1) Which of these things happened in the past week?
a) Donald Trump's puerile renaming of Lake Ontario exposed the cowardice of Apple and Google for changing their maps to "Lake America," while MapQuest became the #1-downloaded app for not only refusing to do so but also giving users the opportunity to rename the lake.
b) SCOTUS told Trump he can build his ballroom, even if it is illegal, because laws shmaws.
c) Punchable-faced Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened "financial violence" to "economically asphyxiate" Iran.
d) All of the above.

2) Which of these things happened in the past week?
a) A whistleblower revealed that the USPS is ignoring court rulings and proceeding with its anti-Vote By Mail planning.
b)  Trump said Kristen Welker would be reported to the FCC for "rebuke or punishment" for calling his mixed success with endorsements "mixed."
c) RFK Jr., now believed to have lied in congressional testimony, suggested that two measles deaths -- measles deaths! in 2026! -- were "fabricated."
d) All of the above.

3) Which of these things happened in the past week?
a) Trump said communities resisting energy- and water-devouring AI data centers are "backwards or poor."
b) George Santos became the first person banned from the prediction market Kalshi after signaling that he would attend Trump's State of the Union, then betting on his own non-attendance and then not attending, and then winning $17,840 -- peanuts compared to the $100K-plus penalties he was hit with.
c) The National Park Service acknowledged that Trump's 250-foot arch would have “adverse effects” on the views, setting, and historical significance of the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, Washington Monument, and Arlington Cemetery, then said: go ahead, build it anyway.
d) All of the above.

4) Which of these things happened in the past week?
a) Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll resigned following preternaturally preposterous War Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's firing and sidelining of senior military leaders, leaving the Army with no Senate-confirmed civilian chief or chief of staff in the middle of a war.
b) We learned that DHS is secretly surveilling journalists, unions, nonprofits, and ICE critics.
c) Trump claimed "majority control" of 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil, essentially making an oil-colony deal.
d) All of the above.

5) Which of these things happened in the past week?
a) Natalie Harp was named -- along with Trump and Dan Scavino -- in a lawsuit arguing, quite rightly, that the sale of early access to Trump's Truth Social posts is unconstitutional.
b) DHS head Markwayne Mullin said ICE agents could very well be sent to polling places.
c) Five wedding guests were killed in U.S. strikes against Iran, and Trump warned that "the biggest attack of them all ... is waiting in the wings and, when it is over, there will be very little left of the Islamic Republic of Iran!"
d) All of the above.

All of the above are just a fraction of the grotesquerie on constant display now, but this is all I can stomach at the moment.

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Donald Trump on Wednesday: “So, this is Lake Ontario, in Canada, and in the United States. But we’re gonna make a little change. We’re gonna call it something different than Lake Ontario. We’re gonna call it Lake America. And all it takes is a good pen and some intelligence. So, Lake Ontario, that’s gone. Lake America! So, now we have a lake, and now we have a gulf. Because we have the Gulf of America, and now we have Lake America. Without the ‘of.’ Thank you very much, everybody. Enjoy Lake America.” Watch this idiocy here.

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On every conceivable measure of humanity — talent, beauty, intelligence, warmth, wit, grace, generosity, decency, compassion, courage, humility, authenticity, integrity, wisdom, kindness, empathy, dignity, and sheer goodness — Dolly Parton was the absolute antithesis of Donald Trump. Really, have you ever heard a bad thing about her? Or a good thing about him?

The richly deserved rapturous outpouring of tributes today is a phenomenon in itself. Is there another public figure — in any arena — as universally beloved as Dolly Parton? And she earned it effortlessly, just by being her.

She recorded well over 1,000 songs, hundreds of which she wrote herself, all sung in that luminous, unmistakable voice. Here’s an eclectic selection of six among hundreds that I love, one or two of which might be new to you.

“Single Women” (written by Michael O’Donoghue!)

“Baby I’m Burnin’”

“Halos and Horns”

Hello God

Potential New Boyfriend

The Grass Is Blue

And this brilliant cover of “Down From Dover” by Marianne Faithfull.

As the saying goes, R.I.P. Dolly.

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“On the third day the messenger came back again, and said, ‘I have not been able to find a single new name, but as I came to a high mountain at the end of the forest, where the fox and the hare bid each other good-night, there I saw a little house, and before the house a fire was burning, and round about the fire quite a ridiculous little man was jumping; he hopped upon one leg, and shouted, “To-day do I bake, to-morrow I brew / The next I’ll have the young Queen’s child. / Ha! glad am I that no one knew / That Rumpelstiltskin I am styled.”’
“You may think how glad the Queen was when she heard the name! And when soon afterwards the little man came in, and asked, ‘Now, Mistress Queen, what is my name?’
“At first she said, ‘Is your name Conrad?’
“‘No.’
“‘Is your name Harry?’
“‘No.’
“‘Perhaps your name is Rumpelstiltskin?’
“‘The devil has told you that! The devil has told you that!’ cried the little man, and in his anger he stamped with his right foot so hard that it went into the ground up to his waist; then in a rage he seized his left foot with both hands and tore himself in two.”
— The Brothers Grimm, “Rumpelstiltskin,” trans. Margaret Hunt

Among the myriad failures of the media and the entire political class over the past decade, one of the most egregious is their collective failure to recognize and popularize the nickname that fits Donald Trump as snugly as Tricky Dick fit Richard Nixon. Not only is TrumpelThinSkin phonetically pleasing, and not only does it shine a klieg light on his hilarious inability to endure even the slightest criticism — let alone ridicule — but Rumpelstiltskin’s response to being bested is a spectacular fit of self-destructive rage. (A lifelong specialty of Trump’s.) And while we’re on rage, how many thousands of times can they write about Trump throwing a tantrum without thinking to call these explosions “tantrumps”?

To be sure, there are hundreds of pejoratives out there that describe him with varying degrees of precision — Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s “Cadet Bone Spurs,” Anonymous’s “The Immaturian Candidate,” Spy’s immortal “short-fingered vulgarian,” and Kurt Andersen’s “The Greatest Self-Parodist of All Time” are my favorites. Still, watching this preternaturally provocable pustule of hate lashing out at everything that isn’t abject praise, “TrumpelThinSkin” seems increasingly appropriate. Given the puerile idiocy of the nicknames he so proudly bestows, the definitive specificity of this one would make him seethe — maybe even enough to figuratively tear himself in two.

My considerable efforts to get “TrumpelThinSkin” in front of people who could get it out there have come to naught. I’ve abandoned all hope that someone with more reach than I have will run with it, no matter how perfect it is. Still — thanks, Robbie Conal — it makes a great t-shirt.

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TRUMP: “Well, no—that ship is moving. No, they’re not. That ship is moving right now, or very shortly, and it’s being replaced with another very similar ship.”

REPORTER: “Do you think that deployment has gone on too long?”

TRUMP: “No, no, no. Not near…

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REPORTER: Air Force One still flew out of Perkins with press, with White House officials on it. How much of this --
TRUMP: Well, this one went over to England, where it was shown to the soldiers. This one went over to England because the soldiers wanted to see it, and it stopped and they showed it to the soldiers. And we did a switch over there. And it was really as for the military, and I just have to do what they say. They go for safety and I have to do what they say.
REPORTER: Why was it too dangerous for you to fly on Air Force One but not too dangerous for the press?
TRUMP: Well, I don't know, I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk.
REPORTER: Why would you say that?
TRUMP: Because that would be the plane I think that they would be more likely to go for it.
REPORTER: “But why would they be more likely to go for the plane they didn't know you were on, rather than the one they thought you were on? If that's what they were going to do, why did the Secret Service hustle you out of what you say was the safer plane to put you in the dangerous one. It just doesn't make any sense. Explain yourself, Sir! At long last, explain yourself.”

Of course, no reporter asked that last thing, just like no reporter has ever challenged him on how VANDALS armed with mere knives, razors, and box cutters somehow managed to elude all of the cameras and gouge a THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FOOT — no, wait, I’m sorry, he upped it to a THREE HUNDRED YARD — GASH in the floor of the water-and-algae-filled Reflecting Pool. Nine hundred feet! Why, that’s more than half an Empire State Building!

And just like no reporter has ever asked him how he dares to keep calling Biden “Sleepy Joe,” given the endless photos and videos we’ve seen of him with his head atilt and his piggy eyes closed.

Imagine how this press corpse would be baying and braying at Biden in similar situations. But nothing rouses them. He uses them as decoys and still they treat him with deference.

The amount of damage this one wretched mutant has done — across all areas of life — is incalculable. As the t-shirt I made says, HE BROKE THE FUCKING WORLD. After that, what more can I say?

As I’m currently at a loss for words that won’t bring me to the attention of the authorities, I’ll share some of the literate, outraged invective that has sustained me of late.

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Senator Bill Cassidy: “I will vote for Mr Blanche. I will be criticized for this vote. What’s new?”

Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian: “Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who lost his primary but never misses an opportunity to show his moral spinelessness, announced on the floor he will vote to confirm Jeffrey Epstein file coverup architect Todd Blanche as attorney general. Disregarding Blanche’s role in an illegal, inexcusable effort to withhold evidence surrounding the worst pedophile scandal in memory and his long list of professional and ethical misdeeds, Cassidy dutifully fell in line.”

Ron Filipkowski at Meidas Touch: “And so Cassidy nears the end of his unprincipled political career despised by Trump, MAGA, Democrats, Independents, Libertarians, Socialists, MAHA - pretty much everyone. What a generational run.”

Senator Tim Scott: “President Trump has done something no other president in the history of our country said yes to, which is complying [with] the ethics strategy and standard for all elected officials. We’ve never had a president ever say yes to that issue, that question.”

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On October 16, 1973, Donald Trump’s name first appeared in The New York Times, under the inauspicious headline, “U.S. Accuses Major Landlord of Bias.” The Department of Justice — in its now defunct role as the administrator of actual justice — charged the Trump Management Corporation with violating the Fair Housing Act (i.e. refusing to rent “because of…

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“I probably was abused more than anybody in the history of our country.” — Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s every action, every word, every thought is self-parodic. There is not a nanosecond of his life in which he is anything other than the most ridiculous human being of our lifetime. While Trump and his family are scientifically Homo sapiens, they are better understood as belonging to their own genus, Trumpus — specifically the species Trumpus odiosus, whose behavior is only barely recognizable as human.

The televised Cabinet meetings — extended grumbles of well-worn Trumpian grievance juxtaposed with everyone else’s self-abasing hosannas and hallelujahs, often directed at a sleeping recipient — provide a portrait of the human condition that could come straight from Dante’s Inferno. They are so far beyond mere farce as to define an entirely new taxonomic category — Trumpus ridiculosus.

The relentless repetition of the same complaints — the astonishing, alien assumption that no one hearing them for the eleventy billionth time ever gets so fucking sick to death of this bullshit that they have to restrain themselves from leaping for his vagina-ish throat — is far and away the funniest thing ever associated with the presidency, if not politics itself.

The preternaturally unearned praise from the groveling sycophants becomes funnier with each successive Cabinet meeting, as the gap between what they're saying and what everyone else is seeing grows ever wider. The spectacle is endlessly entertaining because it’s offered with either an obliviousness to the fact that these grotesquely humiliating exercises in self-abasement are now part of their permanent record, or an indifference to their reputations — current and future — that borders on the psychotic. If I could wish a documentary into existence, it would be a complete chronological collection of every obsequious encomium every Cabinet member has ever slavishly served up on a gaudy gold-plated platter. It would be called Cabinet Fever.

Yesterday brought another installment of the ritual, this one billed as the First Ever From Camp David. I’ve been meaning to document one of these slobberfests, so let’s look at that one in some detail. Feel free to jump to the end at any time. (I will never tire of studying such an extreme freak of nature, but I can see where it could wear some people down.) Or you could actually watch the thing as a cultural archaeologist examining the ruins of American democracy.

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Five months after the Beatles changed the whole idea of what rock ‘n’ roll could be, I was browsing a neighborhood garage sale where there was a box of 45s. Flipping through it, I found a promotional copy of “Not Fade Away,” the first American single by the Rolling Stones. Something told me it was worth 25 cents.

That night, I was watching The Clay Cole Show, a local New York version of American Bandstand, and there were those Rolling Stones, in their sweaters and jeans and really long hair. It turned out that this was their first performance on American TV; a friend told me he’d seen them a few nights earlier on another New York show, but they didn’t perform. They just sat there while their records played.

But on Clay Cole, as I recall, Mick Jagger was lip-syncing, all lips and hips, harmonica and maracas, exuding a surly sexual energy that not even Elvis had achieved. They played both sides of the single I’d just bought. My parents walked in on “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” and the looks of revulsion on their faces sealed the deal. Of course the Beatles were great, and the Dave Clark Five had three really good songs, but the Rolling Stones were the band I’d been waiting for.

If a time traveler had dropped by that night and told 14-year-old me, “These people are going to be with you your whole life. They’re still going to be making songs you want to hear when you’re 76 and Mick and Keith are in their 80s,” well, those words would have been incomprehensible.

One great song followed another until, in late May 1965, the closing credits of Shindig! ran over the world debut performance of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The version of the song was not the final version — they’d cut a demo at Chess Studios in Chicago with a clean guitar riff that Keith intended only as placeholder music for the horn riff he heard in his head — but the performance was indelible and the song undeniable.

They then rerecorded it in Hollywood, with the fuzz-tone version which Keith still thought was just holding a place for brass. But manager Andrew Loog Oldham wisely insisted they keep the fuzz.

Three days after seeing the Shindig! performance, I bought the single. The official release date was June 4th, but I distinctly remember buying it on Saturday, May 29th, in a record store called Music Maker on Fordham Road in the Bronx. When an event is important enough, I remember details like that, and when I got it home and played it in all of its new fuzz-tone glory, I knew I would never hear a better rock ‘n’ roll song. As of this morning, I still haven’t.

When the Beatles hit in January 1964, all three New York Top 40 stations — WABC, WMCA, and WINS — competed to be known as the Beatles station. With the good fortune of its call letters, W-A-Beatle-C pretty much owned that. One of the DJs there was Scott Muni, who saw a full-page ad in Cashbox that said, WATCH THE ROLLING STONES CRUSH THE BEATLES!

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I’ve certainly made no secret of my contempt for the masochistic stenographers who watch in compliant silence as Donald Trump’s anus mouth shoots fecal insults at the women. Did he have a mother as horrid in her way as his Klan dad was in his, or was he just born an emotional mutant? Either way, good God, how he despises women — and especially Black wom…

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On any given day, every member of the Trump Kakistocracy / Kleptocracy / Buffoonocracy has the potential to remind us what ridiculous people they are. They so shamelessly humiliate themselves — knowingly or obliviously, but always completely — that we’re forced to share their embarrassment simply by sharing their species. Yesterday, it was Pete Hegseth’s turn.

To be sure, he’s been bidding for the spotlight lately. During a June visit to a Navy ship, he noticed that his profound “no more beardos” directive was being ignored. So disturbing was this to him — “Is no one listening to me?” you can imagine him spluttering — that he held a series of Pentagon meetings at which officials were told that he was “paying close attention” to enforcement of beard rules. Meetings about his grooming obsession — not about war, but about whiskers.

Then there was last week’s testosterone testing. “The High-T Department of War.” “We’re keeping you on the leading edge of lethality.” Jesus Fucking Christ.

And then there was yesterday’s freak-out. Everyone in Trump’s orbit is absurd in their own way, but Hegseth is among the most preposterous. Whatever the opposite of gravitas is, he exudes it. Frivolous. Glib. Lightweight. Juvenile. Blustery. Vacuous. Farcical. He is as unqualified as any Cabinet member in history, which makes his being Defense Secretary possibly the most dangerous appointment any cretinous president has ever made and any craven Senate has ever confirmed.

The highlights were the questioning by Gary Peters, Jon Ossoff, and Jack Reed, but the whole spectacle is posted above, so click on it, drag the cursor anywhere, and watch the idiocy.

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"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press." 
-- Donald Trump, July 27,2016

Now he’s crusading against foreign interference. Fetch the smelling salts.

Of all the foul moods Donald Trump beats us over the head with, my very favorite is desperation. He plays desperation so maniacally, so intensely, so hysterically that if he were playing this role in a film, any director would tell him, “Sir, you’re astronomically over the top. Sir.” Watching him last night, I could almost smell the flop sweat mingling with the full diaper.

It’s one of Trump’s little quirks that he always announces every nefarious plot in advance. Last night, he informed us that we’re living through an attempted coup, like some common banana republic. What a decade this has been for disproving the phrase “It can’t happen here.”

American politics has never seen such a nihilistic force of unnature. He destroys everything in his path, everything, and even everything isn’t enough. No matter how much money he accumulates — multibillions! — it can never be enough. As long as there’s a single dollar out there that isn’t his, he can’t rest. Of all the seven deadly sins he embodies so thoroughly — pride, lust, envy, sloth, gluttony, wrath, and greed — greed rules.

Of course, one need only hear him bragging about acing all those dementia tests to know that he’s got pride covered. No one knows as much as he does about anything, and he’s damn proud of that. Lust? All the rape accusations speak for themselves. Envy? I give you Barack Hussein Obama. Sloth? Laziest beast to ever waddle around the White House. Gluttony? Look at him. Wrath? Look at him and listen to him.

For all the greedy accumulating, he never enjoys anything — I think even golf, I mean how much fun can it be to play a game you have to cheat at because astonishingly, after a lifetime of playing, you still suck at it? He’s not capable of joy. Can you imagine this sick fuck experiencing any kind of delight that’s not schadenfreude?

A friend told me last night that sometimes she almost feels sorry for him, because he clearly had horrific parents. A month before JFK was elected, Jackie Kennedy was interviewed by NBC’s Sander Vanocur — ah, remember the newsmen of yore? — and she said, “If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much.” By the time she said it, Fred and Mary Trump were already hall-of-fame bunglers. So, what are we saying, Poor Donald? No. If he’s that fucked up and has that much money and still never bothers to see a shrink, he likes being that way, so fuck him.

He’s so out of his mind by now, so tormented by the possibility that the Democrats could win — probably will win — both chambers of Congress, that any other Cabinet in American history would have spent all night readying the 25th Amendment. No sentient being can watch that speech and not know viscerally that he is spinning out. After this display, any Republican who votes to indulge him in any way — like approving Blanche or Clayton — is choosing him over the country, and will be so remembered by history, which already has a dank dungeon’s worth of their villainy.

There’s something cosmically perfect about this happening on our Semiquincentennial. What better way to celebrate winning our freedom from a tyrant than winning our freedom from a tyrant? And, given his deranged blood lust — ICE, start stopping cars and killing people again immediately! — it won’t be nonviolent. Last night’s demented ravings were the opening shots of our uncivil war.

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“We’re marching through the world. We’re cleaning out the bad guys. We’re going to have relationships with new people that will make us prosperous and safe. I’ve never seen anybody like it. This is Ronald Reagan plus. … Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago. He is the greatest commander-in-chief of all time.”
-- Lindsey Graham to Maria Bartiromo, March 8, 2026

It would be one thing if Lindsey Graham gave any hint that he might redeem himself after seeing the horrors that Donald Trump — a man he despised so intensely and appropriately ten years ago — was inflicting on the country.

But, no, not a scintilla of an iota of a jot of regret or remorse. Think about all the ways Trump has broken not just America but the whole fucking world. Then look at that photo and know that there was no redemption in this obsequious enabler's future.

Was he such a bootlicking sycophant because Trump or Putin had something Epsteinian on him that he had to keep secret? That would at least provide some explanation for the most craven selling of a soul that I can remember. But I don’t think he had that kind of performance in him. His genuine enthusiasm for the man who regularly attacked his best friend — even after that friend was dead — can only be explained by the fact that he truly is a wretched human being who’d managed to hide that wretchedness until Trump came along and liberated it.

The thing about God-awful people like Lindsey Graham is that the harm they’ve done isn’t minimized or mitigated by their death. It’s merely stopped. The toxic life that has, mercifully for us, ended must not be retroactively respected. He was a sad little eunuch with so little self-respect that he pledged himself to a man as close to Hitler as this country has produced. His reward? The privilege of playing golf with the world’s most brazen golf cheater.

Forget Ds vs. Rs. Forget left vs. right. The divide now is the biblically basic good vs. evil. When evil loses one of its loudest accomplices, we don’t pretend to feel sad. The world is better for his no longer being here to poison it. We rejoice. You were delighted, weren't you, on hearing the news? Good. There’s no shame in that.

I mean, really. We’re supposed to miss this guy?

One of the things that's going to be fun when Trump finally dies — well, everything is going to be more fun then; washing dishes will be more fun — is watching the hosts and pundits desperately trying to stifle their own gleeful relief while showing scenes of international celebrations that will make Times Square on V-J Day seem funereal.

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When you think about great movie monsters, a Brobdingnagian turtle would surely be a hard sell to the studios. In real life, though, Mitch Y. McConnell has been a fucking monster. To list all the ways he has profoundly damaged this country would require more energy than I’m willing to expend when I should be listening to see if the Stones album can poss…

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Awww, poor rapist Graham Platner. He’s so sad. We’re so mean.

This was one of the most self-pitying concession speeches I’ve ever heard. And just think what we’ll be missing. We won’t have Platner to kick around anymore.

Platner’s instinct to blame everybody but himself for a problem entirely of his own making is positively Trumpian. And, as with Trump, the actual words don’t matter, since they never contain the apology everyone is entitled to. No “I’m sorry I raped her.” No “I’m sorry I went into Iran, it’s just that I’m an insecure psychopath who can’t think about anything but myself for even a nanosecond, I’m desperate for admiration I know I don’t deserve, that’s why I’m always telling those absurd Sir stories.” None of that from either of them.

Platner was always a preposterous candidate who obviously had a closetful of about-to-drop shoes. How did anyone get past the Nazi tattoo — so Hegsethian! — let alone all of his flagrant women issues?

Just so you know how this even happened, 27-year-old New York political consultant Morris Katz met Graham Platner — where, nobody has yet told us — and “within a few minutes of talking to him, I was like, ‘This guy owes it to the country to run for Senate.’” After a few minutes of conversation, Katz concluded that this random oyster farmer didn’t merely seem promising — he had a duty to the nation to become a U.S. senator.

Predators fiercely embracing victimhood is one of the most ridiculous and repellent spectacles out there. Everybody is Bart Simpson’s “I Didn’t Do It” boy now. After 10 years of Donald Trump’s incessant complaining, politics is acclimating itself to this egregious whining note.

It’s the grievance, stupid!

As I predicted — as anyone could have predicted — Donald Trump’s NATO nincompoopery was a festival of deliriously, deliciously oblivious self-humiliation. Too many examples of his increasing decrepitude — verbal and physical — to bore you with, so I’ll just say “the Islamic Republic of Japan” and leave it at that.

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