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

August 12, 2025

Manic misspelling rage poster Trump gave Paul Krugman a gift so he added “Deranged BUM” to his Substack profile. I wish he'd call me a disparaging name too. By Hal M. Brown

Paul Krugman hardly needs publicity. Check this out:

Below is what the Daily Beast article about this looks like.

If you’re reading this and don’t know who Paul Krugman is, and admire him for his insights, you must be a Trumper who by some twist of fate stumbled on my Substack.

This is the comment I posted on Krugman’s Substack:

Here’s the image I put on BlueSky:

I’ve written so often about Trump’s psychopathology that I am weary of the voice in my head composing new ways to describe the mental aberrations that make him the most dangerously unhinged nation’s leader in history out crazying crazy leaders like Caligula and Idi Amin.

Like other manic malevolent leaders, think Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts, he relishes his power to order “off with their heads.”

The Queen of Hearts had her loyal court. Trump has his. Some of them showed their loyalty yesterday after they spoke following the unhinged manic and malevolent off-the-rails address by Dictator Donald.

In his serious Substack regarding Trump’s lies about violence in D.C. Krugman managed the following bit of levity:

I’m not in competition with Krugman for click. His Substack today, as I write this, got 925 hearts, 240 comments, and 175 restacks.

But, hey I’m human, and considering the time and effort I put into my writing I like knowing people appreciate little old me. I would welcome joining the Trump Esteemed Enemies list and having him call me a nasty name. I could write a Substack about it and put the name in my profile.

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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.

August 10, 2025

Did Michael Cohen just write something that could get him in trouble with the DOJ and Secret Service?

This story is about something Michael Cohen wrote when he worked as a personal lawyer for Trump literally, and as the photos below show, figuratively stood behind him.

Even before I read the article “Trump's ex-lawyer makes 'bold prediction' about president's 'king'-like ambition” on RawStory, I wondered why the headline writer just didn’t write “Michael Cohen makes 'bold prediction' about president's 'king'-like ambition." After all, by now every RawStory reader, like most Americans, know that Michael Cohen was once Trump’s personal lawyer and legal consigliere. From 2018, here’s an article about his backstory.

My not really relevant reaction to the title being pointed out, the RawStory article summarizes Cohen’s Substack for today:

I recommend reading it here.

Here’s how he begins:

I’ve never been shy about making bold, public predictions. And to date, as you have seen, I’ve been right almost every time. This one is no different. We didn’t just elect President Trump to a second term. We gave him power that looks less like a presidency and more like a monarchy. And this King is already using his courts to punish those who stood against him.

Even if you don’t read it, or just skim through it, go to his conclusion. This is where he writes something that could get him in trouble with the DOJ or the Secret Service, or both.

The proverb "when you strike at a king, you must kill him" is attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, although he was expressing an idea that goes back to Machiavelli. In The Prince he wrote "men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge."

It is quite clear what kind of injury Machiavelli was suggesting.

It is a crime to advocate this for a public official and if someone does so it can get them in trouble. Just ask Kathy Griffin.

Addendum:

Here’s Michael Cohen on The Weekend on MSNBC this morning.

In his Substack today, “MAGA and Americanism are antithetical propositions,”Steve Schmidt blasted Laura Loomer for what she wrote about her disgusting attack on the fact that Florent Groberg was a recipient of the Medal of Honor, the highest valor award of the Armed Forces of the United States. It was how he described her that hit me as an albeit crude, but spot-on description of her:

Here’s just a snippet of what Loomer wrote:

Are we supposed to believe the Army couldn’t find a Republican and US born soldier?
They had to find an immigrant who voted for Hillary Clinton and spoke at the DNC as Obama’s guest?

You can read the rest of Schmidt’s Substack.

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