If you can't taste the Democracy killing poison in Trump's Kool-Aid there's something wrong with you.

 

Sabrina Haake wrote Governance by deception and this prompted me to respond with the comment below.

Drinking the Kool-Aid, indeed, but this well known phrase coming from Jonestown prompted me to wonder what it would taste like. I doubt even Kool-Aid would mask the taste. The following is from a 2006 newspaper article in Australia.

....

The case is a tragedy, but a doctor says it solved a long unanswered question - what does the deadly poison cyanide taste like?

An Indian man who committed suicide left a hastily scrawled note describing the taste of the fatal toxin, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported on Saturday.

"Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid," he wrote, according to the paper.....

This leads me to wonder how brainwashed those who are drinking both his cyanide laced economic Kool-Aid and all his other poisonous policies have to be not to taste it. The sickly sweet drink may or may not mask the taste of the poison Trump is feeding the country.

Trump is using his poison to murder democracy. We don't need a taste test to verify this. We just need common sense.

Addendum: There are ways to test for actual cyanide.

To 500 to 1000 cc of the solution to be tested add 1 to 2 cc ammonium sulphide, (NH4)2S, and evaporate just to dryness. The final stages of evaporation should be done slowly. Cool, add 10 cc water, stir well, let settle, and filter. To the filtrate add 2 drops of saturated ferric chloride, FeCl3, solution. A red coloration indicates the presence of cyanide.

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30 Barbies: Not good at parenting or at the maths. By Hal M. Brown

 In the past few days we’ve had Trump or his minions prove that they probably failed their math (or as the Brits say “maths”) in grade school. 

Let’s start with the most ridiculous:

Who gives their kid 30 dolls?

Then we had this story:

As of May 2024, there are 291,000 migrant children who arrived in the US as unaccompanied minors who were set free and never given a date to appear in immigration court — meaning there is no way to track their whereabouts.

That is in addition to the 32,000 children that Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities released into the US with hearing dates but then failed to show in court, according to the 14-page report — which tracked a period from October 2018 to September 2023.

One federal whistleblower said that she believes many of these vulnerable kids could already be in the hands of criminals and sex traffickers.

Over a five year period 32,000 children didn’t appear in court when they were supposed to. One, count them, one federal whistleblower said they could be in the hands of criminals and sex traffickers. What the hell does “many” mean? Sure, they could be. But then again, how does she know? 

How about this one?

Trump’s Cabinet members, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, spoke in glowing, sycophantic terms about their boss. But Attorney General Pam Bondi took it a step further, claiming that Trump had actually saved the lives of around two out of three Americans. Bondi cited recent fentanyl seizures as the reason for this supposedly momentous accomplishment.

What about DOGE, you might ask?

MONEYWATCH

DOGE says it has saved $160 billion. Those cuts have cost taxpayers $135 billion, one analysis says.

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, says it has saved $160 billion through its push to root out wasteful or fraudulent government spending. But that effort may also have come at a cost for taxpayers, with a new estimate from a nonpartisan research and advocacy group estimating that DOGE's actions will cost $135 billion this fiscal year.

The analysis seeks to tally the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity, according to the Partnership for Public Service (PSP), a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce.

PSP's estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE's actions, from paid leave to productivity hits. The $135 billion cost to taxpayers doesn't include the expense of defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE's actions, nor the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS.

Then there’s the word Trump says is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. Trump hasn’t claimed that his tarriffs have saved the government, and you, one red cent. I have to hand it to him for not trying to spin that falsehood.

Oops…. refer to my first example. He’s admitting indirectly that the tarrifs are actually costing money for parents doing their Christmas shopping.

There are a few numbers that Trump can’t ignore. These are those coming from the Stock Market. He has a way to admit that the numbers are bad but has a way to spin them.

Trump insisted that Joe Biden — who has been out of office for three months — is to blame for the stock market's plummeting in response to Trump's sweeping tariffs.

As for the rest of the economy:

Whether it is Trump’s ability to estimate crowd sizes or characterize vote counts (remember his non-landslide landslide), his ability to play fast and loose with numbers is a model for his sycophants to emulate to curry favor with him. They just make up impossible numbers to show how well they are doing their jobs and he smiles and nods in approval.

I suppose one could say that it is human nature to see what one wants to see or not see even if it contradicts common sense. After all, as I wrote about yesterday, Trump looked at a fake photo of Abrego Garcia's hand and didn’t see that that it was a really bad photoshop with the added M,S, and 3 off-center.

I did a better job putting MAGA there and I am an amateur:

Back to the dolls. Even Trump’s two dolls is probably double the number of dolls a sensible parent would give to their child for Christmas. Unless they are giving their child a Barbie and a Ken most would give their child one doll. We don’t know how many dolls Trump gave Ivanka for Christmas. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gave her an entire set of Barbie fashionista dolls. 

What better way to teach her how to look the way he wants her to look.

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Fake Photogate: Trump's MS-13 Garcia hand tattoo shows how far he's willing to go to gaslight us. By Hal M. Brown (He's either gaslighting us or gaslighting himself.)

 

This may seem like a small thing, but it isn’t.

Below is how Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s hand really looks:

Here’s what Trump says it looks like:

This so obviously a photoshop that it beggers the imagination that anyone thinks he really has the letters M,S,1, and 3 tattooed on his hand. One would think one of the DOGE incel boys could have created an image that actually looked real.

I am not an expert by any means but while it took me a half hour of trial and error, I managed to erase MS13 and to add my own letters to the image Trump displayed. As impossible as it would be, I wish Garcia had MAGA tattooed on his hand. Unfortunately, there’s no Spanish word for Maga, although there are in other languages (reference).

Polifacts explains why nobody in MS-13 would have the other tattoos which Garcia has on their hand. Futher, Snopes elaborates on this saying that some of the tattoos are real but that the image is altered.

We have two possibilities here. One is that Trump just took it on faith that the photo someone gave him was real. Nobody knows whether he really believes Garcia is, or was, a member of MS-13. The other is that he knew the photo was fake and he decided to lie about it. I am not sure which explanation is worse.

On April 3rd I wrote about all of the possible “gates” we could attribute to Trump (here).

We could add another gate to Trump’s reign in the White House: Fake Photogate.

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