(draft)
This can’t go on indefinitely; it hasn’t before.
Robert Reich, 18 Aug 2025: Why Trump will fail, subtitled “The iron law of grovelers and those to whom they grovel”
Monica Crowley, a former Fox News personality who is now Trump’s chief of protocol, apparently left behind in a public area of an Alaskan hotel documents describing confidential planned movements of Trump and Putin during their Friday meeting in Alaska.
That’s nothing compared to Emil Bove, Trump’s new nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, who reputedly told subordinates at the Department of Justice that they should tell the courts “f*uck you” and ignore any court order blocking the deportations of Venezuelan migrants declared to be gang members.
And then Billy Long, E.J. Antoni…
I haven’t even mentioned the towering ineptitude of Trump’s Cabinet picks, such as Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kristi Noem. Or the flagrant cruelty and wild negligence of Trump assistants Russell Vought and Stephen Miller.
How to explain the rise of so many inept and unprincipled people?
Easy. They could never succeed on their own merits. As soon as their brainless incompetence became apparent — likely as soon as they took the first job that required some degree of intelligence and integrity — they were fired.
So they learned that the if they wanted to be rewarded with promotions, money, and power, they could not rely on the normal processes and systems of recognition for jobs well done. If they were to make anything of themselves, they must instead become ass-lickers, lapdogs, and sycophants.
Thus:
They must latch onto someone who values loyalty above integrity or competence, someone for whom fawning obsequiousness is the most important criterion for being hired and promoted, ideally someone who cannot tell the difference between a groveling toady and a knowledgeable adviser.
Enter Trump.
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Heather on our idiot-child president.
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from and American:: August 18, 2025
Excerpts…
This morning, J.D. Wolf of Meidas News pulled together [I inserted the link, from HCR’s soures] all of Trump’s self-congratulatory posts from Sunday morning, when the president evidently was boosting his ego after Friday’s disastrous meeting with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Trump shared an AI-generated meme of himself with a large male lion standing next to him and the words “Peace through Strength. Anyone can make war, but only most courageous [sic] can make peace.” He posted memes claiming he is the “best president…in American history” and the “G[reatest] O[f] A[ll] T[ime], a “legend.”
Trump also reposted material from two QAnon-related accounts and pushed the QAnon belief that the Democratic Party is “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.” Trump has faced a rebellion among his QAnon supporters as he and administration officials have refused to release information from the federal investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and have moved Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted of sex trafficking children, to a minimum-security prison camp and given her work-release privileges. It appears he’s working to make QAnon supporters forget that he was named in those files and to lure them back to his support.
…
Trump’s social media account this morning posted a long screed saying the president is “going to lead a movement to get rid of” mail-in ballots and voting machines, and lying that the U.S. is the only country that uses mail-in voting because it is rife with fraud. As usual, the post claimed that Democrats “CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE” and claimed they “are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM.” The post said he would sign an executive order “to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”…
This is bonkers across the board. Dozens of countries use mail-in voting, and there is zero evidence of widespread voter fraud in the U.S. Just today, news broke that right-wing channel Newsmax will pay $67 million to Dominion Voting Systems for spreading false claims that the company’s voting technology had been rigged to give the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.
…
These obvious lies make it seem crystal clear that Trump and his loyalists are preparing to reject any election results that they don’t like.
Trump’s panic about facing voters is increasingly evident. His job approval ratings are already abysmal, and the fallout from his tariffs and deportations is only now beginning to show. Last Thursday, a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the Producer Price Index—wholesale costs that will likely show up later in consumer costs—jumped 0.9% in July, the largest jump since June 2022, when the U.S. was mired in post-pandemic inflation. The wholesale price of vegetables jumped 38.9% in July.
With examples about the effects of tariffs, among other topics.
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Another pair of related items.
Remember how conservatives have always stressed states’ rights? That’s what they’ve always said the Civil War was about (not slavery). They’re not so concerned about states’ rights anymore.
CNN, analysis by Aaron Blake, 18 Aug 2025: Trump’s remarkable statement against states’ rights
President Donald Trump’s announcement Monday that he will sign an executive order aimed at getting rid of mail-in ballots and voting machines seems unlikely to amount to much. He doesn’t appear to have any such authority, and legal challenges would surely follow.
But it was instructive in one way: It made clear the president elected to lead the party of states’ rights has very little regard for states’ rights.
Indeed, he almost seems to disdain them.
And:
While selling his new pitch to get rid of mail-in voting and voting machines, Trump included this remarkable pair of sentences.
“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
Trump has described the states as “agents” of the federal government before in this context, but without casting them as subservient to him personally.
This is a rather novel take on the Constitution, to put it mildly.
All his MAGA fans don’t care, likely won’t notice. One more bit:
But just as striking as Trump’s claim to power on Monday was his explicit statement that states are merely his “agents.”
This is very difficult to square with decades of conservative orthodoxy, which holds that the federal government should be small and that states should lead the way.
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On the contrary. Trump’s administration wants to control everything at every level.
NY Times, guest essay by Thomas B. Edsall, 19 Aug 2025: The Mind-Boggling Intrusiveness of Donald J. Trump
The Trump administration ranks among the most intrusive in American history, driving the tentacles of the federal government deep into the nation’s economy, culture and legal system.
Economically, the administration is dictating corporate behavior through tariffs, subsidies and the punishment of disfavored industries and companies, while rewarding allies with tax breaks and deregulation. And that’s all before the government takes its cut.
Culturally, Trump is seeking to redefine the boundaries of public discourse: pressuring universities, elevating grievance politics and reshaping federal agencies to reflect ideological loyalty rather than expertise or experience.
Within the legal system, the administration is aggressively reshaping the federal judiciary, asserting executive power over independent institutions and using the Justice Department for political ends.
Taken together, these interventions reveal a presidency determined to expand executive reach into virtually every sphere of national life.
Again, his MAGA fans haven’t notice, or approve!
As usual with Edsall essays, this one goes on with many quotes from various sources to support this thesis.
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Links about the MAGA/religious conservative mindset.
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 19 Aug 2025: Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick demands citizens stand for Christian prayers—or else
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JMG, 19 Aug 2025: Charlie Kirk: Naturalized Citizens “Are Not Americans”
Again, conservatives are obsessed with purity, and tribalism. Not principles.
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JMG, 19 Aug 2025: Trump Attacks “Woke Out Of Control Smithsonian” For Teaching “How Bad Slavery Was” Instead Of Hailing US
Once again: tribalism. The tribe is good. You are good. All of our tribe are good. Rely only on the stories we tell you. It’s the others who are bad.
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JMG, 19 Aug 2025: Charlie Kirk And Energy Secretary Chris Wright Agree That “Science Says Nothing” About Climate Change
Tell me you’re an uneducated ignoramus without saying those words.
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Reading the latest issue of The Week, and a piece about “Will medical science survive RFK Jr.?” that quotes this piece, Spitting on a Miracle, from Bulwark, by Andrew Egger.
It concludes thus. The last line is the point.
When it comes to questions of misinformation, you can always find a line of heterodox thinking that wants to scold the elites first. People are supposed to believe crazy things about COVID and the shots because Anthony Fauci was too hectoring, or the official guidance for how to deal with the pandemic changed too many times, or because Joe Biden was too heavy-handed with vaccine mandates. But it’s impossible to tell that story with a straight face here. America didn’t turn on an unbelievably promising vaccine technology that literally just saved millions of our lives like two seconds ago because of an elite failure. They did so because right-wing distrust for anything that feels “official” is a suppurating wound on the body politic, and the infection has spread to the brain.
