.

To the things I learned because of this administration’s clumsy, corrupt, and stupid nature, now, I can add to the list the fact that diesel fuel in America is sold in two varieties: clear and red.

Clear diesel is used for transportation; it is what those massive trucks on the highways and interstates fill up with before they go off to terrorize henpecked men on lonely stretches of the desert. Red diesel is functionally identical to the clear stuff sold to truckers and the like but dyed so that its unique color so it can be easily identified for tax purposes. You see, the red stuff is sold for use that doesn’t involve the US interstate or road network: farm equipment and home heating for the northern reaches of the nation. As it is never supposed to touch the highways, it is exempted from the federal highway fuel tax, making its per-gallon cost somewhat cheaper, a benefit that accumulates when one needs to buy so much of the red diesel to make your farm work or to keep from freezing to death in the middle of a New England winter. The highways taxed and non-highway taxed versions of the fuel is logical and serves both consumer communities, until now.

Trump, either manipulated by allies or as a product of his own narcissistic ego, launched a war in the Middle East disrupting the global petroleum markets, driving up the costs of everything downstream of the oil wells, including diesel fuel. The escalating fuel costs combined with the economic terrorism of his tariffs accelerated inflation, the beast that had slain the Biden administration just as inflation had begun to falter. The vast farm states in the middle of the country suffered from both policies as retaliatory tariffs destroyed their markets and skyrocketing fuel costs consumed their budgets from the other side of the equation. Of course, no fence kept the inflation to merely the Trump-supporting farm belts and prices rose throughout the country and an electorate content to ignore the administration’s criminality are unwilling to ignore the injuries it inflicts upon them.

So, the president who helps maintain a far-left socialist government in South America, that considers the Red China leadership his friend, and acquires ownership stakes in private US corporations, turns to his friends in the Kremlin to try, vainly, futilely, to save his government in the face of public wrath. Trump announced a “deal” to purchase fuel from Russia, a small and insignificant amount that he attempted to disguise by reporting it in tons instead of the industry standard of barrels and which is even questionable, given the war there, if it will ever be delivered. In addition to a phony deal that supplies hard cash to a nation that is assisting the killing of American troops, Trump has also announced an intention to allow red diesel to be sold and used for transportation purposes, hoping, irrationally, but everything he does is irrational, that this will somehow and magically tame inflation in time to save him from a hostile House and Senate.

However, the cold equations of supply and demand doom this move to failure with the predictable result that those farmers, who so enthusiastically threw their support to Trump, will suffer even more. Without expanding the supply of the fuel, allowing the trucking industry to use it on the nation’s highways only increases the demand for the red-dyed diesel which, as any highschool-level economics class with tell you, correspondingly drives up the price.

The Midwest is learning the lesson of the Second law of Trump, the first being that Everything Trump Touches Dies, and the Second that is Trump Always Betrays His Partners.

From installing industry-nationalizing socialists, to close friendship with dictators, to acquiring ownership stakes in private business, to his inclination to command the economy, Trump is the most communist, most socialist chief executive this nation has ever seen. It is fitting that his most recent idiotic move is to make red fuel available everywhere.

.

Jonathan V. Last, staff writer and watch-geek over at The Bulwark, has intoned both in print and on various podcasts from that fine publication that if Donald Trump does not run for a third term as President of the United States, then the man would be unwilling to hand such awesome moneymaking and criminal authority over to anyone who is not in the family by blood. JVL has suggested that one of the prime contenders to take the Republican nomination, should Trump, in a break from character, obey a law that disadvantages him, would be the eldest son, Don Jr.

While JVL is often right and can do a pretty decent job as a modern Cassandra seeing the disaster around the corner while far too many ignore his warnings, here I think his gift of prophecy fails him.

Several factors worked synergistically to curse our nation with the two terms of Donald J. Trump, destroying our alliances and our institutions, causing the deaths of countless people, loosing masked police madness on our streets, all while engorging himself and his cronies at the public trough. Decades of priming the GOP base for cruelty and to view their fellow Americans not as people with a different view as to how this nation might improve but as ‘the enemy’ worthy only of contempt and destruction cultivated the poisonous soil for a crude, mean man like Trump. A 40-year parasocial relationship built on the myth and the lie that Trump possessed some innate and superhuman talent for business, despite managing to drive casinos into bankruptcy, paired against a professional politician who had been the subject of vicious attacks for more than twenty years, made the unthinkable a reality with Trump’s election in 2016. Biden’s physical feebleness combined with the toxic stew of his inherent arrogance made it impossible for him to step aside in 2022, and then his far too late departure in 2024 crafted the conditions to return to the presidency a convicted felon who, despite Senator Collins’ insistence, had never learned a lesson in his life.

None of this applies to Junior.

Prior to 2016, I doubt many people could pick this man out of a photograph. He has no long parasocial relationship either through culture or politics. He has displayed none of his father’s dubious talents for working a crowd, and outside the circle of sycophants, grifters, and foreign money, he has no base of support from which to build any sort of electoral coalition. Trump commands a cult of personality that built around himself and solely himself. While the cultivated ground will be there for another ideologue to harvest a crop of hate, that gardener will not be Junior. Trump has expended zero energy in building anything around his son, or any of his children. For a cult leader to successfully transfer the devotion of the cult to a chosen successor, that leader must work, and work hard, to affix the affections of the masses to the next in line. Trump, handicapped by his own blinding narcissism, finds such action an impossibility.

Perhaps most damning of all, I would suggest to you that to the broader public not only does he have no real base, he is, in fact, for all intents and purposes, an unknown.

I have laid out the reasons why, practically speaking, Junior has no real base of support, but here is a different yardstick by which we can measure the man’s invisibility to the public at large: do an impression of him.

As with every sitting president, Trump impressions are everywhere. That is true for every person who has sat in that office and for all the major contenders for that post. The satirical impression is a marker for how far your star has risen above all the other people vying for the public’s attention. Fifty years later, people can still recognize even a bad impression of Richard Nixon, but is anyone anywhere doing an impression of Junior that isn’t simply a one-note punchline about rumored cocaine use? Elections are about public perceptions, good or bad, and frankly, in my opinion, the public has no perception of Don Junior at all.

I don’t know what the presidential field in 2028 will look like on either side, but I am confident that even if Junior makes the attempt, it will flame out rather quickly.

.

Adam Serwer titled an Atlantic article, The Cruelty Is the Point, arguing that the first Trump administration and its supporters were more interested in inflicting harm on their enemies than in any actual outcome of their various initiatives and programs. The concept struck such a chord that the phrase has become a shorthand for everything cruel and malicious that originates with Trump, his administration, and his supporters. The phrase is almost certain to gain usage with October 8’s revelation that not only does the administration plan to execute a mass-murdering soldier by firing squad, but that the Department of Defense, at the prompting of ‘No Tab, Whiskey Pete,’ wants to livestream the killing, much in the same manner that mass shooters have utilized social media to glorify their killings.

There is no doubt, none at all, in my mind that both the method of execution and the desire to stream it live to the world were chosen for their cruelty, but there is another factor beyond that reason which I believe motivates this heinous proposal.

It is a psychological imperative for Trump, Hegseth, Miller, and the rest of this depraved and damaged administration that they be seen as ‘strong.’ These are men whom life, childhood and beyond, has wounded deeply with a powerful and crippling insecurity at the heart of their psyches that compels them to behave in a manner that they need others to perceive as evidence of their tremendous, but entirely illusory, strength.

I have often said that a grave error a person can make is to mistake cynicism for wisdom. Here is a companion piece of knowledge: what these men are doing with nearly every official act is cruelty masquerading as strength. The brutal imposition of a twisted and corrupted form of ‘justice’ serves dual purposes and fails at both. It seeks to cow and impress the people into believing that Trump and his broken and frightened cabinet are actually strong, like the mafia goons and tin-pot dictators that they so idolize. And second, it vainly tries to fill the hole in their souls, because no matter how cruel you are, no matter what torments you inflict on others, you cannot escape yourself, and it is their own terror and intuitive understanding of their weakness that proves inescapable.

If they were not doing so much damage to our nation, our government, and our people, I might feel more sympathy for these pathetic persons. They weren’t born monsters: life made them into monstrosities, but these men in particular would rather the world burn to ash around them than admit fault or seek help that they so desperately require.

.

America has a number of Federal Holidays: the 4th of July, where we celebrate the American arrogance to tell the greatest empire at the time in the world to stuff it, and the only time we slip back into a European style of notating dates; Labor Day, when we celebrate the people that work hard to make everything function; Memorial Day, when we pay respects to the fallen in all our wars and conflicts we dare not call wars; Veterans Day, to honor those that served and survived; Juneteenth, to acknowledge the end of that horrific institution, slavery; and Thanksgiving, where we give thanks just for surviving at all, either the terrible New England winters or the crushing masses storming the department stores. We also have a few to recognize particular people: Presidents’ Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and of course Christmas.

There are also crowding the calendar a number of Recognized Days where events and concepts are honored, but not so much as to interfere with capitalist commerce with time away from laboring: Groundhog Day, which spurred a film and endless copycats of that movie; Flag Day; Pearl Harbor Day; and far too many to enumerate here, but there is one that slipped by this week that is scarcely noted, not called out in popular culture with a comedic movie, and certainly not used to generate an excuse to leave work or bash each other at football: September 17th, Constitution Day.

September 17th, 1787, the U.S. Congress achieved enough signatures to send its newly crafted Constitution out to the states for ratification, and nine months later it birthed the United States government as we know it today.

The document, like all things made by human hands, is not perfect. Far from it: there have been more than two dozen amendments to the document, and more need to be performed, but for more than two centuries it has guided this imperfect nation towards a more perfect union.

Fallible and flawed people have ignored it, twisted it, misinterpreted it, and outright violated it, but it remains one of the most brilliant governing ideas in history, inspiring countless other nations to follow in our footsteps, and today, at this critical moment in history, its fate and our future are in our hands.

A vote is coming in a few short weeks, a vote that will determine the future of that precious document, that dream made real. Vote carefully.

Kash Patel, our incompetent director of the FBI — good god where is Gordon Cale when you really need him — sat before Congress, grilled on his stewardship of that organization and faced questions that before this administration wouldn’t have survived a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Senator Kennedy of Louisiana, play-acting his ‘simple country boy’ persona, zeroed in on the FBI’s loosening of standards for applicants, specifically that now, under Patel’s direction, the Bureau would no longer automatically disqualify for employment anyone who had engaged in bestiality.

Patel maintained that the purpose of the change in qualification was to ensure that victims of bestiality were not wrongfully excluded from services while Senator Kennedy seemed unable to process anything as a victim of bestiality except the animal that had been sexually abused. With blinders provided by the patriarchy, it appeared that both men could either not envision applicants to the FBI that were not men or that only men engaged in the terrible practice under discussion.

I have no idea if the urban legends have any basis in factual history, but for decades there has persisted the myth that in hidden and secret clubs in foreign lands — it is always in foreign lands — audiences can ‘enjoy’ watching women have sexual intercourse with animals. Mentioned most often in these tall tales are donkeys and horses. This urban legend is so well known that it appears as a plot point in the celebrated film The Godfather Part II.

Apparently, Kash Patel is so addled-brained that not only was he unprepared for this sort of questioning, he could not even muster the defense that this relaxing of qualifications on this point was to protect women who had been abused in precisely the manner depicted in the myth. Nope, that was beyond him because no one in the administration has any real intelligence and we are all paying the price for 70 million Americans who placed such idiots in positions of power.

.

It is a near certainty that after the November ballots are cast and fairly counted the Democratic Party will be in control of the U.S. House of Representatives. There is a better than even chance that they will also have a majority in the Senate.

Should this come to pass, the most active elements of the Democratic party will be hungry for the political blood in the water and the numerous corruptions and crimes of the administration will drive them into a frenzy. There will be a nearly irresistible and terrible temptation to impeach the President.

They Must Not Do This!

The Republican party showed that even after a blatant and violent attempt to illegally seize the office of President that they would still not remove Trump. The process of impeachment is a dead letter, unattainable for any reason and only theatrically possible if one party controls more than two-thirds of the Senate. Even under the wildest of political fantasies the Democratic party will not have that level of control over the U.S. Senate.

Beyond that pure practicality there is another powerful strategic reason why attempting to impeach this president for a third time would be a catastrophic mistake.

The Republican party, as it is currently constituted, is a one that is a cult of personality with its focus entirely on Trump. The die-hards that continue to support the Party are doing so because of their devotion to Trump. The wishy-washy voters that lean Republican have abandoned the party this election cycle but they have not in any manner become members of the resistance. If Trump himself is subjected to intense and unending proceedings, hearings, investigation, and impeachments not only will such a course not yield the removal of this demented, vain, greedy, and erratic man from the levers of power it will reenergize those Republican-leaning voters back into active support for their party that they see as ‘under attack.’ This is the power of a cult of personality, the personality drives everything and direct attacks there only stiffen the resistance and engages an immune-like response.

What should the Democratic Party do with the power that they are likely to acquire next year?

Oh, they should definitely impeach, just not Trump himself, but his officers and his cabinet. The economy will continue to worsen, both nationally and globally with more and more of the electorate willing to blame, justly, the administration for their woes. The political environment will be right for the impeachment of this corrupt and sycophantic cabinet.

Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, Pete Hegseth, Todd Blanche, Doug Burgum, and the rest command no cult of personality. Hearings, proceedings, and impeachments of these individuals will not provoke an activation of Trump’s remaining and fanatical base. The Republican senators responsible for voting either for or against these officers will feel far less terror at ‘breaking ranks’ on these matters and Trump, never one to show any shred of loyalty to anyone outside of his family, will easily abandon his cabinet to save his own diseased skin.

Removing these officers will degrade the administration’s ability to act and strengthen the opposition for future elections. It is the best course and the best attacks to launch in the new year.

.

July 9th of this year, President Trump returning from an overseas trip secretly switched aircraft due to what the Secret Service believed to be a credible threat against the vehicle. Utilizing a catering truck, the President, after visibly boarding Air Force One, left the most famous aircraft in the world and boarded another military airplane for his return to the United States. While the Secretary of Defense and Trump’s personal assistant flew with him to the military aircraft, Secretary of State Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Bessent, along with the White House Press Pool remained aboard the identified Airforce One, returning to the United States ignorant that they now rode in an aircraft that the Secret Service believed to be a target of a credible threat.

When the day arrives that Donald J. Trump assumes room temperature, you will see no tears shed by me, in fact, it is quite likely that the corners of my lips will curl upwards in a satisfied smile. Paraphrasing The Manchurian Candidate’s fictitious Senator Jordan Trump “Could not do more damage to this nation if he were a paid communist agent.” Despite my feelings of utter horror and contempt for the man currently holding the awesome office of President of the United States, his assassination would , perhaps at this time, be the worst fate that could befall this nation. Myths are born of such events and this nation does not need more myths but more truth, so if the Secret Service feels that the threat is real enough that a game of Three-Card-Monty with official aircraft are required to keep the President safe, then that game needs to played, and played well.

With that said it was not needed to fly the decoy aircraft with innocent and ignorant people aboard who may have lost their lives had the threat materialized. All that was required was that the world at large, and presumably the actors threatening the presidency, continued to believe that Trump was aboard the official Air Force One until he was safely beyond the scope of the danger. While the President flew to the United Kingdom aboard the other military aircraft the press and the world could have been told that he was business conferring in the meeting space aboard his aircraft and would not depart until the conference had concluded.

Rank and rampant speculation about the ‘meeting’ would erupt; what could it be with the Secretary of State and treasury aboard but not Defense? No word, no further official statements would fuel the theorizing and once the President was safe in the UK the ruse could be revealed with a flourish nodding towards the expertise and skill of America’s Secret service, without endangering any innocent lives.

But, of course, this is not what happened.

Trump, a narcissist incapable of thinking of anyone but himself, not only contemptuously, casually, and with utter indifference endangered the lives of senior officers of the U.S. Government and the reporters aboard the decoy aircraft, but once the deception came to light, insisted that it was himself that remained in the great danger. For Trump, at all times and in all situations everything, everywhere is about him and only him. No other person has any value at all except in their servitude to the mad king.

And what of Secretaries Rubio and Bessent?

They are men so thoroughly broken that they continue to bend the knee, kiss the ring, and lick the boots of the man who so dismissively endangered them. History will remember them as cowards that abandoned their former beliefs for the momentary glare of a spotlight whose edges they shared with an egotist that cared for them not at all.