Showing posts with label DC. Show all posts

August 20, 2025

This is what the Fox News website thought were the most important stories this morning, and why it matters, By Hal M. Brown

The top of the Fox News website page when I began to write my Substack this morning featured the article: “From ‘homicide capital’ to safer streets? Memphis area sees policing push.”

This seemed to me to be an attempt to address the publicity about other cities being far more dangerous than D.C. and to normalize federal intervention in them to fight crime. The sending in FBI agents is a Trump alternative to sensibly dealing with root causes of crime and looking at ways to augment local law enforcement from within. Federal grants to local police departments would make more sense than sending addtional FBI agents. Cities like Memphis already have FBI and and DEA agents fighting crime in their usual purview. Of course doing things in a sensible way wouldn’t be as flashy and self-agrandizing for Trump. It also would cede control of fighting most crime to local authorities. This is something dictators do not do.

Here are next articles shown above fromleft to right:

Justice Barrett teases new memoir in abrupt conference exit

This article isn’t really news. It just says that Barrett “emerged as the most-talked-about justice on the high court this term, confounding and frustrating observers as they tried and failed to predict how she would vote, and that “she’s been hailed as the ‘most interesting justice on the bench,’ a ‘trailblazer’ and an iconoclast, among other descriptions.”

Congressman whose DC apartment complex was robbed blasts Democrats for criticizing Trump crime crackdown

This is obviously a pro-Trump D.C. law enforcement takeover article. It is a typical first person account of crime in D.C. applauding Trump’s militarization of policing.

'The View' co-host Ana Navarro rips Melania Trump's Putin letter as 'so hypocritical you can't believe it'

The last one was actually critical of both Melania and Big Daddy.

She added, "How about the children all over the world who are not receiving U.S. aid because her husband's government decided we shouldn't be feeding starving children all over the world? How about all those kids?"
Navarro sarcastically applauded the first lady’s letter as a "good thing" for Ukrainian children but told her to "start a little closer to home."
"Maybe she should turn around and say the exact same thing to her husband, because there are children in America crying, suffering, going to bed in fear, returning to homes that are abandoned and empty, not knowing where their next meal is coming from because of what her husband is doing," Navarro said.

An interesting thing happened as I was writing this Substack. The article about crime in D.C. changed postions on the main page:

Somebody running the Fox News website decided that a story about crime in Memphis and calling it “the homicide capital” went against the Trump narrative that the nation’s capital was the crime capital. Even though it doesn’t rank number one in homicides you can be sure that Trump wishes it did.

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August 11, 2025

Trump's song was "It's My Party and I'll Do What I want To." Now it's "It's my Country and I'll Do What I want to."

Leslie Gore’s 1963 hit, “It’s My Party,” was a lament:

It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to, cry if I want to
You would cry too if it happened to you
Nobody knows where my Johnny has gone
Judy left the same time
Why was he holding her hand
When he's supposed to be mine?
It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to, cry if I want to
You would cry too if it happened to you…

Trump’s version is anything but a sad song. Not for him, it isn’t. It is a victory ballad. Once upon a time, he could spaz dance to the original version about “merely” owning the Republican Party lock, stock and fucken smoking barrel. Now he all but owns the country.

Trump doesn’t have the gene for crying. In it’s place may be the sadism gene which produces visceral pleasure when he’s able to assert his dominance by inflicting pain on others. It’s a true hard-on for him if he can make his enemies writhe in pain, but just being able to make anybody suffer gives him pleasure. The head of the IRS, for example, wasn’t really an enemy until he didn’t obey without question. Laura Loomer can tell him he needs to get rid of someone and I doubt he even looks into whether they’re really an enemy. He just does it because he can.

Rewarding those who bow down to him orgasmicly. Punishing those who cross him is an earthshaking O.

Every day we wonder what fresh pile of stinking steaming sulfurous vapor will issue forth from the hell from he has unleashed, whether upon the country or the world.

Today, or at least this week, he may do a twofer. He may sell out Ukraine to Russia, and at no addtional cost except to the victims, he may sell out homeless people and home rule in Washington, D.C.

UPDATE:

I doubt Trump ever reads HUFFPOST, but if he did, he’d salivate over main page headlines like this:

Trump has more legal cover for doing this in DC (see What Trump can — and can’t — do in his bid to take over law enforcement in DC. Even so, there is no doubt it is a test of how far he can go. The next step would be to hype up another lie in order to declare martial law nationwide. That would ostensibly give him justifaction for using the military anywhere. It would be a test as to whether there are enough true patriots in the armed forces to allow it to happen. If there are enough of them who say enough is enough, we are looking at the possibility of a soft coup or a classical coup d'état.

P.S.

The DOJ is launching an investigation of Leticia James and Adam Schiff today, too. For certain, it’s a great day in the morning for Donald J. Trump, the preeminent sadist of our time.

Addendum:

I’m not going to explore this here, but it is a relevant question to consider whether or not Trump has a a rage, or anger addiction. People with this are sometimes called “angerholics.” There are numerous articles about this (here).

For all his victories, Trump still can’t resist venting his spleen, or whatever organ, at enemies. For example this story:

Excerpt:

After midnight Monday — and seemingly out of nowhere — Donald Trump lashed out at the New York Times with a claim the venerable paper should be sued by people who chose to stay out of the stock market since 2016 because of the newspaper — and a former columnist's influence.
The president began by focusing his ire on Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, apparently unaware that the columnist left the Times several months ago. Krugman wrote at the time on The Contrarian, "If you check out my Substack, you will see that I have by no means run out of energy or topics to write about. But from my perspective, the nature of my relationship with the Times had degenerated to a point where I couldn’t stay."
Regardless of the widely publicized departure, Trump took to Truth Social in the early hours of Monday to write, "Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been predicting Doom and Gloom ever since my great election success in 2016. In other words, he has been wrong for YEARS, as ALL markets have been hitting new HIGHS, and are now higher than ever before."

This is just a small story compared to what else is going on, howver we deserve something to wish for:

Here’s another article, this by Michael Cohen, about the vice president: “JD Vance Makes Dumb Look Strategic.”

On an unrelated matter, those who are regular readers know I have been permanently suspended from Facebook. (Here’s my Substack about this.) I can’t post links to my Substacks there, nor can I even read it. Mark Zuckerberg, who owns it, has pissed off his neighbors. In the mold of Trump, I am sure he doesn’t care, and he probably enjoys that he has the power to do this. Read: How Mark Zuckerberg upended a quiet California neighborhood to maintain his own private paradise.

Hal Brown's Substack (fomerly Hal Brown's Blog)