave a bible around.

Since then, groups of uniformed officers in helmets and body armour – often without identifying insignia – have appeared in Washington, expanding a security perimeter around the White House into the city’s commercial district – and prompting questions about who was in control of the streets and the public right of way.

And why the capital city was being occupied by troops.

When reporters asked one group about their affiliation, an officer replied “DoJ”, the Department of Justice, but would not be more specific. All the federal law enforcement agencies deployed in Washington are reporting to the attorney general, William Barr, who has been the architect of the heavy military presence and who told state governors on Monday: “Law enforcement response is not going to work unless we dominate the streets.”

So the Attorney General can declare war on the citizens? I didn’t know that.

The presence of elite units such as the Green Berets has raised concern because of the symbolism of sending combat troops, and the unsuitability of their training for responding to protests.

And the fact that the government isn’t supposed to go to war with us. That’s a military takeover.

Other units sent on to Washington streets included the FBI’s hostage rescue team and prison riot control officers. The Bureau of Prisons director, Michael Carvajal, argued that federal prison guards were “often called upon to assist during crisis situations within our communities”. 

Are they? That’s bad news.

But Deborah Golden, a Washington lawyer specialising in prisoners’ rights said that correctional officers are trained in a completely different environment from public demonstrations. Protests are restricted in prisons and officers are entitled to use much greater force.

Golden said on Twitter: “They aren’t trained for the job they’ve been put in. And it’s a set up for disaster.”

We’re not prisoners and we’re not an invading army.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that the Pentagon had ordered to national guard units not to carry firearms, a decision made without consulting the White House. The president had wanted the soldiers to carry guns, in a show of force.

Of course he did, the chickenshit little pig. He wants to terrorize people who don’t agree with him George Floyd is having a great day.

The mayor underlined her defiance of the president by giving permission for the words “Black Lives Matter” to be painted in giant yellow letters on the road leading to the White House. The painting began in the early hours of Friday morning and was finished before noon.

Fascist president issues official fascist threats via his official presidential fascist Twitter.

Kelly says Trump is telling whoppers about Mattis.

Former White House chief of staff John Kelly said Thursday that President Donald Trump “has clearly forgotten” the circumstances of former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s departure from the administration, breaking with his former boss to side with a fellow retired Marine Corps general.

Aka is telling whoppers.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Kelly contradicted Trump’s claim that he had fired Mattis. Kelly called Mattis “an honorable man” and described Trump’s Twitter attack on the former Defense secretary as “nasty.”

…

“The president did not fire him. He did not ask for his resignation,” Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff when Mattis departed the administration, told the Washington Post. “The president has clearly forgotten how it actually happened or is confused.”

Uh huh.

Sure, Don, sure.

Another portent:

The US has been downgraded from a “medium risk” to a “high risk” country in a civil unrest index by the global risk analysis company Verik Maplecroft.

As nationwide protests continue over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the firm finds that the “marginalisation of racial and religious minorities” is the single biggest driver of the unrest “because of the profound impact on the living standards of entire communities.” The conditions mean that direct acts of violence to express discontent “appeal to a broad range of community members.”

This is what I was just saying (or ranting) – George Floyd is not a one-off, George Floyd is part of the whole big picture of this country from the beginning. He’s part of the history of a former slave-owning nation that never did what it had to do after the formal ending of slavery. Slavery continued in all but name and we’ve never fully dealt with that fact, and the prison system is perpetuating it to this day.

The Guardian reports on Trump’s “press conference,” at which Trump took no questions, which makes it not a press conference but an announcement.

Trump has started his White House press conference, and the president opened the event by quickly veering from the jobs numbers to the George Floyd protests then back to the jobs numbers…However, the president unexpectedly shifted from the jobs numbers to the protests, bragging about the progress seen in Minneapolis this week after demonstrations last week turned violent.

Veering unexpectedly is what he does. He doesn’t do joined-up thinking, he does blurts.

He said we are “largely through” the coronavirus, which of course is not even slightly true.

Then the Guardian kind of threw up its hands in defeat.

Trump appears to have abandoned his prepared remarks, assuming he had any to begin with. The president has celebrated the jobs report, while mocking his critics.

Oh he had some, you can tell, because when he’s reading them he stares down and talks in a slow monotone. When he veers he looks up and babbles very fast and very disconnectedly. There’s always the impulse to take his elbow and guide him back to his room.

Trump described those who have criticized his response to the coronavirus pandemic as his “enemies,” and he characterized the policy goals of the Green New Deal as “baby talk.”

The president also enocuraged governors to allow him to send National Guard troops amid the George Floyd protests, saying he would send troops “so fast it’ll make their heads spin.”

Then he said the headline thing.

“Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying, ‘This is a great thing happening for our country,” Trump said of Floyd, who was killed in police custody last week. “A great day for him, a great day for everybody. This is great day for everybody.”

Not sure we can agree with you there, Don.

His campaign, on the other hand, thinks it was a gem.

What he said while staring down at the written speech:

Equal justice under the law must mean every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement regardless of race, color, gender or creed. They have to receive fair treatment from law enforcement.

What he said when he looked up from the written speech to ad lib:

We all saw what happened last week. We can’t let that happen. Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying, ‘This is a great thing that’s happening for our country.’ This is a great day for him. It’s a great day for everbody. This is a great day for everybody. This a great, great day in terms of equality.

Then he babbled about the economy.

Golly.

It’s all much too familiar, and not in a good way.

The scenes have been disturbingly familiar to CIA analysts accustomed to monitoring scenes of societal unraveling abroad — the massing of protesters, the ensuing crackdowns and the awkwardly staged displays of strength by a leader determined to project authority.

In interviews and posts on social media in recent days, current and former U.S. intelligence officials have expressed dismay at the similarity between events at home and the signs of decline or democratic regression they were trained to detect in other nations.

“I’ve seen this kind of violence,” said Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst responsible for tracking developments in China and Southeast Asia. “This is what autocrats do. This is what happens in countries before a collapse. It really does unnerve me.”

And others too.

Marc Polymeropoulos, who formerly ran CIA operations in Europe and Asia, was among several former agency officials who recoiled at images of Trump hoisting a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington after authorities fired rubber bullets and tear gas to clear the president’s path of protesters.

“It reminded me of what I reported on for years in the third world,” Polymeropoulos said on Twitter. Referring to the despotic leaders of Iraq, Syria and Libya, he said: “Saddam. Bashar. Qaddafi. They all did this.”

The impression Trump created was only reinforced by others in the administration. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper urged governors to “dominate the battlespace” surrounding protesters, as if describing U.S. cities as a foreign war zone. Later, as military helicopters hovered menacingly over protesters, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, toured the streets of the nation’s capital in his battle fatigue uniform.

So I’m not the only one who found the image of Milley in battle fatigues sinister.

Former intelligence officials said the unrest and the administration’s militaristic response are among many measures of decay they would flag if writing assessments about the United States for another country’s intelligence service.

But but but we’re special.

About that unrest…the thing is, the problem has always been there. Racism, white supremacy, generation after generation of suppression and oppression and neglect and ferocious separation and revenge have always been there. We never made any reparations for two centuries of slavery. We never made any serious effort to compensate for two centuries of slavery. Instead we blamed the descendants of slaves for the poverty that the slave-owning race had imposed on them, and we used that blame as justification for continuing the oppression and neglect and ferocious revenge. That monstrous deformation has always been there, all this time, so we’ve never actually been the city on the hill we like to boast of being. We talked a good game and it worked out well for a lot of people but there was always this huge festering wrong that we just fucking ignored.

So, yeah, it’s not actually all that surprising that now at last the curtain is pulled back and we see how rotten the whole thing has been all along.

Even this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lectured China about its efforts to prevent citizens of Hong Kong from holding a vigil to mark the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.

“If there is any doubt about Beijing’s intent, it is to deny Hong Kongers a voice and a choice,” Pompeo said in a statement that was met with derision on Twitter because it coincided with crackdowns urged by Trump in the United States.

I wonder how much attention Pompeo has paid to the effects of generations of state-enforced segregation over his career. I’m guessing zero.

That scamp Bari Weiss has been mixing it up again.

Hmmmyes that’s not at all oversimplified or crude.

But her colleagues say that’s not how it is.

The New York Times – in the wake of an almighty outcry – has thought again about that bright idea of giving a US Senator space to say let’s have the military go to war on the citizenry.

Fewer but better op-eds; sounds like a plan. Now if only they would send David Brooks on his way.

Trump has decided wellllllllllll maybe he won’t fire Esper after all because hey who needs the tsuris this close to an election am I right.

Trump had been [gone] ballistic, said people familiar with the situation, about a news conference Esper held where the defense secretary tried to distance himself from the president’s church photo op on Monday and said he didn’t support sending the military into U.S. cities at this time — a move Trump had said he was considering. The president was so angry he had told aides he was considering dismissing Esper, one of the people said.

But a day later, the view inside the White House was that the president was now unlikely to do so given how close it is to the election, those people said, with one senior administration official saying that removing Esper “is not worth the shakeup five months from an election.”

So because it’s a day closer to the election, he decided nah.

Yeah, sure, guys. What you mean is he had yet another ego-meltdown yesterday and by today he had calmed down a little, like any toddler. A tip: we’re not going to vote for him just because he didn’t fire Esper. Nope. That’s not going to happen.

Trump’s anger with Esper came as a string of former military officials began speaking out against the president’s handling of the demonstrations across the country. Esper’s direct predecessor, James Mattis, publicly slammed Trump’s response to the protests over the death of George Floyd, saying in a piece published in The Atlantic magazine on Wednesday statement the president “tries to divide us” and calling his “bizarre photo op” in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church “an abuse of executive authority.”

Has he smashed all his toys with a hammer yet?

Esper had not cleared his plans for the news conference with the White House beforehand, one person said.

Esper said that he was aware of the Monday night plan to visit the church — where Trump posed for photos holding a Bible — but had not known what would happen there.

…

He also said he did not support invoking a 213-year-old Insurrection Act, something Trump had been considering, to deploy active-duty U.S. troops to respond to civil unrest in cities across the country.

It’s a wonder Trump hasn’t fed him to the lions.

[Editorial note: you can’t be ballistic (unless you’re a weapon), you can only go ballistic. The idiom is going ballistic, not being it. You’re welcome.]

Christing fuck.

Play the second clip.

Adding: Doucette has a whole long thread of these.

What was Barr’s role?

Attorney General William Barr was part of the decision to expand the perimeter around the White House Monday, CBS News has confirmed, pushing protesters who were assembled there from the area before President Trump delivered remarks and walked across the street to survey a damaged historic church.

A Justice Department official told CBS News the decision was made late Sunday or early Monday morning to move the perimeter keeping protesters from getting close to the White House back one block. The official said it was a coordinated decision, and Barr advised it was the correct move.

…

The Justice Department official said the president’s movement’s did not have any bearing on the decision to extend the perimeter around the White House. Barr went to observe the scene at Lafayette Park after visiting a command center Monday afternoon and was surprised to see it hadn’t been moved as intended. The official said Barr then met with police to discuss moving the perimeter. Afterward, officers began pushing protesters from the park.

The decision was made to move the perimeter Sunday night or Monday morning, then later Monday Barr took a look and was shocked shocked to see that nothing had happened and told the police to hurry up and get it done. It was SHEER COINCIDENCE that Trump went marching up to that church moments later. Sheer coincidence I tell you.

Trump actually pumped his nasty little fist at the cops on Monday.

Barr held a press conference just now (or perhaps is still holding it).

Adding:

Andrew Coyne at the Globe and Mail says Trump just wants to watch the world burn, which I think is a good way of putting it.

It is hard to assess how much Donald Trump is the cause of his country’s disintegration, and how much the consequence. Suffice it to say that the times brought forth the man: the perfect embodiment of all the fears and resentments – of foreigners, of minorities, of liberal elites – of the Republican base.

They found in Mr. Trump a vehicle for their nihilism and their rage, perhaps the least suitable candidate for high office in the entire United States – a petulant, insecure man-child, so wholly lacking in intelligence, competence, integrity or emotional stability as to be disqualified in most states from driving a bus, let alone leading what was once the most powerful country on Earth.

Driving a bus, though, is a very skilled and high-stress job, if you think about it (and/or if you ride buses a lot). Trump is definitely the last person you want to see at the wheel.

That was the point: to invert every norm or expectation, not only of public life, but of ordinary human behaviour; to render those norms and expectations, by a combination of their callousness and his shamelessness, impotent. The point was to “send a message,” although as Mr. Trump and his enablers in the Republican political class intuited, the message was less of rebellion than credulity.

The results are all around us: the world’s worst death toll from the novel coronavirus; the worst economic collapse since the Depression; the worst race riots since 1968. Mr. Trump wasn’t the immediate cause of any of these, but he has made each measurably worse, whether by the incompetence of his administration, the incoherence of his policies or the toxicity of his rhetoric. Elect someone to blow up the system, it turns out, and you will be picking up the pieces for years.

The U.S. accordingly gives every indication of coming apart, torn along lines of race, class, ideology and region, with Mr. Trump gleefully pulling at each frayed seam. Every institution of authority that might have mitigated the damage has been attacked and undermined. Every belief or movement that might have exacerbated it – racists, gun nuts, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists of all kinds – has been cultivated.

And torn along other lines too. There are the lines of political orientation, related to moral orientation. There are the lines of egotism versus public-mindedness. There are the lines of being an absolute shit at all times versus not doing that. There’s the embrace of hatred and violence and domination versus trying to do better than that.

Worst of all has been the collapse of trust. It is true that Mr. Trump can be trusted to always do the worst possible thing in any situation – to do it not in spite of expert recommendations to the contrary, but because of them.

But even here the sense of bad faith is inescapable. He does things not because he believes in them – for he does not believe in anything – but because they make him feel good in the moment, or because they might benefit him in some way. He lies, not because he wants to be believed, but to advertise his disdain for the very notion of truth as distinct from falsehood. He gives orders, not because he has anything he wants done, but as tests of loyalty for his underlings.

I think that’s right. There’s no there there. Lots of pundits still claim he’s diabolically clever but I don’t think so – I think he’s random in the way Coyne describes, and that his randomness is what his fans love about him.

Jennifer Rubin collects a number of distancings and rebukes from military boffins:

We do not yet know precisely why Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper publicly broke with President Trump on Wednesday, renouncing the use of the Insurrection Act as a means to deploy the military against civilian demonstrators. We can surmise, however, that Pentagon brass was finally fed up and prevailed upon Esper to speak out.

It’s unnerving when it’s the military having to remind the civilian government that we’re not supposed to have military government.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, who had accompanied Trump on his march across Lafayette Square, put out a memo on June 2, which read like a not-very-subtle rebuke of Trump’s attempt to use the military to suppress protesters:

1. Every member of the U.S. military swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution and the values embedded within it. … We in uniform — all branches, all components, and all ranks — remain committed to our national values and principles embedded in the Constitution.

…

3. As members of the Joint Force-comprised of all races, colors, and creeds — you embody the ideals of our Constitution. Please remind all of our troops and leaders that we will uphold the values of our nation, and operate consistent with national laws and our own high standards of conduct at all times.

I didn’t know he’d done that. Never mind about the combat fatigues then – I withdraw my suspicion that he meant to add to the intimidation factor by marching to the church in them.

Rubin cites James Miller’s resignation from the Science Defense Board and

Gen. David Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff, and Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria, superintendent of the Air Force Academy, also spoke up this week in support of the protests for racial justice, with Silveria directly repudiating use of violence against fellow Americans.

In addition, Air Force Gen. Joseph L. Lengyel, who heads the National Guard Bureau, put out a statement Wednesday entitled “We Must Do Better,” denouncing the racism that has resulted in the deaths of so many unarmed African Americans, urging Americans to listen and learn and reminding us, “Everyone who wears the uniform of our country takes an oath to uphold the Constitution and everything for which it stands.” He declared that if they are to uphold their oath as service personnel and “decent human beings” they must uphold the oath.

And the biggest wallop of all was from Mattis.

Mattis’s unprecedented rebuke raises a number of issues.

First, he was widely and justifiably criticized for failing to speak out previously against Trump, not even to share direct observations that might persuade lawmakers and Americans that Trump is unfit for office. That failure remains, and we do not know whether speaking up earlier would have deterred Trump from further action. Nevertheless, no one should diminish the importance of his action, which may carry sway with other current military officials, Congress and the public. It is late, but it better than anything we have heard from any other former administration official. (Contrast Mattis’s action with the refusal of former national security adviser John Bolton, who chose to hold back direct knowledge of Trump’s alleged impeachable conduct for the sake of a book deal.)

Second, it remains unclear whether Mattis will hold any sway with Republican lackeys in the Senate who refuse to break with Trump — or worse, who try, as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) shamefully did, to outdo Trump in vowing to use the military against civilians. Most of them long ago tied themselves to Trump’s mast, willing to go down with the him — and take the country with them — rather than be on the receiving end of a Trump Twitter tirade.

There’s also the fact that some of them are every bit as evil as Trump is. They stick to him because they like his fascist leanings.

Hot times. Bloomberg yesterday afternoon:

Ex-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis condemned his former boss, President Donald Trump, over his aggressive rhetoric and strategy to quell protests that erupted after the death of an unarmed black man in police custody.

…

The sharply worded and unprecedented rebuke from Trump’s first defense chief will raise pressure on the president, who this week threatened to dispatch active duty troops to quash protests and drew widespread condemnation when the square in front of the White House was forcibly cleared before he walked to a historic church to hold a Bible for photographers.

The president responded Wednesday evening saying that he “didn’t like his ‘leadership’ style or much else about” Mattis. “His primary strength was not military, but rather personal public relations,” Trump wrote in one of a pair of tweets.

Oh, interesting, because Trump’s primary strength is not military or governmental or intellectual or policy-wonkish or diplomatic or judicial or public spirited, but rather fomenting rage and hatred.

Mattis’s statement, first published in The Atlantic, came on what had already been a rough day for the defense establishment.

Trump’s current secretary, Mark Esper, angered White House officials by publicly distancing himself from Trump’s potential use of the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy active duty forces to cities confronting protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

So Esper publicly distanced himself from Trump’s military takeover plans. Good!

It remains to be seen if Mattis’s denunciation will have lasting political power, but it strikes at the heart of what the president has pitched as one of his strengths: His fulsome praise of the military as part of his “America First” approach to the world, even while he frequently accuses the national security establishment of trying to undermine him and his administration.

Part of his Murka First approach yes but also part of his love of force and domination as opposed to argument and persuasion – part of his mindless love of violence and hatred and rage. He doesn’t have any serious understanding of the military, much less of foreign policy, he just loves the association with maximum violence.

Despite Trump’s praise of Mattis when he took office, by the end of the defense chief’s tenure, their relationship was shattered. Upon his departure, Mattis he issued a blunt resignation letter that amounted to a public reproach of Trump’s “America First” mantra.

“We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances,” Mattis wrote. “Because you have the right to have a secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”

What I’m saying. Trump doesn’t give an actual shit about our security, prosperity and values or the solidarity of our alliances. He just wants to order people killed and then watch the real-life war movie.

In his statement this week, Mattis took aim at Esper, too. Without naming the Pentagon chief, but citing the military jargon the Defense secretary and other top officials have used in describing the geography of the current protests, Mattis said, “We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace’ that our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate.”’

Esper had used the “battlespace” term during a call with governors on Monday, before U.S. authorities used smoke bombs and pepper-spray-like devices to clear out the peaceful protest outside the White House.

Jeezus. I missed that. Battlespace!

But since then apparently Esper has gone all squishy like Mattis so now he’s on the naughty stool too.

President Donald Trump confronted his Defense secretary, Mark Esper, after the Pentagon chief publicly opposed the idea of deploying the military to contain protests, according to people familiar with the matter.

Separately, the president later asked top advisers if they thought Esper could still be effective in his position, two people familiar with the discussions said on Wednesday night.

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Esper met with Trump in the Oval Office after telling reporters at the Pentagon that active-duty military forces to perform law enforcement within the U.S. is “a matter of last resort” and that the National Guard was better suited to the task.

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The defense chief also appeared to back away from his boss by saying that while he knew he would be joining Trump to walk into Lafayette Square in front of the presidential residence on Monday, he was not aware of specific plans, including what would happen when the group reached St. John’s Episcopal Church.

He said he knew they were going to the church but not that it was for a photo op.

(Well, given Trump, what else would it be? Hardly a quiet thoughtful visit to ask how everyone is doing.)

His remarks generated irritation at the White House, where three Trump aides who asked not to be identified said the secretary should have moderated his comments to draw less of a distinction with the president.

No, actually, quite the reverse. Everyone’s comments should draw a huge distinction between self and Trump, because Trump is a murderous violence-loving racist monster.