Are we on the verge of societal collapse in the US, back into totalitarianism or feudalism, or will this current era pass?
- Ilhan Omar on Trump’s naked bigotry;
- Robert Reich on Trump’s mental decline, and the relaxing of inhibitions in people in their 80s and 90s;
- How anti-science cynics like RFK Jr. have always been around;
- Adam Serwer wonder why Trump’s racism isn’t a problem for his fans;
- Short items about lame ICE recruits, LGBTQ safety standards, and Kennedy Center artists who’ve been stiffed.
Because there was some sort of tax-fraud scheme among Somali immigrants in Minnesota, Trump now trashes the entire nation, its people, and US citizens who immigrated from there. As racist conservatives do.
NY Times, guest essay by Ilhan Omar, 4 Dec 2025: Ilhan Omar: Trump Knows He’s Failing. Cue the Bigotry.
On Tuesday, President Trump called my friends and me “garbage.”
This comment was only the latest in a series of remarks and Truth Social posts in which the president has demonized and spread conspiracy theories about the Somali community and about me personally. For years, the president has spewed hate speech in an effort to gin up contempt against me. He reaches for the same playbook of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and division again and again. At one 2019 rally, he egged on his crowd until it chanted “send her back” when he said my name.
Mr. Trump denigrates not only Somalis but so many other immigrants, too, particularly those who are Black and Muslim. While he has consistently tried to vilify newcomers, we will not let him silence us. He fails to realize how deeply Somali Americans love this country. We are doctors, teachers, police officers and elected leaders working to make our country better. Over 90 percent of Somalis living in my home state, Minnesota, are American citizens by birth or naturalization. Some even supported Mr. Trump at the ballot box.
“I don’t want them in our country,” the president said this week. “Let them go back to where they came from.”
You all good with this, Trump voters?
(I know, I know: The Democrats would take away your guns!)
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And with this, Trump voters?
Robert Reich, 4 Dec 2025: The clearest symptom yet of Trump’s mental decline, subtitled “His brain is turning into sh*t”
After criticizing media coverage about him aging in office, Trump appeared to be falling asleep during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday.
But that’s hardly the most troubling aspect of his aging.
In the last few weeks, Trump’s insults, tantrums, and threats have exploded.
To Nancy Cordes, CBS’s White House correspondent, he said: “Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? You’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person.”
About New York Times correspondent Katie Rogers: “third rate … ugly, both inside and out.”
More examples, including the one above about “garbage”. Then:
What to make of all this?
Trump’s press hack Karoline Leavitt tells reporters to “appreciate the frankness and the openness that you get from President Trump on a near-daily basis.”
Sorry, Ms. Leavitt. This goes way beyond frankness and openness. Trump is now saying things nobody in their right mind would say, let alone the president of the United States.
But then Reich turns to a more general issue.
It’s true that when you’re pushing 80, brain inhibitors start shutting down. You begin to let go. Even in my daily Substack letter to you, I’ve found myself using language that I’d never use when I was younger, like the word “sh*t” in this subtitle.
When my father got into his 90s, he told his friends at their weekly restaurant lunch that it was about time they paid their fair shares of the bill. He told his pharmacist that he was dangerously incompetent and should be fired. He told me I needed to dress better and get a haircut.
He lost some of his inhibitions, but at least his observations were accurate.
I think older people lose certain inhibitions because they don’t care as much about their reputations as do younger people. In a way, that’s rational. Older people no longer depend on their reputations for the next job or next date or new friend. If a young person says whatever comes into their heads, they have much more to lose, reputation-wise.
But Trump’s outbursts signal something more than the normal declining inhibitions that come with older age. Trump no longer has any filters. He’s becoming impetuous.
This would be worrying about anyone who’s aging. But a filterless president of the United States who says anything that comes into his head poses a unique danger. What if he gets angry at China, calls up Xi, tells him he’s an asshole, and then orders up a nuclear bomb?
Is it because you have little left to lose? Or because the brain is actually deteriorating?
It’s time the media reported on this. It’s time America faced reality. It’s time we demanded that our representatives in Congress take action, before it’s too late.
Invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment.
Personally, I’ll be surprised if Trump finishes his term. For one reason or another.
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Slate, Mary Harris, 4 Dec 2025: How Many Kids Will Have to Die for RFK Jr. to Be Stopped?
Key quote:
“Anti-vaccine activists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have been around forever, arguably since the first vaccine, usually shouting from the sidelines, but now they’re not shouting from the sidelines anymore, they’re making policy,” says Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Cynics and the intuitively superstitious will always doubt scientific claims. Despite the enormous amount of evidence that society and societal health has improved over the past century due to application of scientific discoveries, including vaccines.
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The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 4 Dec 2025: Why Doesn’t Trump Pay a Political Price for His Racism?, subtitled “Immigration isn’t breaking our society. We are.”
More about those Somalis.
During a White House meeting on Tuesday, surrounded by his Cabinet, President Donald Trump referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage” and said, “We don’t want them in our country.” No one in Trump’s Cabinet stood up to this expression of gutter racism, although Vice President J. D. Vance enthusiastically banged on the table. The president’s remarks were ostensibly in response to real events—in Minnesota, dozens of members of the Somali diaspora have been implicated in fraud related to social services—but the community does not bear responsibility for the actions of those individuals.
This is such an obvious point, but Trump fans apparently don’t understand this. It’s the essence of xenophobia and prejudice: judging an entire group based on the sins of one, or a few.
Similarly, white Americans as a whole are not responsible for Trump largely dismantling the federal government’s capacity to fight white-collar crime and corruption, his doling out of pardons for people who donate money or commit crimes on his behalf, or his scandalous profiteering. I don’t believe that there is something inherent in white culture that causes Trump to act this way; he is simply a particularly reprehensible human being.
And a good last paragraph:
There is a difference between inheritance and action. I cannot help who my ancestors are, but I can make my own choices. That so many Americans chose to place in power a man who holds people in contempt on the basis of race, religion, and national origin; that so much of the mainstream media conveys this bigotry through tired, obfuscating euphemisms; that there is so low a political price for the president’s racism that he and those around him see little risk in its expression—well, that does say something about America, and Americans. Immigration isn’t breaking our society. That’s a job Americans can do on their own.
This is an example of criticism of mainstream media from the left, for those on the right who think MSM is beholden to the left.
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Briefly noted.
- JMG, 4 Dec 2025 (from Daily Mail): REPORT: New ICE Recruits Are “Fat, Illiterate, Violent”
- They are scraping the bottom of the barrel, to find people anxious to harass brown people on the street. No standards, no principles.
- JMG, 4 Dec 2025 (from NPR): DOJ Orders Prisons To Drop LGBTQ Safety Standards
- Could the administration’s animus toward gays et al be more obvious?
- JMG, 4 Dec 2025 (from Hollywood Reporter): Some Artists Say Kennedy Center Has Stiffed Them
- So, Trump must be actively involved, because this is the kind of thing he’s done his entire career. Not pay his bills.
