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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Wait a New York minute, Trump may have a case that his hush money trial should be moved to federal court

 By Hal Brown

I just read about this:

Click above to read article

Trump’s lawyers called District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution politically motivated and argued that the federal courts have so-called “protective jurisdiction” to prevent state hostility to a federal officer. This is a legal maneuver, but wait a New York minute, let's analyze this from an entirely different perspective. 

If Trump is correct in his belief about grabbing women, that is that if you're a star you can do it, or anything else that is illegal for that matter, then it stands to reason that if a president does it, he can do it too. Or, to quote Nixon, when a president does it, it's not illegal.  

From shooting someone on Fifth Avenue to sexually assaulting women, to the comparatively minor crime of paying hush money to someone who could upset your political aspirations if they went public with what they knew, to making false and misleading financial statement to get better loan deals, Donald Trump believes that he is so far above the law that he'd need the Hubble telescope to even see where the law was.

Click images below to enlarge them

Let's remember that Richard "I'm not a crook" Nixon set a precedent for getting away with being a criminal.

Here's the famous phrase in context:

...because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got. 

Nixon was saying he legally earned everything he had. Today Trump is not only facing charges that he tried to steal an election and stole documents, but that in the New York civil case that the Trump organization basically stole money.

Thanks to Gerald Ford, Nixon never was tried and convicted, let alone indicted for Watergate.

Not that Geraldo Rivera should be worth a thimble full of digital newsprint, but his proposal that Biden should pardon Trump was greeted by presidential laughter and Twitter mockery (read HUFFPOST article).

These are the most snarky tweets in the HUFFPOST article:

You can predict how Trump, the most psychoanalyzed world leader since Adolf Hitler, will react in given situations. On the one chance in a gazillion that Biden would issue a preemptive pardon for Trump I think we can speculate that Trump wouldn't accept it. 

It remains to be seen whether Trump will end up playing with his little putter in a prison yard, let alone be indicted and tried in criminal court for any felonies which carry a prison sentence. However if flop sweat had a stink to it I'd say that even if Trump was normal and not in narcissistic delusional denial being around him would be worse than being on the wrong end of a threatened skunk.

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DeSantis on Trump extradiction, it's all about me, me, me, me...

 By Hal Brown

Caricatures by DonkeyHotey

If the reporting is correct Trump will present himself for arraignment  in New York and not hole up at Mar-a-Lago making himself the most famous fugitive since Julian Assange . Notwithstanding this Ron DeSantis, made a play for publicity minutes after the Trump indictment was announced:

Ignoring the antisemitic dog whistle about George Soros, the key words in his tweet are that Florida will not assist in an extradition request. 

The procedure and process for extradition is spelled out in detail here. It is in the US Constitution:

Extradition Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article IV Section 2) requires that:

A person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.

This is how Business Insider addresses what DeSantis tweeted: 

There are two ways that someone can be extradited from Florida to another state. These are described below.

Excerpt from Business Insider:

In the more common method — which DeSantis appeared to refer to — New York Gov. Kathy Hochul would send an extradition demand to the Florida governor. The governor's only role is making sure the demand meets all the legal requirements before ordering the extradition, legal experts told Insider. The demand would have to include a copy of the indictment, proving there's a warrant out for Trump's arrest.

If DeSantis wanted to slow the process he could ask his legal affairs office or a prosecutor to review Hochul's extradition demand and write a report before signing off on it. If the extradition demand is legitimate, however, he'll have to sign it within 60 days, legal experts said. He could also delegate and let another member of the Florida executive branch sign off on Hochul's extradition demand.

In the second extradition method, Manhattan prosecutors could bypass the governors entirely and ask a Florida court to order Trump to show up in New York court.

This Newsweek article also explains why DeSantis couldn't block an extradition request.

I can't imagine Donald Trump doing anything that might make it appear to his supporters that he is in any way, shape, or form accepting a favor from Ron "DeSanticomious". As I write this someone on MSNBC just agreed with me saying that there's no way Trump would want to make DeSantis look like the alpha dog. Jonathan Lemire just called it political theater coming from DeSantis. The MSNBC panel is agreeing that this matter has become a clown show.

None of this matters to DeSantis. He is competing with Kevin McCarthy for headlines:

DeSantis is threatening to do something that won't happen. McCarthy is threatening to do something, absurd as it is, which he can actually do. Still, DeSantis with his rhetorical flourishes has the more buzzy tweet.

Of course nobody's tweets can compete with the often all caps "truths" coming from Trump on his Truth Social platform.  

Unless the judge in Manhattan restricts what he can post or say about his indictment, or his lawyers convince him to put one sock over his fingers and another into his mouth, I expect Trump will continue to rant and rave. 

I predict that this posturing about horrors of Trump's indictment by DeSantis will pass since in his black heart I am certain he wants nothing but a shitload of bad for Trump.

Update: 

"Empty posturing": Experts rip DeSantis' "cheap and performative" threat to block Trump extradition

"It shows a real contempt for the rule of law in this country"

By SAMAA KHULLAR

PUBLISHED MARCH 31, 2023 1:21PM (EDT)

Addendum:

Watch Rachel Maddox discussing what DeSantis tweeted:

At the end of her show when she did the handoff to Lawrence O'Donnell she invited Stormy Daniels to appear on her show and wished her the best in making money off of this new development..

More:

It seem as if all the pundits predict that DeSantis is biding his time before announcing that he's going to run against Trump. Heather "Digby" Parton is the first person I've read who questions the inevitability of this:

Count me among those who think it's quite likely that instead of harming his chances of winning the Republican nomination, this indictment and any that follow, will almost guarantee it. As we can see by the reaction from the elected officials, it's not just the MAGA hardcore who feel compelled to rush to defend him. This is an organizing tool and a fundraising vehicle for the whole party and it may just vault him to the nomination without much competition. It's even possible that DeSantis might decide not to run after all. Article

---------------------------------------------------

On an only slightly related subject, yesterday I was wondering what the covers of the New York City tabloids would look like this morning. The New York Daily News has had a number of snarky covers featuring Trump so I was hoping to see one today. However they played it straight. It was the Murdoch NY Post which went with a snarky cover.

Click above to enlarge. Old Trump and Stormy cover upper right.

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Predictions of Trump's legal downfall could be a big nothing burger, but what if it's the opposite?

 Predictions of Trump's legal downfall could be a big nothing burger, but what if it's the opposite? 

What if the Trump indictment proves to be a giant everything burger with all the fixings?

By Hal Brown

Trump not only has nicknames for just about everyone he wants to disparage. He also is referred to in numerous ways by his enemies when they post comments about him on progressive websites. Here's an exhaustive list of both, obviously out of date since it's from 2020.

The man with many names has apparently decided that all-caps is the way to go on his Truth Social posts, leaving no other way to scream his outrage unless the techies working there decide to add formatting so he can add bold or enlarge the font. Click below to enlarge without going to Truth Social:

If these posts are any indication, there's at least one person who doesn't think the legal machinations happening behind the scenes represent a big nothing burger. 

Progressive pundits are handling the prospect that the coming Stormy Daniels case ending up with an indictment gingerly with a lot of equivocation and the most common word you hear and read is "if".

Progressives and anti-Trumpers of any stripe by and large don't want to engage in wishful thinking by getting their hopes up in anticipation lest nothing come of this. After all, Trump has avoided serious consequences for his misdeeds so many times in the past that one runs out of metaphors and similes to describe what he's like in this regard. For example fill in the blank here: he's been as slippery and slimy as a __________.

To the vast majority of us, engaging in an illegal act involving $130,000 and an adult film star, and getting caught would scare the living crap out of us. Still, many pundits tending to writing this off  or minimizes this because ,not only of Trump's history of avoiding having his life seriously disrupted by his lawlessness, but because even though he lies about how much money he has, for a multi-millionaire $130,000 is chump change.

My own view is a bit more nuanced. I am a hard and fast disbeliever in karma, that is, as in Hinduism and Buddhism the belief that the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence is viewed as deciding their fate in future existences. 

If I did believe in karma I would be thinking how fitting it would be to see that the first domino to fall in Trump's delicious destruction would be something involving his behavior with a woman. Of all the women who could start this process I'll be happy if it is the one he once thought was gorgeous and now calls "horseface". 

I wrote Clinton: It depends on the meaning of 'is", while Trump's basic defense re. Stormy depends on the meaning of the word "affair" and see that Crooks and Liars also published the same thing in 'Sleazebag': Trump Reacts To Stormy Daniels Meeting With Prosecutors -Lumpy didn't get much sleep last night.

So, if the former President hadn't seen her in 18 years, what was the $130,000 payment in 2016 for? And he keeps using the word "affair" when it was allegedly a one-time sexual encounter. And the sexual (alleged!) encounter occurred in 2006. This feels like a badly scripted soap opera.

Stormy Daniels humorously noted that what happened could only be considered an affair in Trump's mind (click to see on Twitter or below to enlarge image without going to Twitter):

I will add, just because it bears repeating, is that Stormy called this the worst 90 seconds of her life.

I am always in quest of really good hamburgers. 

While I don't want to get my hopes up too high, there is mounting evidence that realistically one or another case against Trump will be the first rock to fall leading to a legal avalanche that will bury Trump.

I admire Stormy Daniels. She has astutely handled the fame that Donald Trump handed her on a golden platter. She avoided becoming a political pawn and made career moves which proved she was anything but a run-of-the-mill adult film performer.

Full disclosure: Stormy Daniels is one of the 123 people I follow on Twitter:

Perhaps she'll retweet this:

Addendum

Even if Trump is indicted and eventually this all turns out to be a plate of beans without a juicy burger underneath Trump will experience the following:

"Look, Jake (Tapper), he's very anxious about the prospect of being indicted for a couple of reasons," she began. "Yes, two things can be true at once: he is aware that there are reasons to believe this could help him politically, we have heard a lot about this morning already, but he does not want to face getting arrested, which is what happens when you get indicted."

"You get fingerprinted, you get brought in, you have to ask for bail," she elaborated. "None of that is something that he's excited about." on CNN's"State of the Union," the New York Times' Maggie Haberman (story).

This is what Chris Cristie said here:

"But the vision of a former president of the United States being processed, fingerprinted, mug shot," he added. "You know, what else do you expect Trump to say, as I said to [George Stephanopoulos] last week, than to say it helps his campaign? But being indicted, I don't think it ever helps anybody.

For a change, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a voice of restraint on her Twitter page (here):

Clicking above will enlarge image but not go to Twitter.

About the blog:

I am posting these essays on both Booksie and Medium. It is gratifying and motivating to know people read what I write. When I was banned from Daily Kos and switched only to posting my opinion writing on my online readership dropped significantly. Now it averages around 1500 a week at this address, but by posting the same story on two new platforms there are additional readers.

Please scroll down to the comments link and let readers know what you think. Sharing on social media, also through the links below, is appreciated. New to the blog, note that the archives are on the very bottom of the screen.

Trump has ants is his pants and so does this guy named Steve Cheung

Trump has ants is his pants and so does this guy named Steve Cheung

By Hal Brown

This is a logo, title-card, or title-screen owned by Treehouse TV for Ants in Your Pants. Fair use.

It would have been easy to put ants in the background of the image used in the HUFFPOST top of the webpage article:

Click above to read article

The word "antsy" is derived from the saying having ants in one's pants:

Imagining this literally happening to you evokes decidedly unpleasant feelings. Even tiny sugar ants, itchy ick, but imaging carpenter or red ants, ugh!

Rather than put a background of ants in my illustration (just for my fun and hopefully readers enjoyment) I changed the ad that appeared in the article:

Click above to enlarge image

Trump did nothing wrong? Hmmmm... 

I suppose just like his claiming he didn't have an affair with Stormy Daniels (as I wrote here, he didn't, he had a one-night-stand, the worst 90 seconds of Ms. Daniels' life) it depends on the meaning of the word "wrong" (below is how the dictionary defines it):

Click above to enlarge image

This is from the HUFFPOST article:

“President Donald J. Trump is completely innocent, he did nothing wrong, and even the biggest, most Radical Left Democrats are making that clear,” Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for his campaign, said in a statement. “From Russia, Russia, Russia, to the Mueller Hoax, to Impeachment Hoaxes 1 and 2, and even the Unlawful Mar-a-Lago Raid, Democrats have investigated and attacked President Trump since before he was elected — and they’ve failed every time.”

Steven Cheung

Steven Cheung, who is quoted above, is basically mouthing the words from his boss. Wikipedia tells us that he used to be a communications executive for the Ultimate Fighting Championship and attended, but not necessarily graduated from, California State University in Sacramento. In a Politico interview he said:

“My career began in the California governor’s office as a communications and speechwriting intern while in college. It was one of the most rewarding jobs I’ve ever had, because I learned the importance about what not to do just as much as what I should do. That experience has helped guide me throughout a variety of jobs in my career from working on political campaigns across the country to sports organizations like the UFC.”

Since Mr. Cheung was a speechwriting intern for Gov.

Arnold Schwarzenegger it is fair to assume he knows the meaning of the word "wrong" even if Donald Trump doesn't.

He must also know what side of the bread his butter has to go on. For example, he worked for the Ultimate Fighting Championship which it by some accounts is a scripted pseudo-sports competition, for example It's all fake, right? A professional wrestler explains everything. Whether these matches are scripted or not, you know anyone promoting them has to make sure fans believe the outcomes aren't pre-determined.

There are so many prevarication promoting people today working for right-wing politicians and media who must have in their job description that they have to be adept at saying the opposite of the truth. They could be working for Big Brother.

What the hell... I made the illustration anyway:

.Also published on Medium and on Booksie, because why not?

Please scroll down to the comments link and let readers know what you think. Sharing on social media, also through the links below, is appreciated. New to the blog, note that the archives are on the very bottom of the screen.