Journalists must be like weigh station masters as they opine on which Trump straws will break his back.

 I was hoping there would be real news when I saw the featured article when I opened HUFFPOST. First thing in the morning I check their main story just to see what it is. This is what I saw there:

I thought "Wow, they have a scoop about what the title said."
Nope.
Clicking there went here:

This went to updates by Lydia O'Connor:

• Trump Distances Himself From RFK Jr.: 

• Vaccines That Work 'Should Be Used'

• Trump Says He's Hosting Next Year's G20 Summit At His Own Club

• Trump Says You Can Tell Which Immigrants Are Bad By Looking At Them

• Hegseth: Department Of War Will Be All About 'Maximum Lethality'
  and more.

So this is supposed to be main page news?

It is really weak sauce.

Even the Four Trumps on Mt. Rushmore was weak sauce. None of the depictions come close to showing aspects of the aberration of a president worthy of a main page photo. I can get better ones using AI as I do for my Substacks:

Yesterday I wrote “Again Trump shows he's the Master of Distraction: Like a pesky fly on his eye Epstein was a fuss that flew away in a day.”

I tried to show how it is Trump who personally controls the news cycle. However, it is essential to use the correct words here. The news cycle is determined by actual people who fancy themselves to be journalists. They decide which stories merit the most attention. 

Trump can be seen as the metaphorical camel whose back is in danger of breaking as one straw after another is loaded on its back. What is most imporant to grasp in this analogy is that not all of the straws are of equal weight. 

Back in 2016 when I wrote online it was called a blog rather than a Substack, I posted the illustration below (see that webpage here). I repost it here because that’s when I first thouse of the camel’s back analogy as applied to Trump.

It is up to well known journalists, and throw in pundits, historians, and anyone who wants to be seen as an expert, to assume the role of the weighmaster at a truck weigh station.

I made these during Trump’s first term:

Everything I surrounded the truth fueled Popeye (as a hero resisting Trump) with was a straw then. Some were more important than others. All are aspects of his personality today, although I would add sadism. All of the things he has actually done are far more important because they are actions in service of his ultimate goal of destroying democracy.

We can’t predict which, if any, will break his back and crush him. It could be a lightweight straw or it could be a heavy straw.

Ultimately, if it happens, everything he has done added together, that is, will be a bale of metaphorical hay, that leads to his downfall.

Either that or he will soldier on, carrying it all on his back, wihout a care in the world.

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Again Trump shows he's the Master of Distraction: Like a pesky fly on his eye Epstein was a fuss that flew away in a day.

 

One might almost think that Trump’s calling all of the accounts coming from the Epstein survivors a hoax would be a story that had legs. Oh, how naive I am.

Trump called it a hoax (see yesterday’s Substack) ….

…. and the next day RFK Jr. was all over the news. Add this to Trump wanting to rename the Defense Department, and throwing in teasing a federal takeover of the 911 Museum, as well as what was meant to be more media attention grabbing, the meeting on AI chaired by Melania. Because it was planned for the Rose Garden, but was rained out, it was meant to get more coverage. So what happened to the Epstein story in the media? 

Trump is master at dominating the news. Perhaps knowing the poor jobs report would come out today or maybe just a fortuitous coincidence, already this morning we have these two reports:

So far the RFK Jr. story is reverberating. 

If it sticks around long enough and begins to damage Trump in ways he cares about there would seem to be only two ways be could put the story to bed. He could fire him or he could mount an even bigger distraction.

It would have to be bigger…. let’s say

than just illegally murdering 11 drug smugglers by blowing up their ship in international waters. Perhaps Venezuela just gave him an excuse to mount a most major distraction:

Trump could order a military strike against one of their air bases. More likely is his bloviating against their messing with him “or else” and instead ordering a military strike against Chicago and in a what he’d see as a terrific twofer send troops to New Orleans where Jeff Landry would welcome them.

It’s become a cliche to even say that with Trump it is all about the theater (taking over the Kennedy Center is a literal example). He knows how to mount a distraction when he needs to do so.

He has armies with guns and armies with legal briefs at his beck and call. This is just the most recent example of the latter.

Readers of this can be excused for despairing when they see all of this. After all, Trump is the man who had the presence of mind to get up after getting shot by a bullet and give the world one of the greatest money camera shots of all time, and posed for a mug shot very possibly knowing he could make it as iconic as the Iwo Jima photo, 

Our good friends R and D just sent us an email asking if we’d be interested in going to yet another anti-Trump protest (here). 

I don’t know if we’ll be able to go to this. It’s only a 21 minute drive but parking may not be easy. I admit that I have moments when I think along the lines of “why bother.” I haven’t thought of stopping writing this Substack, but I can easily sit here every morning and write it and hope that as an individual I can offer a hopefully unique perspective to an audience that already agrees that Trump is a dangerous dictator on his way to destroying democracy. 

Goddamnit, Trump who famously, or infamously, said we (meaning his people) would get tired of winning so much, has worn me down with his never ever ending victories.

I suspect that like everyone reading this…

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Holy Smokes Hoax: Malice in Trumperland where up is down, black is white, facts are fake, and verifiable sex abuse is a hoax

 

Below are CNN photos of Trump yesterday calling the accounts by the victims of Epstein’s sex ring liars by saying the whole story was a Democrat hoax.

That one would have to explain how utterly impossible it would be for this to be a hoax is an absurdity beyond an absurdity. From the conviction of Epstein and Maxwell to the number of women who didn’t know each other prior to this coming together with consistent accounts of being abused, pulling this hoax off would be as close to impossible as it gets.

It would be a feat of legerdemain that would have required dozens, perhaps hundreds or even more, of the best mind manipulators to secretly come together and put together a deception at the level of D-Day or the Manhattan Project.

Trump apparently thinks he can pull off this it’s a Democrat hoax whopper single-handedly. His performances so far reek of dry flop sweat as he repeats two word tag-lines. I wonder if he’s using Kontane’s Flop Sweat stopper product to stay dry when creating his hoax hoo-ha.

Does he really think this will work as well as his fake news denials? Arguably this was a very effective counter to media reports he wanted to deny. As of 2020 he’d called journalists and news outlets “fake news” nearly 2,000 times (reference). Below I highlight the crucial word, fake, in his response to news revealing that he paid a mere $750 in federal income taxes the year he ran for president:

“It’s fake news,” he told reporters at the White House on Sunday. “It’s totally fake news. Made up. Fake. We went through the same stories. You could have asked me the same questions four years ago. I had to litigate this and talk about it. Totally fake news. No.”

This was his go-to word then:

This is his new go-to worm-out word to deal with what could be the fissure in his facade of invulnerably. 

Let’s face it, with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace discovering their inner feminist selves and, at least for now, abandoning their sycophantic obeisance to Trump, this could the most damaging thing to happen to Trump since Stormy Daniels described his manly manhood.

I thought these numbers were interesting:

Wih RFK Jr. going before a House committee today and providing what must be a welcome distraction from the Epstein matter for Trump, it is striking that he is the least unpopular of all the key Trump officials. Given Trump’s personality and refusal to admit he’s ever wrong, I wonder if these polls will influence whether or not he fires him. He is, after all, the least important of this group of four. Aside from Covid, Trump never cared much about issues related to health.

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Thinking The Unthinkable, By Hal M. Brown

Tue, Aug 26 at 5:23 AM

 

I was going to write a Substack about this before I read my friend Sabrina Haake’s Substack this morning. Then I read her Substack and realized how what I was thinking fit in with what she was saying in her Haake Take titled “Blue states: Stop funding Trump's Confederacy.” It is subtitled “Previously held assumptions about federalism, including taxation, are falling.” I noticed that the illustration she used was Archibald Willard’s “Yankee Doodle” which is also known as “The Spirit of ‘76.”

I wondered why she used this painting rather than an illustration of a Civl War battle like one of these:

Still, even though she wrote about a peaceful civil war the picture is of a battlefield and you can clearly see, in addtion to the drummers and fife player a wounded soldier and a Union soldier raising his hat in victory.

This is her concluding paragraph:

A new kind of civil war is here, but Democrats did not invite it. When our backs are against the wall, facing the firing squad of a rogue president, complicit party, and corrupt high court determined to destroy us, we must act in our own self-interest. Freedom and our nation’s survival depend on it.

I agree completely with what Sabrina is saying about blue states hitting the Trump Confederacy in the wallet.

My focus is on the development we hope never comes to pass. This would be an actual armed confrontation between the New Union and the New Confederacy.

The Oregon Army National Guard consists of 41 armories in 33 communities. (Read about it in Wikipedia.)

Because we drove by one of their amories yesterday and Ann managed to take some decent photos last night I thought I’d use them as part of my Wednesday Substack.

Click above to enlarge.

There are a few scenarios which could develop where blue states would end up mobilizing their National Guards to protect themselves. Much would depend on the legal cover given if the Supreme Court came to its senses and ruled that Trump had violated the Posse Comitatus Act in sending troops to LA and DC. This could come to a head if he does this in Chicago as he has threatend to do.

If Trump defied such a ruling (Sabrina may want to weigh in on this since she’s a lawyer) and tried to take over normal law enforcement functions could the state governors order the National Guard to stop them from doing this? I seems to this non-lawyer that it is possible.

If Trump wanted his own soldiers to enforce his will, it could pit members of the Oregon National Guard against members of the Idaho National Guard (Wiki) or against members of active duty military.

I find it beyond the pale to imagine another actual replay of the Civil War with Americans shooting Americans. I could, however, see some extremely tense face-offs which resulted in a trigger happy soldier shooting someone.

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