“Trump Moves to Strip Tax Exemption from Schools that Aid Minority Students”

It’s the latest move by our very advantaged president against the disadvantaged. Sadly, there are many more examples. And they add up to the word “racist” when we’re talking about Donald Trump.

He is the man who reposted a video depicting the Obamas as apes. He’s the guy who frequently refers to Black women as “low IQ.” He’s the jerk who claimed Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH., were eating the dogs and cats of their neighbors. They weren’t. Trump is the man who picked the execrable Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon, where Hegseth almost immediately fired the Black Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

To Trump and his testosterone-addled acolytes, even when you work your way up the ladder as Brown did, you’re still not worthy of a top job that could/should have gone to a White person. Why do you think Trump’s pet gargoyle, Stephen Miller, would say “America is for Americans and Americans only,” but then not object to welcoming White South African refugees to this country?

MAGA demonized “critical race theory,” the 1619 Project, and D.E.I. Why do you think that is? When you go to a Trump rally, what do you see? An ocean of white faces turned toward their champion who feeds them the bigotry they embrace. Why do you think so many avowed racists are for Trump?

But consider this.

In 2016, Trump won roughly 6 to 8 percent of the Black vote in America, roughly commensurate with what you’d expect for a guy who claimed not to know anything about the Ku Klux Klan.

In 2020, he won 8 to 12 percent, better but not great. But in 2024, Trump won 15 percent of the Black vote. In other words, Trump more than doubled his Black support from 2016 to 2024. He was actually gaining ground in the Black community. Why?

The economy and health care were the most important issues in this voting bloc, coming in ahead of racial or ethnic inequality. Indeed, 61 per cent of young Black voters identified the economy as their top issue, according to Politico.

I hope they’re all enjoying $4-a-gallon gas, and their new health insurance premiums, especially those whose Medicaid coverage was taken away from them. How’s the economy working for Blacks compared to Whites? Call it a hunch, but I’ll bet Blacks are suffering more than Whites in Trump’s “hot” economy.

All of this tells me that Black voters by surprisingly large numbers bought what Trump was selling. But Trump’s pitch was so blindingly disingenuous. How could they? Well, there was another factor which Barack Obama identified during the last presidential campaign: Black men had difficulty voting for a Black woman, i.e., Kamala Harris.

During a speech in Pittsburgh on behalf of Harris, Obama decried a lack of enthusiasm for her prospects. And, he said, “it seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”

Obama went on. “And you are thinking about sitting out? Part of it makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”

So, well done! Sure, polls are showing second thoughts now about Trump among Blacks and just about every other sentient human being of whatever race. Uh, too late.

This new retrograde proposal to revoke tax-exempt status would involve secondary schools and universities that have any policy or program — including admissions and scholarships — which the I.R.S. finds racially discriminating. As the New York Times put it: “Such a change would thrust the I.R.S. into the center of the Trump administration’s push to pressure schools to abandon initiatives aimed at supporting Black and other minority students, effort meant to address the nation’s long history of racial discrimination and segregation.”

But, of course, the Trump administration doesn’t want to think about “the nation’s long history of racial discrimination and segregation.” Doesn’t want White kids growing up thinking their forefathers did something monstrously wrong. It might make them feel bad.

So much care and consideration for vulnerable White people. It’s touching.

Lester Maddox and George Wallace would be proud.

I admit I get choked up when I hear “Oh Canada” the national anthem. “God keep our land glorious and free, Oh Canada we stand on guard for thee. Oh, Canada we stand on guard for thee!”

When Canada plays the United States in international sports competition, do you sense that in your heart you’re actually hoping the Canadians show up the Americans? Does that make us anti-American? I don’t think so. I think it says we long for the days when America and Canada were best friends. The days before we elected a clown as our president.

Those were the days when you could expect a warm welcome from the hearty people up north, when Canada was a tourist destination, the Maritime Provinces, including Prince Edward Island, the Bay of Fundy, and dinner in Halifax. God, I hope those days aren’t gone.

Lake America, my ass! I watched Rep. Byron Donalds on Real Time with Bill Maher the other night. Donalds is running for Florida governor as a Republican, and as all Republicans do, he tried to make the renaming of Lake Ontario a joke. Just Trump being his hilarious self. “I thought it was funny,” Donalds said, like a man who doesn’t believe it but knows he has to say it.

The whole Canada as the 51st state thing is embarrassing. Trump means it. There is no joke there. And so, what has he accomplished? Canadians by overwhelming margins reject the idea of joining the United States. If Canadians were divided before, they aren’t anymore. The specter of joining a bunch of drooling, gun-toting MAGA buffoons is somehow not appealing, I guess. Who knew?

A poll last year found about 85 percent of Canadians against joining us. Nine percent liked the idea. A Reuters story said Trump’s repeated threats to swallow our neighbors has strengthened Canadian nationalism. Yes, there was once — about 40 years ago — a movement in the western provinces to join the U.S. or at least break away into an independent nation, but that fever broke long ago.

So, Mark Carney is now something of a hero on the international stage. He’s offering the world a blueprint on how to stand up to a bully as stupid as our president. The irony is that Carney and the Canadian Liberals would probably have lost the last general election were it not for bigmouth, his tariffs, and his idiotic annexation talk.

Last week, Carney said what many of our erstwhile allies think, that the U.S. government’s commitments could no longer necessarily be relied upon and the American signature on any agreement is written “in pencil.”

“I grew up in Canada admiring and respecting (America’s ideals),” said Carney, “but the America of today is not the America my father fought in Europe to preserve.” No, it’s not.

That America was not obsessed with “size.” Trump wants Canada, Greenland and maybe Cuba to show massiveness on the map. Domination. It’s so grade school.

A few years back I was sent to Nunavut, the Canadian province run by indigenous Inuit people. It was brutally cold up there, but the people were proud. Today, Nunavut is a province with all the standing of Ontario or Quebec. Hard to imagine America turning a state, maybe North Dakota, into a government run by Native American tribes.

Doug Burgum sure wouldn’t like that. He’s the former governor of North Dakota who once actually ran for president, though you’d have to peruse the fine print to find his name in the 2024 campaign. Today he spends his time smearing innocent people for allegedly befouling the Reflecting Pool near the Lincoln Memorial.

And that’s what we’re about in August of 2026. Small bore, penny-ante, petty stuff. Canada has been ripping us off for years, says Trump, yada, yada, yada. See, we’re supposed to hate Canada so we get distracted from the Iran War disaster. Hate the Canadians? Do you think Trump’s ever heard of Juno Beach? Does he know who fought with us on D-Day? No, Canada should be penalized for their forest fires. Uh huh. Right.

We give Canadians so many reasons to avoid us. And these days, who would want to befriend us?

Hang on, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver! Just a little over two years to go. We won’t be jerks forever.

Do you remember him?

Mladic was the bull-necked beast who led his Bosnian Serb forces during the Balkan wars of the 1990s in a campaign of sectarian bloodlust not seen since World War II. He is most remembered for ordering the extermination of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at a Bosnian town called Srebrenica in 1995.

But he was guilty of so much more.

Together with his idiot boss and political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, one Radovan Karadzic, Mladic sought to carve out of Bosnia-Herzegovina a separate rump state known locally as Republika Srpska. It would be Muslim-free. By the way, Karadzic was a real piece of work. A psychiatrist, for God’s sake, he also thought himself a poet. Yeah, right.

To get all the Muslims out, Karadzic and Mladic hatched an ethnic cleansing campaign involving deportations, concentration camps and executions, buttressed by constant shelling designed to drive the Muslims crazy. The primary target was Sarajevo, where I reported as a correspondent for ABC News.

I recall my first trip into the city on a charter flight. The airport was quiet. The streets empty except for the burned buildings and cars lining the pock-marked roadway. The smell of death was everywhere. This way into the city was prime sniper territory. The riflemen thought it was really sharp to kill somebody as they first arrived, and the PRESS sign on the car was more of a target than a deterrent.

I remember arriving at the only working hotel in the city, the Holiday Inn, to be told by the staff that while the elevator to my 8th floor room was still operating, I should probably take the stairs instead. Lug a month’s worth of baggage up eight flights? I asked incredulously.

The reason was simple, as one of the hotel staff members explained. If you took the elevator to your floor, when you reached it, the doors would slide open, and a light would illuminate the space and the hallway to either side.

So?

Well, I was told, the snipers on the cliffs across from the hotel can see the light come on and use it to aim at whoever emerges. I took the stairs.

But you were never safe. I’ve often said Sarajevo was the scariest place I’ve ever been. There were no red lines or green lines beyond which you would be taking your life into your own hands. There were no lines at all. Snipers were everywhere, shooting at whomever they pleased. The police were absent.

A friend of mine, ABC News producer David Kaplan, was shot in the back and killed as he was driven into the city. He bled out before he got to the hospital. After that, ABC began supplying us with protective vests.

At the Holiday Inn, the back end of the hotel had been completely blown out so that you could literally plunge to your death if you wandered down the wrong darkened corridor. There was near constant shelling. Much of it indiscriminate designed to terrorize the mostly Muslim inhabitants of the city, which was the point of what Mladic was doing.

But a lot of his orders were targeted. Mortars would occasionally land in markets as people hurriedly shopped for food. Another of Mladic’s tricks was to order his men to lob shells at the maternity wards of local hospitals, with predictably tragic results. But that was not enough. Mladic would find out when the funerals for those mothers and infants killed were to be held and he would have his men bomb the mourners in the cemetery. Atrocity is not a big enough word.

Amid the ethnic cleansing of one region, Mladic’s forces came upon a mental institution for adults. Its occupants had been abandoned by their caregivers who had fled the approaching army. What our cameras captured there in that horrid place was almost medieval in its depravity. Grown retarded men, half naked, covered in sores and excrement, were chained to their bed posts and scrounging for food scraps on the floor. Dogs in a kennel were treated much better than they were. But this kind of horror was all part of Mladic’s plan.

I saw him once at the local airport. He seemed at ease with himself and his “deeds.” A man at the top of his game.

I tried to get a question to him about whether he had any plans to kill more infants, but he blew me off. He was peacocking his way past a bevy of well-wishers. And there were many of them. So deep was the animosity that divided the country, and so “fresh” were the wounds inflicted during the Second World War and earlier conflicts by one side or the other that whole communities were still chomping at the bit to get in the last shot.

Indeed, the night before he carried out the massacre at Srebrenica, Mladic said it would avenge the conquest of Serbia by Ottoman Muslims in 1459.

Once the Balkan war subsided, Mladic scurried away like the rat that he was. Moving from safe house to safe house for almost 16 years, eluding authorities and the reckoning awaiting him. It’s believed he was helped a lot during those years by his fellow Serbs, who still considered him a hero. A hero.

He was finally caught on May 26, 2011, in a farming village not far from Belgrade, the Serbian capital. And in 2017 he was tried and convicted by an international tribunal on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Today’s New York Times reminds us that as he pronounced a life sentence for the “Butcher of Bosnia,” the presiding judge, Alphons Orie, said Mladic’s crimes ranked “among the most heinous known to humankind.” An appeal of the verdict was denied.

In the end, the war this poor excuse for a general did so much to worsen claimed some 100,000 lives and displaced millions more.

In announcing Mladic’s final exit, authorities today did not release a cause of death. But I hope there were many.

“You are all that matters to me,” read one to the president. “I never want to bring you anything but joy,” read another. A third read, “Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life.”

Nauseated yet? “Please,” a fourth went on, “when I fail, will you tell me? You have the absolute right to cuss me out, if need be, when I deserve it, because no one knows or cares about me more.”

A former anchor for the right-wing propagandist One America News Network, Harp’s current title is executive assistant to the president. The White House says Harp is “a loyal and hardworking aide to the president.” And I’ll bet she is. But c’mon! All presidents have devoted helpers, people who love them, sometimes literally.

But this? We’re talking glassy-eyed Jonestown devotion here.

From news reports, it appears that Harp’s main job is to feed a constant stream of good or great news to Trump, who already exists in a bubble of sycophancy. Sometimes she reportedly helps him plumb the shallows of social media or encourages some of his worst postings in the wee hours. She’s known as The Printer because she carries around a laptop and portable printer to get the sun-in-the-morning messages to her boss.

He gets laudatory commentary from questionable sources like Gateway Pundit and other rags of that ilk. Digesting such pusillanimous porridge goes a long way to explain why Trump keeps telling us the economy is going gangbusters; the Iranians lie prostrate at his feet; his approval ratings are historically high; the 2020 election was rigged, etc., etc.

Imagine what he would do if she screwed up and thoughtlessly gave him the front page of the New York Times on any given day. He’d learn about the U.S.S. Lincoln and the hardships the sailors he sent to war have been enduring. He’d realize his Board of Peace is really a piece of work, rejected by the Israelis before any plan for Gaza reconstruction can get started.

He’d find out his family is wildly enriching itself at the public trough. He’d know that a lot of people are really disappointed about the high cost of gasoline — even more so than whether a trans kid is on the local soccer team. He’d glean that some of his supporters are getting buyer’s remorse about mass deportation, about a measles outbreak, and feeling duped that the guy who supposedly settled all these wars has attacked eight countries — so far.

He’d understand at last that the Reflecting Pool is a mess, that his laughable Great American State Fair was a bust, that his speech last month about vote fraud landed with a journalistic thud, and he’d figure out that his approval ratings are swirling the toilet bowl.

And what of Harp the person? Does she exist beyond Trump’s reach? Her kind of “devotion” has reportedly drawn the attention of the Secret Service and members of Trump’s inner circle. The concern is that she may be unstable, and thus a risk. She apparently believes that legislation Trump signed permitting experimental drugs is what saved her from bone cancer.

What Trump thinks of her can be deduced by just observing this president we’ve all regrettably come to know all too well. He has no real friends, only “pals.” Harp answers Trump’s insatiable need for affirmation and acclamation. That’s all he wants.

And so, we are left with this truly odd arrangement in this truly odd administration. Are they having an affair? Doubtful. I mean, look at Trump. Is she essentially his caregiver? Who knows? All she apparently wants to be is a supplicant. Unwillingly thrust into the spotlight by a recent spate of stories must be really upsetting for her. And make no mistake, the people thrusting her into the spotlight work at the White House. They’re the ones doing the leaking. Death by a thousand cuts.

Tom Wellborn writes a terrific Substack called Politmix. He wrote about Harp in July and put it this way:

“I do not think Natalie Harp is a villain. I think she is a person who suffered enormously, decided a powerful man (Trump) had saved her, and gave him everything she had left in gratitude, and I think a decent person around Trump would have seen the vulnerability in that and protected her from herself.”

I agree. But find me a decent person around Trump. Please!

I lived and worked in Israel for almost nine years, between 1986 and 1995. During that time, I witnessed both the first and second Palestinian intifadas, or uprisings against Israeli rule in the occupied territories. I saw both of the reluctant but exhausted sides come together at the peace table in Madrid in 1991 in an attempt to end a century of bitterness.

I watched PLO chief Yasser Arafat, a terrorist mastermind, shake hands with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the White House in 1993. Rabin, who had once urged Israeli soldiers to merely beat up Palestinian protesters instead of shooting to kill them, was nobody’s peacenik. But he was pursuing a policy — first started by covert talks in Oslo, Norway — which would likely have resulted in some kind of Palestinian nation and some form of land swap.

Then, on Nov. 4, 1995, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli who feared he was giving Israel away to the Arabs. Benjamin Netanyahu won the next Israeli general election and immediately began rolling back the progress Rabin had achieved.

Netanyahu’s incompetence as prime minister led to his defeat by Ehud Barak in 1999. Barak’s failure to achieve peace with Arafat during talks at Camp David in July 2000 plus a spate of Palestinian suicide attacks led to his defeat at the hands of Ariel Sharon in 2001. Sharon had spent his life fighting Arabs but decided in 2005 to relinquish Israeli control of the Gaza Strip to the PLO and Arafat, reasoning that holding onto the land wasn’t worth the cost. The Israeli army and 8,000 Jewish settlers were withdrawn from the strip.

Sharon was incapacitated by a massive stroke in January 2006 and never recovered consciousness. Ehud Olmert took over and then won the election later that year — an election in which Netanyahu’s Likud party did historically poorly. And yet, three years later he returned to power. And, except for a few months, he has led Israel ever since.

Right into a brick wall.

The Israel of Bibi Netanyahu today bears no resemblance to the country I knew 30 years ago. I interviewed Netanyahu a few times as he rose up the ranks in politics. His perfect English helped. But he came across as an arrogant, tough guy-wannabee. He was patient and clearly waiting for his opportunity.

Back in those days, there was zero chance that acolytes of the racist American rabbi Meir Kahane would be included in any Israeli government. Too extreme even for the extremists. Not so nowadays. Not with do-anything-to-stay-in-power Netanyahu.

Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich lead religious nationalist coalition partners with Netanyahu. Ben-Gvir is the National Security Minister with a warm place in his heart for the Jewish settlers on the West Bank, especially those who seek to expand their presence through legal or illegal means. Smotrich is a kindred spirit. Netanyahu needed their support to construct his ruling coalition government but their presence in positions of authority remains a stain on the Jewish state.

And they would not be there were it not for Bibi, the diplomatic genius who lured our gullible American president deep into the abyss called the Strait of Hormuz. How’s that war in Iran going now?

Bibi has also aligned himself, his government, and his country with the MAGA-led Republican Party. Israel used to be a bipartisan cause in America. Not anymore. Netanyahu’s military campaign of retribution has leveled Gaza but has also aroused the sleeping giant of global antisemitism. In some corners, the butchers of Hamas who orchestrated and carried out the atrocities of Oct. 7 are actually seen in a sympathetic light.

It’s given rise to a “progressive” movement in this country that wants to end — or seriously scale down — America’s alliance with Israel for the first time in the 78 years since it was created. Now, if you are a candidate who accepts support from AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, you are taking a political risk. AIPAC money and support besmirched the campaign of Rep. Haley Stevens, who just lost Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary — to a Muslim.

Don’t expect Netanyahu to change. Indeed, he is openly hostile to Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace plan for the restoration of Gaza. Bibi has flatly rejected the plan. Why? He will never support the idea of a Palestinian state, and his right-wing constituency hasn’t seen enough Palestinian suffering to assuage their fears about another Hamas attack. So, the Gaza rubble continues to jump.

The government policy — or lack thereof — on the occupied West Bank is even uglier. Weekly, almost daily, pogroms by Jewish settlers have laid siege to Palestinian families and entire communities with little or no consequence. Afterall, the army and the settlers are on the same side. Don’t expect Israeli soldiers to take strong action against the settlers. Indeed, Haaretz, the leading liberal Israeli newspaper, reports today that any such move by the army could jeopardize a commander’s hope for career advancement.

The West Bank town of Qusra has been harassed for weeks by armed settlers, often in the company of uniformed Israeli soldiers. The army continues to supposedly work out a plan whereby both settlers and the Palestinians are mollified. But they’re taking their time so I wouldn’t hold my breath. I mean, it’s so much fun to torch cars, or homes, or olive tree orchards with impunity. As long as Netanyahu is in power, settlers will have a free hand to terrorize Palestinians, the idea being to force them off their land and out of the occupied territory altogether.

Just ask yourself what would happen if Palestinians had taken over a Jewish family’s house in a settlement community. How long do you think the Israeli army would take to work out a plan to evict them? Do you think they would use force?

Some military officials describe the West Bank as a “powder keg” waiting to explode. And in most civilized countries run by honorable leaders, this would be a bad environment which should be defused. But I don’t think Netanyahu sees it that way. I think he believes that tightening the screws on the Palestinians will eventually provoke them. And a conflict will help him politically. The Israeli general election is only 11 weeks away. Bibi’s party is trailing in the polls. He needs to shake things up and change the momentum. Scared voters usually support the guy who will protect them. That’s Bibi’s great, if tragic, political strength.

An election loss would be devastating for him; he’s on trial now on bribery, fraud and breach of trust charges. The cases against him basically accuse him of doing favors for political supporters in exchange for financially benefitting his party and his family. He denies any wrongdoing.

And while his trial has been ongoing for years, it’s one thing to prosecute a prime minister, and quite another to prosecute a private citizen, which is what Bibi Netanyahu could be if he loses the election in October.

As a reporter, newsworthy events tend to carry the gravity of a death in the family, or the thrill of a college graduation, the birth of a child, etc. Because, as a reporter, you are often living these events in person, you maybe knew the participants, or you could easily weigh the personal toll it took on you as you reported on them.

These days, in this summer of 2026, so many years away from one particular moment in American history, you not only have to explain what happened, and why, but also who was involved, and why.

Fifty-two years ago this weekend, President Richard Nixon resigned from office, the first president to ever do such a thing. Had he chosen to stay, Nixon would have been impeached and removed from office. He had lost the support of Democrats and Republicans in Congress. So, as it was, he sort of cheated the political hangman by quitting voluntarily.

Months of lying about his own connection to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington had been exposed by his own Oval Office taping system which captured him musing aloud about paying off burglars, concocting a false narrative, blaming and firing underlings, and wallowing in self-pity.

Nixon didn’t want to give them up, but the Supreme Court voted 8-0 to force him to let the tapes go. Days later, the House Judiciary Committee voted in favor of articles of impeachment and sent them to the full House.

On Aug. 7, 1974, Republican congressional leaders went to the White House and told Nixon the obvious: it was time to go. Sens. Barry Goldwater, R-AZ, and Hugh Scott, R-PA, along with Rep. John Rhodes, R-AZ, told Nixon his support had collapsed, that he had been flat out caught in a scandal, and his complicity would no longer be tolerated by the nation.

The next day, in a prime-time address, Nixon announced he would resign.

“I have never been a quitter,” Nixon told a national audience. “To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first.”

And so, on Aug. 9, Nixon quit.

It’s hard to exaggerate the enormity of this story — the biggest since the Kennedy assassination just 11 years earlier. For a young reporter like yours truly, it meant running around with your hair on fire all day every day.

I was an editor at UPI at the time, working the overnight shift. I had two real jobs: read the Washington Post’s amazing coverage of Watergate, turn it into a wire service story attributed to the Post, and await a call from the legendary UPI White House reporter Helen Thomas.

Helen, with whom I worked a few years later at the White House, was a conduit for information from disaffected Nixon administration officials — and their wives. John Mitchell was the former Attorney General who was running the Nixon re-election committee when Watergate exploded. His wife, Martha Mitchell, had no use for Nixon or his henchmen and she would frequently call Helen to vent. All of it went into stories I and others would edit. Stories that were so hot my fingers burned.

Keep in mind that nothing like Watergate had ever happened before. No president had ever resigned. No president had ever been told to leave by his erstwhile political allies. Nixon had won a huge landslide re-election two years earlier. And I think it’s fair to say no president had been so reviled by the reporters who covered him.

He hated the press. His aides hated the press. But the press did its job. Over time, Nixon seemed to shrink. It was once said of Lyndon Johnson that when he entered the room, by God, you knew he was the President of the United States. But when Nixon entered the room, you felt you were in the presence of a reasonably competent head waiter.

Why bring this up? Because it’s worth noting the historical contrasts between then and now. Between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, between Republicans then and Republicans now.

Back in 1973-74, there was no Fox News Channel, no pro-administration podcasts, no Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, et al. Nixon might well have survived Watergate if he had had an entire news network lying for him, as Fox did for Trump during the 2020 election, and continues to do even now. When J.D. Vance said recently that, today, Watergate would be a 12-hour story, he was probably right.

Back in 1974, getting impeached was shameful. The process practically crushed Nixon. Today, Trump marches around literally bragging about his two impeachments, using them to further his lies about being persecuted by his enemies. His anger toward them is basic — he was caught. And he hates the people who caught him.

Today, Republicans on Capitol Hill are like supine dogs. Greenlighting illegal and unethical behavior by a man many believe should never have been elected in the first place. But they’re all too frightened to speak out. Far from urging Trump to do the right thing, they enable him to do whatever he wants. Build a wall, great! Build a dance hall, even better! Desecrate the Kennedy Center, you rock! Build an Arch de Trump, so beautiful!

Don’t you just love how Sen. Susan Collins, R-ME, is always “concerned” by things Trump does, but seldom opposes him. Republicans have just approved Todd Blanche to be Attorney General. The man who has led the coverup of the Epstein scandal is now the chief law enforcement officer of the land. Way to go!

I think it’s safe to say Barry Goldwater would not have enjoyed the company of Donald Trump, and vice versa. Goldwater was the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, and many back then thought he was a war-mongering kook. But today, he’s seen by history as a statesman with a conscience. That’s how far the pendulum has swung in the 52 years since Nixon departed.

And what would Nixon and Trump have thought of each other? The word loathe comes to mind. Nixon, for all his faults, was an institutionalist who had some respect for the office he held even as he sullied it. He would have seen through Trump in a nanosecond.

Trump is an arsonist, a narcissist, a historically bad person with malice toward everyone who doesn’t kiss his ring. Even Nixon didn’t know hate like that.

There was a feeling in the country when Nixon left that, as President Gerald Ford put it, “our long national nightmare” was over. Ford was a good man, but man, was he ever wrong.

Mr. President, why did federal prosecutors working for your Department of Justice drop the felony charge against the Olympic canoeist, David Hearn? (I know why they did, but I want to hear Trump’s explanation.)

Hearn stuck his hand in the Reflecting Pool water. Is that a criminal offense? Should he go to prison for 10 years? Life?

Mr. President, you said you believe vandals were responsible for the damage, why do you still believe that, and who is giving you that dumb information which contradicts what investigators from you own government determined? Could it be Natalie Harp? Elon Musk? Todd Blanche?

Have you spoken to U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro about her decision to drop the charge? You posted on Truth Social, “I don’t know what she was thinking.” Do you know what she’s thinking now? I mean aside from how quickly she should clean out her desk?

Pirro had said, after all, that “we will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hearn willfully destroyed property.” She once even alleged that Hearn had “forcefully and violently” ripped the newly installed liner on the pool. Remind me, who told her that? Did she point the finger at anyone else as a reason for changing her mind and essentially taking a pie in the face? (Oh boy! Did she ever!)

Pirro attributed her about-face to new information received from Interior Department documents. Have you discussed this with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum? If so, what did he say?

Pirro also dumped on the U.S. Park Police for feeding her office bad information on what she earlier stated was “tremendous evidence” against Hearn. Again, where is that evidence?

As recently as Saturday, Secretary Burgum was saying “the evidence is clear” that vandalism was the cause of the damage. Period. End of sentence. Did he share that evidence with you and why did the White House not share it with us? If you spoke to Burgum, did he offer to bring over some warm chocolate chip cookies for the occasion?

Burgum’s been quite unequivocal about it, telling Fox News that vandals left gashes that ran for 350 feet across the bottom of the pool. Did Burgum snorkel the length of the pool? Have you asked him if he speaks to people at the department who work for him?

People like, oh, I don't know, the U.S. Park Police, for example? As you surely know, they are part of the Department of the Interior. Any idea why Park Police officers would concoct a fairy tale about left-wing radicals damaging federal property? Could it have been just to save you the immense embarrassment of appearing not to know what you were talking about or that another one of your stupid projects is an abject failure?

You, too, said the whole mess was “a pure case of vandalism.” Did you know what you were talking about? Your White House spokesman said, “deranged individuals made several gashes in the side of the pool.” You called these so far unseen vandals “thugs.” How do you know they were thugs or even deranged? Did you consult a psychologist? Were these radicals observed wearing funny hats or something?

And by the way, you went on to say, “there may have been some contractor difficulty.” What did you mean by saying that? Hmmm…

Is it possible that the whole problem with the pool was because of what Pirro’s office eventually determined was a botched installation, and that your demand to have the pool ready by the Fourth of July was completely unreasonable?

Why was one of the no-bid contracts to fix the damn thing given to a company whose owner is a fat slob neighbor of yours in Florida?

A different subject, Mr. President? Just days ago, you and your administration indicated you were going to escalate the military attack against Iran, but then over the weekend you backed off your threats, claiming there was some unspecified progress toward a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. What was that progress and how is this not another example of how Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO)?

First, let’s be real here. The poorly educated dunces who form the base of Trump’s MAGA movement are unlikely to be regular museumgoers in the first place. I mean, c’mon! “Look Billy Bob, here’s the exhibit on George Washington Carver you’ve been bugging me about going to see.”

I don’t think so.

No, Trump wants a sanitized history to be on display. No dwelling on the bad parts, like um, slavery, the mass displacement of Native American tribes, Jim Crowe, or that idiot of a president who was impeached twice.

Trump and his minions complain that the Smithsonian, which I used to visit from time to time when I lived in D.C., is a cesspool of extreme political activism which does not accurately reflect our national story. The Trump signs will rebut — if not refute — the radical activist ideology spewed by the museum’s director, Anthea M. Hartig, who Republicans have accused of teaching “national self-loathing.”

She testified to Republican critics a rather simple truth: “When historians talk about reframing a traditional narrative, we don’t mean erasing it. We mean adding the evidence, the voices, the objects that earlier tellings left out so that more Americans can see themselves reflected in the national story.” Alas, MAGA sees that as “woke.”

History is history, right? Digging further might turn up embarrassing information.

According to a story I read in the New York Times, the suggested signage will point tourists to places where American history is better presented, perhaps including those showing Americans and dinosaurs living in Flintstone-style harmony.

The Smithsonian was accused, for example, of not doing enough to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary. But how much is enough? Certainly, it would be hard to compete with the Great American State Fair — that almost no one attended. That was Trump’s idea, and it sure looked and sounded like it. Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” still rings in my ears, and I didn’t even go. And who could forget Trump’s speech? Better still, who could remember it?

Friday’s executive order ordered several government officials to “restore trust in the Smithsonian Institution” and seek its compliance with what the president wants. Among those who should do the president’s bidding is Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, and a man who would give Samuel Alito a run for his money as most aggrieved partisan in Washington.

Vought has apparently never forgiven civil servants for getting paid to keep the government working. He’s talked about his simmering rage that the taxpayer had to foot the bills for these workers. Taxes meant Vought’s parents consequently had a hard time making ends meet, and that made him feel bad as a kid. Now that he has power, Vought relishes cutting off these workers and their progressive programs. Soft underbellies like the Smithsonian are just too easy a target.

Some of the possibly objectionable items on current display in the museum are George Washington’s military uniform, Maya Angelou’s manual typewriter, and Judy Garland’s ruby slippers. What?

Next week the museum will hold Smithsonian Sleepover late night (7 to 11 p.m.) for kids 8 to 14, accompanied by an adult. They get to wander the museum’s galleries “in a memorable evening adventure” (and socialist indoctrination!)

And you can see how fragile feelings might be hurt if a kid sees a part of the actual lunch counter and stools from Greensboro, North Carolina where four Black college students asked for service at the “white’s only” section back in February 1960. They were, of course, refused service. Racial segregation was legal back then. But who needs to be reminded of that? Sit-ins shmit-ins. Haven’t we moved on as a country? We’ve already had a Black president, so shut up already!

Do we have to listen to those who rose up against the (all White) police?

Better to dwell on Abraham Lincoln’s top hat — the one he wore to Ford’s Theater the night of April 14, 1865. But we don’t have to get too deeply into the whys and wherefores of the Civil War, do we? I mean, don’t some still call it the war of northern aggression? And why rub it in?

You can find Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves. But do we really have to get into why he was stripped of his title as heavyweight champ? That would just bring up the whole Vietnam War mess, and who wants that? There’s also Julia Child’s kitchen (and all the elitist mushrooms she used to crow about.) Miss Piggy is somewhere inside, and C-3PO, too. Just asking, were they trans?

There’s Thomas Jefferson’s portable desk, the one he used to draft the Declaration of Independence. And I suppose it’s only fair that the desk of the guy who wrote “All men are created equal” is balanced by the inkstand Lincoln used to draft The Emancipation Proclamation.

The museum offers courses for kids in elementary, middle and high school, though I could see some problems with one part entitled “What Does the President Do,” especially since our current leader seldom gets to the Oval Office before 11 a.m. and stays up much of the night shitposting and whining about the 2020 election he lost overwhelmingly. A presidential role model, hmmm.

From the Smithsonian’s website, “The office of the presidency has evolved over more than 200 years, founded in the debates of the Constitutional Convention, influenced by the model of George Washington, and shaped by subsequent presidents and the public.

“As a nation, we place no greater responsibility on any one individual than we do on the president. The most successful chief executives thrive at balancing the numerous roles they must play; others stumble because they cannot master one or more of the many duties. (I’ll say!) And all of this is done within a framework of constitutional and political constraints which limit presidential power.”

How quaint.

From “I cannot tell a lie” to “I cannot tell the truth.” You can see why you-know-who would object. Treasonous! Put up those signs quick as you can. Call out the guard!

But let’s be serious. This is a play to the basest instincts of Trump’s awful base. Screwing the Smithsonian tells the knuckle draggers he has their backs and won’t kowtow to those pointy-headed know-it-alls who collect history and stuff.

There was the famous “malaise” speech, in which he never actually said the word “malaise,” but it’s tone and message certainly fit the word. Carter was being tuned out by the electorate which was turning its gaze to the former governor of California, Ronald Reagan. We all know how that turned out.

Anyway, after one of these Carter speeches, the Boston Globe dummied up a joke headline to an editorial about the address entitled “Mush from the Wimp.” It was a joke, but somehow it got printed and more than 161,000 copies of the Globe went out that way.

I’m reminded of this because of how weary we have all become of Donald Trump, his presidency, his politics, his bluster and his bluff.

From the incessant whining about the 2020 election he lost, to the supposed vandalizing of the Reflecting Pool, to the UFC bloodletting on the White House lawn, the desecration of the Kennedy Center facade, to the demolition of the East Wing, to his absurd 250-foot arch overshadowing the national cemetery at Arlington, it’s all so terribly boring, isn’t it? Tedious, really.

Now comes word via Truth Social that our president is once again threatening Iran. Are you sitting down? Specifically, Trump is claiming that “anytime the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz,” he will order U.S. forces to hit civilian infrastructure, including sites in and around Tehran. Things like water treatment plants, bridges, electrical grids, etc. It would be the kind of attack the world considers a war crime under international law.

But I wouldn’t worry. We’ve all seen this movie before. Remember how American and Israeli forces “obliterated” the Iranian military capability more than a year ago? Remember how Trump assured us the war, or operation, or whatever they call it would be extremely short-lived. Just a little light bombing should do the trick. Or when Iran refused to capitulate, do you remember when Trump said he was going to wipe out an entire civilization in response?

None of what he threatened — or even merely said — has come true. It’s almost as if you can’t take the guy at his word, right? And if we, sitting here on our comfortable couches watching the war on TV feel that way, imagine how Iranians and their awful leadership feel.

The mullahs probably reason they can wait out Trump because he never follows through or, to turn a phrase, “always chickens out.”

Now comes word that the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen plan to close the Red Sea at the nautical chokepoint known as the Bab al-Mandab Strait. It is the waterway on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula across from the African nation of Djibouti. Lots of Saudi oil goes through that strait. The fact that the Houthis would want to join this misbegotten conflict should tell you a lot about how seriously they take Trump’s warnings.

But maybe the Saudis aren’t going to export so much oil from now on. Much of what went through the Bab al-Mandab was bound for Asia anyway, and we’ve just learned of an agreement whereby Washington will help the Saudis enrich fuel for nuclear reactors.

Even if it’s for “purely peaceful purposes,” does giving the Saudis nuclear technology sound like a good idea to you? Remember those 19 hijackers involved in the 9-11 terrorist attack on the U.S.? Fifteen of them were Saudi citizens. The Saudis are led by a prince of a guy who the CIA concluded had ordered the murder and dismemberment of an American journalist who displeased the regime.

As the New York Times reports, the deal totally sidelines Israel, which has its own nuclear program and is always nervous about the technology falling into the hands of, oh, I dunno, its mortal enemies perhaps? Doing something that could provoke a regional nuclear arms race was not the bargain Jerusalem thought it was getting from Trump. Weren’t the Israelis our allies? Maybe they, too, took Trump at his word.

Big mistake. Huge.

And have you heard the proud recipient of the FIFA “peace prize” is, according to the Washington Post, weighing military action against the West African nation of Mali? The target would be a terrorist off-shoot of Al-Qaeda. And the Post says a big advocate for attacking them is Sebastian Gorka, who somehow has the job of senior counterterrorism director for the National Security Council.

You may remember seeing the British-accented Gorka hawking a pain “medicine” on Fox TV called “Relief Factor.” Guess what? Relief Factor is marketed as a dietary supplement and has not been evaluated by the FDA to treat, cure, or prevent disease. Shocking, I know.

After his pitchman days were over, though, he joined the Trump administration as an expert on, umm, not sure what, exactly. Terrorism? Anyway, Gorka is now reportedly pushing Trump to strike what would be the eighth country attacked since Jan. 20, 2025.

So much for the guy who told his followers he was in favor of ending wars, not starting them.

Imagine writing that sentence about any other president. Even Richard Nixon.

From what I read in the run-up to this speech, Trump was working off a load of crap — perhaps even explosive diarrhea? — shoveled to him by conservative journalist John Solomon regarding the 2020 election. Solomon, as Will Sommer of the Bulwark has pointed out, is famous for big exposes that wither upon closer inspection.

Reports are that Trump sees the government of China as the villain in his defeat. You know, the election he lost by seven million votes to Joe Biden. The mind boggles. Were Chinese restaurants the real dens of iniquity where the plot to deny Trump victory was hatched? Who knows? Who cares?

Obviously, Trump does. Defeat is as bad as death to our president. And yet, we know from his aides that Trump acknowledged his loss in private. He just couldn’t do it in public. What would his millions of meatheads have said if he conceded?

Remember, Trump was the president in 2020, not Biden. Trump had the entire government’s muscle on his side. And yet somehow, we are supposed to believe that the out-of-power Democrats were able to steal the result and turn Trump out of office. I think it’s fair to ask why the scheming Democrats failed so miserably to rig everything in 2016 and 2024 too. Trump never talks about that.

His own attorney general, Bill Barr, said the whole stolen election lie was “bullshit.” And in much nicer, legalese, judge after judge agreed with Barr.

But I keep coming back to this speech, and how Trump has degraded the office he confoundingly holds. Word of his speech spawned a debate among the news networks as to whether they should bother to cover it. And if they did decide to turn over their platforms, how to cover his lies. The idea that there is even such a debate is a measure of how far we have fallen on Trump’s trip to the bottom.

When John F. Kennedy requested airtime from the networks in 1962 to speak to the nation “on a matter of national urgency,” there was no debate. Reporters had already ferreted out the subject: the Cuban missile crisis. Nobody figured Kennedy would lie to the country about such a momentous story.

In 1968, LBJ requested radio and television time and was duly given it by the networks to speak on Vietnam. But he added a rather large wrinkle toward the end of his speech:

“With our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office, the presidency of your country.

“Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

I remember watching that speech at home. Not once did I — or anybody else, for that matter — wonder if he really meant it.

For Trump to say something on that scale in his speech, people would immediately wonder what the trick was. Some sloppy sleight-of-hand? And because he lies all the time, he probably gets a pass. I mean, nobody is dwelling any more on his bluff/threat to wipe out the entire Persian civilization (in one night), or his insistence that Iran’s military might had been “obliterated,” or that his stupid war of choice would end in days.

Fewer and fewer people believe that vandals ruined the Reflecting Pool, or that the Kennedy Center had to be closed for two years not because nobody was buying tickets, but because it was in desperate need of “repairs.”

Does anybody think he’s telling the truth when he claims world-class sycophant Bill Pulte is totally qualified to be the interim director of national intelligence? Do they believe Kash Patel is the best we can do to head the FBI, or that RFK Jr. is a wonderful health secretary who happens to hate vaccines?

Almost no one believe that stuff anymore. They don’t see tariffs as the economic miracle Trump touted, and increasingly, even Republicans are incredulous about ICE’s need to shoot and kill people to make Stephen Miller’s nativistic point.

So, whatever Fox News tells you, Trump lies. And there is a difference between lying when your approval rating is good and when lying it’s in the toilet, as it is now.

What you have is the spectacle of an increasingly unpopular president attempting to fool his fools one more time.

“They stole the election, and I have proof!”

Sure you do.

There, there, Mr. President. Why don’t you just lie down. Have a cheeseburger.

And shut up.

I mean, for God’s sake! Retire Mitch! You’ve done all the damage you can do by now. You stuck us with Donald Trump, you clown. It would have been so easy to round up a couple of your spineless colleagues back in early 2021, have them vote to convict the bastard, and assure he could never run again — for dog catcher. But no. You said the courts would take care of Trump. Sure they would.

Speaking of judges, Mitch, may I introduce you to Federal Judge Aileen Cannon. Surely you remember her. She’s the “jurist” who stalled the case of the purloined top-secret national security documents. Trump took them from the White House after his seven million-vote loss to Joe Biden, stashed them in Mar-a-Lago, shoved them to one side of his toilet, and no doubt intended to use them in some way to make money off them. Tell me I’m wrong!

It was the most open-and-shut case against our president, but Cannon sat on the prosecution, delaying, obfuscating, and undermining with rulings her superiors in the federal judiciary found faulty in the extreme.

But hey! If Sam Alito retires from the Supreme Court sometime in the next two years, Cannon will be right there, waiting to be elevated by Trump to the highest court in the land. The thought of it makes me laugh — like a mad man. These are the kind of judges McConnell thought would take care of Trump?

McConnell can ease into retirement, knowing full well that he is a hero to Republican partisans who just loved how he maneuvered to keep Merrick Garland off the court, with bonus points for embarrassing President Obama. What was the reasoning again? Something about how a president couldn’t put somebody on the high court during an election year, was it? Brilliant.

Yep, we all got Neil Gorsuch instead of Garland. Gorsuch, who once thought a woman’s right to choose was guaranteed by law, is the guy who voted to do away with that right.

McConnell strong-armed beer-swilling Bret Kavanaugh onto the court too, overlooking the testimony of a woman who said a blackout drunk Kavanaugh sexually abused her when they were young. Obviously, a slut.

But the real piece de resistance of his lousy seat-warming career was how he got Amy Coney Barrett on the court just a few days before the 2020 election. What was his argument then? Remind me. Oh, I remember, he said his earlier argument against Garland and Obama was inoperative. Again, brilliant. He had the power, and he loved using it against the godless Democrats.

Another reason to rest on his “laurels,” is to relish his reputation as a master lawmaker. McConnell is often referred to a sly fox in the Senate, a guy who could run rings around his opponents and always come out on top. I don’t know about you, but that always said more to me about McConnell’s colleagues than it did about McConnell himself. Let’s just say none of them is bringing potato salad to the Mensa picnic.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Ia, is 92, and at times appears to lack a firm grasp on where exactly he is. McConnell is 84 and has clearly mastered the art of wordlessly staring straight ahead mid-sentence. Sen. Jim Risch, R-Id, is 83. Go ahead and tell me what you think is Risch’s main accomplishment in his 17 and a half years in the Senate. I’ll wait. All of them should retire. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, is also over ripe at 84. But no, McConnell has to soldier on in pursuit of some longevity record nobody will ever care about.

For me, the lingering memory I have of McConnell was that vote to repeal Obama care back in 2017. It was Trump’s mission in life to erase any achievement of his predecessor, and he was so close. He had no plan to replace it and never did. Millions would have lost health insurance.

But anyway, on that day, John McCain walked onto the Senate floor and voted against the repeal. A thumbs down that was a thumb in the eye of Trump. I remember watching McConnell, arms folded, head down, as the gallant McCain took a stand. McConnell was crestfallen. So very disappointed. He couldn’t understand why McCain would deny his party a “win.”

Well, maybe in the future there’ll be a bust of Mitch in Statuary Hall. Children will walk by, asking their parents, who’s that?

And no one will know.

That a creature like Platner with his Nazi tattoo and his carnal history could rise to even an electoral possibility is a measure of the despair Democrats are feeling about their party’s ability — or even willingness — to take on Donald Trump. It’s not as if the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate had no fair warning of what was to come in a second execrable Trump term.

Do they not know the kind of person Stephen Miller is? Why weren’t they prepared for the onslaught of racism, fascism and narcissism that unfolded over the last year? As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report in their book Regime Change, Miller was the guy “who forced through executive actions and emergency declarations at a speed that had stunned even some of Trump’s other officials, often with little regard for the trail of fallout.”

It was Miller’s plan to knock the opposition off balance from Jan. 20, 2025 on. Was that a surprise? Ask yourself if anything the Democrats have done in response has had a measurable impact on Trump’s low standing in the polls. Trump has hurt himself. The Democrats have watched.

Now, of course, there is a longstanding belief in politics that when your opponent is committing suicide, you just get out of the way. Ok, so far. But getting out of the way does not mean disappearing.

But what we got were repeated hunched Senate floor mumblings from Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, peering at us over his glasses, or whiny tut-tuts from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. I get that when you’re in the minority like the Democrats are, the tools of resistance are few, and that taking the fight to Trump can be perilous. But c’mon.

Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia is showing how it’s done. He’s running for re-election against a rather shameless racist Republican. And Ossoff calls him that. No handwringing, no squeamishness. Ossoff also calls out Trump’s corruption repeatedly at campaign appearances and, not surprisingly, audiences are eating it up.

There are other Democratic governors who are also fighting back. Pritzker of Illinois, Newsom of California, and Beshear of Kentucky are all spoiling for a clash with the party of crypto billionaires. But their reach extends only so far. It’s the national Democrats who have dropped the ball repeatedly.

Again, I go back to what I proposed months ago: the Democrats should hold a press conference every day and force the news media to cover them in the interest of fairness. That press conference by whomever would be a platform for attacking Trump’s daily outrages. You can’t just stand by as the malice, misrule and mendacity pile up. Take each offense, one at a time, and remind voters of the stakes.

Which brings us back to Graham Platner. What was his appeal? He was a fighter, I guess. He was ready to take on the oligarchy. He had never been tainted by electoral politics before he jumped into the race for the Senate from Maine. He was authentic. An oysterman, a veteran, etc. He’d be perfect to take on the forever “concerned” Republican Susan Collins. Forever wrestling with her conscience when it comes to Trump, Collins always won. Yes, Platner was the kind of Democrat who could scare the elites, the billionaires, and their ilk.

Sure, he had covered up that Nazi tattoo, and yes, there was some whispering about his oafish behavior around women, but he was a real man as opposed to the faux fighters for Trump. I’m looking at Hegseth.

Well, it turns out Platner was/is a garden variety lout with considerable drinking and anger management problems to boot. Overlooking his issues has meant an entirely beatable Collins may now win the damn race and place the Senate out of reach for Democrats. So, well done.

And while we’re talking about the mistake of voting with your hearts instead of your heads, can we talk about the Social Democrats who’ve won races this year and look ready to take their seats in the House of Representatives? Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, for example.

Avila Chevalier’s X or Twitter account contained repeated sympathetic references to communism, to Marxism, and to Soviet figures, including Vladimir Lenin. She’s also called for abolishing the police, doing away with prisons and erasing borders. Dare I forget that she is also a big fan of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israeli villages near Gaza. Today she says she has “grown considerably” since her firebrand Tweets. Uh huh.

Valdez wants to abolish ICE, the immigration agency, wants to raise taxes on the rich, and opposes Israel’s retaliatory attack on Gaza. The New York Times says Valdez’ district is home to some of the country’s youngest, most progressive voters. In other words, the ride-or-die liberals who are interested in making a point over winning elections. See: McGovern, George or more recently Sanders, Bernie.

It comes down to whether Democrats really want to regain power. I would argue that nominating Lenin-loving, Israel-hating candidates is a sure way to win in those districts, but the ripple effects from their victories will not be helpful to the party as a whole. And, by the way, are these candidates really Democrats at all?

Platner identified as a Democrat but had definite Social Democrat tendencies, Medicare for all, affordable housing, strengthening labor unions, etc. Are the others like Avila Chevalier and Valdez just running under what they think would be a more acceptable banner that says DEMOCRATS in capital letters and socialists in tiny, eye-exam type?

Let’s see how they do as just plain Socialist candidates.

And is it any wonder that Trump is now including repeated references to “communists” in his speeches? A scare word from the 1950s and 60s, “communism” conjures up images of the Soviet Union, the Politburo, the KGB, food shortages, Nikita Khrushchev, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Castro’s Cuba, etc. It is as if the Democrats have handed Trump a cream pie and are begging him to hit them in the face Three Stooges-style.

The late columnist Jimmy Breslin once wrote a book about the woebegone 1963 New York Mets. He called it Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?

The same question seems timely for the Democrats these days.

And there’s no amount of cheerleading by the nitwits on Fox News that will cover over the dismal facts that we carry around every day. The Reflecting Pool, the White House ballroom, the crypto criminality, the insider trading, the Arc d’Trump, the 47 trees he wants to plant to honor himself, the gilded Oval Office, Natalie Harp’s love notes, the immunity from prosecution, and on and on it goes. We’re all supposedly having a great time at the Great American State Fair that Donald Trump thought up. But are we? Are any of us at the fair?

Sure, it’s hot. But Washington in July always feels like a trip into my dog’s mouth, so you can’t blame the temperatures for why so few are showing up. The crowds aren’t there because they don’t want to come. Pay homage to a highly unpopular president? I’d rather mow the lawn.

America on its 250th birthday seems listless, resigned, tired and bored. I well remember the 200th birthday. A completely different mood. Amiable Gerald Ford was president. Richard Nixon was gone, consigned to the irrelevance he so richly deserved.

By contrast, Ford was a truly decent guy. He lived within the guardrails almost all of his White House predecessors had honored. I remember watching the fireworks from the roof of an apartment building near the National Cathedral and feeling immense relief that the country’s institutions had replaced a criminal with an honest man. Watergate resumed being a place and stopped being a scandal.

On that Fourth of July the nation exhaled because, as Ford put it, “our long national nightmare” was over. We had turned a corner and seemed to be heading in the right direction. Presidents came and went after that, but few of us felt the world was about to end during their terms.

Then Trump showed up, demanding our fealty, our loyalty, and most of all, our attention!

Every day I brace for some new outrage from this oaf in the Oval Office. And he always delivers.

Vice President Vance was correct when he said recently that Watergate would have been a 12-hour story if it broke today. Vance was, of course, trying to minimize the scandal that did Nixon in. But he was unwittingly highlighting the era of Trump’s manifold corruption that makes it impossible to concentrate on just one scandal when so many are in full swing right before our eyes.

Trump’s sludge suffocates us. His character divides us and will continue to divide us for a long time. His taste — fueled by his crippled ego — his grifting, his cheating, and his hatred for half the country, leave us wondering about where we will go when he’s finally gone. But that is an exciting prospect.

Yes, Trump will go. And the history he has written will follow him for the rest of his days like shit on his shoe. Those craven Republicans who enabled him may delude themselves by thinking once Trump is gone, they can all act normal. But no. There is coming a day of reckoning for these cowards in Congress. And it’s not going to be pretty.

If the Democrats take over Congress next year, Trump will be put through the hell of investigations, inquiries, and ignominy. But even if the Republicans manage to hold onto power — whether by theft or not — the era of Trump is painfully, inexorably grinding to an end.

So go ahead and light the fireworks. Give us the rockets’ red glare! Let’s try to be happy. As we mark this Independence Day, we can celebrate our eventual independence from Trump too. He’s going to disappear soon. Two more years.

Start the clock.

And he was serious.

Barr knows what the job entails. He’s been attorney general twice under two different Republican presidents. He is conservative to the point of being tribal. He openly campaigned for the job after Trump’s first choice, Jeff Sessions, imploded. He then embraced the Trump notion that the Mueller probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election was a stretch. And he published a glaringly misleading summary of the report, arguing falsely that it exonerated Trump.

Barr willingly did Trump’s bidding right up to — but not including — embracing the false rigged election nonsense. In fact, Barr literally called “bullshit” on Trump’s arguments that he somehow had an election which he lost by 7 million votes stolen from him.

But Barr is no hero.

And those who are disappointed by his endorsement of Blanche have just not been paying attention. I would argue that Blanche is exactly the kind of guy Barr would want because Barr believes the DOJ should be an instrument of Republican presidents to further conservative goals and to impede what he sees as a liberal onslaught on our American values.

“The main thing going for Mr. Trump and his party right now,” Barr wrote, “is the administration’s domestic policy agenda aimed at rolling back destructive progressive policies and restoring common common-sense, prosperity and public safety.” In other words, we all have to fight the transgendering of America and the creeping expansion of civil rights.

Certainly, he’s right that the “main thing going for Trump and his party right now” is not the war in Iran. Nor is it the ruinous tariff plan that has sapped America’s economic strength. It isn’t the immigration snafu which we don’t really want to talk about any more than we want to mention inflation. No, it’s definitely not the execrable Cabinet Trump has cobbled together from a local sewerage system. It’s not Bill Pulte as director of national intelligence, or RFK Jr., as protector of our health, or Push-up Pete Hegseth, who evidently wants to return to the glory days of the Crusaders.

Sure, let’s throw in the perfect Trump lackey, Blanche, to oversee law enforcement in this nation. He was Trump’s personal attorney, after all, and must be eager to further his boss’s campaign of vengeance against those who caught him in wrongdoing.

Barr wrote a book, One Damn Thing After Another, in which he freely concedes that Trump was responsible for the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “I do think he was responsible in the broad sense of that word, in that it appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill,” Barr told NBC’s Lester Holt.

It sure as hell does “appear” so, Bill.

And yet knowing all that he knew about Trump up close and personal, this tower of integrity was still unwilling to consider voting against him in 2024. Why? “Because I believe the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party,” Barr told the Today Show, “it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee” — even if it’s Trump.

That’s right, Bill.

If Kamala Harris had defeated Trump, she would not have bombed Iran, tanked the economy, alienated our best friends abroad, lusted for Greenland, abandoned Ukraine to the bestiality of the Russians, sent bully boys playing dress-up into the streets of American cities to corral landscapers, maids, nannies, and busboys.

No, Kamala Harris would not have demolished the East Wing of the White House to build a dance hall or plastered her name onto the Kennedy Center’s facade. She would not have enriched herself or her family. She would not have gilded the Oval Office or entrusted the Reflecting Pool to cronies who transformed it into a swamp. There would be no talk about a “Harris triumphal arch” steps from the fallen of Arlington National cemetery. And Stephen Miller would hopefully be living in a trailer park right next to Steve Bannon.

And you know what else, Bill? Harris would not have lied 100 times a day. She would not have dozed off during Cabinet meetings. She would have understood the majesty of the office, its true meaning to Americans, and she would have embraced the responsibility that came with it instead of acting like a grade school jerk “because I can.”

Kamala Harris would not have bent the rules, skirted the norms, flipped off traditions, or trashed the guardrails that have governed every man who assumed the job since the Founding Fathers and George Washington envisioned it.

So, go ahead Bill. Tell me again why you voted for Trump. And I have one question. Are the Democrats so godawful that you would vote for President Pond Scum again when he seeks a third term?

Hitler then decreed that Germany’s existing infrastructure — its factories, bridges, utilities and transportation systems — should all be destroyed and, thus, the conquerors would be kept from using any of it.

So, as the war which he started wound down to ignominious defeat, Hitler turned on the people who were once so enraptured by his presence, so mesmerized by his leadership, so confident of ultimate victory. It wasn’t Hitler’s fault, see, it was the German people — the Aryans he rhapsodized about — who actually were unworthy.

I’m not going to compare Hitler to Donald Trump. Afterall, JD Vance has already done that for us. But what I do see is a similarity in their responses to catastrophic reversals. And I think Trump is turning on this country too.

Take what he did today (Wednesday) when he canceled a ceremony drummed up by Republicans to witness his signing of housing legislation that could address the affordability issue bedeviling his administration and Republicans in Congress. The bill’s passage was a rare show of bipartisanship and a sign that lawmakers can actually do things beyond bickering or posting YouTube videos.

The GOP was desperate for something to show financially strapped voters as the mid-term elections draw near. Building more houses might help bring down the cost of homes.

Trump was having none of it.

He is insisting that the so-called Save America Act pass first. It’s a piece of legislation designed to restrict voting by the people Trump blames for his loss in 2020: basically, Black people. He’s convinced himself, and wants to convince the rest of us, that urban centers like Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Detroit are hotbeds of fraud. Two things about that list of cities: they’re all in critical states, and they all have large Black populations. Trump doesn’t care about what goes on in South Dakota, North Dakota, or Oklahoma. They’re lily White, and, in his mind, MAGA country.

There would be no more mail-in voting, according to this bill. Government photo IDs would be mandatory to prove citizenship before anyone could cast a ballot. States would be required to verify citizenship and identify and remove non-citizens from voter rolls based on information from the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. Absentee ballots would be more closely scrutinized. And on it goes.

Trump has been told the bill won’t pass, but he doesn’t care.

Six years after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Trump is still trying to win the fraud argument. An argument that has failed dozens of times in court. An argument that helped incite the Jan. 6 insurrection, an argument that his base still fervently supports.

Speaking of his base, Trump’s dismal approval rating has now reached 30 percent in one poll I saw this week. That’s the core of his support shorn of those idiots who knew he was corrupt but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Black woman. The idiots are the ones you now hear voicing second thoughts about their decisions. Uh huh.

Trump can read the polls. He sees his presidency swirling the bowl and heading for the sewers of history. He knows his congressional supporters are going to get shellacked in November. So, I think he’s decided to punish the country for being so disloyal, for spurning him, and especially for laughing at him.

His refusal to sign the housing legislation has the potential to do real damage. But he doesn’t care if it aggravates the housing crisis.

His stewardship of the stupid war with Iran can now be seen with clarity to be an immense geopolitical belly flop. He didn’t bother to ask the Congress about it before plunging face-first into the Strait of Hormuz. Congress is the elected voice of the people, but Trump doesn’t care what the people want. The public is turning against him and should, thus, be penalized.

He has appointed a corpulent imbecile to be the director of national intelligence. Bill Pulte is a “class A” suck-up who will salute and do what he’s told, especially if it includes digging up some flimsy allegation of election interference by shady foreigners. Italian thermostats anyone? Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, was already headed down that dirt road when she “oversaw” the seizure of 2020 election records from Fulton Co., Georgia. You tell me what that had to do with national intelligence. I’ll wait.

But God help us if a real threat arises while Pulte is pawing through, say, Detroit voting rolls. The country is no longer being protected by experts. Pulte has just fired a lot of them. Morons are in charge. And Trump doesn’t care.

Trump doesn’t care if people my age still revere the memory of John F. Kennedy. Smearing the Trump name on the facade of the Kennedy Center in Washington is just what those bastards with their lingering fondness for the New Frontier richly deserve.

Trump apparently has no use for the Kennedy family beyond the chowder-brained RFK, Jr. Why else would he uproot Jackie’s Rose Garden and pave over its beauty with a splash of concrete worthy of the Berlin Wall? In one stroke, he turned a gift that kept on giving to the nation for decades, into something resembling the Mar-a-Lago patio suitable for the rich slobs Trump plies with devil’s food cake.

Tearing down the East Wing of the White House itself was further evidence that Trump disdains Americans. We of a certain age can remember Mrs. Kennedy’s televised tour of the East Wing all those years ago. Can I see a show of hands from those who are really excited to see the vulgar dance hall Trump intends to replace it with? The East Wing was an American treasure, but Trump doesn’t care.

The Reflecting Pool with its bile green effluence and floating dead ducks is a hurtful sight. Imagine bringing your children to DC for the first time to get sense of America’s greatness and its greatest. There’s Lincoln, there’s Jefferson. Wow! And what’s this? A shimmering, simmering petri dish of algae guarded by a phalanx of pistol-packing cops warding off what Trump claims are knife-wielding left-wing vandals who’ve made the pool look like a piss pot. Oh please!

He turned over this treasure to one John J. Cafaro, a cigar-chomping neighbor of Trump’s who runs a business called Greenwater Services, and who presents as a hair-dyed cross between Oliver Hardy and the 600 lb. pro wrestler, Haystacks Calhoun. (Go ahead, look him up.) It was Cafaro who got the no-bid contract to install a water purification system for the pool. And if the color green is what you associate with purification, he did one helluva job.

See, Trump doesn’t think we deserve these precious pieces of history that once bound us together as a nation. He doesn’t understand why people appreciated such things. All he knows is that the country is rejecting him, so he’s rejecting the country.

Vice President Vance has chimed in with insults as well, suggesting Israel has overplayed its hand in the Middle East and had better wake up to the reality that the only friend the Jewish state has is America. That may or may not be true, but do you say it out loud for all the world to hear?

Astoundingly, Trump et al have lurched chin-first into a trap laid by the civilization he not so long ago threatened to erase from the face of the earth. Remember “Unconditional Surrender!? See, the clerics knew Trump loved nice, tidy, brief wars. He said so. Publicly. They knew he was infatuated with how easy it was to take over Venezuela. And they knew he was dumb enough to think he could pull off the same thing in Iran.

Big mistake. Huge.

Everyone enjoying that ceasefire? Others have said it’s more like a “decrease fire,” which I think is more accurate. So, the Strait of Hormuz is closed again. Perfect.

The Iranians know a gift horse when they see one. Every time they’re displeased about something, they can tweak the enfeebled Trump by closing the Strait. They know Trump doesn’t want to be blamed for causing a global economic depression because he told them so. He says he doesn’t want to be like “the late great Herbert Hoover” who was at the presidential helm at the start of the Great Depression.

In defense of Hoover, though, he didn’t intentionally start the Great Depression. But Trump carelessly, foolishly and intentionally started this war that could affect every person alive on this planet. And not in a good way.

The clerics know the midterms are approaching in this country. They can see how panicked Trump is, how he’s trying to rig the results, so he won’t have to face a Democratic-run Congress for the last two years of his miserable term. A recession would not be a good look as voters go to the polls in November, so the last thing Trump wants to do is prolong the conflict in the Gulf with more bombing raids. Have you heard? This war is pretty unpopular.

The Memo of Understanding signed this week has been roundly attacked — by Republicans. It does not demand an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. And even if it did, the mullahs would just repeat — fingers crossed and hope to die — that they have no intention of developing a nuclear bomb. It doesn’t do away with Iran’s missiles which threaten the entire Middle East, on the ridiculous grounds that since Saudi Arabia has them, it wouldn’t be fair to deny them to the Iranians. This is what Trump is actually saying.

It does not demand that Iran stop supporting terrorist proxies like Hezbollah, the Houthis or Hamas. You know, the ones who love to lob rockets into Israel. But it warns the Israelis to stop attacking them. What? Now comes word that U.S. intelligence is assessing that the Israelis are likely to undermine the deal the U.S. stupidly thinks it has with Iran. Too bloody right they will.

The Iranians are well aware that Netanyahu is facing intense domestic pressure not to leave the battlefield in Lebanon, and not to give the Iranians a free pass to do what they like. He is facing an election this year and needs to maintain his profile as protector of the nation. If he loses, he might wind up in jail whenever his years-long trial on bribery charges ends. So, Bibi is not playing along.

Predictably, Israel launched airstrikes across southern Lebanon after a Hezbollah drone strike killed four Israeli soldiers this week. I mean, what does Trump expect Israel to do? Well, he seems to think they’ll back off. He said of the Israelis, “They have a lot of respect for me, and so they do as I say.” Wow! Besides, he told Axios, Israel wouldn’t exist without him because of what the U.S. military just did to Iran’s military might.

We’ll see about that.

I know Bibi. I’ve interviewed him many times while I was reporting from Israel. I think I can say with great certainty that he will not be pushed around by Trump or anyone else. Afterall, Israel had no hand in the negotiations that led to the Memorandum of Understanding, so it pretty clearly does not feel bound by it no matter what Trump says. Hezbollah knows that a choice few rockets here and there will put Bibi in a bind as Trump tries to back him over his knee.

At times Trump, his chameleon of a vice president, JD Vance, and pushup pro Pete Hegseth resemble a Three Stooges movie. Everyone is blundering around in the dark, constantly surprised as they wallop each other with wrenches. His tariffs were a bust, his popularity is swirling the bowl, nobody wants his dumb dance hall, and that UFC cage match on the White House South Lawn? The applause has died down, hasn’t it?

But it’s really not funny. These fools are in charge. Surrounded by fluffers, they are told every day they’re doing just great. Like the algae-growing, swampy Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial, the administration is oozing — incompetence. The pool now looks like a busload of beer-swilling college wrestlers barfed into it late one Saturday night.

Maybe Trump will try to paint the Persian Gulf next. How about bile green?

But your like-minded friends have been killed or imprisoned. Demonstrators against the regime have been mowed down by the government’s machine guns. Your family has been followed by the secret police. You’ve been hiding and waiting for the knock on the door. Most Americans cannot fathom that kind of terror, that kind of life.

All you wanted was freedom for yourself, your wife and your daughters. You wanted to vote freely, speak freely, act freely without fear of recrimination — or death.

And for the last year, you’re hopes were lifted by one man: Donald Trump. The president of the United States repeatedly threatened the mad mullahs, repeatedly warned them to back off their support for global terror and their aspirations for a nuclear weapon they could drop on whomever displeased them, especially the Jews.

Surely the president of the United States meant what he said and said what he meant. He told you he had obliterated Iran’s military capabilities. He told you — and Iran’s leaders — not to play games with him or he would smite them like never before. And so, when Trump’s military — in conjunction with Israel’s defense forces — attacked Tehran last winter, you were actually heartened and hopeful that the end of Iran’s nightmare was near.

The attackers assassinated Iran’s leaders, its military officers, and its nuclear scientists. The top officials of the government were gone at last! The glowering Khamenei with his eighth century mentality was dead. And then…

The momentum ominously shifted. Yes, the ayatollah was eliminated but his son took his place, a son many Iranians believe to be even more menacingly medieval than his father. Worse, the Americans seemed to want to talk to him or his cohorts about an end to fighting that had just begun. And you began to wonder whether Trump was getting tired of this conflict, that maybe he thought disposing of the mullahs would be as easy as toppling a Venezuelan strong man, though that didn’t make much sense to you.

Then, inexplicably, the Iranian government appeared to gain the upper hand by closing the vital Strait of Hormuz, cinching a chokepoint through which 20 percent of the world’s energy passes. Its allegedly depleted weaponry was still useful enough to bomb the hell out of its Persian Gulf neighbors, who then brought pressure on Trump to call a halt to hostilities.

Where was this going, you thought to yourself? Surely the all-powerful Americans and their Israeli sidekicks weren’t going to quit before finishing the job. You heard on the radio that the Israelis wanted to keep going, wanted to keep attacking Iranian proxies who had made their lives hell along the border with Lebanon. Hezbollah was not helping the Lebanese people or you, you thought. They needed to be shut down, and Iran’s patronage ended.

But peace talks continued anyway. What peace? Surely Trump was not getting tired of a war he started on your behalf, a conflict that included regime change as one of its many goals. Vice President JD Vance would be able to outmaneuver our corrupt leadership in any negotiations, you reasoned.

Along the way, you heard Trump bluster and bluff. You heard him threaten that the whole Persian civilization would be wiped out. And then you heard him back off. Today you heard him talk of a “deal” that had been struck. You heard him compliment the mullahs, calling them smart even. That gave you considerable pause and made you wonder if the president of the United States knew anything about the repressive regime you and your fellow Iranians have been living under. Or whether he cared.

But you remained hopeful that Trump — like no president before him — had brought the theocrats to their knees — not in prayer but in supplication. And you awaited the details of this so-called Memorandum of Understanding.

You finally heard about the “deal”, and you scarcely believed what it said — and didn’t say:

Iran’s ballistic missiles are still a threat to their neighbors.

There is no end to Iran’s nuclear aspirations, just another tired pledge by the mullahs not to ever develop a weapon, the same thing they’ve been saying for decades.

There was no pledge to stop the support for worldwide terror or for the proxies like Hezbollah, the Houthis of Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, and sundry other groups in the region.

Most discouraging of all, there was no hint of regime change. Actually, the opposite. Iran, under the mullahs, will now be much better off than they were before the war. They can sell their oil now to whomever they want, the Strait of Hormuz will reopen, and the U.S. blockade of Iranian naval ports will end, the economic sanctions will be lifted, and billions upon billions of dollars in frozen assets will be returned. Iran will rebuild — thanks to a $300 billion reconstruction fund — but only in a way that the clerics approve.

Nor does any of this seem to bother Trump, who you heard repeatedly tout how well the U.S. stock market will do. What does that mean for us on the street, you ask?

And you reluctantly concluded that Trump didn’t really mean any of it. That he was most interested in being called a peacemaker — enroute to his coveted Nobel Prize. Peace apparently at any price, you thought. Then you heard him today claim that President Obama was ridiculed by Iran’s leaders who Trump said had called him “a stupid son of a bitch” after he had struck a deal to slow Iran’s nuclear ambitions. And you really didn’t believe that’s the way the mullahs talked about anyone.

Worse, as you read Trump’s Memo of Understanding, it appeared that Obama’s deal — the one Trump tore up — was as good if not better. But Trump seemed happy, almost giddy, and certain that the world economy would now boom back. So what, you asked yourself? How does the price of gasoline in Iowa help me get out from under this repression?

“The one president I did not want to be was the late great Herbert Hoover,” you heard Trump say. And you wondered, who’s Hoover, and what the hell does he have to do with the life I am now doomed to live?

“Iran’s nuclear facilities have been obliterated — and suggestions otherwise are fake news.” When reporters did in fact suggest that Trump was his usual hyperbolic self, and that it might actually be a stretch to use a term like obliteration, the president was enraged.

Again, quoting from the White House release:

“Obliteration is an accurate term!” You could easily imagine him stomping his feet and holding his breath to make it so. But was it? No.

Almost immediately came the hedges. Vice President Vance, in the same release, offered, “I can say to the American people with great confidence that they (Iran) are much further away from a nuclear program than they were 24 hours ago.” Doesn’t quite sound like obliteration to me.

The Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, was quoted saying, “I can say here that the assessment is that we significantly damaged the nuclear program, and I can also say that we set it back by years.”

Ok, but was it “obliterated?” Special Envoy, and full-time real estate guy, Steve Witkoff was one who naturally agreed with Trump, his friend, and boss. “There’s no doubt that it was obliterated. So, the reporting out there that in some way suggests that we did not achieve the objective is just completely preposterous.”

That should settle it for everybody, right, except for one teeny-tiny question: why did we join Israel again in attacking Iran this past February? Well, according to Trump, the Iranian regime still harbored “sinister nuclear ambitions.” So, make the rubble jump?

I don’t want to belabor the point, but it’s pretty obvious that Trump was blustering and bullshitting about the U.S. success in Iran last summer and has been doing it ever since the start of this latest incursion, or conflict, or exercise, or tussle, or whatever he wants to call it short of “war.”

Whatever, the war’s over, the administration said after one week of bombing. The Iranians are desperate to end the conflict, Trump alleged. Then, exasperated by Tehran’s intransigence, he threatened to wipe out the entire Persian civilization if the mullahs didn’t melt. So, what did they do?

They closed the Strait of Hormuz and severely damaged the world oil economy. Freighters are still idling in the waters of the Persian Gulf while Trump tries to convince everybody he’s really putting the screws to the theocratic regime.

Last June, Trump boasted that “We’ve achieved a 90 percent reduction in their ballistic missile launchers and a 95 percent reduction in drone attacks.” I guess you could try to convince the Gulf States Iran has lately been targeting that that is true, but it would be a very hard sell.

Was he just making this stuff up or was someone feeding him this nonsense? If it’s the latter, that’s pretty dangerous. If it’s the former, it’s truly awful. But Trump lies all the time about things large and small.

In October of 2019, when U.S. forces killed ISIS mastermind, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, Trump said he died “like a dog,” and that ISIS was — you guessed it — “obliterated.” There was no real proof of that, but who cares? Just Trump being Trump.

And yet, imagine President Obama coming before the microphones to declare Osama bin Laden dead before he was actually, well, killed.

Did you all see Trump’s heated exit from a Meet the Press interview with Kristin Welker? What really triggered him was Welker’s insistence that there is still no proof that Trump’s loss — or Joe Biden’s victory by seven million votes — in 2020 was rigged. When she asked Trump where’s the evidence for his claims, Trump insisted there was a lot of evidence and that the fake news was simply ignoring it. Naturally, he called her “stupid” and “crooked.” I mean she’s a woman after all.

Asked to explain himself, Trump simply can’t. Some have suggested he has convinced himself that he won, and that he truly believes there was fraud. I don’t buy it. I believe he knows he been lying about it for five years. That’s why he reacts the way he does when challenged. And what rude challenge it was!

Show us some evidence, Mr. President.

He can’t, because there isn’t any. Never has been. The election denier’s argument is that this was a conspiracy so vast that it’s impossible to identify. What?

I bring up the Meet the Press argument as a way to shed some light on the negotiations, such as they are, with Iran. The Iranians keep calling Trump’s bluff, keep embarrassing him, keep exposing his threats as all hat and no cattle. This makes Trump very mad.

The Iranian nuclear program was “obliterated.” The 2020 election was rigged. Trump is desperate to make us all believe these lies. His desperation shows. He so wants these statements to be true. And he’s surrounded himself now with people who tell him that they are.

But we know he’s lying.

And I think he does too.

He went back to 60 Minutes and produced and reported incredibly important events to an ever-expanding audience of viewers. Why am I walking you through history? Because wherever Scott Pelley has worked, he left a trail of excellence the other networks never matched. I should know. I competed against Scott when I worked for ABC News.

Nowadays, Dateline NBC is a mishmash of true crime dramas, as is ABC’s 2020. The two basically stopped trying to do what 60 Minutes does because they couldn’t.

Last year, 60 Minutes increased its audience by 9 percent — an impressive and almost unheard-of jump for a program in what many derisively call the “lamestream media.” The Evening News without Pelley struggled, its audience has dwindled to the point that the program is now the object of ridicule. The morning show was dead last in the ratings — and still is. But 60 Minutes was flying high.

That was apparently not good enough for Paramount-Skydance, which owns CBS. Its chairman, tech scion David Ellison, hired a person named Bari Weiss to shape up the news division, and particularly 60 Minutes. Weiss has no experience in broadcast news, a losing personality, and an opinion on just about everything, which she shares like a person who thinks it doesn’t matter whether someone in charge of a journalistic organization should be trumpeting their biases.

Along those lines, she describes herself as a “Zionist fanatic.” Don’t tell me she won’t try to color CBS reporting from the Middle East. She has already permitted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have a correspondent of his own choosing for an interview on 60 Minutes. Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl had been working on getting that interview, but Weiss intervened and gave the gig to Major Garrett, who is not a correspondent for that show. Maybe he will be soon. I don’t know.

I do know that Weiss has fired three star correspondents from 60, including Pelley. A fourth, Anderson Cooper, left voluntarily but clearly disappointed at what he saw coming. A number of highly talented producers were also shown the door, including Tanya Simon, who ran the show, garnered the big audience increase, worked for CBS for 30-some years, and who, by the way, is the daughter of legendary CBS Newsman Bob Simon. Thanks, Tanya, from a grateful network.

In her place is this guy, Nick Bilton. No experience ever producing a news show. No experience in television news at all, but he presents as a tousled, unshaven, too-cool-for-school hot shot. The kind of guy my dad used to call “a studied pig.” He once worked as a tech reporter for the New York Times, had a job with Vanity Fair, and has tried his luck at screenwriting. That’s funny, since those who know him say he can’t write. Somehow, he caught the attention of Bari Weiss. As Jonathan Last of the Bulwark has pointed out, “A’s hire A’s. B’s hire C’s.” And that’s exactly what has transpired.

Bilton will now make 60 Minutes mediocre, if he doesn’t kill it outright as Pelley fears. Weiss has been meddling with 60 Minutes for months, inserting unwanted information here and there in a blatant attempt to recast some of the reporting in a way President Trump might find more pleasing. This is serious and dangerous.

“For my part,” Pelley wrote, “new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.” I would expect nothing less from Pelley. Indeed, any self-respecting reporter from 60 Minutes all the way down to a local radio station in Nebraska would object to such intrusions from a boss.

Weiss and Bilton have now fired back. Said Weiss, the CBS News Editor in Chief, “I’m only interested in working in a newsroom that is built on trust and mutual respect; we cannot do our work without it.” No, you can’t. So why have you attempted to destroy the trust and mutual respect at the network? She went on to bray about how she had tried so hard to meet privately with Pelley but just couldn’t seem to arrange it — because of Pelley. “Unfortunately, we weren’t able to do so, and so we had to part ways,” she continued. “We did not want that to happen, but that’s the path he chose.” My ass!

And poor Nicky Bilton’s feelings were apparently hurt when Pelley laced into him during a staff meeting on Monday. He said Pelley’s outrage at having a rank amateur helm the best news show in the business was “performative.” No Nick, it was genuine. In response to Pelley, Bilton said he knew nothing about why correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were let go, a laughable assertion for someone who is expected to run the show without two — and now three — of its best contributors. There’s an inquisitive mind for you!

Somewhere in the news business, Weiss and Bilton are considered far-sighted influencers, swimming-against-the-tide journalists, who are able to discern things other, merely mortal reporters miss.

No. They’re garden variety hacks. People like Weiss and Bilton are a dime a dozen in the news industry. But they don’t know that because they have so little experience in it. They have no grasp of a newsroom environment or the people who inhabit such offices. From the earliest days of my half-century in the business, I learned that newsrooms are places of arguments, fistfights even. They are places where emotions run high because the people at the typewriters or keyboards care deeply about what they do and what they produce. It’s a great responsibility.

When I read that one of Weiss’s assistants at the Monday staff meeting accused Pelley of being “rude,” I had to laugh. Rude? I once worked with a boss who told a producer he wished he were dead. How terribly rude! Journalism is a tough business. How tough, Weiss and Bilton will soon find out.

Which brings me regretfully to a man named Tom Cibrowski. His is not a household name, and his story is a little inside baseball, but he has the title of President of CBS News. This is an office where giants once roamed, but no more. Cibrowski is at least nominally a peer of Bari Weiss. But everyone knows who’s calling the shots.

He is a career TV producer. I worked with him, respected him, liked him. But something has happened to Tom. I am not privy to their conversations, but he appears to agree with Weiss and her defenestration of Pelley and the others. That’s shameful and it’s sad.

I wish he had the courage to take a stand and quit. It might possibly save his reputation. Without doing the right thing, Cibrowski will be remembered as the guy who helped kill CBS News, and who never spoke up as the lights were turned off and the door closed forever.

Nothing more fitting as a celebration of this over-compensating president’s 80th birthday than to have two sweaty, cauliflower-eared brawlers duking it out just below the Truman Balcony. Testosterone will probably cloud the air for what UFC CEO Dana White says will be several “marquee fights.” I’m not sure what he defines as “marquee,” but I can’t wait to find out. Go ahead, name the current UFC heavyweight champion if you can. I can’t.

Can you imagine a more forlorn job than as a color commentator for these “bouts?” Not the blow-by-blow ringside guy, but the “expert” he defers to on the “technique” involved in kicking an opponent in the head. What the hell is the expertise involved here? These “cage matches” could be seen for free in most Chicago alleys when I was a kid. Whatever. I hope the combatants will beckon President Cankles to join them in the octagon for a little push and shove.

But why stop with the cage matches? Why not offer some really red meat to the poorly educated MAGA crowd on hand. I have a few suggestions:

If the organizers really want to get the crowd going, why not offer us some oiled-up female wrestlers wearing high heels in the ring? Slapping each other around while the audience goes wild!

They could be followed by some alligator, bear, or gorilla wrestling too — the finer points of taking down a huge reptile could be explained over the loudspeaker by Stephen Miller while the event is underway.

What’s a presidential birthday without an honest-to-God tractor-pulling contest? Sure, it will leave huge ruts in the lawn, but all the heavy-duty machinery involved in destroying the East Wing has already done much of that job.

If some are not transfixed by such a display, there could be Jefferson Davis impersonators roaming around and offering autographs to Confederate dead-enders.

When the “fighting” is done, why not stage an all-White basketball team that can actually defeat the Harlem Globetrotters for once? What a kick that would be! And long overdue. Take your D.E.I., your Critical Race Theory and your Project 1619 and put it where the sun don’t shine!

Imagine that sun setting on the Ellipse as Mel Gibson offers a stirring reading of Warren G. Harding’s first — and only — inaugural address. I’ve got chills.

That could be followed by an audience-participation game I’d call “Can you?” As in:

Can you find Iran on a map?

Can you find Ukraine on a map?

Can you find Greenland on a map?

Can you find the 51st State on a map?

Can you find your ass with both hands?

Exhausted? Save your strength. You won’t want to miss a facsimile of the Fox News “green room” where you can meet a bunch of anchors you’ve never heard of, and where you still might bump into Jesse Waters or Trey Gowdy for a spirited conversation about Hillary’s emails or Hunter’s laptop. Jazzed yet?

Vendors could be selling red hot MAGA thongs along with new $100 DVDs of the Melania movie. The First Lady, sadly, probably won’t make it that night. But there should be plenty of Melania blow-up dolls for those who need a fix.

And now that a federal judge has ordered Trump’s name must be chiseled off the facade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, our president could top of the night with a fitting response.

He could tell us he plans to do what he’s always wanted to, re-name the Executive Mansion “Chez Trump.”