Instructions for interpreting our Orange Toddler monster

Is he serious -- or is he bluffing? Journalist and activist Parker Molloy has some suggestions for navigating that question while Trump continues to bark and weave while threatening genocide.

She's insightful in describing how most of our media play Trump's game, falling for his lying feints over and over again.

By Tuesday, Operation Epic Fury had been running for six weeks. The whole time, Trump had been telling anyone listening exactly what he planned to do. He said Iran could be “taken out in one night,” and named the bridges and power plants that would come down. Each of those threats was parsed by the political press. Each was processed as leverage or theater. Each was written off as Trump being Trump.

Then the bombs started falling. On Kharg Island. On power plants. On bridges.

The ["take him seriously, but not literally] frame has a near-perfect track record of being wrong in one direction. It rarely overestimates how far Trump will go. It only underestimates him. A prediction that’s always wrong in the same direction stops being analysis and starts being an alibi.

[Newsweek senior editor-at-large Josh] Hammer reached for the ... line on the day Trump posted that a whole civilization would die that night. That’s the tell. That’s what “seriously, not literally” is actually for. The frame comes out when the sentence is so plainly monstrous that the only defense left is to tell the reader not to read. 

That's the pattern we are caught in by this decompensating madman. If JD cannot pull a rabbit out of an empty hat to cover up the United States' strategic defeat by the mullahs, she predicts we'll see some variant again:

... Since the war began, Trump has repeatedly backed off his own deadlines at the last possible hour. The sequence is always the same: threat, deadline, airstrike, walkback, a news cycle crediting him with dealmaking, the original threat filed away. The walkback itself becomes retroactive evidence that the morning post was never serious. And the next morning, he can say something worse.

By Wednesday morning, the headlines were about the Hormuz ceasefire. The genocide post was yesterday’s news. The laundering was happening in real time. 

Trump is failing at home. Even Melania is undermining his defenses. How about a little genocide in the one arena where his power is still apparently unfettered?  

Friday cat blogging

 

You might say Mio is putting his best face forward. You'd be right. Actually, he's a softy, but in this slightly wary posture, it is hard to tell.

 

Janeway, on the other hand, looks sweet and loving -- until she decides to explore her surroundings with teeth and occasional claws. I have the scars to prove it.

"The strikes were everywhere, all at once."

The Guardian's soft spoken reporter Will Christou spells out the shock in the Lebanese capital when Israel bombed central Beirut, killing at least 250 yesterday. This ten minute clip is much longer than what I usually post here, but I would urge readers to take the time to watch. It's not gory; instead, it is morally devastating.

The leaders of Israel are ethical monsters, as are our own US rulers. As, of course also, are the Iranian rulers and the princelings of the Gulf States. 

We give a f**k

That distinguished commentator on journalist practice and ethics Margaret Sullivan recognized immediately that the Orange Toddler's bleat would cause trouble for honest working reporters. 

The moment I saw Trump’s crazy and dangerous Truth Social post on the morning of Easter Sunday, I could imagine the freakout in newsrooms across the country. The essence of it would be something like this: “How much of this do we publish? How do we report this without breaking with every one of our standards and traditions?” 

The President of the United States demanded: "Open the Fuckin' Strait ..."

Later in the day, and by Monday morning, it was easy to see the results of all those internal discussions.

“Expletive-filled threat,” said the AP.

“Profane” and “expletive-laden,” said the Washington Post.

“Expletive-filled ultimatum,” said USA Today.

All I can say is that, the walls here in the San Francisco Mission district don't do euphemism.

 

Some political commentary looks quite elegant. 

 

Some uses posters. We encourage youth participation.

 

Some window signs are bilingual.

When we go to protest, we don't moderate our language.

 

Hey, we've got our own standards! 

Calling all California Democrats

We've got a race for a new governor on the ballot this year and, for the moment, it's a mess.

As you probably know, California chooses most of the candidates who appear on our November ballots by a crackpot "top two jungle primary" system. (I've always hated this foolishness, but the voters chose it by referendum, so here we are.) Everyone seeking a state office runs on the same ballot in the June primary; that includes all Democrats, Republicans, and whatever other nuts may be out there. 

Only the two with the highest number of votes in June get to move on to contest the fall election when most normal voters get around to tuning in. That's what the primary is for, to pick the genuine candidates. Or at least what it should be for: weeding out those with no chance. 

But this year, a ridiculous number of politicians think Californians just might decide to want them as governor. In addition to two right wing Republicans who have fractional support, eight Democrats are competing for our votes. 

Five of the Dems are living also-rans who have proved unable to break into more than 8 percent (and usually much less) in polling. 

Three of the Dems are running neck and neck in the mid-teens in polling. And of those, any of the three might have a chance to win the job. The other low-polling five are vanity candidates, just taking up space. 

The two Republicans also poll in the teens. No Republican is going to win the governor race against any Democrat. Dems are some 45 percent of the state's electorate, while Reps are about 25 percent while the rest are independents who mostly vote for a Dem.

But while the Dems divide their votes among eight candidates, five of whom haven't got a chance, it's numerically possible that the top two highest voter winners in June could be the two Republicans! Dems would not have a November candidate.

The five also-ran Democrats need to do the state a favor and DROP OUT NOW!

The ones who should drop out now for the good of the state are:

Xavier Becerra: info@xavierbecerra2026.com

Antonio Villaraigosa: contact@antonio2026.com

Matt Mayhan: mayor@sanjoseca.gov

Betty Yee: info@bettyyee.com

Tony Thurmond: info@tonythurmond.com

Some big names there. But these folks have not caught fire and merely endanger their state by staying in a race they can't win. Their personal ambition should give way to the good of the community they claim to want to serve. I've provided email addresses: we can thank them for their service and ask them politely to step aside for the common good. 

Then, take your pick among the genuine Dem prospects; links are to their websites:

Katie Porter 

Eric Swalwell 

Tom Steyer 

If we can get the also-rans out of the running, we can forget about the two Republican knuckle-draggers. But serious California Dems need to step up and let the voters choose their candidate without letting personal ambition risk the well-being of us all. 

• • •

For a more temperate description of this absurd California kerfuffle, see this link. 

This is a madman

I think reporter and historian Garrett M. Graff is only being responsible by discussing the unthinkable out loud. This is what keeps us awake at night.

Is Trump About To Nuke Iran?  
The fact we can't say "no" for sure should terrify us.

... The simple fact that we can’t say “definitely no, absolutely not, for sure” is an astounding commentary on how unhinged and dangerous his presidency has become and how far off the rails the war with Iran has gone as Trump flails about with no plan, no strategy, no exit, and a global economy that day-by-day is reeling from the biggest geopolitical oil shock in history. ...

... I think we have to take seriously the possibility that Trump does consider nuclear weapons as an answer to his own floundering in Iran. ...

 

Graff excoriates the media for failing to digest and raise up Trump's threats seriously. An historian of Watergate, he knows about the "Madman Theory" -- Richard Nixon's bluffing approach to threatening North Vietnam. During Trump's first term, he saw some of that acting in Trump's bellicose threats to North Korea. But he fears Trump's current antics are something else.

... Are we really this inured to unhinged comments that “Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell” doesn’t even warrant a full 24-hour news-cycle?

... This isn’t just “Madman Theory.” This is a madman. Trump’s “leadership” is indistinguishable from your crazy uncle yelling at the TV. He is clearly unwell. And increasingly desperate. He thought he could start a war and turn it off when he wanted, and now has delivered the US a perhaps generational strategic defeat in the Middle East.

... As Vermont’s congresswoman Becca Balint said yesterday — in one of the few and too-rare strong statements of condemnation — “"If President Biden or President Obama had said anything remotely like this, it would be nonstop coverage on every single channel and everyone on the other side of the aisle would be howling about it and demanding that they step down.”

... for the first time, it’s the president who represents an unstable and reckless part of the nuclear equation. Trump, after all, is someone who thinks we could even use a nuclear weapon to defeat a hurricane. We have no idea how the coming weeks of the Iran war will unfold, but does anyone think Donald Trump’s going to be less unhinged and more stable and more thoughtful as the US strategy continues to flounder? .... I’d personally put the chance that Donald Trump uses a nuclear weapon against Iran at some point in the three percent range — which is a stunningly high number, given the history of nuclear weapons and the presidency. ...

Can the U.S. figure out how to curb a lunatic in power? Guess we're going to find out.

Slow-motion imperial decline

Richard Stengel is a former under secretary of state for "public diplomacy" in the Obama administration and once the editor of Time. "Public diplomacy" is a euphemism for image promotion by a country for its benefit -- by as much as possible making friends through soft, cultural power. 

Yes, just the sort of thing that the felonious Orange Toddler despises. Stengel has a harsh assessment of what the current president is doing to the USofA around the world.

... today’s unprecedented disengagement with diplomacy and our allies diminishes Brand USA. To call it a suicide pact is too strong, but it is a deliberate, conscious unraveling of the things that truly made America great.

What Trump is doing to America is a deliberate, slow-motion version of how Great Britain, one of the world’s great powers in the 20th century, became little England after the second world war. Within 15 years, an imperial hegemon became a medium-sized, more inward-focused European country concerned more with domestic economic recovery than foreign influence.

That is essentially what Trump is doing to America. Post-Trump, America will be a more domestic, inwardly focused nation, a country with fewer international connections and allies, but with an outsized, muscle-bound military, and always willing to do anything to make a buck. That is the fortress America of the 19th century, protected by two oceans and happily self-absorbed and insular.

No, we were never quite the shining city on the hill we thought we were. But, post-Trump, the United States will become little America. Smaller, meaner, less shiny. 

I found informative Stengel's evocation of a US analogy to the shriveling of Great Britain as a world power after 1945. A US imperial denouement is even happening in the same part of the world; the Suez Crisis of 1956 marked the end of Britain's far flung order. In that military flare up, the US Eisenhower administration prevented the Anglo-French-Israeli alliance from humiliating a nationalist Egyptian government; by fiat, the US preserved Egyptian sovereignty over the vital Suez Canal and signaled the end of Britain's worldwide reach.

Might we now see China play some similar role in our current Strait of Hormuz adventure? A flailing TACO Trump could use an intervention to get him out of the crisis he has made for himself and us all. An anxious world wishes there were an adult to step in ...

It was the women who laid Jesus' body in the tomb

This work by Arthello Beck.hangs in the worship space/chapel at the Interdenominational Theological Centre in Atlanta, Georgia. I am haunted ...

Good Friday

I fear I am largely allergic to poetry. Too often, it seems to flow at a pace and by a course that my mind doesn't grasp. (Since Erudite Partner is a poet, this is an unfortunate disability.)

Lucas van Leyden, 1517

But very occasionally, a poem gets through to me. This meditation/poem did so this morning as I sought to engage with the commemoration of the execution of Jesus.

Nobody crucified Jesus

Religious leaders accused,
culture made excuses,
politicians gave orders,
people in the streets went along,
friends left him to the system,
and the army pounded nails.
Who do you blame for that?

We live in a cross-shaped world
that believes in the expedience
of other people’s pain.
The most injurious to God
are those with good reasons.

Even the most powerful
have only the power someone gave them.
What evil have I helped to empower?
What part of me helped create this evil?
Am I ready for it to be healed?

Just as we found ways, working together,
to do evil,
it will take a lot of us working together
to do good. 

By Steve Garnaas-Holmes; h/t Diana Butler Bass.

Friday cat blogging

 

She wants to know what's in there. She approached cautiously, then braved the narrow tunnel. What if there were something in there to eat or harry to its death? (That's what she does to the unlucky stray fly.)

But no -- nothing in there. It took her a moment to figure out how to back out. She looked a little disconcerted. 

A low energy, dimwitted speech to the nation

What if an American president gave a speech and nobody cared? That's what happened last night. I almost never listen to Trump; his bleetings are not worth attempting to decode. But he's gone and launched a murderous war so I figured, I should. Thousands are dying under air assault by my country. Why? 

What a waste of time it was to watch this. The man is a floundering moron. And he looks like he could use a nap.

Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama communications guy, knows what he saw.

Typically, presidents follow a decision to go to war with a nationally televised address to explain the decision, call for shared sacrifice, and define what victory looks like. ... One month into the war, Trump finally gave a nationally televised address — but instead of offering clarity or rallying the country to the cause, he delivered an overlong, low-energy, rambling speech that served no strategic purpose. 

... Because the speech was so poorly written, it’s hard to identify any strategic rationale for giving it. To the extent there was a purpose, it was to declare victory. Instead, it read as an admission of defeat. ... 

Having started a war, Trump seems to intend to bomb some more and just walk away from a broken international oil delivery system, leaving passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz under hostile Iranian control. I guess we knew he didn't know how to read a map.

During the speech, Trump argued this didn’t matter to the United States:

The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future. We don’t need it. We haven’t needed it, and we don’t need it.

With Trump, the line between dumb and dishonest is always blurry — but this is a genuinely nonsensical statement. ...

Trump started this war and raised your gas prices. Ending it on these terms won’t lower them.

What Trump says doesn't matter here, because Americans can't be tricked into thinking gas prices aren't high. The fact that he thinks they can says a lot.

Pfeiffer knows well that slipping presidential approval rarely recovers during a second term.  

Trump’s numbers have been sliding for a year, but the decline has accelerated since the war with Iran began. A bounce-back is conceivable if the war ended and gas prices came down — but that would be a historical anomaly. Most second-term presidents never recover. They just amble off into the dustbin of history.

Trump’s path back to relevance looks especially precarious. The decision to go to war violated the two fundamental pillars of his political appeal — lower costs and no new wars. And as last night’s speech made clear, he can barely muster the energy to sell the war or save his presidency.

Trump has three more years to do possibly irretrievable damage to people and planet. The project remains: stop him as much as possible and envision a better future.