One of the keys to understanding the current catastrophe enveloping this country because it chose to make Donald Trump president (twice, so far) is that for no doubt complex sociological and psychological reasons lots of elite actors have to pretend to themselves and everyone else that what is happening is something other than what it is, which is to say complete madness.

Commenter Cereal makes a crucial point about this description in the WSJ of Trump’s totally imaginary 20% toll for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz:

“Officials had been sent scrambling on Monday after Trump announced the policy.”

That’s not what policy means. Trump sharted out some imaginary brain juice with BIGLY NUMBERS and a bullshit boast and the headless chicken henchmen ran around trying to bridge the gap between his idiocy and some kind of reality.

That’s a concise description of something that now happens on a practically daily basis. The levels of denial here are truly mind-boggling.

First, Trump has no power to impose a 20% toll on ships passing through the strait. To do that, before we even start getting into trivial details such as what the legal or pseudo-legal mechanisms for doing this would look like exactly, the US would have to defeat Iran in a war that the US is currently losing, and quite badly.

Second, even if we enter into a fantasy world in which the US government would have the power to impose such a scheme, attempting to do so would completely destroy the economic viability of using the strait in the fashion it was being used in during the Before Time. Indeed the 20% number is classic Trump: it’s something that he pulled out of his feculent ass because, as Cereal notes, it sounded bigly and powerful, even though attempting to impose such a toll would destroy the commerce upon which it was imposed.

Third, and more globally, this is just some insane bullshit that Trump spewed on social media, which then has to be treated as if it’s something else, because the alternative would be to admit that we as a nation have done what we have in fact done, which is install a demented narcissistic madman as president.

Which, obviously, is not really an option.

. . . Commenter Tzimiskes sums up something that I’ve been feeling in an inchoate way for just about exactly eleven years now:

Trump is really helping me to understand history. If our elites can lie to themselves this much to rationalize their own power, I can much better understand how people in the past thought that some useless inbred king was divinely ordained by God. All that stupid stuff from the past that seemed unbelievable seems so much more plausible now that I am seeing people engage in the same stupidities in real time.

Especially since unlike in the past we had better options immediately available in very recent memory and our elites choose to go along with this insanity anyway. Anything is better than having their authority challenged.

That’s it, right there.

Trump has redecorated the White House using the same style as he did with the Oval Office.

 

Excuse me, but this is TRASHY.  That gold stuff on the walls and around the fireplace is plastic decorations that were spray-painted gold then glued onto the walls.  The man is white trash all the way.

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MORE AT THIS LINK

Border Goon With Racist Troll Account Bragged About Escaping Justice

AND MORE AT THIS LINK

Gun-Toting Border Patrol Goon Unmasked as Racist Online Troll – NewsBreak

 

Shortly after Trump’s “pool guy” sprayed some crappy sealant on the Reflecting Pool, pieces of sealant floated to the top.  Clearly, the “pool guy” didn’t know what he was doing and Trump had fucked up another national monument.

Of course, Trump never takes the blame for anything, so, the noted daytime drunk Jeanne “Boxwine” Pirro, US Attorney for DC, charged several people with vandalism.  Pirro even claimed there was a (350 – 450 foot long gash” that had been cut into the bottom of the Pool by “vandals.”  Of course, there was no surveillance video, no witnesses, no evidence of any kind.  Just an alcoholic Fox host.

Then, the Pool was drained for inspection and, possibly, doing it right.

And guess what?  NO GASH.  NO CUT.  Just pieces of improperly applied sealant here and there where the improperly applied crap had come loose from to pool.

But there’s more.  Also found in the sealant after the pool was drained were TIRE TRACKS that appeared to have damaged the coating causing pieces to come loose.  And where did the tire tracks come from?  Remember how three days after the coating was applied by the “pool guy,” Trump ordered his Secret Service escort to drive up and down through the empty Poll so he could see his handiwork?  Here’s a pic of TEN 7,500-pound armored Chevy Suburbans driving over the freshly applied Pool coating.  There is your vandalism.

WATCH: Trump’s Motorcade Drives OVER the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool

 

 

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Here you see the tire tracks as the vehicles turn in unison, exactly as did Trump’s motorcade.

 

 

More tire tracks from Trump’s motorcade

 

 

 

The media has one job Thursday night: Tell the truth about Trump’s lies

Donald Trump is a stone-cold liar. He lies about his height, his wealth and his golf game. He lies about his accomplishments and his failures. He lies about everything, large and small, important and insignificant.

There is nothing, however, that Donald Trump lies about more than elections — particularly, the 2020 election. There is a reason his statements about the 2020 election were dubbed the Big Lie.

In his second term, Trump has transformed the executive branch into a factory for creating, disseminating and enforcing these lies. His Cabinet is filled with election deniers who parrot his falsehoods. He insists that every nominee — whether to an agency post or a federal judgeship — offer an answer about the result of the 2020 election that reinforces the lie.

The result, as the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn said of the Soviet Union, is that “In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.”

The difference between the former Soviet Union and the United States today is that we have the constitutional right to speak freely and criticize our government. Our media is protected from government censorship by a robust First Amendment.

But these rights are only as strong as we are willing to exercise them. Sadly, right now, too few people in positions of power are willing to loudly criticize Trump for his lies. Even worse, the once-proud legacy media has proven itself too timid to speak clearly about Trump and his lies.

But on Thursday night, the media and its powerful backers have a chance to partially redeem themselves. That is because Donald Trump has announced a prime-time speech to the nation. According to reports, he will use this time to once again lie about elections.

Specifically, he is reportedly set to announce that he has new intelligence reports supporting his lies about the 2020 election. Some suggest he may single out Georgia, while others suggest he will try to implicate multiple states’ election results.

What is important to keep in mind is that it will all be lies.

To be clear, everyone in the legacy media knows Trump’s history and knows that he will spread dangerous lies on Thursday night. They also know that they have a choice about whether to cover the speech in whole, in part or not at all. Most importantly, they know the danger and the stakes.

In 2014, the Obama White House sounded out the networks about carrying a prime-time address on immigration and was told no. In 2022, the networks refused prime-time coverage of a speech Joe Biden delivered on democracy.

The question we must all put to these same networks today is this: Do they plan to provide valuable free airtime to a president who is going to systematically undermine democracy by lying about elections?

Sadly, I suspect we know the answer. The largest media outlets have already proved unwilling to stand up to Trump. Their corporate overlords and outside business interests drive them to curry favor with Trump rather than hold him to account.

Some of them will no doubt cloak their decision to cover the address as important for the public to hear. While I disagree, I offer them a compromise solution: Label the entire speech with a prominent disclaimer: “Trump Is Lying to the American People.”

That disclaimer should appear on screen whenever footage is shown. It — or words to the same effect — belongs in the headline and lede of any written story. It can be read aloud on podcasts and radio broadcasts.

Some will object that this is unfair, that no outlet would agree to editorialize so openly while covering a sitting president. However, neutrality is not the same thing as silence. A decision to carry a speech the media knows is false isn’t neutral — it’s complicit.

We have seen what happens when Trump lies about elections. On Jan. 6, 2021, thousands of Americans stormed the Capitol because they believed Trump’s lies. They believe what Trump told them, night after night, from podiums much like the one he will stand behind Thursday.

Trump could not spread these lies alone. Media outlets that knew better broadcast, quoted and printed his lies with too little context and correction. The results were deadly.

We are again watching this same situation play out in front of us. But the institutional media has a chance to learn from its failures and serve democracy and the public better.

History will not be kind to those who platformed falsehoods they knew were dangerous and called it balance. Journalism was built on a promise to inform the public, not to launder lies into the appearance of legitimate debate. Thursday night will test whether that promise still means anything.

If I hear the mainstream media, PBS, or NPR, use the word unprecedented one more time I’m going to vomit.

Trump pardoned violent January 6 terrorists. He and the Republicans are standing by while American citizens are being murdered, and while people who are here legally are being put in concentration camps. He has fired all the generals who would refuse to obey an unlawful order.

This is not unprecedented. This is what fascist and dictators do. This is how Putin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler . . . . and every other dictator has operated. 

What do you all think while happen during the midterm elections?

Trump and the Republicans have told violent people that they have no worries because he will pardon them. Yet, mainstream media, PBS, and NPR, are still acting like this is politics as normal. WTF?

Let’s review Trump’s vanity projects in DC.

1. Add his name to the Kennedy Center.
2. Tear down the White House East Wing, build a ballroom that – according to him – will cost $300 million, all donated. And now we learn it will cost at least $500 million, all coming from us taxpayers.
3. A triumphant arch that will tower over Arlington National Cemetery.
4. Remove the original columns on the White House and replace with Corinthian columns more to Trump’s liking.
5. “Redecorating” the interior of the White House by purchasing vinyl wall decorations from Home Depot, spray painting them gold, then gluing them to every wall in the White House.

This all sounds familiar.

Hitler was obsessed with adding an expensive new wing to the Reich chancellery, part of his grandiose architectural ambitions for the nation’s capital.

Hitler wanted it big. He wanted lots of gold, lots of marble. He wanted visitors awestruck by his architectural expansion of the country’s symbolic seat of power. “They should sense the strength and grandeur of the German Reich as they walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Adolf Hitler told his chief architect, Albert Speer, outlining his plans for an extension to the old Reich chancellery, at Wilhelmstrasse 77 in Berlin.

The new annex, connected to the chancellery by a marble corridor hung with crystal chandeliers, was part of Hitler’s ambitious plans to align the Berlin cityscape with his vision for the future of the country. Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wanted an “Avenue of Splendor” for military parades. “The Champs-Élysées is a hundred meters wide,” Hitler told Speer. “We will make our avenue twenty meters wider.” A planned Volkshalle was to accommodate 180,000. The Eiffel Tower could fit beneath its cupola. This “Hall of the People” was to be topped by the largest swastika on Earth. Berlin itself was to be rechristened as Weltstadt Germania, “Capital of the World.”

Speer embellished these extravagantly outsized “Hitler branded designs”—Entwürfe Hitlerscher Prägung—with fascistic flourishes: bundled reeds, or fasces; spread-winged eagles; and enormous twisted crosses. In 1938, when André François Poncet, the French ambassador to Berlin, visited Hitler at the Berghof, the Nazi leader’s Alpine retreat outside Berchtesgaden, he was led through a “gallery of Roman pillars” to an “immense glassed-in rotunda” with a dramatic view that gave one the impression of being suspended in the air. “Was this edifice the work of a normal mind,” François-Poncet wondered in his memoirs, “or of one tormented by megalomania and haunted by visions of domination?”

 

Trump’s first wife said he did almost no reading but that he did keep by the bedside a book of Hitler’s speeches, which he read often.

 

Because he is afraid of investigations into his actions, President Donald J. Trump has abandoned all pretense of governing for the good of the country and is focusing on rigging the 2026 election to keep Republicans in power.

This morning, as the National Association of Realtors reported that U.S. home prices have hit an all-time high, he announced that he will not sign the housing bill, which was designed to address the unaffordability of housing and which passed Congress with strong bipartisan majorities, “in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.”

As the Lincoln Project summed it up, the Republican Party’s message four months before the midterms appears to be, “You’re not getting affordable housing unless you give up your voting rights.”

His demand for the passage of a bill that most observers agree will suppress voting is only one of the ways that Trump is trying to rig the 2026 election.

After federal judges have repeatedly prohibited the administration from seizing state voter lists, apparently to run them through a program designed to identify noncitizens who are not eligible for certain federal programs (something federal judges have also prohibited), Trump’s appointees at the Department of Justice appear to have turned to trying to intimidate election officials.

On Tuesday the Department of Justice confirmed that it has sent letters to election officials in all fifty states and Washington, D.C., warning them that they could be criminally prosecuted if noncitizens vote. The letters came from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump loyalist, and gave them five days to detail how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”

Utah lieutenant governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican, posted on social media: “Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution. I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts. This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”

Last night, Trump fired the last two Democratic members of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent federal commission that helps state and local officials make sure elections are smooth and secure. Among other things, it certifies voting machines and maintains the national mail-voter registration forms. The only other current member of the EAC, a Republican, resigned. The fourth member of the EAC, a Republican, resigned earlier this year.

A White House official told Justin Papp of CNBC that the Supreme Court recognized Trump’s authority to fire the agency officials in its June 29 Trump v. Slaughter decision, which overturned more than 90 years of precedent to rubber stamp the president’s right to fire agency officials who are not aligned with his political agenda.

“The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted,” the official told Papp. “The Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so.”

Legal analyst Harry Litman says this interpretation of the Slaughter decision is a stretch. He noted that “[n]othing in the agency cases held that Trump could simply shut down an agency of Congress’s creation. That’s what he has done with the [E]lection Assistance [C]ommission which now lacks commissioners to act. It’s taking the court’s cases to the ultimate conclusion and just disabling an important agency.”

The nonpartisan, nonprofit League of Women Voters, which works to protect the right to vote, called the removal of the Election Assistance Commission officials “a direct attack on the independence of our nation’s election infrastructure…. The American people deserve elections administered by trusted professionals, not shaped by political interference. This is not a routine personnel decision—it is a dangerous escalation in the effort to weaken the safeguards that protect free and fair elections in the November midterms.”

This is the backdrop for the news from Betsy Klein and Kaitlan Collins of CNN today that the White House is fortifying the White House entrance at the North Portico during Trump’s renovation of the Ionic columns there.

In March, Trump’s appointee to the Commission on Fine Arts, which advises Trump on design matters, urged replacing the historic Ionic columns with more ornate Corinthian columns that would match the ones Trump picked out for his ballroom. The White House says the work on the North Portico is “standard restoration work,” but did not answer CNN’s question about whether there would be more substantial changes to the North Portico. Trump recently posted pictures of the Corinthian columns at his proposed ballroom, boasting that “When completed, there will be nothing like it anywhere in the World!”

While the focus has been on the historic columns and their possible replacement, it is not until now we have learned about the strengthening of the White House door. The portico is now covered with scaffolding that is covered with a drape, and a White House official told Klein and Collins that the renovations will include security enhancements at the request of the U.S. Secret Service.

Dan Diamond of the Washington Post also reported today that under the Trump administration, the Secret Service, the White House, and the Interior Department are seeking to place permanent eight- to nine-foot-tall fencing around Lafayette Square, where tourists and protesters congregate, in front of the White House. They are also considering fencing off the parts of Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. In the past, when officials believed it was necessary to shut off access to Lafayette Square, they used temporary barriers to avoid the perception that they were restricting public access to what is known as the People’s House.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting congressional representative from the District of Columbia., objected. “More fencing around the President’s Park would send the wrong message to the nation and the world by continuing to transform our democracy from one that is accessible and of the people to one that is exclusive and fearful of its own citizens,” she said.

Tonight, at 11:59 PM, the housing bill became law without the president’s signature.

The end of an empire does not come suddenly in a thunderclap.  No.  Empires fall by degrees both internally and externally concurrently as internal failures lead to the failing empire being abandoned by its former allies and challenged by its enemies.  And that, folks, is where the US empire stands today – we are a failed empire that is collapsing – collapsing slowly but surely collapsing.

America remains an economic superpower with an enormous military budget. And the combination of a supine Republican Party, along with a Supreme Court that shamelessly greenlights Trump’s authoritarianism, has given this president more control over U.S. policy than any president has ever had, or ever should have. But while Trump is able to run roughshod over Americans, he can no longer bully the rest of the world. Thanks to Trump, the U.S. has seen its global influence plunge.

There are three big reasons for that precipitous decline.

First, there is the debacle in Iran. Not only did Trump’s war of choice fail in all its objectives, it revealed that U.S. military power is far more limited than almost anyone realized. The insistence by Trump and his lackeys that this humiliating defeat was a great victory shows that American foreign policy only serves to pander to Trump’s fragile ego. And when his ego meets reality, it slithers away.

In addition to showing the limits of U.S. military power, the war also showed the limits of U.S. financial power: It is increasingly easy for nations to bypass U.S. banks and the dollar using cryptocurrency — and Chinese yuan.

A second, in its way equally important, blow to U.S. prestige and influence has been Trump’s failure to deliver Ukraine to Vladimir Putin – as Trump promised Putin he would do.

For make no mistake: everyone at that summit in Ankara knows that Trump, JD Vance and company both expected and hoped that their betrayal of Ukraine would lead to Russian victory. Surely, they imagined, Ukraine would be unable to hold off the onslaught from its much bigger neighbor without U.S. aid. To America’s everlasting shame, Trump told Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he didn’t “have the cards.”

Yet after Trump cut U.S. aid to Ukraine by 99 percent, Ukraine not only survived but began gaining the upper hand. Europe has stepped up financially, more or less replacing the lost American dollars. And Ukrainian military innovation has largely made up for the loss of American weapons.

The result has been to make the U.S. increasingly irrelevant. Put it this way: Iran taught foreign governments not to fear American might; China, along with the crypto industry, has taught rogue countries that they needn’t fear American financial control; and Ukraine has taught foreign governments that they don’t need American support.

Finally, Trump’s global power play rested on economics even more than on military force, above all on his belief that other nations would cower in fear at the prospect of facing U.S. tariffs. But Trump’s attempt to weaponize international trade has been a bust. Most notably, China’s economy has powered right through the Trump tariffs. Furthermore, it turns out that China has escalation dominance in the trade war: we need their rare earths more than they need access to our consumers.

And other nations — even Canada and Mexico, which have historically been highly dependent on the U.S. market — are moving to reduce their dependence. Canada’s move to build a new pipeline that will let it sell Alberta oil to Asia rather than the Midwest is just a highly visible symbol of a general world move toward bypassing America now that we have become an unstable, unreliable economic partner.