What''s the deal with Trump wanting the Panama Canal back and Canada to be a state. It's all about his being threatened by the President Musk meme. By Hal M.Brown

How long before Trump starts wearing the MAGA Panama hat? I want bragging rights for predicting this if he does.

President Theodore Roosevelt wore a Panama hat when he visited the Panama Canal. Will Turmp wear his own version when he goes there if he can take it back? My hunch is that Trump felt he needed an issue to change the subject from people saying Musk was really the president. Maybe we'll see Trump wearing a MAGA Panama hat.

Just as I was starting to write this Jonathan LeMire said this on MSNBC - "when the Time Magazine cover drops" about a Time cover about Elon being president. I was going to write that I really hope they have a snarky cover showing President Musk. Trump pays attention to Time Magazine covers! I made this to post on X using the X logo to cover Trump's face.

I don't follow X having moved to BlueSky (here) but being able to do things like this is the only reason I use it.

Back to the Panama Canal story...

Trump's bringing this up pretty much out of nowhere except the convoluted recesses of his warped mind demonstrates that even though he is about to be sworn in as president he is still deeply insecure. The bloviating macho man has always had an Achille's Heel and it is having a superior macho man take the limelight away from him.

Another Trump weakness is having a woman make the news like Stormy Daniels did by mocking his masculinity and E. Jean Carroll did by forcing him to endure day after day in court. I think that every minute he spent in court he was seething inside and was plotting his revenge.

People make fun of Trump's dancing and although I haven't seen Musk dance at a Trump rally, he does dance in his own energetic odd way. Here's a video

He also can enthusiatically leap quite high, apparently, as shown below, not pleasing Trump.

Musk often wears his black Colonize Mars t-shirt and in this photo he looks like he could be using levitating powers to actually start the journey.

As far as who the real macho man is, Musk is the richest man in the world. Trump is rich and just got back on the Forbes 400 list, but he's nowhere near as rich as Musk who is worth 10 times as much as he is. As far as another common, albeit phallocentric, measure of masculine prowess, Musk has 12 children. Critics question whether Trump and Melania even share a bedroom. Musk just had a baby.

Trump wants to round up undocumented people who want to live here and be productive members of our society.  He wants to depict them as evil so he can be say he vanquished them and saved innocent true Americans from being victims of horrific crimes. Musk wants the immigration problem to be resolved but his focues is on how much it costs.

Musk wants to be known for DOGE and saving the goverment and Americans billions, but he also is passionate about sending people to inhabit another planet. Instead of wanting to be known for helping to cure cancer he tried to cut funding for children's cancer research. Wanting to rocket off to Mars just isn't as glamorous and manly an accomplishment as curing cancer. This is why you won't see Trump making this an focus of his presidency.

Trump has made many promises he is unlikely to be able to keep. People are not particulary patient. They want to see lower grocery prices as soon as he takes office. Trump has to make good on his Hitlerian rhetoric about rounding up immigrants and deporting them. He wants this to happen overnight. Of course it won't and the endeavor which will be marked by ineptitude will be met with a lot of blowback and bad publicity. Trump is setting himself up for failure. So what does he do? He decides to take the Panama Canal back.

On top of this he has also once again brought up the idea of buying Greenland.

There is something so utterly self-defeating about Trump interjecting Panama and Greenland into the news coverage that I can only clincally explain it by positing that the viral President Musk meme has hit his Achille's Heel and hobbled him so he is totally off balance. He is desperate for a diversion. He want to show how powerful he is. He's decided that one way to do this is to pull a Putin. He wants to annex land, in this case a canal, and Greenland, and even the entire country of Canada making it our 51st state. 

He tried unsuccessfully to antagonize Prime Minister of Canada so perhaps this is why he took on the president of Panama. He's trying to sell this idea on Truth Social:

I can't keep up with the images about President Musk that I see posted in social media. Below are just a few of them.

These are mine:

I doubt very much that Trump sees any of these. I admit I enjoy making them and in all modesty think his wearing the "I'm the boss" t-shirt is one of the best I used AI to create. 

To say it is all over the news is an understatement. Consider this simple Google News search for President Musk.

Click above to enlarge image

Trump is that he's the most transparently self-revealing president in my lifetime. This sounds like a complement considering that he has also lied more than any president or presidential candidate this needs some explanation. Most of his lies reveal something about the inner workings of his mind. This goes for many of the words he types on social media and utters when he goes off the teleprompter when he speaks. 

There was a time when mental health professionals were criticized for trying to diagnose Trump without assessing him in person. By now I hope those who lambasted us realize that we have so much information about his psychopathogy it would be a kind of malpractice not to diagnose him. 

Trump is a malignant narcissist who is a dangerous to our democracy. In addtion he meets every critera for being an examplar for the Dark Triad.

Trump, who lacks a semblence of empathy, has a sadistic streak. So do others like Stephen Miller and his choice to head the immigration round up Tom Homan. Like with Trump, the cruelty is the point. Being cruel makes them feel tough and manly.

Related:

Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski on plot to take Greenland: 'We have not expanded our country in 70 years'

"Corey, what do you make of Trump's threat about the Panama Canal?" Newsmax host Logan Ratick asked the Trump adviser.

"Yeah, once again, this is President Trump focused on America first," Lewandowski explained. "We sold it for a dollar, which was just the most ridiculous thing that anybody has ever seen."

"And so it's time to make sure that our independence and our dominance on the world stage is back in play," he continued. "He's talking about maybe Greenland from a historic perspective coming as part of the United States, taking back the Panama Canal so that China doesn't have its influence there."

"This is a president who is making outside-the-box announcements to put the world on notice that, once again, the United States is the dominant world superpower."

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Anti-Trumpers made a big mistake calling Trump just a convicted felon. By Hal M. Brown

Consider how public perception might have been changed if all the articles and signs saying "Donald Trump becomes the first convicted felon to be elected president" instead said "Donald Trump becomes the first convicted rapist or sexual abuser felon to be elected president" or billboards were put up like my version of the one below:

The E. Jean Carroll trial is again in the news, today with many articles like this in HuffPost with the link on top of their main page:

Here's another article, with a video, about it:

'What is going on!' MSNBC host stunned by new Trump legal settlement

The upside I see is the timing of the ABC action. It brings this into the news again, especially at a time when Trump is pushing his nomination of Pete Hegseth, who  someone accused of sexual assault, to be Secretary of Defense. The country needs to be reminded of Trump's sexual assault history and how he has treated women as unwilling objects for his sexual gratification. 

While I think ABC took the chicken shit route and should have stuck with the law suit this isn't the point I want to make today. Everyone who followed the E. Jean Carroll trial knew it was technically about defamation. However, it was really about Trunp sexually assaulting Carroll. There was debate mired down in legalise about whether what Trump did was technically a rape or a sexual assault.  How one decides to define rape may depend on whether one is looking at a lawbook or a dictionary. Here's a dictionary definition:

Cick above to enlarge

Note the seocnd part of number two above: The crime of using force or threat of force to compel a person to submit to some other sexual penetration (my emphasis).

This is from Wikipedia's entry for E. Jean Caroll v. Donald J. Trump.

Carroll's accusation of rape was in a different category from claims of any other women. Regarding this accusation of rape, the judge gave to the jury "the narrow, technical meaning of that term" under New York law as it existed at that time, which defined rape as forcible penetration with the penis, as Carroll had specifically alleged. The jury rejected her rape claim, but found Trump liable for a lesser degree of sexual abuse than rape. In July 2023, Judge Kaplan said that the jury had found that Trump had raped Carroll according to the common definition of the word which did not require the alleged penile penetration. In August 2023, Kaplan dismissed a countersuit and wrote that Carroll's accusation of "rape" is "substantially true".

Wiki, ever up to date, includes the following:

In December 2024, Trump settled a defamation case with ABC News after anchor George Stephanopoulos falsely stated that Trump was found liable of rape in the case. ABC News agreed to pay Trump $15 million for his presidential library and $1 million for his legal fees, as well as issue a public apology.^[17][18]

I think that a large part of Trump's rage and drive for revenge is rooted in this case and his having to sit through day after day in court. This may have been the first time in his adult life that Trump was forced to be somewhere he didn't want to be day after day, and worse than this, somewhere he was being charged with a crime. This is a side aspect of what I want to say here. 

While the trial was all about what Trump did to E. Jean Carroll anti-Trumpers kept calling Trump a convicted felon which left out the salient fact that it was sexual abuse that led to the case being brought in the first place. His supporters turned his conviction to their advantage making him into a hero with his mugshot a badge of defiant honor, and other in-your-face depictions showing how little his cult cared about his convictions.

Trump friendly media, like the Murdoch New York Post, also had their own slant on the conviction.

Consider what would have happened if the anti-Trumpers as well as the objective press publishing articles, about the conviction and those making billboards and signs never used the word felon without prefacing it with at the least the words "sexual abuse" and preferably the single word "rapist." 

If there was true justice Trump would have been tried and convicted for rape in a criminal trial rather than in a defamation civil trial related to a rape allegation. If this happened the headlines would have been very different and Trump could have gone to prison. If convicted of Forcible Touching, ie.  one who forcibly touches the sexual or other intimate parts of another person for the purpose of degrading or abusing such person, or for the purpose of gratifying the actor’s sexual desire, He could have been senetenced to a year in jail:

Forcible Touching, Penal Law Section 130.52, is a class A misdemeanor punishable by up to 1 year in jail. However, the opportunities for a plea agreement are more limited than in most misdemeanor cases. The District Attorney may not offer a non-criminal plea, even for a first offender. And, if some form of conditional discharge is offered, it will typically depend on completion of a mandated treatment program or sessions with a private therapist.

Trump can factually be called a person who was found liable for sexual abuse and what was really the far less egregious crime of defamation by a jury of his peers.

I am just one small voice trying remind people of this. Hopefully the media addressing the $15 million ABC settlement will remind more people about this.

In 2016 people elected a man who uttered a few words which were recorded and replayed hundreds of time and which if said by any other candidate would have lost him the election. Voters just didn't care enough.

He hasn't changed. He is proving this by the choices has made for people to serve in his administration. He is turning it onto a phallocentric manosphere ruled by the ultimate mad megalomaniac manly monarch.

Read related blog: For some MAGA manly men, Hegseth's sexual assault and drinking charges are badges of honor worthy of a medal.

and this blog: 

If only the entire country could divorce itself from a toxically masculine regime.

If only the entire country could divorce itself from a toxically masculine regime

Previous list of  all blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

Maybe George Soros had his Jewish space laser scrambling the brains of the E. Jean Carroll jurors., Plus George Santos

 By Hal Brown, trying to think of something remotely original to write about the verdict of the E. Jean Carroll trial

Trump rants about the evil corrupt Democrat judge failing of course to address the fact that it was a jury of nine New Yorkers who found him liable and decided how much he had to pay.

Republicans with the rare exception of Mitt Romney either refuse to comment or give mealy mouth answers when asked their opinions about this.

Some are defining the phrase doubling down in expressing how their support of Donald Tump has increased since the verdict. Case in point, Sen. Tommy Tuberville who said it made him want to vote for him twice.

Pence wins the Academy of Lame Irrelevancy Award for his saying that in all his years of knowing Trump he never heard or witnessed behavior of that nature. Talk about a lame way to try to avoid giving his opinion about whether Trump was fit to be president. As if Trump would disabuse his holier than thou vice president of his belief that the most righteous one is actually a crude decidedly unchristian misogynist who has a history os sexual assaulting women. How lame is Pence's comment? This lame:

Across the country there are two basic group of Trump worshippers reacting to this verdict. One group is composed of those who agree with Trump's claim that it never happened and he didn't even know who E. Jean Carroll was (despite this photographic evidence to the contrary). They believe in one or another, or perhaps all, of the possible conspiracies which led to this outcome.

Then there's another group who may or may not think the charges are bullshit. In a way these people, mostly men but some women, think that Trump was entitled to sexually assault E. Jean Carroll because he's some sort of testosterone fueled god. I have no doubt that there are men who envy Trump for having gotten away with sexually assaulting so many women. The more the merrier could be their motto.

These sexual predator wannabes wish they were famous enough so they could roam the aisle of high end women's clothing stores and target women they found attractive and have their way with them in convenient dressing rooms.

As for the hopefully small group of Trump supporters who suffer from delusional psychiatric disorders I suppose it is possible a few believe in far-out, literally far far out explanations for the verdict. After all, George Soros supposedly has powers few if any other mortals possess and lasers are amazing. It wouldn't take a leap of their imagination for these pathetic people to be convinced he had his orbiting mythical machine zapping the brains of the E. Jean Carroll jurors into finding Trump guilty.

Among the GOP professional political prognosticators there are many who know that while Trump may cruise to victory in the primary he is likely to lose in the general election. A good example of this comes from the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal.

I expect that at some time an entrepreneur in New York City will start a MAGA bus tour where Trump cult members can hop on a bus and gawk at the various sites significant in Trump's life.

Lower right, Trump visited this German restaurant in 2007 because his head of security at the time was friends with the owners. He autographed a photo of himself. Later the owners took the photo off the wall when patrons complained.

Revealed on "Morning Joe" this morning: "He did it and you know it" is what E. Jean Carroll told Joe Tapocina when they saw each other and shook hands after the trial. She said she looked him right in the eyes.

I think it is fitting that she decided to go on "Morning Joe" today.  She appeared with one of her lawyers, Roberta Kaplan. This is a show that Trump is known to watch at least occasionally.

“Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski mocked former President Trump for sending a statement attacking the MSNBC show. 

“From: 

‘Morning Joe’ hosts mock Trump

From Trump: Will ‘Morning Joe’ be canceled? He and Mika’s ratings are very low—they are having an extremely hard time finding an audience to listen to the Fake News they spurn,” Trump said in his statement. “Losing them would be very sad—hope it doesn’t happen!”

“A couple things here,” Scarborough said, grinning, as he sipped his iced coffee. “I’ve never heard him talk about spurn. Using that as a word. I don’t use the word.” 

“Secondly,” Scarborough said of Trump, “he can’t quit us.” 

“Even had to say, ‘It’d be a shame.’ I’m surprised, we’ve been talking football for two hours,” he added. 

The panel on the show laughed as they read a chyron displayed on the screen during the segment that read: “Morning Joe thanks faithful viewer: Florida retiree sends thoughts on show.” 

I am glad to have been able to see E. Jean Carroll on TV this morning. I found her to be both engaging and forthright. I can see how the jury ruled in her favor. Comparing someone testifying with sincerity and genuine feeling in person, and being cross-examined in an unempathic way, with the video deposition of Trump it had to be a simple task for the jury to decide who to believe. The short deliberation which came as a surprise to legal observers attests to this.

Just a bit of snark:

Trump posted this on Truth Social:

"I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE - A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!"

My take on this:

Trump with his mother, click image to enlarge

On another subject:

This is unrelated to the Carroll-Trump case but very much related to justice. We have the arrest of George Santos on federal charges which if convicted could land him in prison. There are several elements to the Santos case in addition to what will be his fate. One of course is that he has been a big time embarrassment to Republicans. The other, more significantly, is that Kevin McCarthy is hamstrung in being able to pressure him to resign since he needs his vote on the dept ceiling.

Note how this morning the Santos story was top of the website in The Washington Post, inflation number two, and the Trump verdict number three:

The verdict story was even lower down The New York Times website:

On another subject

Comer fails to link president in Biden family probe

The Oversight chair revealed Wednesday that Biden family members, business associates or related companies received more than $10 million from companies run by foreign nationals. He showed no connection to Joe Biden.

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