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.