Trump wins again

[Maximus]

have to say that, while I find Heather's articles interesting and informative they are always in that God-forsaken A! style, and nearly always far too long. 
They almost always start along the lines of
"At ...(insert ime here), the President of the United States (insert active verb here eg sat/stood/walked etc) (insert where he was doing, saying,'it' ...

you catch mah drift!?

Drives me nuts...to the extent that I will now only scan very quickly her stuff.
Doesnt mean she's wrong in communicating what's happening ...but she just lost my full attention, so I may lose interest completely...which is exactly what that piece of @##@ in the Shite House thrives on. Apathy.

[Gruff]

9 hours ago, Uriah Heap said:

... Now he's visiting China, meeting with a genuine statesman in Xi. A leader who wisely keeps his own counsel and must feel he's dealing with a child.

Your info provided by who exactly?

[Hedley Jordan]

 

[Hedley Jordan]

 

[foxmerts]

4 minutes ago, Hedley Jordan said:

 

What complete rubbish - you know when it's fake when they have to use old video footage of The Don or anything else they can drum up

Lefties getting desperate again because The Don is capturing all the positive headlines again 

No doubt tho it'll excite the TDS's for a few days 

[Maximus]

 

Where Sunset Watching is a National Pastime

Uruguay -- a Trump "shithole country" -- survived brutal authoritarianism. Here's what they built when they came through it.

 

Paul T Shattuck, MSW, PhD

May 15, 2026

∙ Paid

 

 

 

 

 

I was standing on a beach in Montevideo, Uruguay when the crowd of thousands went quiet.

The sun touched the horizon over the Río de la Plata. Something moved through the crowd on La Rambla, the public park that runs along the water for 22 kilometers. People stopped mid-sentence. Couples paused dancing. Tens of thousands of strangers shared the same breath as the sky burned orange.

I met my wife on that trip several years ago and have spent a lot of time in Uruguay since. The country holds lessons and inspiration for what we’re fighting for in the US and what’s possible for a country that successfully gets to the other side of an authoritarian period.

I’ve been writing lately about what it looks like when a society protects human life from forces that would extract and destroy it. Uruguay is the most vivid example I know. And right now, watching the deliberate dismantling of what we’ve built in the US, I keep coming back to what I’ve witnessed here.

What Functional, Equitable Democracy Feels Like Day to Day

 

Go to the same panadería (bakery) in Montevideo two days in a row and the owner starts to recognize you. Third day, free samples and a real conversation. Warm, genuine, not performative.

The farmers markets run in most neighborhoods several days of the week. You talk to the farmers. You talk to the jewelers and artisans set up around them. People have actual conversations with you.

 

 

In the parks on weekend afternoons, couples dance salsa and tango — holding each other, making eye contact, laughing. Groups of friends hang out, talking and drinking mate, a caffeinated herbal drink with an earthy, grassy flavor. People sit on park benches next to the ocean reading books. Others work out using one of the many free outdoor gym setups. Just what people do with a Saturday.

Many major roads and parks are named for people who fought for human dignity. Gandhi Boulevard. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park. Martin Luther King Square. A large holocaust memorial sits in one of the parks along the waterfront, not far from the Gandhi memorial.

The presidential Executive Tower is a regular downtown office building. One security guard in the lobby with a six-shooter. That’s it.

 

Presidential offices: no troops or barricades

None of this is paradise. The streets in some neighborhoods are genuinely dirty. The architecture is mostly unremarkable. And the drivers — I have nearly been run over crossing Gandhi Boulevard more times than I can count. But honestly, there’s no better place to get hit by a car. I know I can go to the hospital, get quality care, and emerge without needing a 36-month payment plan.

I learned that firsthand. Ran out of medication on one trip. Braced for the American experience — long wait, expensive visit, runaround. Got an appointment the next day. The doctor spent almost an hour with me. Thorough intake, full history, real attention. No insurance needed. Cost me $45 cash. Prescription cost $10.

The country gets roughly 98% of its electricity from renewable sources. That didn’t happen by accident. Around 2008, a growing economy was outpacing energy supply and fossil fuel import costs were crushing the country. A physicist named Ramón Méndez Galain drafted a national energy transition plan. Every political party approved it. Government, industry, and civil society aligned behind it. They attracted over $7 billion in private investment, built the infrastructure, and cut electricity costs in half. Seven years later, done. Electric buses run on time and go everywhere. Uber drivers cruise around in affordable (under $20,000 USD) Chinese electric cars that feel like you’ve stepped into a Star Trek shuttle — genuinely impressive technology most Americans have never seen.

 

[Hedley Jordan]

 

[Ohokaman]

The senile old man is watching it crumble……
 

Just after 5:31 pm this evening, Donald Trump finally broke. After a day of court losses, one after another, he opened his personal social media platform, Truth Social, and unleashed a meltdown that must have surprised even some of his most loyal enablers inside the White House. He declared himself America’s “favorite President,” attacked a federal judge, took a swipe at Barack Obama, blamed “Radical Left Democrats” for his problems, and then announced that if he wasn’t given complete control, “I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into NEVER NEVER LAND.” He was talking about a judge ordering his name removed from the Kennedy Center, but what he was really saying was that if he cannot have it his way, then no one can have it at all.

This outburst was not really about a building. It was about a name. And it was triggered by something Donald Trump has never handled well: being told no. Because today, on what would have been John F. Kennedy’s birthday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that adding Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center was unlawful, and he ordered it removed within fourteen days. And it wasn’t just the building it needed to be removed from. It was also the website and every piece of official material. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” Cooper wrote in a 94-page opinion. The administration had tried to argue that “Trump Kennedy Center” was just a nickname, a secondary label. Cooper was not persuaded. The lettering installed on the building, he noted, “literally reads: ‘The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.’” Then he asked the obvious question. “If that is not a renaming, what is?”

This was a monumental blow to Trump’s ego and, maybe even worse, unimaginably embarrassing. The Kennedy name means something in this country that Trump has never been able to touch. It means Camelot. It means an idea of America that people still reach for, country over party, service over self, a borrowed sense of innocence we attach to better days. He cannot compete with that. He never could. And this was his way of annexing the emotion behind the name. And also a way to upstage it. No doubt Trump wanted this ego project, but this wasn’t just about repairs, renovations, or a golden age of the arts. It was about putting his name first, ahead of Kennedy’s, on one of the most American buildings we have. His name went literally in front of Kennedy’s on that wall. And now it comes down, and he is lashing out.

And maybe that is also why he keeps a Kennedy close. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sits in his cabinet, running a federal department in his name. Trump can never be a Kennedy. He can never earn that name or what it used to carry. But he can own one. He can keep one beside him, useful and obedient, a Kennedy who answers to him. If you cannot join the family that came to stand for the best of the country, who sacrifice members in the name of service, then maybe the next best thing, for a man like Trump, is to make one of them serve you.

And this isn’t just a simple loss for him. He did everything he could to permanently add his name to the building. Including when he fired members of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees and announced he would “make the Kennedy Center GREAT AGAIN.” He named himself chairman. He filled the empty seats with loyalists, including his own chief of staff, Susie Wiles. That handpicked board then voted to put his name on the building. He built the very body that would hand him what he wanted, and it still did not survive the courts. Rep. Joyce Beatty, the board member who brought the case, said it plainly. “The Kennedy Center is an institution that belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump,” she said. “He has desecrated this sacred memorial for his own vanity.”

And the name was not the only thing the judge stopped. Cooper also blocked, for now, the plan to shut the Kennedy Center down for two years beginning after July 4th. He found that the board’s vote to close it was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained,” based on “an insufficient, one-sided presentation of information.” He was careful here, and we should be too. He did not say the building needs no work. The repairs, he wrote, are “sorely needed,” and the board can still vote to close for them if it follows a proper process. What he stopped was not maintenance. What he did stop was Trump turning it into an unrecognizable shrine to himself.

And upon hearing the news, Trump let us all see what this was really all about. He did not push back. He said he would hand the Kennedy Center off entirely, instructing the Commerce Department to begin transferring the “failing Institution” to Congress so they could decide what to do with it. His long rambling post showed it was really about his name on the building more than care for the cultural institutions; he had nothing to say about the music, the artists, the students, or the building itself. Only that unless he was “free to do what I do better than anyone else,” he was finished with it. He would rather walk away from the place than keep it without his name on the front.

And the Kennedy Center was only the first loss of the day. Because two more judges were doing the same thing to him in two more courtrooms.

In Virginia, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema froze his nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. “It is important that the status quo be maintained,” she wrote, so that no money is “irreversibly disbursed” before the court can rule. This is the $1.776 billion in taxpayer money, pulled from a federal account meant to cover the government’s legal settlements, set aside to pay people who say they were politically targeted. Two of the officers who defended the Capitol on January 6th have now sued to stop it. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington called the fund “a jaw-dropping act of presidential corruption.” Even his own party recoiled. Republicans were split enough over it that they abruptly dropped a vote on a major spending bill this month. And to win the holdouts back, the administration reportedly floated that senators whose records had been secretly subpoenaed could apply for a payout, too. They tried everything to buy the votes with the slush fund itself.

Because that fund did not come from nowhere. It was created when the administration settled Trump’s own $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. And then a third judge went after the root of it. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami reopened that IRS case to investigate whether the whole thing was, in her words, a “product of collusion” and “a fraud on the court.” She acted after thirty-five former federal judges, appointed by presidents of both parties, asked her to. One of them was J. Michael Luttig, the conservative who testified before the January 6th committee. “The Court was deceived,” they wrote. Their argument was simple. Trump was the plaintiff suing the IRS, and Trump, as president, runs the branch of government the IRS answers to. He was on both sides of the table at once. Williams gave him until June 12th to explain himself.

This was a very bad day for Donald Trump. Three losses in one day, and he took his rage to social media. That is what we need to hold onto. And also that this buys us time. None of these are clean victories. The fund could still go through. He could still keep fighting for his name on the Kennedy Center. The IRS case could be argued for months. None of these were expected to be slam dunks. But they are still huge wins. Some might hold, but what we want today are delays. Every motion, hearing, and response window is time. And time is the thing we need more than anything right now. Authoritarian movements run on speed. They move fast because they are counting on us being too slow, too tired, or too scattered to catch up. So when a court makes him stop, even for two weeks, even temporarily, it is not a small thing. It is the gears catching and the clock running toward the midterms, which is exactly where this gets decided.

I know how this stretch has felt. It has been roughly a year and five months of nonstop chaos, instability, and cruelty. And for so much of it, the news has come in one direction, bad piled on bad, until it started to feel like that was simply the shape of things now. We have had ups, and we have had downs. We have had days that knocked the wind out of us. I’m sure you have heard it in my voice, the way I have struggled through those nights when we couldn’t see a way out of this. So I do not say this lightly, and I am not going to pretend tomorrow can’t bring something hard, because it can. But tonight was not one of those nights. Tonight, three different judges looked at the most powerful man in the country and told him no.

And here is something concrete we can do with that. None of these rulings happened on their own. Behind each one is a legal organization that did the work, filed the case, and carried the cost. The plaintiffs who froze the slush fund were represented by Democracy Forward. The watchdogs pressing on it include Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The case that pulled Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center was carried by the lawyers at Democracy Defenders Action. These groups, and others like them, are the ones putting friction in the gears every single day, often on behalf of people who could never afford to fight back alone. So look at who is doing this work. Find the ones litigating the cases that matter most to you, and support them however they allow it, with your time or with your money. That is money very well spent.

And if you are here in California with me, we have something else in front of us this weekend. The primary is only days away, and this is the last weekend to make a plan. A lot of people are saying that at this point it is too late to trust the mail, so take your ballot to a drop box or a polling place instead. I plan to hand-deliver mine. However you do it, we cannot sit this one out. The whole fight we just watched in those three courtrooms runs straight through who we send to govern us, and that begins now, with the primary.

Because the trajectory is turning, and tonight is the proof. The courts are holding. Some of his loudest enablers have gone quiet, backing away from the cameras they used to chase. Democrats are no longer only reacting; they are planning for what they do when they take back control. And those with an audience are continuing to refuse to lend him their names. The Trump-backed Freedom 250 concert for America’s birthday has lost even more of its headliners. We are close to 75% of the announced performers refusing to perform.

I am not promising the way out of this will be a straight line, because it won’t be. We will have to walk through both peaks and valleys before we reach where we are going. But step back and look at how far we have come. The highs are starting to outnumber the lows. Tonight, three judges held the line. We are closer to the midterms than we were yesterday. More people are finding their voice.

And we are going to survive this. I believe that more tonight than I did yesterday. We are not going to come out the other side the same as we went in. We are going to come out clearer about what we actually want this country to be, and more determined to build it. We are going to come out with the guardrails we should have had all along, the ones we now know we need, so that no one can ever do this to us again. That is the work waiting on the far side of all this. But it starts with nights like tonight. A name coming off a wall. A slush fund frozen. A fraudulent deal cracked open. Three judges who refused to look away. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,

Heather

[foxmerts]

43 minutes ago, Ohokaman said:

 

The senile old man is watching it crumble……
 

Just after 5:31 pm this evening, Donald Trump finally broke. After a day of court losses, one after another, he opened his personal social media platform, Truth Social, and unleashed a meltdown that must have surprised even some of his most loyal enablers inside the White House. He declared himself America’s “favorite President,” attacked a federal judge, took a swipe at Barack Obama, blamed “Radical Left Democrats” for his problems, and then announced that if he wasn’t given complete control, “I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into NEVER NEVER LAND.” He was talking about a judge ordering his name removed from the Kennedy Center, but what he was really saying was that if he cannot have it his way, then no one can have it at all.

This outburst was not really about a building. It was about a name. And it was triggered by something Donald Trump has never handled well: being told no. Because today, on what would have been John F. Kennedy’s birthday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that adding Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center was unlawful, and he ordered it removed within fourteen days. And it wasn’t just the building it needed to be removed from. It was also the website and every piece of official material. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” Cooper wrote in a 94-page opinion. The administration had tried to argue that “Trump Kennedy Center” was just a nickname, a secondary label. Cooper was not persuaded. The lettering installed on the building, he noted, “literally reads: ‘The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.’” Then he asked the obvious question. “If that is not a renaming, what is?”

This was a monumental blow to Trump’s ego and, maybe even worse, unimaginably embarrassing. The Kennedy name means something in this country that Trump has never been able to touch. It means Camelot. It means an idea of America that people still reach for, country over party, service over self, a borrowed sense of innocence we attach to better days. He cannot compete with that. He never could. And this was his way of annexing the emotion behind the name. And also a way to upstage it. No doubt Trump wanted this ego project, but this wasn’t just about repairs, renovations, or a golden age of the arts. It was about putting his name first, ahead of Kennedy’s, on one of the most American buildings we have. His name went literally in front of Kennedy’s on that wall. And now it comes down, and he is lashing out.

And maybe that is also why he keeps a Kennedy close. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sits in his cabinet, running a federal department in his name. Trump can never be a Kennedy. He can never earn that name or what it used to carry. But he can own one. He can keep one beside him, useful and obedient, a Kennedy who answers to him. If you cannot join the family that came to stand for the best of the country, who sacrifice members in the name of service, then maybe the next best thing, for a man like Trump, is to make one of them serve you.

And this isn’t just a simple loss for him. He did everything he could to permanently add his name to the building. Including when he fired members of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees and announced he would “make the Kennedy Center GREAT AGAIN.” He named himself chairman. He filled the empty seats with loyalists, including his own chief of staff, Susie Wiles. That handpicked board then voted to put his name on the building. He built the very body that would hand him what he wanted, and it still did not survive the courts. Rep. Joyce Beatty, the board member who brought the case, said it plainly. “The Kennedy Center is an institution that belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump,” she said. “He has desecrated this sacred memorial for his own vanity.”

And the name was not the only thing the judge stopped. Cooper also blocked, for now, the plan to shut the Kennedy Center down for two years beginning after July 4th. He found that the board’s vote to close it was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained,” based on “an insufficient, one-sided presentation of information.” He was careful here, and we should be too. He did not say the building needs no work. The repairs, he wrote, are “sorely needed,” and the board can still vote to close for them if it follows a proper process. What he stopped was not maintenance. What he did stop was Trump turning it into an unrecognizable shrine to himself.

And upon hearing the news, Trump let us all see what this was really all about. He did not push back. He said he would hand the Kennedy Center off entirely, instructing the Commerce Department to begin transferring the “failing Institution” to Congress so they could decide what to do with it. His long rambling post showed it was really about his name on the building more than care for the cultural institutions; he had nothing to say about the music, the artists, the students, or the building itself. Only that unless he was “free to do what I do better than anyone else,” he was finished with it. He would rather walk away from the place than keep it without his name on the front.

And the Kennedy Center was only the first loss of the day. Because two more judges were doing the same thing to him in two more courtrooms.

In Virginia, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema froze his nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. “It is important that the status quo be maintained,” she wrote, so that no money is “irreversibly disbursed” before the court can rule. This is the $1.776 billion in taxpayer money, pulled from a federal account meant to cover the government’s legal settlements, set aside to pay people who say they were politically targeted. Two of the officers who defended the Capitol on January 6th have now sued to stop it. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington called the fund “a jaw-dropping act of presidential corruption.” Even his own party recoiled. Republicans were split enough over it that they abruptly dropped a vote on a major spending bill this month. And to win the holdouts back, the administration reportedly floated that senators whose records had been secretly subpoenaed could apply for a payout, too. They tried everything to buy the votes with the slush fund itself.

Because that fund did not come from nowhere. It was created when the administration settled Trump’s own $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. And then a third judge went after the root of it. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami reopened that IRS case to investigate whether the whole thing was, in her words, a “product of collusion” and “a fraud on the court.” She acted after thirty-five former federal judges, appointed by presidents of both parties, asked her to. One of them was J. Michael Luttig, the conservative who testified before the January 6th committee. “The Court was deceived,” they wrote. Their argument was simple. Trump was the plaintiff suing the IRS, and Trump, as president, runs the branch of government the IRS answers to. He was on both sides of the table at once. Williams gave him until June 12th to explain himself.

This was a very bad day for Donald Trump. Three losses in one day, and he took his rage to social media. That is what we need to hold onto. And also that this buys us time. None of these are clean victories. The fund could still go through. He could still keep fighting for his name on the Kennedy Center. The IRS case could be argued for months. None of these were expected to be slam dunks. But they are still huge wins. Some might hold, but what we want today are delays. Every motion, hearing, and response window is time. And time is the thing we need more than anything right now. Authoritarian movements run on speed. They move fast because they are counting on us being too slow, too tired, or too scattered to catch up. So when a court makes him stop, even for two weeks, even temporarily, it is not a small thing. It is the gears catching and the clock running toward the midterms, which is exactly where this gets decided.

I know how this stretch has felt. It has been roughly a year and five months of nonstop chaos, instability, and cruelty. And for so much of it, the news has come in one direction, bad piled on bad, until it started to feel like that was simply the shape of things now. We have had ups, and we have had downs. We have had days that knocked the wind out of us. I’m sure you have heard it in my voice, the way I have struggled through those nights when we couldn’t see a way out of this. So I do not say this lightly, and I am not going to pretend tomorrow can’t bring something hard, because it can. But tonight was not one of those nights. Tonight, three different judges looked at the most powerful man in the country and told him no.

And here is something concrete we can do with that. None of these rulings happened on their own. Behind each one is a legal organization that did the work, filed the case, and carried the cost. The plaintiffs who froze the slush fund were represented by Democracy Forward. The watchdogs pressing on it include Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The case that pulled Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center was carried by the lawyers at Democracy Defenders Action. These groups, and others like them, are the ones putting friction in the gears every single day, often on behalf of people who could never afford to fight back alone. So look at who is doing this work. Find the ones litigating the cases that matter most to you, and support them however they allow it, with your time or with your money. That is money very well spent.

And if you are here in California with me, we have something else in front of us this weekend. The primary is only days away, and this is the last weekend to make a plan. A lot of people are saying that at this point it is too late to trust the mail, so take your ballot to a drop box or a polling place instead. I plan to hand-deliver mine. However you do it, we cannot sit this one out. The whole fight we just watched in those three courtrooms runs straight through who we send to govern us, and that begins now, with the primary.

Because the trajectory is turning, and tonight is the proof. The courts are holding. Some of his loudest enablers have gone quiet, backing away from the cameras they used to chase. Democrats are no longer only reacting; they are planning for what they do when they take back control. And those with an audience are continuing to refuse to lend him their names. The Trump-backed Freedom 250 concert for America’s birthday has lost even more of its headliners. We are close to 75% of the announced performers refusing to perform.

I am not promising the way out of this will be a straight line, because it won’t be. We will have to walk through both peaks and valleys before we reach where we are going. But step back and look at how far we have come. The highs are starting to outnumber the lows. Tonight, three judges held the line. We are closer to the midterms than we were yesterday. More people are finding their voice.

And we are going to survive this. I believe that more tonight than I did yesterday. We are not going to come out the other side the same as we went in. We are going to come out clearer about what we actually want this country to be, and more determined to build it. We are going to come out with the guardrails we should have had all along, the ones we now know we need, so that no one can ever do this to us again. That is the work waiting on the far side of all this. But it starts with nights like tonight. A name coming off a wall. A slush fund frozen. A fraudulent deal cracked open. Three judges who refused to look away. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,

Heather

AI Heather returns with another deranged rant 

I've missed them last week or so 

[Ohokaman]

[Ohokaman]

1 hour ago, foxmerts said:

AI Heather returns with another deranged rant 

I've missed them last week or so 

Hardly deranged when she is quoting the orange morons posts……

[Ohokaman]

The decline is obvious to all but the stupid…..

 

At 8:15 this morning, the President of the United States began panicking in front of the entire world. For more than seven hours, he posted nearly 50 times. And when he finally slowed down, it would stand as one of the most revealing fits of rage of his presidency to date. Because what he shared was beyond any reasonable person’s comprehension.

He complained that because China has a ballroom, he should have one too. He posted an image of a “Trump Peace Prize” bearing his own face. He repeatedly compared himself to George Washington. He shared an image of himself kissing a flag. He shared a heroic fantasy image of himself depicted as the God of War that said, “YOU’RE GETTING DISCOMBOBULATED.” And most concerning of all, he repeatedly called for a federal judge to be investigated, impeached, and removed from the bench, placing both the judge and his wife in danger by putting a target on their backs before an already radicalized base of loyalists.

The judge who he was putting in harm’s way is Christopher Cooper. He has sat on the federal bench in Washington since 2014, when the Senate confirmed him in a unanimous vote, every Republican and every Democrat agreeing he belonged there. He graduated with high honors at Yale and Stanford, where he led the law review. He spent decades in law before he ever put on a robe. And he spent today being told, in writing, by the President of the United States, that he should be ashamed of himself. His offense was reading a law and applying it. The statute that created the Kennedy Center says it is to be named for President Kennedy and can carry no other name. Cooper ruled accordingly. For doing that, the President wrote that he “should be brought up on charges,” and then, hours later, returned to the same target to write that he, “like numerous other Crooked Judges on my cases, should be IMPEACHED.”

But going after the judge was not enough. He went after the judge’s wife. He named her, too, Amy Jeffress, a lawyer who served the Justice Department for nearly two decades and once advised the Attorney General of the United States. He wrote that she “doesn’t use the ‘Cooper’ name because they, as a couple, don’t want people to know that she has a Conflict of Interest,” and added, “obfuscation anyone?” The truth is that she has used her own name her entire professional life, the way millions of women do, and the man who officiated at her wedding was even a future Attorney General. But none of that mattered this morning. What mattered was that the President of the United States once again instigated potential political violence against a judge and his private citizen spouse. All because a judge told him no and upheld the law.

We have watched this movie before, in other countries and in other decades, and it always opens the same way. The strongman does not begin by jailing his enemies. He begins by naming them. He points, and he lets the people who follow him understand what the pointing means. The judges go first, because an independent court is the one thing that can tell a president no and make it stick. And so the courts are not argued with. They are made afraid. A ruling becomes a personal risk, and then a physical one, and a judge who once only had to weigh the law now has to weigh whether his family is safe. That is what happened this morning. That is what “FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT!” at the end of his post about a sitting judge was for.

And we cannot say this part quietly, because the title in front of his name is the whole point. This is not a troll on the internet. This is not a man yelling into a void from his basement. This is the President of the United States. This is the one human being on the planet who commands the most powerful military, who holds the nuclear codes, who can move markets and topple governments and start wars on a whim. When a man like that names a judge and a judge’s wife and tells millions of followers they should be ashamed, investigated, and jailed, the distance between a post and a real human being in real danger collapses to nothing. There is no one above him to send it up the chain to. He is the chain. And the entire world is watching him spend a Saturday this way, our allies and our adversaries alike, all of them now asking the same question every American should be asking, which is whether the person with that much power over their lives is well enough to hold it. These are dark days for this country. They are dark days for the world. And it is a strange and frightening thing to live through a time when the most dangerous instability on earth is not a foreign army or a failing economy, but the mind of one man posting cartoons of himself for nearly 7 hours on a Saturday.

Because in between the threats against the judge, he spent the same seven hours building a shrine to himself. He posted images of his own face carved into Mount Rushmore beside Washington and Lincoln, not once but twice. He posted himself standing shoulder to shoulder with George Washington in front of the White House. He posted an image of the roof of the White House turned into a military installation, armed soldiers and combat drones lined up across the people’s house, and he labeled it a “DronePort,” as if turning the nation’s home into a fortress were something to brag about. He posted a graphic titled “Excellent Health” with green checkmarks beside every line. He posted another image titled “Trump Energy 2026,” showing colonial soldiers on horseback beneath formations of stealth bombers and fighter jets, as if the entire arc of American history, from the Revolution to the most powerful military on Earth, existed solely to glorify him.

Think about what it takes to feel confident enough to post such nonsense. Think about what has to be missing inside a person for them to spend a Saturday generating pictures of themselves as a founding father. None of us does this. None of us, on the worst day of our lives, sit down and manufacture images of ourselves on a mountain beside the men who built the country, or press a flag to our own face and kiss it, or put our face onto a fake peace prize we invented. We don’t need to. People who are secure in who they are do not spend hours showing how powerful and beloved they are. And a president who actually believed he was powerful, steady, capable, and of sound mind would not do this either.

Which brings us to the timing, which is very telling. On Friday night, the White House released the results of his physical. They told us his cardiac age was 14 years younger than his real age. They told us he scored a perfect 30 out of 30 on a cognitive test. They told us he was in “excellent health” and “fully fit” to serve. They released it late on a Friday, the slot reserved for news you are required to put out but would rather no one examine. What you want the weekend news staff to cover when the full week staff are gone. What you want to fade into the chaos by the time Monday rolls around again. And yet the very next day, the man that report describes spent seven hours proving the opposite of everything it claimed. A man with nothing to prove does not post a homemade scorecard of his own health to the internet. A man who feels well does not need the world to be told, again and again, that he is.

And the medical statement does not match the man we have all been watching with our own eyes. Because the report says one thing, and the footage says another. We have watched him fall asleep, over and over again, in meetings that were supposed to be the most important of his day. We have watched him go breathless, stopping mid-sentence to catch air that does not seem to come easily. We have watched him do the slow, pursed-lip breathing of a person whose body is working harder than it should just to keep him upright. We have watched a man who, by the account released Friday night, has the heart of someone 14 years younger, and what we have seen does not look like that man. And then there is the scan. He went back for another look at his arteries, a coronary scan, the kind of test you do not repeat on a healthy person every six months. He had extensive imaging in the fall. And here he is again. Multiple medical professionals have noted that healthy people do not get their hearts imaged on that schedule. People who are worried about something do.

We cannot see his chart. We are not his doctors, and we will not pretend to be. But we can watch what a man does the day after he gets his results, and we can ask an honest question. Maybe the report we were handed on Friday night is not the report he was handed. Maybe a man who keeps falling asleep, who keeps losing his breath, who keeps going back for scans that healthy people his age do not need, heard something this week that frightened him to his core. We do not know. But we know what fear looks like when it has access to a social media account, and it looked a great deal like this morning.

And even his cruelty today carried the same desperate edge. In between the founders and the medals, he stopped to post a series of memes splitting the screen between “Biden’s Solution” and “Trump’s Solution,” on fentanyl, retail theft, and stealing groceries. His side of every one was a cage. Handcuffs, prison jumpsuits, people behind bars. That was the punchline. Not a policy, or a plan, just human beings in chains offered up as entertainment to a base he wanted to thrill on a day he felt small. A man who feels powerful does not need to post pictures of other people in cages to feel it. A man who feels himself slipping does.

And underneath all of it, driving the whole desperate display, is an embarrassment he cannot make go away. He cannot get people to perform at his own party. The country is about to turn 250 years old, and the artists he wanted for the celebration have been walking out the door one after another, saying they were misled about how involved he would be. So this morning, he tried to turn his rejection into their failure. He wrote that the artists are getting “the yips.” He called them “Third Rate ‘Artists.’” He said he only wants to be “surrounded by Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN.” And then he nominated himself to replace them, “the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar,” “the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!).” By the afternoon, when even that did not fix the picture, he gave up and called for the whole thing to be scrapped, an event celebrating the founding of the United States, because the alternative was admitting that the performers who represent this country would not stand on a stage with him.

And there it is, the whole man in a single day. The artists who represent the living country said no, so he generated fake images of our dead founders who cannot decline to be in his proximity. Washington cannot decline the invitation. Lincoln cannot walk off the stage. The living people turned him down, and a federal judge told him he could not put his name on a building, so he spent the day surrounding himself with a country that exists only because he typed it into a machine, and threatening the one real person who told him the truth.

And I keep coming back to one thing tonight. Never before have we seen an American president behave like this. Not in a country founded on democratic norms, not in our lifetimes, not in any lifetime we can point to. There is no modern equivalent for this, no American equivalent, for this level of instability, corruption, and sheer insanity playing out in public day after day. To know that there are people beside him taking his wildest fantasies and turning them into digital hallucinations for him to share is its own kind of betrayal. And then there are the people who still claim to follow him, who cannot keep pretending that any of this is normal, because it is not, and somewhere underneath this unimaginable spectacle, they know it too. He cannot keep going like this. A man does not spend his day the way he spent today unless something is wrong. What we are watching is a man in cognitive and physical decline doing it in front of the entire world. And one day soon, we are going to have to come to grips with something even harder than the posts themselves, which is that there were likely medical professionals who knew, who put their names to words like “excellent” and “fully fit,” and who covered for him anyway. We are going to have to reckon with how many people looked straight at this and chose to call it normal. How many looked straight at it and called it healthy. How many looked straight at it and chose loyalty over truth.

Because here is what today actually showed us, underneath the noise. This was not strength. A man in command of himself and his country does not spend seven hours of a Saturday begging the world to see him as George Washington. The judge did his work calmly, in writing, on the law, and it held. The President spent the day melting down at him in public, in front of everyone, in front of the whole world. One of those is what lasting, real power looks like. The other is what it looks like when power can feel itself slipping and cannot stop grabbing at the air. We have not seen him this exposed before. The mask he used to keep up, the one that hid the worst of it, is gone, and a man who has to insist this loudly that he is well and powerful and beloved is telling us, without meaning to, exactly how unwell and how unsteady he has become. These are dark and dangerous days, for this country and for the world. But we are closer tonight than we were yesterday to the end of them, and we know that because of what he showed us with his own hands today. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,

Heather

 

 

 

 

[Ohokaman]

[Ohokaman]

Mad Magazine in 1991. They knew what he was back then……

 

 

[foxmerts]

Speaking of comic's I see a great week for  the world of comedy and television with wanna- be hack Stephen Colbert taken of air permanently raising late night tele's IQ up a few hundred points 

Though thought the final guest pretty much summed up Colbert talent

 

 

[bloke]

So much for freedom of speech. Trump does not like what Colbert says, so gets him removed. Trump can abuse all and sundry but sulks when someone takes the piss.

[foxmerts]

1 hour ago, bloke said:

So much for freedom of speech. Trump does not like what Colbert says, so gets him removed. Trump can abuse all and sundry but sulks when someone takes the piss.

No - can't blame The Don for this one , he  had nothing to do with it -CBS canned his show because he was costing the station  millions and millions as well as his ratings were appalling   

Though like Trump everyone applauded with the decision and are still celebrating

[bloke]

Trump Leaned on CBS

[Hedley Jordan]

 

[Hedley Jordan]

 

[Hedley Jordan]

 

[Hedley Jordan]

 

[bloke]

On 6/2/2026 at 11:14 AM, bloke said:

So much for freedom of speech. Trump does not like what Colbert says, so gets him removed. Trump can abuse all and sundry but sulks when someone takes the piss.

CBS and CNN are now owned by Trump's Oligarch mate, Larry Ellison so now in addition to doing Trump's bidding, he plans to turn both of these into another Fox News, full of lies and Trump Propaganda

[foxmerts]

7 minutes ago, bloke said:

CBS and CNN are now owned by Trump's Oligarch mate, Larry Ellison so now in addition to doing Trump's bidding, he plans to turn both of these into another Fox News, full of lies and Trump Propaganda

Hallelujah the evil has seen the light 

[bloke]

2 minutes ago, foxmerts said:

Hallelujah the evil has seen the light 

Hardly surprising from someone like you who worships Trump's lies and corruption.