Nightmare before Christmas - the Trump Santa t-shirt collection, by Hal M. Brown

 

If you are familiar with the plot of Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (see Wiki) you know that it is a story about how the denizens of Halloween Town kidnap Santa from Christmas Town. In the story he is rescued. In real life with Trump there's no happy ending like there was in the movie.

I don't remember which website had the ad shown above on it but it was either The New York Times, The Washington Post, or Salon. These are hardly the websites which have readers likely to buy this t-shirt. 

We already know that Trump has been depicted as Jesus' favorite president. Now we also know if the t-shirts on sale are showing the truth about the sentiment of our favorite chubby Christmas gift giver that he is Santa's favorite. If you have any doubts check out some of what I found when I did a Google Image search of the shirt above for similar t-shirts.

When I was looking online I found a few like these that express opposition to Trump:

Favorite felon has a ring to it. We know which naughty or nice list Trump is on.

The one below may or may not be pro-Trump. It may be meant to be an ironic expression of Trump's phallocentrism (look it up here) or it may be serious.

I doubt Trump would be audacious enough to have someone dress as Jesus at a Chistmas Party. If Jesus did attempt to crash his party (images below from Perchance Photo AI) we know he'd end up unceremoniously escorted out, or worse.

I don't see a self-effacing fun loving Trump dressing up as a rolly polly Santa even though he wouldn't need any padding. It would give him a chance to strut into his party saying "ho, ho, ho, illegal aliens gotta go!"

Here's Trump telling Santa about his plans to deport birthright children along with their illegal families and telling him it means he can finish up early on Christmas night with few presents to deliver.

Threated with restricting sleds from flying on Christmas Eve Santa had give the thumbs up to agree with this plan.

Addendum: If you know anything about the George Lucas, the genius who created Star Wars, you know that there's no way in the universe that he'd agree that Donald Trump was attuned to the good side of the Force or that he could be a Jedi. If he saw this I am sure he would be appalled.

This is how the t-shirt ought to look:

Addendum: There's a lots of advice being thrown around based on assessing what the Democrats did wrong and suggesting what they should do right. This is what I think:

What the Democrats need to do is find people like those in the advertising world who convinced so many American's that by smoking Marlboros they could be the Marlboro Man, or by smoking Virginia Slims they could be some exemplar of  ideal womanhood, or if they were Black by smoking Kools they could be cool. Who wins the next election will be whoever markets their product the best to enough of the people who voted for Trump's sales pitch.

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Music for the Trump era: They’ve got the loons, we’ve got the tunes. By Hal M. Brown

Something different for the blog today. Everyone else I read is rehashing what went wrong in the election or doomsaying about what Trump will bring us. I wrote about music. This is where our side wins.

Note: When I posted this in the morning for some reason I erased the title.

The only photo I could find of the J6 Prison Choir was the blurry one (below) which was used to illustrate this article in The UK Telegraph.

Trump will probably pardon all of the people who ended up in prison due to their role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. They no doubt are feeling vindicated. Even those with a job to return to may be looking on ways to (ready for the pun) capitalize on their fame.

Some will go on to become social media personalities and a few may end up being hired by right wing media. 

Members of the J6 Prison Choir, once they are released, we will will no doubt have new songs and they'll probably have an album. They don't have to write them. There are plenty of patriotic songs in the public domain (here's a list).

I expect that they will go on tour, possibly with Kid Rock, and enough people will attend their performances so they will eventually become rich beyond their dreams.

I doubt whatever recording they make will go Platinum as it was falsely claimed their song "Justice For All" did (see article) but I expect people who paid for Trump's  non-fungible token collections (NFT) and made money and bought other Trump crap will shell out for their musical renditions which will be sung with bits of Trump's speeches in the background. That song was number 1 on the iTunes download list (article) for a week and was viewed on YouTube over 500,000 times after its release.

Trump may have the J6 Prison Choir to the White House if Chief of Staff Susie Wiles decides they don't belong in the clown car (read article).

It doesn't really matter if Trump goes beyond pardoning them and calling them patriots by calling them musical artists. This is America. They are famous for being famous. If they get a good manager they can have a musical career which while short-lived can make them money. There might be one or two of them who can carry a tune and be their lead singer.

Picture their concerts with jumbo screens showing Trump dancing and prancing and raising his fist after getting shot at. 

This is from the Business Insider article:

Two songs about Trump's wealth, however, have achieved RIAA certification. 2011's "Donald Trump" by Mac Miller — who later feuded with Trump over the lyrics and called him a "delusional waste of skin and bones" — went platinum. "Up Like Trump," a 2018 song by Rae Sremmurd, has gold certification.

To be sure, "Justice for All" has achieved some success. An image of the plaque included on the event website correctly notes the song charted at No. 1 for weekly digital song sales at one point in March 2023 and reached No 4. on the "Bubbling Under Hot 100," according to Billboard charts reviewed by BI.

Hmmm... even if a record of theirs does sell the million needed to reach Platnium status, it could go Gold with 500,000 sales.

How well do these 20 men sing? You can watch the video and judge for yourself here. I'm not a music critic but I'd say that for their musical careers to really take off they really could use singing lessons.

For comparison here's Kid Rock singing "Never Quit" his anthem to Trump." 

Aside from country singers and rapper Kanye West Trump doen't have an A list musical artist who will sing live for him. He can still use other A-listers music even if they object if he pays royalties (read why here). 

Whether he can convince his suporters that the cat being strangled sounds of the J6 performers is music remains to be seen.

Of his supporters who can sing most are country artists. There's Billy Ray Cyrus. You can decide for yourself listening to him singing Achy Breaky Heart. There's Jason Aldean. Here he is singing Fly Over Country. And then of course there's rapper Kanye West. Here he is 14 years ago in a music video performing Runaway.

Here's an article with a list of all the musicians supporting Trump. I'm not going to provide links to the songs of those I never heard of as my ears are hurting from listening briefly to the music of the others.

Compare the list of Trump's musicians with Kamala's list here. 

I expect that once Trump begins to unleash his dark cloud of despotism over America we will see a new era of protest music similar to what we saw during the civil rights movement and the anti-war protests during the Vietnam War.

His musical minions will have their songs but I expect we will have songs coming from some of singers and song writers like Carole King who were active in the civil rights and anti-war movments back in the day, and others who came on the scene more recently. They will provide anthems for our resistance against Trump's autocracy.

I can see a national tour of some of our top musicians - I am sure someone will come up with a good name for it. Consider some of the duets it could feature. There are the obvious ones like Taylor Swift and Beyonce, but for those of us who are Boomers or older how about a duet with James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen? We even could have a generational mix, for example, Carole King, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift together.

At 81 I don't know how Carly Simon's singing voice is holding up, but she could certainly introduce other acts. Consider:

Carly Simon on meeting Donald Trump: “He was all over me like ugly on an ape” 

There also could be a version of Woodstock. 

For all the bad that we know Trump will usher in there is the power of music. Democracy loving Americans have supremacy in their musical armory to inspire and rally their troops in the battle for what the Founders envisioned as the embodiment of American spirit.

Afterthought:

I wonder if Trump will have live music at his primary inaugural ball, the one where he'll dance with his every so happy loving wife.

I doubt he'll want the country to see him dancing with Melania to the dulcit tones of Kid Rock. Perphaps his very-bestie Vlad will send him the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra.

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Will Trump sign an ethics code before assuming office? By Hal M. Brown

If you have a subscription to The NY Times you can read this article by clicking here:

Read a summary here: "Trump's team hits first roadblock as they start to assume power" in RawStory.

This is from the Times:

In 2019, Congress amended that law to require candidates to create and publicly post an ethics plan before the election and to “include information on how eligible presidential candidates will address their own conflicts of interest during a presidential term.”

That bipartisan law was born in part out of concerns about ethical issues during the first Trump administration.

While Mr. Trump’s appointees were required to comply with ethical codes, Mr. Trump declared shortly before taking office that he would not divest his assets, nor would he place them in a blind trust.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, has since identified more than 3,400 conflicts of interest tied to Mr. Trump during his first administration, among them holding political events and hosting foreign dignitaries at hotels and resorts owned by his company.

How insane is this? Read on:

By refusing to sign that agreement, Mr. Trump effectively faces no limit on contributions and does not need to name his donors publicly. Money raised by the transition is not regulated by any other government agency.

A separate concern involves the other memorandum of understanding, with the White House. Among other things, it sets the conditions under which the current administration can share sensitive government information with the incoming president’s team.

Until the Trump transition signs that document, the Biden administration is legally barred from providing it with the security clearances needed to share classified intelligence and national defense briefings, Mr. Stier said. It also cannot give transition employees physical access to the 438 different federal agencies that they will soon control, and it cannot allow them to review their files.

But by law, that agreement cannot be signed until an ethics plan that conforms to federal statute is submitted to the White House and posted online, creating something of a game of chicken between the outgoing Biden administration and the incoming Trump transition.

If neither side blinks, Mr. Trump’s team would be forced to assume control of the entire federal government cold. That, Mr. Stier said, could leave the country vulnerable at a critical moment.

“The consequences are severe,” Mr. Stier said. “It would not be possible to be ready to govern on Day 1.”

I think that, to put it mildly, this shows a surfeit of arrogance. I can see Trump, knowing he's about to become dictator with a Supreme Court and Congress cheering him on, saying something along the lines of "I don't need to sign no freaking ethics code" and other choice non-grammatical expletive laden lines like saying where Biden's transition team can shove their ethics code.

I don't think Trump believes he needs any transition process that involves members of the Biden administration.

My sense of him in his now supercharged highfalutin narcisstic feeling of having the ultimate unchecked power of a dictator, and his being, oh, let's say being a wee bit narcisstic, is that he thinks he can sashay into the White House without any preparation and start giving orders.

 Tragic as it is to recognize this he can do it.

As for the ethics code, it would go from this...

... to this:

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Phallocentrism

Manosphere

Toxic Masculinity

If Trump has dementia it might be a kind doctors have never seen. Call it weaveheimers. If not, the weave may be as brilliant as he says it is. By Hal M. Brown, MSW

I was among numerous mental health experts who thought there was evidence that Trump was in the early stages of dementia. Most of what we pointed to as symptomatic was his fragmented speaking style where he jumped from disconnected topic to disconnected topic. We often called it word salad. He never denied he did this but he described it in a positive way. This is from The New York Times on Sept. 1. 2024:

Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius.

Former President Donald J. Trump’s speeches often wander from topic to topic. He insists there is an art to stitching them all together.

But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.

“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”

Asked for examples of the technique, the Trump campaign provided what it called a “masterclass weave” — a four-minute, 20-second video of the candidate speaking at a rally in Asheville, N.C., in August in which he bounces from energy bills to Hunter Biden’s laptop to Venezuelan tar to mental institutions in Caracas to migrant crime to “the green new scam” to Vice President Kamala Harris. 

 

Trump has said his speaking style, his weave, is genius. What if it is? Here's more from The NY Times:

Certainly, in the history of narrative, there have been writers celebrated for their ability to be discursive only to cleverly tie together all their themes with a neat bow at the end — William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Larry David come to mind. But in the case of Mr. Trump, it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell.

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University and a renowned Shakespeare scholar, ruminated about Mr. Trump’s use of the word: “I read Trump’s comment bragging that ‘I do the weave.’ I take him at his word, as one of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of ‘weave’ is ‘to pursue a devious course.’”

James Joyce was celebrated for his stream of consciousness that, over the course of hundreds of pages, revealed a person’s temperament. William Faulkner was an early adopter of the weave, engaging in a kind of circular storytelling, as seen in “Absalom, Absalom!” These weavers were trying to capture on the page the inconstant nature of a shifting mind.

If it is not an indication of dementia or psychosis, as a Freudian I see his speaking style as free association. Instead of putting a filter between his unconscious and what comes out of his mouth he does what a patient on an analyst's couch does. He says whatever comes into his mind without censoring it or trying to make it sound rational. If he was in psychoanalysis with his analysts help he would try to understand the messages his unconscious was sending him.

Because he often did this so-called weave during rallies he had the audience reaction to decide which lines were effective. If the crowd cheered or laughed he incorporated the better lines into subsequent rally speeches and interviews. If an audience didn't repsond the first time he'd know not to use the lines again. The effective lines became part of his shtick.

If Trump has dementia we are likely to see it worsen over the next few years. If he doesn't I will be able to say that I was wrong.

It will be a major mea culpa. After all I'm the clinical social worker in the title of this Salon Chauncey DeVega column:

Clinical social worker: "With the Trump Bible, one must consider dementia"

Here's more of what I wrote at other times:

It wasn't just myself and a handful of clinicians seeing signs of dementia with Trump. Here's a general Google search of "Trump dementia" and here's a Google News search of the same terms. 

There are two things we will discover about Trump in the coming months and years. One is whether he really wants to follow Project 2025 chapter and verse and remake the country into an authoritarian country with him as its dictator. The signs that he is trying to do this will be obvious. The other thing we will know is whether he has dementia because this condition, while its course varies, always gets worse.

If Trump has been doing the brilliant and beautiful weave perhaps we'll see that he's created a tapestry you might want in your house.

However, we don't know whether he'll create a lovely tapestry or an ugly scary one.

If he has dementia his weave could create something that looks like this:

These images were created by Perchance Photo AI

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Addendum on a personal note: 

I live in a continuing care retirement community in a liberal suburb of Portland, Oregon. Many of the residents here, almost all of whom are politically progressive, have taken to wearing generic name tags. I had my own made to reflect how I was feeling. The first used as a background Salvadore Dali's painting The Persistence of Memory (see Wiki article). 

Then as the election approached with the polls neck and neck I had another one made with the figure from Edvard Munch's "The Scream" (see Wiki).

Thinking Kamala might win I had yet a third one made with another Dali painting, Le Sommeil (Sleep) which you can read about here. Here's the excerpt that resonates with me:

Freudian theories, however, extends beyond just a consideration of the unconscious. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Freud, the renowned psychologist proposed a theory, Thanatos, or 'Death Instinct', in which he suggests that all animals, including humans, try to prolong their life by defending all threats of death that are inappropriate to their particular species. In humans, this is manifest as aggression if the threat is external and self-destruction when directed at the self. The counterpart to Thanatos is Eros in which an individual life moves towards a 'natural' death. Le Sommeil seems to suggest that tension, the head in a catatonic state supported by a series of crutches.

Now I am not sure which one I will be wearing. Perhaps I will alternate. 

(Click below to enlarge)