IS TRUMP REALLY A NATURAL DISASTER?

Yesterday I ran across this discussion between Megan McArdle of The Washington Post and Kat Rosenfield of The Free Press.

Real "oh my god, she admit it" moment here. Trump is treated as an uninteresting figure without agency so we can dump endless criticism on liberals for how they react to his "natural disaster." He "doesn't participate in moral frameworks" lmfao

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— Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 (@josephpolitano.bsky.social) December 30, 2025 at 1:28 PM

(The original discussion is here if you want to read more from these folks. I don't.)

Unlike Joey Politano, I think McArdle and Rosenfield are half-right: Trump's character flaws ("flaws" is too mild a word for Trump's off-the-charts amorality) and America's right-wing partisans really do make moral shaming of Trump ineffective. Mostly it's Trump. He wallows in evil. He thinks evil runs the world. He also thinks evil is fun. I sometimes think he marries women just so he can have the pleasure of cheating on them; I think he'd rather make a dishonest dollar than an honest one. It occurs to me that he hasn't become Hitler or Stalin -- a dictator who has completely crushed all opposition parties, all opposition from the legal system, and all opposition from the media and ordinary citizens -- because having opponents to defeat is what gives his life flavor and meaning.

And I think Rosenfield is on to something when she calls Trump "a natural disaster in human form," if only because our system has allowed him to be as unchecked as a Category 5 hurricane. But she's missing an obvious point about natural disasters, which is that we don't just deal with them after they've been through.

Before a natural disaster, we board up windows, we evacuate, we pre-position supplies for relief efforts. Taking a few steps further back, we require buildings to be capable of withstanding diasters. And then after the fact, we need to do a better job than George W. Bush and his FEMA director did after Hurricane Katrina. I think that's what Rosenfield means.

But if you want to compare Trump to a phenomenon that can't be reasoned with, I'd choose a disease outbreak, not a natural disaster. Like Trump, natural disasters leave devastation in their wake that might take years or even decades to clean up, if it's ever fully cleaned up at all, but natural disasters pass -- hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods don't linger for months or years.

Disease outbreaks linger. They're amoral, like natural diasters or like Trump, but unlike natural disasters (and like Trump), they just keep going. What's important is "how everyone else deals with the carnage."

But we can anticipate disease epidemics and pandemics, just the way we were largely able to anticipate the horrible things Trump would do to America. We had the ability to vaccinate our system against Trump -- we had the Constitution, we had separation of powers, we had a free press. We had laws limiting a president's powers.

We could have educated a sufficient number of people to prevent the disease from ever getting a foothold in America, but we failed at that. Then, when the disease hit, Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court acted as the Robert Kennedy Juniors of our political system, thwarting any attempt to keep our body politic healthy. (The Supreme Court started in on that even before Trump won his second term.) The mainstream press wasn't sufficiently alarmed. The Democratic Party establishment cowered in a corner, hoping the disease would burn itself out.

Ordinary citizens and a few brave political actors are working hard to limit the worst consequences of the disease. But it's still spreading.

Rosenfield and McArdle think it's pointless to appeal to Trump's morality or empathy, and they're right. But this natural diaster, this deadly disease epidemic, has done untold damage because people like McArdle and Rosenfield aren't appealing to the morality or empathy of Trump's enablers, or the voters who enable the enablers, and haven't found a way to make them change their behavior. Many of the enablers -- Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, and dozens of others -- are as cold-blooded as the man they serve. Others, probably correctly, fear no consequences -- they know that as long as a rock-solid Republican propaganda apparatus keeps the GOP in power (or at least gives it permanent veto power, either in the courts or via the Senate filibuster), they'll remain powerful players and never fear legal consequences.

Can we ever make the enablers accountable? Can we limit their ability to be disease vectors?

I'm not sure, but we should try. McArdle and Rosenfield should try. But of course they won't.

"BUT DEMOCRATS ARE WORSE": WHY TRUMP WON'T EVEN BOTHER TO ADDRESS VOTERS' DISSATISFACTION IN 2026

Here were the top stories at FoxNews.com at 9:15 this morning:

I don't know what to make of the lead story. It says,

A report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently revealed billions in taxpayer funds that went to "questionable" rental assistance recipients under former President Joe Biden....

HUD officials told the Post that a "large concentration" of the funds went to New York, California and Washington, D.C., with deceased recipients getting funds in all 50 states.

The story cites a 183-page HUD report claiming " questionable payments totaling $5.8 billion" in fiscal year 2024 -- but this is reported under the heading "OTHER INFORMATION (UNAUDITED)." Would a formal audit reveal that much of this "questionable" funding was legitimate? Is this a greater or lesser amount of "questionable" funding than in other years? And if a "large concentration" of the "questionable" funds went to evil liberal hellholes -- New York, California, Washington -- why do we need to hear it from unnamed HUD officials? Why isn't that in the report?

The two stories below this one focus on reported fraud in Minnesota -- the right's favorite story at this moment. Tim Walz! Somalis! It's got everything right-wingers hate.

This is how you know that the White House and congressional Republicans have no interest in addressing the issue of affordability in 2026. The right-wing press works hand in glove with the GOP, and the message here is clear: You think Trump is why you feel broke? Nahhh. It's Democrats who are really picking your pockets!

The Republican message going into 2026 is what it always is whenever the GOP is vulnerable: But Democrats are worse. Republicans might not be solving America's problems, but Democrats are taking heartlanders' money and giving it dishonestly to Those People.

I don't think this can do more than establish a floor for the GOP's popularity, but it might limit the party's losses in the House and might help save the Senate for the GOP, and it will probably keep Trump's approval rating from permanently slipping below 40%.

Republicans gave up on selling their economic agenda a while back. For decades, they've wanted to slash the social safety net, including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, so they can give more and more money to the rich and to large corporations. Fifteen or twenty years ago, they still believed they could persuade Americans to go along with this agenda, telling us that America needed to have "an adult conversation about entitlements," or words to that effect. Americans weren't having it. The country rebelled against Social Security privatization during the George W. Bush presidency. A proposed "grand bargain" in the Barack Obama years never happened. Republicans stopped trying to sell their agenda directly.

Now they try to win every election with culture war. But they got Roe overturned already. They have trans people under assault in red states, and some Democrats are abandoning them in blue states, but an emphasis on the alleged trans menance failed spectacularly for the GOP in the Virginia gubernatorial election last month.

And the Donald Trump/Stephen Miller war against immigrants has led to a backlash, with, as Gallup reported this summer, "a record-high 79% of U.S. adults say[ing] immigration is a good thing for the country."

What can Republicans do when their usual cultural attacks seem stale and tired? In theory, they could change their economic positions -- but that's unthinkable for the party of the Koch network and fascist techno-libertarians like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

So they're going to keep running nationwide against Tim Walz, Joe Biden, Zohran Mamdani, and other Democrats who won't appear on congressional ballots next year. And for Fox viewers at least, it will undoubtedly work.

WE NEED TO RESIST THE SANEWASHING OF J.D. VANCE

I don't know if you've noticed, but the race for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination appears to be over already, and J.D. Vance has won. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Uninterested in a competitive Republican primary in 2028, Turning Point USA plans to deploy representatives across Iowa’s 99 counties in the coming months to build the campaign infrastructure it believes could deliver Vance, a Midwesterner from nearby Ohio, a decisive victory, potentially short-circuiting a fractious GOP race, insiders said.

It is the latest move in a quiet effort by some in Trump’s orbit to clear the field of viable competitors. Earlier this month, Marco Rubio, the secretary of State previously floated by Trump as a possible contender, appeared to take himself out of the running.

“If Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him,” Rubio told Vanity Fair.

And Axios says (free to read here):

Vice President JD Vance plans to literally fly above MAGA's rising civil war — campaigning coast to coast in the midterms and sticking close to President Trump, while building support for an expected presidential run in 2028.

Polling this early in a presidential cycle is usually meaningless, but Vance has an overwhelming lead right now -- 37.8 points in the Real Clear Polling average. He's at 48.8% and no other potential candidate is in double digits except for Donald Trump Jr., who's at 11%. But Junior is a friend and ally of Vance's, and he's making no obvious 2028 moves. In fact, no other Republican appears to be making 2028 moves -- not Junior, not Rubio, not Nikki Haley or Glenn Youngkin or Ron DeSantis or even Marjorie Taylor Greene. Many Democrats are making moves, but in the GOP, only Vance seems to be serious about the next election.

I know you all think it's hilarious that Turning Point, now headed by Erika Kirk, is all in on Vance. I'm sure you think Vance's marriage is a sham and he and Erika Kirk are doing the deed.

They might be, but I'm going to toss out a conspiracy theory I made up and half-believe: Vance wants you to think he's fucking Erika. He wants you to think he'll soon dump Usha, his Indian-American wife, and marry the blond Aryan widow. He knows that Christian conservatives don't really care whether their heroes are faithful husbands -- their two favorite presidents, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, are the only two divorced presidents we've ever had -- while the racists in the party really do care about Vance's marriage to a woman of non-European descent. Would Vance fake infidelity just to keep the racists in his coalition? Would his wife go along with the gambit, even going so far as to appear publicly without her wedding ring, just to advance his career? Who knows? It seems far-fetched, but I wouldn't put anything past the Vances and the grieving widow.

I'm old enough to remember Ross Perot, the billionaire who ran for president twice in the 1990s. He leaned right and appealed to many of the same kinds of voters who flocked to Donald Trump, but he regularly said one very admirable thing: "If you hate people, I don't want your vote." Approaching 2028, Vance is telling voters: If you hate people, hell yeah I want your vote.

Closing out the [recent] Turning Point USA conference, Vance called for party unity amid escalating conflicts among right-wing influencers over the acceptability of racism and antisemitism within Republican politics.

“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests,” Vance said. “Every American is invited. We don’t care if you’re white or Black, rich or poor, young or old, rural or urban, controversial or a little bit boring, or somewhere in between.”

Perot very clearly said that not every American was invited to his coalition. But Vance welcomes the haters.

I think Vance welcomes the haters for the obvious reason that he's a hater himself, a man who has championed German neo-Nazis, defended young Republicans who engaged in extremely racist group chats, and slandered Haitian immigrants as dog-eaters, all while following multiple racist accounts on social media.

But I see him on the verge of being sanewashed by the mainstream press.

Here's Axios:

Vance has no intention of taking sides in the civil war among celebrity MAGA podcasters, who are fighting bitterly and publicly over antisemitism and America's role abroad.

The feuds were a backdrop for Vance's appearance earlier this month at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest, where he condemned "endless, self-defeating purity tests," and said he "didn't bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform."

Republicans close to Vance say he knows it makes no sense to antagonize any MAGA faction so far in advance of the 2028 primary. Vance, who was close friends with Charlie Kirk, has made opposition to censorship a key part of his political identity.

One person familiar with Vance's thinking said he's working to be a "voice of unity against the left."

When Vance's open embrace of bigots and bigotry is treated as nothing more than a campaign stragtegy, that's sanewashing. We have to fight hard to ensure that the media doesn't succeed in normalizing this extremely hate-filled man.

I worry that this kind of coverage will make Vance seem acceptable to centrist swing voters. Many people think he's too dull to be a successful candidate, but after eight years of Trump -- twelve, really -- normie voters will probably want a pendulum swing back to boring and polished, and might be persuaded that Vance is the soft-spoken stylistic alternative to Trump that America needs, all while angry Republicans see in him the hate and inner rage they crave.

(I agree that Vance can't energize the Republican base the way Trump does, but I think the base feels his anger and responds to it. He isn't charismatic or grandiose the way Trump is, but I think he's a sort of Tom Ripley character -- cold-blooded and evil -- and the GOP base likes that.)

In order to keep normies on the hook, Vance had to defend his wife against a recent racist attack by the Hitler-loving podcaster Nick Fuentes -- but Vance triangulated, saying:

On Fuentes, I’ve criticized him in the past, but let me be clear: anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat s---. That’s my official policy as vice president of the United States.

Vance paired Fuentes's name with the name of an MS NOW commentator, placing her name first and thus suggesting that what they said was equally vile (or Psaki's attack was worse). So what did they say? Psaki appeared on the I've Had It podcast and said this:

“I think the little Manchurian candidate, JD Vance, wants to be president more than anything else,” opined Psaki. “I always wonder what’s going on in the mind of his wife. Like, are you okay? Please blink four times, we’ll-, come over here. We’ll save you.”

But Fuentes said this:

“And now they’re all in favor of a fat, race mixer who’s married to a jeet, who named his son Vivek ... and that’s your guy? Your guy is literally a fat, gay race traitor who married a jeet ...” Fuentes said, using a racial slur for Indians.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes attacks Usha Vance using anti-Indian racial slurs

This is a man who had a private dinner with Trump in 2022 at his resort pic.twitter.com/X0EQe3xhEZ

— Shashank Mattoo (@MattooShashank) November 1, 2025

Maybe it's just me, but if you used a word that's become analogous to the n-word and applied it to my wife, then brought my child into it, I'd be a lot angrier than I would be at Psaki's insult. I wouldn't equate the two. And I'd recognize that the racist insult was much worse for America than Psaki's snark.

But it gets worse. Fuentes subsequently doubled down, portraying "eat shit" as a literal dinner invitation in a vile way:

After JD Vance said in an interview published Monday that Fuentes can “eat s---” for his remarks, Fuentes disparaged Indian culture on his podcast....

“I really appreciate the invitation. It’s very gracious. I’ve said a lot of negative things about JD Vance, so for him to extend an invitation like that to me to have dinner, a traditional Indian dinner with him and his family, it actually moved me, it actually touched me a little bit,” Fuentes said.

“I said I’ve been nothing but antagonistic to this guy, really unprovoked – I started the beef. And so for him, in the spirit of the holiday and the spirit of Christmas, for him to extend an invitation in public like that to enjoy a traditional Indian dinner prepared by his wife with his family at the Naval Observatory – he’s a better man than me and I gotta give him a lot of credit for that. Credit where it is due," Fuentes said....

“But respectfully, I must decline. That’s sort of the whole point. I don’t want to eat s---.

“We don’t want them here because we don’t want to eat s---. I know they do that in India. I know they literally eat cow s---, I know that they will scratch their a—and then prepare food and eat s--- that way also," he said.

“We don’t want them here because we don’t eat s--- in America. We try to avoid eating s--- as much as possible. It’s why we wash our hands. So, respectfully, I will have to decline. Thank you, but no thank you. I will not be eating s---. I wish you the best on your Christmas Eve dinner. I hope that goes well for you guys.”

"Every American is invited" to Vance's coalition, the vice president says -- even the man who said this about Vance's wife and Indians everywhere.

LIBERALS ARE EVIL, ACCORDING TO THESE RULES WE JUST MADE UP

Hi -- I had some weather-related travel interruptions, but I'm back. Thank you, Yas, for great work while I was away.

In my absence, I see that the right found a couple more reasons why liberals are evil: they violate rules and norms the right made up.

One evil liberal is Chuck Redd:

The Kennedy Center says it plans to file a $1 million lawsuit against jazz artist Chuck Redd, after the musician canceled his annual Christmas Eve performance. The Associated Press first reported that Redd pulled out of the show days after President Trump's name was added to the exterior of the performing arts center in Washington, D.C.

Redd violated a rule of the performing arts that a government spokesperson appears to have invented:

In an email to NPR on Saturday, Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi said Redd's decision is a disservice to the arts.

"Any artist cancelling their show at the Trump Kennedy Center over political differences isn't courageous or principled—they are selfish, intolerant, and have failed to meet the basic duty of a public artist: to perform for all people," she said.

Did you know that it's "the basic duty of a public artist ... to perform for all people"? I didn't -- and if it is, then the Beatles, who had a rider in their performing contract stating that they must "not be required to perform in front of a segregated audience," and who threatened to cancel a 1964 show in Jacksonville, Florida, if the audience was segregated, violated the rule. So did Frank Sinatra, who championed civil rights for many years and refused to sing for segregated audiences -- yes, Stephen Miller's hero.

Watched the Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra Family Christmas with my kids.

Imagine watching that and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) December 26, 2025

(Sinatra and Martin were, of course, the children of immigrants from Italy, a country many Americans believed was not sending its best during the wave of Italian immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.)

I'd also point out that while Kid Rock didn't really say that he's refusing to perform in New York City in the aftermath of Zohran Mamdani's election as mayor, there's been no backlash to the rumor -- no one on the right appears to believe that he has a "basic duty ... to perform for all people."

The president of the Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell, invented another accusation against Redd:

In a post on X on Friday, Grenell wrote: "The left is boycotting the Arts because Trump is supporting the Arts. But we will not let them cancel shows without consequences. The Arts are for everyone - and the Left is mad about it."

Does Redd want to deny art to conservatives? No.

According to a Kennedy Center online biography, Redd has been involved with The Smithsonian for more than two decades, serving as artist-in residence at The Smithsonian Jazz Café from 2004-2008. The Kennedy Center is part of the Smithsonian Institution.

That means he maintained ties to the Smithsonian during George W. Bush's presidency and Trump's first term.

We also have Elon Musk making up a rule about New York mayoral appointees:

Tech billionaire Elon Musk on Friday slammed New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (D) for appointing a non-firefighter to lead the city’s fire department.

“People will die because of this. Proven experience matters when lives are at stake,” the former White House adviser wrote in a post on the social platform X, which he controls.

Mamdani's appointee is Lillian Bonsignore, who seems to have a lot of relevant experience:

The mayor-elect defended the appointment:

Experience does matter, which is why I appointed the person who spent more than 30 years at EMS. You know, the workforce that addresses at least 70% of all calls coming into FDNY? https://t.co/shTYVvvy4C

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) December 27, 2025

I haven't verified this, but Musk's own AI platform says that 22 New York City fire commissioners had no firefighting experience:

The outgoing mayor, Eric Adams, has appointed two fire commissioners who were never firefighters, apparently without offending Musk's sense of propriety. Laura Kavanaugh, who held the job from 2022 to 2024, had experience in emergency response but hadn't fought fires:

Prior to her appointment as Fire Commissioner, Kavanagh spent several years with the FDNY, involved in the agency's response to major incidents including the Ebola outbreak of 2014 and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.... Kavanagh's tenure as commissioner was met with opposition by rank-and-file members of the FDNY based on her relatively young age, lack of any experience as a first responder and allegations of her department's demoting older and more experienced fire chiefs.

A subsequent appointee, Robert Tucker, who served for more than a year in 2024 and 2025, had no relevant experience whatsoever, but appeared to appeal to Adams for ... um, other reasons:

Following law school, Tucker worked as special assistant to the District Attorney in Queens County....

In 1999 Tucker became chairman and CEO of T&M Protection Resources, a company specializing in security, intelligence and investigations....

Tucker was appointed FDNY fire commissioner by New York City Mayor Eric Adams on August 12, 2024. Six weeks before Tucker was appointed FDNY commissioner, eight employees of Tucker’s former business made political contributions to Adams on the same day.... Tucker has never been a firefighter or emergency response official. He is a self-described "fire buff" who cites his time as a young boy chasing fire engines as inspiration for his service.

Tucker very showily resigned as fire commissioner immediately after Mamdani was elected, citing Mamdani's criticism of Israel, and gave his first interview to Bari Weiss's CBS News a couple of weeks later.

I'd also like to remind Musk that the first fire commissioner appointed by Rudy Giuliani, the right's favorite New York mayor, was Howard Safir, who also had no experience as a firefighter -- his career prior to his appointment was all in law enforcement, at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the U.S. Marshals Service.

So Mamdani violated a made-up rule, which right-wingers will invoke if any fire in New York during his tenure is handled with less 100% skill. And Chuck Redd is facing a lawsuit, which ought to inspire some activism:

If I were a wealthy, commercially successful non-Trump Kennedy Center honoree, I would very publicly offer to pay 100% of Redd's legal fees, all the way up to the Supreme Court, as well as any fines imposed.

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— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) December 27, 2025 at 8:41 PM

Past Kennedy Center honorees include Robert De Niro, Barbra Streisand, and Bruce Springsteen. What do you say, folks?

Holiday Reading: Jon Swift Memorial

 

One of the meanings of Italian "batocchio": The thing you use to whack your Tibetan therapeutic singing bowl, in black chamois and wood, with wooden bowl, €49.90 from macrolibrarsi.

Oh, hell, the gang's all here! OG blogger Batocchio has mounted the annual Jon Swift Roundup for 2025, honoring the late Jon Swift/Al Weiser and the ghosts of blogs past and blogs present and Blogmas yet to come, and the blogiverse itself, such as it is gathering the bloggers' best posts of the year, in the bloggers' opinion (and we're nothing if not opinionated!). So pay it a visit!

Epstein Narratology

 

Not finding a credit for this widespread image. Can't reach the T-shirt company, Picturestees, that was selling it at Halloween.

Everybody loves a good Christmas ghost story, and I don't mean the Dickens of A Christmas Carol, but something a lot darker, the kind of ghost story that offers a real chill without a compensatory sweetness. This one is maybe altogerther too creepy, in fact, especially in the sense that you can easily imagine it's true, though that's unlikely. It's about that postcard that showed up in the Epstein document dump yesterday, purportedly addressed by Jeffrey Epstein shortly before his death to the notorious child molester Larry Nassar, the team doctor of the women's national gymnastics team, who assaulted the young athletes under his care for years before he was finally stopped:

Dear L.N.

As you know by now, I have taken the “short route” home. Good luck! We shared one thing … our love and caring for young ladies and the hope they’d reach their full potential.

Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to “grab snatch,” whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system.

Life is unfair.

Yours

J. Epstein

Some time after the documents went on line, Department of Justice issued a statement on this one, to the effect that it was conducting an inquiry about its authenticity, about which there were some reasonable doubts: the card had been mailed from Virginia, not from the jail in New York where Epstein was being held, gave an incorrect name for the jail in the return address (it also had the wrong prison for Nassar, who thus never received it), and was processed three days after Epstein died on August 10, 2019.

Also, the authenticity had come into question before: another document in the dump tells how the card was returned to the jail (September 25), and made its way to the FBI investigation of Epstein's death; nearly a year later, they sent the letter to the lab with a request for a handwriting analysis. The request was posted yesterday, but DOJ hasn't posted the analysis itself, or the samples of Epstein's handwriting that had been sent with it. (Indeed, it's extremely hard to find an example of Epstein's handwriting; at least, I haven't succeeded in doing it.)

A couple of hours after that, though, DOJ did post a notice that the card was a fake, for the reasons cited, and because "the writing does not appear to match Jeffrey Epstein's."

That's when I started getting suspicious. They had to look at the analysis, presumably, to determine that; why didn't they post it? Unless, of course, they were lying, as if Pamela Jo Bondi's Justice Department would ever do something like that!

Bye, Elise

 

21st congressional district, New York, via Wikipedia,

Some gossip, mostly from a caller from New York's 21st congressional district, on the radio WNYC Brian Lehrer, unable to link at the moment), about Rep. Elise Stefanik: that she's never liked the district, the state's largest geographically and most sparsely populated and of course poorest, if only because it's too cold, not too mention plagued by awful unemployment and alcohol and drug abuse. She's not even from there but from Albany; she's a carpetbagger, claiming residence on the basis of what upstaters call a "camp", or summer place, owned by her parents. She hasn't done a town hall for six years, and in what the local press categorized as a "rare visit" for a ceremonial function in August, to Plattsburgh, the booing stopped her from addressing a crowd consisting mostly of anti-Trumpers:

"Well, Elise has not shown up in our district for months and months," said protester Mavis Agnew. "She won't hold a town hall, she won't take questions. She's never in her office. People show up at her office constantly, door's closed. Her representatives, her employees won't talk to her... So this was her first appearance, the first opportunity we had to let her know we're unhappy."

She got a more positive response in February, but that was what was advertised as her farewell tour, when she was expecting to leave the House for a stint as US ambassador. Then, when Trump ordered her to stay in Congress instead to protect his razor-thin majority, a visit to Saranac Lake celebrating a federal grant for the firehouse (in an appropriation signed by President Biden) was received with "mixed emotions".

The other thing is, the district isn't inevitably Republican; it was held by Democrat Bill Owens, defeating a GOP torn by culture war issues, from 2009 through 2015, and voted for Obama twice, along with Schumer and Gillibrand (whose 20th congressional district overlapped a good deal with where the 21st is today).

Her dropping out of the governor's race is pretty easy to understand: she was certain to win the Republican primary, but very likely to lose the general election, and certain to lose, at least as long as Trump refused to endorse her, which he did for his own Trumpy reasons; perhaps he was mad at her for even considering giving up the congressional seat, like she valued herself more than him. You can see how that would be hard for him to take. Whatever happens to her next, she's certainly an instance of the Trump Curse. I"m sure she'd love a job in Washington, but I really feel she's headed for being relatively alive on the proverbial Farm Upstate. 

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Are We There Yet?

For a while yesterday, it seemed that the Kennedy Center's new name was simply "THE DONALD", like an Upper West Side co-op dedicated by the board to somebody named Donald who lived and died there, as my building briefly contemplated naming itself "The Virginia" after Virginia in the apartment above me passed away (Eileen the board president and I had to break into her place through the fire escape to find her body in the bathroom, so it's intensely memorable)—the rest was just subtitle. But there's also a tradition of referring to our emperor as "The Donald", going back, if I remember right, to Ivana, who had an English learner's confusion over the mysteries of when English uses an article. Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images via MS-NOW. 

Later, it was revealed that that grammatical weirdness had been was really part of the plan, sitting atop the old name:

THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND
THE JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS

That is, it now has two names, "The Donald J. Trump", and the other one, also starting with "The". Unlike the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace, on an independently owned building illegally seized and depopulated last March by DOGE as a squat for themselves, for which workers couldn't find an approximately appropriate font. The State Department suggested that in ordinary usage it would be best to just omit the name of the country, though they didn't take it off the edifice:

Steve had a fine commentary the other day on Trump's increasing preoccupation with monumentalizing himself, with these renamings and the astonishing Trumpese-language plaques in the White House's new "Presidential Walk of Fame", and the paved-over Rose Garden and destroyed East Wing and gigantic "ballroom" under construction and proposed triumphal arch across the water from the Lincoln Memorial, which I like to call the Arc du Trumphe (the Arc of the Trump bends slowly, but it will bend all the way over sooner or later), the projects he and his munchkins sometimes refer to as his "top policy priorities", even as 20 million or more Americans face the imminent loss of their health insurance, and the negotiations ove Russia's attempted conquest of Ukraine have been taken away from the State Department and taken over by billionaires with unconcealed financial interest in the outcome (including the president's son-in-law).

Steve sees it as an attempt on Trump's part to reconfigure the little world to which he is now largely restricted (the White House and a couple of his own commercial properties) into a bubble in which he is a success, and none of the bad news is real, the way his father before him, another psychopath, commanded his family: "Do what I want. It'll be better for you."

But I think it's also compensatory, connected to a growing awareness that he is a failure, as even Fox News reports the bad economic news and the increasing belief that he's not innocent in relation to Jeffrey Epstein and the strife within the Republican party. He doesn't have time for those matters, he's busy marking Washington forever with the labors of what he regards as his real skills, being "a builder" and interior decorator. He doesn't feel guilty about not knowing anything about health policy or fiscal policy or foreign policy, he simply doesn't accept that he has any responsibility for them, and as far as he's concerned, whoever is responsible (generally a cabinet secretary) is doing fine, and the reporters who suggest he's missing something are bad and stupid.

Of course he's never had any interest in any policy anyway, other than hurting the defenseless, and shouting the slogans that have worked for him, on immigration and tariffs. (I connect these with his father too; it's Charles Lindbergh's America Firstism, which was to Fred Trump's generation of reactionaries what Pat Buchanan has been to the current one, now for the moment triumphant over the bloody-minded neoconservatives.)

But also de-compensatory, if you know what I mean. I know I've said it before, but this time I think it's real, he's decompensating under his personality disorder, from the pressure of his many terrible mistakes, fruits of his abuse of the near absolute power the Supreme Court has given him and his complete incapacity for productive action. First he can't hide his indifference to everyone who isn't him, then he goes wild:

In rare moments of self-awareness, the narcissist realises that without his input - even in the form of feigned emotions - people will abandon him. He then swings from cruel aloofness to maudlin and grandiose gestures intended to demonstrate the "larger than life" nature of his sentiments. This bizarre pendulum only proves the narcissist's inadequacy at maintaining adult relationships. It convinces no one and repels many.

The narcissist's guarded detachment is a sad reaction to his unfortunate formative years. Pathological narcissism is thought to be the result of a prolonged period of severe abuse by primary caregivers, peers, or authority figures. In this sense, pathological narcissism is, therefore, a reaction to trauma. Narcissism IS a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that got ossified and fixated and mutated into a personality disorder.

Quod erat diagnostandum.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names. 

THANKS

I'm off for Christmas. I'll be back on December 27. I'm not feeling especially jolly right now, but maybe we can hope that a few dams will burst next year. Meanwhile, I think there'll be guest posts here, so stop by. And thanks for joining me in this all year.

THE WHITE HOUSE WILL NEVER RELEASE ALL THE FILES

Yesterday was the day when all the Jeffrey Epstein files were supposed to be released. That didn't happen.

Garcia: In our initial estimation—It could be that we're only getting about 10% of what the DOJ has. And of that 10%, 5% of that has already been released. And the other 5% is highly redacted. So we're getting very little so far

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) December 19, 2025 at 6:41 PM

What was missing?

Financial records, internal memos from prosecutors who investigated Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking ring, key material obtained from the searches of Epstein’s palatial homes — none of it figured prominently in the documents released Friday.

Interested in records that would help explain how Epstein grew so wealthy? None to be found.

Want to read emails from federal prosecutors deciding who to charge — and, equally importantly, who not to charge — during their 2019 investigation? You’re out of luck.

Curious about the role of Maurene Comey, the prosecutor who co-led the probes into Epstein and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, before being fired without explanation in July? Nothing from her to see here.

We all think the administration is trying to protect Donald Trump, but it may also be trying to protect the kinds of people he regards as his C-suite peers:

... the documents and photos were largely silent about a roster of ... well-known people who have long been associated with Mr. Epstein and his finances, including businessmen like Leon Black and Leslie H. Wexner.

The lead sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act are not satisfied:

Unfortunately, today’s document release by @AGPamBondi and @DAGToddBlanche grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law that @realDonaldTrump signed just 30 days ago. @RepRoKhanna is correct. https://t.co/gZQyQBUT4R

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 19, 2025

In his video on X, Khanna said:

“We will prosecute individuals regardless of whether they’re the attorney general, or a career or political appointee. We need full transparency and justice for the survivors.”

He added in his written post: “Any person who attempts to conceal or scrub the files will be subject to prosecution under the law.”

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has promised a drip-drip of files:

“The volume of materials to be reviewed ... means that the Department must publicly produce responsive documents on a rolling basis,” Blanche wrote. “The Department’s need to perform rolling productions is consistent with well-settled case law that statutes should be interpreted to not require the impossible.”

Blanche also said in TV interviews that while “hundreds of thousands” of documents would be released in the initial round, hundreds of thousands more would be processed over the next few weeks.

Maybe this will happen. Maybe a few more documents will trickle out between now and the Monday after New Year's, when normie Americans will be distracted. Or maybe the follow-ups will be like the Trump healthcare plan -- something we're supposed to get in the next two weeks, forever. Whatever happens, I'm certain that we won't get a full document release.

Culturally, the pressure is off. Some documents were released in time to meet the deadline for all of them, and GOP/QAnon voters (the only voters the administration cares about) got what they wanted, more or less: lots of pictures of Bill Clinton. Republican voters don't care about getting to the bottom of this case. They don't care about following the facts wherever they lead. They don't care about justice for the victims. All they care about is their ongoing war against Democrats. They're either happy now or frustrated because they were hoping for evidence against Clinton that was genuinely incriminating. They want Clinton and other people they hate, like Bill Gates, tried and convicted (and maybe executed). But shamed is reasonably satisfying.

Now there's no deadline to meet. No one's going to create a new one. In this Congress, you won't get 218 House members to vote for impeachment of any Republican over this, or vote for any reprimand, really -- remember that one of the few sincere GOP antagonists of the White House on this issue, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is leaving Congress altogether in a couple of weeks.

This just feels like the culmination of the Epstein moment, the Epstein year -- I question whether the moment can be sustained after ordinary people have seen these documents and photos. Most people don't pay close attention to the details of political stories -- I'm sure they believe a lot has come out, not just a tiny percentage. I think this document dump relieved a great deal of the pressure on the White House. And if Democrats win one or both houses of Congress back next year, this might seem like a story that's far back in the rearview mirror by 2027 -- never mind 2029, which is the earliest moment a post-Trump Justice Department could possibly prosecute anyone for failure to comply with this law (and there'll be many more crimes to focus on then, assuming the new administration doesn't just decide to "turn the page").

I hope I'm wrong about this. I hope we don't find ourselves in mid-January with perhaps 15% of the documents released and the White House saying that, well, actually, there are no additional document releases scheduled. But that's what I expect.

BARI WEISS'S ELITIST BUBBLE

A few days before CBS News broadcast Bari Weiss's town hall with Erika Kirk, I said that Weiss didn't really understand the country if she thought Kirk's husband was a universally beloved figure outside a few small liberal enclaves. As YouGov polling has noted, only about half the country was really familiar with Charlie Kirk at the time of his death, and only about a quarter of the country has a favorable opinion of him. After the town hall aired, Variety reported that all but the most desperate advertisers questioned the town hall's viewer appeal and chose to avoid buying time on the broadcast:

During the hour, commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data. Viewers of the telecast on WCBS, CBS’ flagship station in New York, even saw a commercial for Chia Pet, the terra-cotta figure that sprouts plant life after a few weeks.

Direct-response advertisers typically pay lower prices in exchange for allowing TV networks to put their commercials on air when convenience allows. A flurry of the ads appearing in one program usually offers a signal that the network could not line up more mainstream support for the content it chose to air.

A more monied class of sponsors was evident during the first commercial break appearing in the 9 p.m. hour on CBS, a rebroadcast of a 2024 episode of “48 Hours.” Marketers appearing included Amazon, Ferrero Group, and Procter & Gamble.

And then we learned that the town hall was a ratings flop.

According to early numbers from Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel measurement, the one-hour CBS News town hall ... drew 1.548 million total viewers and 237,000 in the coveted advertising demographic of viewers aged 25 to 54. Those numbers rose to 1.867 million viewers overall 265,000 in the advertising demo when Nielsen released its final numbers Tuesday afternoon.

Based on Nielsen’s final ratings, the Erika Kirk sitdown declined 11 percent in total viewership compared to the network’s standard programming in that time slot year to date – and was down 41 percent in the key demo.

But Weiss and CBS News are undaunted. They're doing more town halls, although the guests seem a bit more upmarket.

CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is ... launching a series of primetime town halls and debates alongside Weiss’ The Free Press under the banner “Things That Matter.”

CBS says that Vice President JD Vance, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have all agreed to participate in the town halls, with the debates set to address topics like “Does America Need God?” “Has Feminism Failed Women?” and “Should Gen Z Believe in the American Dream?”

CBS has lined up people like Isabel Brown and Harry Sisson to debate the American dream, Steven Pinker and Ross Douthat to debate the God question, and Liz Plank and Allie Beth Stuckey to debate the feminism question.

While Weiss might think she's making CBS News more appealing to Americans in flyover country, what she's really doing is creating a right-leaning version of the sort of lecture series that upper-middle-class Manhattan dwellers love, the kind of programming you'd expect at the 92nd Street Y or the New York Historical Society. I live among these people, and this programming seems maybe a few inches to the right of what they enjoy -- and some of it would be appealing to them just the way it is. They'd flock to a chat with Wes Moore or Sam Altman. They read and occasionally agree with Ross Douthat. And while they might not be J.D. Vance fans now, a Vance talk would have sold out quickly on the Upper East Side or Upper West Side in his pre-Trump days.

All this leads me to believe that while Weiss may have regarded Erika Kirk as a blood-and-soil heroine of the heartland Volk, she also saw her as the head of a well-connected political organization -- just the sort of high achiever (or at least the widow of a high achiever) whose opinions should be valued most.

Weiss thinks other top news media decision makers are out of touch with ordinary Americans, but she's as out of touch as she thinks they are. She thinks Americans sit down in front of the TV after a long day's work hoping to be educated and lectured to. I wonder how many of these broadcasts she'll be allowed to do before her employers pull the plug.

TRUMP'S DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO IMMERSE HIMSELF -- AND THE REST OF US -- IN AN ENTIRELY TRUMP-SHAPED WORLD

You know about the plaques, right?

White House staff updated the so-called “Presidential Walk of Fame” Wednesday by adding lengthy descriptions of each former president, in rhetoric that aligns with President Donald Trump’s – such as calling former President Joe Biden “the worst President in American History.”

As part of the president’s ongoing effort to customize the White House to his liking, Trump set his well-known opinions of each former president in stone by adding plaques underneath the portraits that now hang along the colonnade.

For instance:

“Sleepy Joe was, by far, the worst President in American History,” the plaque underneath Biden’s portrait, which is an autopen as opposed to his official portrait, reads. “Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States.”

We saw those plaques before we heard last night's speech.

Wearing a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, Trump unleashed a shouty stream of consciousness with barely a pause or punctuation mark....

“Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” Trump said, starting as he meant to go on by telling a lie: he claimed that inflation was the worst in 48 years when he took office, when in fact it had come back down to 3%.

He went on to place blame at the feet of Biden, previous trade deals, immigrants and what he described as a corrupt system. As at his campaign rallies, Trump painted a lurid picture of Biden forcing “transgender for everybody” and throwing open the border to criminals from insane asylums. He claimed to have “broken the grip of sinister woke radicals in our schools”.

... he conceded that prices remain high while arguing that the nation was “poised” for an economic boom. “I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast,” he said. By way of example, he claimed a sharp drop in gasoline prices, even though a White House graphic displayed by Fox News as he spoke showed only a slight decline in the national average....

Trump delivered his customary boasts about settling eight wars and bringing peace to the Middle East “for the first time in 3,000 years”. He repeated ugly remarks demonising Somali Americans and echoed European far-right extremists by stating: “We are now seeing reverse migration as migrants go back home, leaving more housing and more jobs for Americans.”

Trump rants on Truth Social. He adds captions to photos in a White House presidential gallery that read like those same Truth Social posts. Then he gives a speech that also sounds like his Truth Social posts. And he has regular press availabilities where his pronouncements sound like ... well, you guessed it.

I see this, I see the changes he's made to the White House, I see his plans for an "Arc de Triumph" in Washington (it amazes me that he's not calling it the "Arc de Trump"), and I think that Trump is trying to create an entire world where everything he sees appears to be of his own making -- his words, his opinions, his visual effects. What's more, he wants the rest of us to live in that world. How dare we not recognize his greatness! How dare we have opinions different from his!

I always go back to the steak story, as recounted by Trump's first wife:

Once she was a Trump, Ivana encountered the patriarch of the family, her husband’s father, real estate developer Fred Trump.

"Fred Trump was [a] really brutal father," she said. "We went to Tavern on the Green for the brunch one Sunday and [Trump’s] father ordered a steak. So all the, you know, the sisters and brothers, they ordered a steak."

"And I said, 'Waiter, can I have a filet of sole? And Fred looked up at the waitress and, 'No, she's going to have a steak.' I look up at the waiter, I said, 'No, Ivana is going to have a filet of sole,' -- because if I would let him just [roll] right over me, it would be all my life and I would not allowed it."

As The New York Times noted when it reviewed the book, Donald took his father's side rather than his wife's.

... Ivana holds firm. Donald doesn’t back Ivana up then or afterward, but rather is displeased that she didn’t knuckle under: “Why didn’t you just have a friggin’ steak?”

Or as Donald said when asked about this on a separate occasion:

Mr. Trump defended his father’s conduct. “He would’ve said that out of love,” he said. If his father had overruled her fish order, Mr. Trump said, “he would have said that only on the basis that he thought, ‘That would be better for her.’”

More than anyone else, Fred Trump is the man who made Donald the monster he is today. Donald Trump believes what his father believed: Do what I want. Think what I think. That would be better for you.

As I said on social media:

Bill Clinton: I feel your pain. Donald Trump: I don't feel your pain, and neither do you.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) December 18, 2025 at 6:12 AM

Trump thinks it would be better for all of us if we believed the lies he tells himself about his own greatness and every rival's inferiority. More than 40% of the country is still on board with that, but the majority of us aren't. So Trump thinks he'll just have to shout his words louder.

WHY THE SUSIE WILES STORY WILL CHANGE NOTHING

You might have expected the Vanity Fair profile of Susie Wiles to cause friction in Trump World and harm the administration overall. But I regret to say that the Trumpers are responding shrewdly. Rachael Bade, a former Politico journalist, writes on her Substack:

Within hours, the long tail of Wiles’ power and deep relationships across Trump World whipped into a rescue mission. Without so much as a summons, longtime allies from the campaign trail and others inside her orbit cleared their schedules and showed up at the White House to ask how they could help, I’m told from multiple sources. During a huddle in the West Wing, a fire crackling in Wiles’ office, they set to work on a damage-control plan to push back on the story as unfair — and activated the entire Cabinet.

All day, MAGA figures and Cabinet secretaries alike took to social media to defend Wiles and deride the story as a “hit piece” with “cherry-picked” quotes taken out of context....

“That’s called circling the motherfucking wagons,” as one Wiles loyalist and Trump ally told me tonight. “If you look at the reaction on the Hill, if you look at MAGA World and all the people who rallied behind her in a period of eight hours, it shows the depth of loyalty to the president. It shows the depths of loyalty to the chief of staff.”

For example:

Hilarious. The WH had all the Cabinet members simultaneously put out statements supporting Susie Wiles after the Vanity Fair article came out.

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— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) December 16, 2025 at 12:34 PM

Wiles, a seasoned political operator, is pretending she was snookered.

Lady with obvious daddy issues who is wily as fuck pretends she was snookered by an all powerful magazine writer. Hey, Susie: It’s 2025 and you have been the main handmaiden to your boss dad’s heinous war against the media. As if you are a victim.

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— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher.bsky.social) December 16, 2025 at 7:42 PM

That will be persuasive to the only voters Trump and his aides care about: the base. They think literally every story they don't like is 100% fabricated, so they'll believe that there was some "context" in which the things Wiles said didn't have the plain meanings they obviously had.

There's another reason this won't have an impact:

Trump and Vance literally said they agreed with Wiles, Musk has acknowledged his ketamine habit, and Vought probably thinks Wiles was complimenting him.

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— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) December 17, 2025 at 8:36 AM

Trump addressed the "alcoholic's personality" assertion in a phone conversation with a New York Post reporter:

“No, she meant that I’m — you see, I don’t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that — but I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality,” Trump said, a teetotaler who has frequently cited the 1981 death of his older brother Fred at age 42 of an alcohol-induced heart attack as the main impetus for his abstinence.

Vance copped to conspiratorialism in a speech yesterday afternoon.

"But, conspiracy theorist. Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true," he [said] as the crowd cheered and applauded. "And by the way, Susie and I have joked in private and in public about that for a long time."

And we know Musk has no shame about his drug use, nor does Vought have any shame about his extremism. In fact, one of the main reasons the White House doesn't see this as damaging is clearly the fact that Wiles accused the administration of doing things and believing things the rest of us think are unconscionable, but Republicans don't. Trump freed even the most violent January 6 rioters? Trump's base loves that! Trump is leaving hundreds of thousands of people to die by shuttering USAID programs? The base thinks it's a good thing when non-Europeans from countries that are seen as shitholes die painfully! Compassion? Soft power? Who cares! And so on.

And finally, the president is presumably fine with the story because Wiles made her deference to him clear:

“There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” Wiles said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”

As did Vance:

Vance described Wiles’s approach to the chief’s job. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”

Sure, she said he doesn't understand the details of what his administration is doing. On USAID:

“The president doesn’t know and never will,” she told me. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”

But Trump is proud of his ignorance. He believes he has such a superior brain that he makes better decisions without knowing what he's talking about than other presidents have made after learning the facts.

So, sadly, the White House is shrugging this off. The voters Trump and his people care about will be unfazed. The rest of us are horrified, but the White House doesn't care what we think and never will.

SUSIE WILES IS A UVALDE COP

Vanity Fair has published a two-part story based on interviews with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. The Trump White House is full of absolute monsters -- the president himself as well as Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Robert Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem, among others -- and it's generally conceded that Wiles is not one of those monsters. But like many of the other non-sociopaths who fill out the administration -- think Marco Rubio, for instance -- she won't choose morals or principles when they conflict with her ambition. She might have twinges of conscience, and they might explain why she's been talking to the author of the Vanity Fair piece, Chris Whipple, since the 2024 campaign. Or it might be that she wants to resign soon -- presidential chiefs of staff don't usually stay in the job very long -- and use this controversial profile as a pitch for a high-dollar memoir deal or a lucrative, low-stress TV gig.

In any case, she's never acted on any of her qualms about Trump in a serious way. If this profile is how she lets the world know that she thinks the Trump administration has done some reprehensible things, then she's a Uvalde cop, someone who dithered while bad things were done, apparently determined to save her own neck. She portrays this as a matter of job philosophy, according to J.D. Vance:

Vance described Wiles’s approach to the chief’s job. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”

So she expresses her qualms, then shrugs and goes back to work.

... Trump issued pardons to almost everyone convicted in the bloody January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, in which nine people ultimately died and 150 were injured. Even rioters who’d beaten cops within an inch of their lives were set free. (Fourteen people convicted of seditious conspiracy had their sentences commuted.)

Did she ever ask the president, “ ‘Wait a minute, do you really want to pardon all 1,500 January 6 convicts, or should we be more selective?’”

“I did exactly that,” Wiles replied. “I said, ‘I am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn’t do anything violent. And we certainly know what everybody did because the FBI has done such an incredible job.’ ” (Trump has said his FBI investigators were “corrupt” and part of a “deep state.”) But Trump argued that even the violent offenders had been unfairly treated. Wiles explained: “In every case, of the ones he was looking at, in every case, they had already served more time than the sentencing guidelines would have suggested. So given that, I sort of got on board.” (According to court records, many of the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump had received sentences that were lighter than the guidelines.) “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” Wiles said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”

You can argue that this wasn't a good enough reason for Wiles to fall on her sword -- no one was directly harmed by these pardons. That's not the case with the administration's assault on USAID, and Wiles knew that.

[Elon] Musk triggered the first true crisis of the Trump presidency and an early test for Wiles. Trump’s chief was shocked when the SpaceX founder eviscerated USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. “I was initially aghast,” Wiles told me. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”

In his executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump had decreed that lifesaving programs should be spared. Instead, they were shuttered. “When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” said Wiles. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.” ...

Wiles says she called Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalls telling him. At first, Wiles didn’t grasp the effect that slashing USAID programs would have on humanitarian aid. “I didn’t know a lot about the extent of their grant making.” But with immunizations halted in Africa, lives would be lost. Soon she was getting frantic calls from relief agency heads and former government officials with a dire message: Thousands of lives were in the balance.

So she knew.

But Musk forged ahead—all throttle, no brake. “Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Wiles said. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china. But no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”

Some rational people would have wanted to fight harder or disassociate themselves from an administration that was about to leave hundreds of thousands of people to die. Wiles chose to be a Uvalde cop.

She's not alone. The father of one of the programs Musk gutted effectively did nothing.

The shuttering of USAID crippled the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The antiretroviral program, launched with $15 billion by George W. Bush in 2003, was credited with preventing millions of deaths. It depended on USAID grants....

Bush himself had gotten wind of the gutting of PEPFAR. He called Rubio to express alarm, according to a former aide close to Bush.

I want you to read this quote about George W. Bush closely. I hope it infuriates you as much as it infuriates me. I've highlighted that parts that are particularly enraging:

“He’s been appalled by Trump from the beginning and he’s determined not to weigh in,” the aide said. But Musk’s attack on one of his legacy achievements was too much. Bush, said that person, “cares deeply about the PEPFAR program. That and Wounded Warriors are the two things where he will weigh in, not publicly, but with intention.”

Lives were in the balance, and Bush cared -- but it would have been unseemly for him to express that concern publicly. It's just not done! Trump is a fellow Republican, and one mustn't stir up trouble within the party, even if thousands of lives are at stake, and even if your words as a former president of the United States would carry great weight.

Reading this now is especially appalling because it comes at a time when a few Republicans are finally challenging Trump on some issues, at some personal risk. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Indiana state legislators are receiving death threats, but they're acting. Wiles did nothing. Bush did nothing.

Even Peter Baker of The New York Times can see Wiles's spinelessness.

President Trump’s chief of staff said she tried to get him to end his “score settling” against political enemies after 90 days in office, but acknowledged that the administration’s still ongoing push for prosecutions has been fueled in part by the president’s desire for retribution.

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told an interviewer that she forged a “loose agreement” with Mr. Trump to stop focusing after three months on punishing antagonists, an effort that evidently did not succeed. While she insisted that Mr. Trump is not constantly thinking about retribution, she said that “when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

... Ms. Wiles confided in Mr. Whipple in March that she had told Mr. Trump that his presidency was not supposed to be a retribution tour.

“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” she said then. When that did not happen by August, she told Mr. Whipple that “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour” but said that he was aiming at people who did “bad things” in coming after him. “In some cases, it may look like retribution,” she said. “And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”

If this ends with Susie Wiles resigning and getting a cushy, high-paying cable-news commentator job while she works on a seven-figure memoir, that's another failure of our political culture. She had power. She didn't use it. She could have fought the administration's psychopaths. In real time, like the cops in Uvalde, she just allowed them to keep hurting people.

IN HIS RESPONSE TO ROB REINER'S DEATH, TRUMP IS JUST EXPRESSING THE VIEWS OF HIS BASE

You've probably seen Donald Trump's repulsive Truth Social response to the death of Rob Reiner and his wife:

A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!

Trump adds his usual narcissism and a desperate attempt to convince us, yet again, that we're living through an era of peace and prosperity, but apart from that, his meanspiritedness reflects the viewpoint of his angry base, which has been told for decade that Democrats and liberals are unspeakably evil and the cause of all misery and suffering in America. You can see that by going to the comments in response to stories about the Reiners' deaths on right-wing sites.

At Fox News, the commenters pat themselves on the back for not being haters while ... being haters:

Although he would never do the same for me based on who I voted for, and would probably in fact, wish me dead... rest in peace. Hopefully you don’t carry that weird anger to the pearly gates. They aren’t a fan of that I hear.

****

It sounds like there may be irony in Reiner's presumed death and his politics. We'll see. Regardless, I have never rooted for or cheered anyone's death and never will. I will admit Joe Biden has really pushed that resolve.

****

If he was a conservative the liberals would be cheering in the streets ... they’ve already proven that. That’s one difference between us and them. RIP Mr Reiner.

****

Dont wish death upon anyone but he has been quite hateful the last 10-15 years....if roles were reversed I can easily imagine the comments on her by progressives and liberals against the other side. RIP you deserve peace after all that hate.

****

Didn’t hear from the Hollywood crowd after the murder of two American patriots in Syriia yet everyone is so devastated about Reiner and his wife. our priorities are definitely misguided.

Having said that may they all rest in peace.

****

After reading many of the comments here, I want to say that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is mind blowing.

Almost every comment here is sad by this, loved him as a director and not his politics.

If he had been a Republican, the left would be happy he was dead.

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He did give us ' This Is Spinal Tap ' and ' When Harry Met Sally'. Unfortunately his TDS overwhelmed him.

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Unfortunately, the torment he felt under Trump may be nothing compared to what he is currently experiencing.

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Unlike liberals who would be joyful at this news if Mr. Reiner were a conservative. I find it extremely sad that a tragedy such as this has happened to the Reiner family. No one deserves to have this happen to them and I pray for both Mr. and Mrs. Reiner as well as the Reiner family. Hopefully they will be allowed to mourn in peace.

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It would be easy for me to make a terrible comment about another TDS sufferer here. But I will not stoop to this level. So I will just say that to his relatives, I'm sorry for your loss.

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I do not wish ill on others, even if Reiner himself would not/did not behave the same way towards conservatives, it doesn't do any good to spread hate.

The commenters responding to Breitbart's story largely dispense with the self-congratulation and go straight to the hate, some of them focusing on reports that the Reiners may have been stabbed by their son, who has struggled with substance abuse:

Trump will get the blame for sinking the son's drug supply.

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Rob R pushed so much of this stuff on society. We didn’t want him to pass away like this, nor his wife, but it’s the way Rob R would have wanted it.

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Was absolutely pisses me off, both of them what liked the dems solution: muslims all over the place, chinese buying land near our military bases, somolis in Minneapolis ripping us taxpayers off for billions.
Ya that is thee solution to getting rid of Trump.

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He was always running his mouth about Trump being a dictator but never said a world about rampant crime in California caused by his buddy Newscum.

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Democrats have no solutions only chaos.

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I have said for years that if open season was declared on drug dealers and they were executed on site, and left at the curb for the trash collectors that within six months there wouldn't be a drug dealer anywhere to be found. Trump is trying to eradicate the supply/suppliers, yet democrats want him to leave them alone. Who are the bad guys? DEMOCRATS.

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It is amazing to me the Democrats are violently defending letting drug dealers and criminal narco terrorists and gangs into our country. And that they are even a party any more when they are defending these people. But I guess this is proof that we aren't fighting people, but forces of darkness. Because even the stupidest people don't want chaos, crime, and enemy gangs who deal in prostitution, r*pe trafficking and drugs from third world countries to tear their homes and neighborhoods apart.

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Democraps know this creates chaos. That’s why they promote it along with their other favorite bad for society stuff.

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I guess you have to have sympathy for the parent. But I know a flaming lib that lost his middle aged son to Fentanyl. But he'd scream about blowing up the drug boats. Just people who shouldn't be in charge of anything.

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Guess he should have spent less time crying about Trump and more time trying to get his son into rehab.

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Alleged celebrities with drug addled children are now looking over their shoulders.
Hey, it takes a village.

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Democrats are violent, psychotic filth and should not be allowed near sharp objects or guns. Don't turn your back to them. Never, ever let them near the children.

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WE NEED ACROSS THE BOARD COMMON SENSE LIBERAL CONTROL LAWS.

One commenter assumes the son was trans:

Because of his Radical Left TDS, he programmed and groomed a "tran" kid who probably received psychotic drugs and went full mental and took Reiner's life and his wife. Radical Liberalism is a disease!

Another is appalled at the possibility that the White House press corps might ask Trump to comment on the Reiners' deaths:

Next WH press corp question: "Are you sorry Rob Reiner was murdered?" Don't be stunned when it comes. I still remember them asking if Trump was sorry the South lost the Civil War. They should simply have been thrown out, and I don't remember what outfit asked it, but they should NEVER have been let a toe over the threshold ever again.

Well, not to worry -- Trump already told us what's in his repulsive heart. And much of his base is no better.