'The Smoke'

The White House Correspondents’ dinner went a long way towards normalizing a sexual predator, a man who spent decades abusing teenage girls with Jeffrey Epstein and then actively abused his own power to cover up his criminality. He of course, did not do this alone but with a motley crew of co-conspirators, several of whom were also in attendance.

Anyone in that room that calls themselves a real reporter and sat there smiling, or even with a bemused look of shock at his antics should be ashamed.

Much of the DC political press corps helped whitewash predation and the most anti-democratic, corrupt president in the history of the United States in the interest of self-congratulatory pageantry.

Trump knows he owns the mainstream media now - his mean-spirited and abusive performance proved that much. The WHCA gave him the platform he craves and a national primetime audience on a Friday night.

45-47-48? used it as an opportunity to attack the very people who had feted him, smear a transgender woman who is a private citizen and go after a CNN journalist, Kaitlin Collins, who does not demure to his brutish behavior.

It was a disgraceful evening in every way.

It was not only embarrassing and hard to watch, it was counterproductive to saving our republic. The self-congratulatory AI shlock at the beginning, enlisting digitized Founding Fathers to crow about the importance of the Fourth Estate only served to punctuate what we have lost.

POTUS’ appearance followed a full day of ‘Executive Time’ and a late afternoon Oval Office press event that showed how unmoored and unmanageable he has become; we are enabling and indulging active addiction at the highest level of government.

Trump sat behind his desk like some sort of primordial lizard king as his supplicants fanned out behind him, all dressed in identical matching blue suits and too long ties.

DJT’s bloated face looked like someone had stuck sunflower seed shells sideways on a rotting pumpkin and then slathered it in bacon grease. He slithered as much as he spoke, a pale serpentine tongue darting back and forth over his thin crooked lips.

The sideways mouth that has only spewed lies in a lifetime of unworthy words.

Each answer was crazier than the last until it built to a cacophonous crescendo and his twin blonde assistants, who look like they were genetically engineered in a backroom lab at an Ole Miss sorority and should be named Kayla One and Kayla Two, hurriedly ushered the gobsmacked press out of the Oval Office.

Trump has always been a mess, especially behind the scenes, but he is now disintegrating before our eyes - not in a shrivel up and disappear kind of way, but more like a distended farm animal cooking in the midday sun half-eaten by piranha, ribboned and rancid, floating down a river poisoning all the other fish.

DJT’s particular kind of rot is dangerous: we must disinfect and protect our country from it.

Trump began his week beclowning himself on a stage filled with Spanish soccer players who openly mocked him, as his greasy consigliere, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, attempted to steer him off the stage.

Donald walked up there fully expecting to be in the middle of the picture when the players hoisted the trophy. It was not to be the case, but not before embarrassing himself in front of 80,000 people and providing endless clips for social media ridicule.

Not to mention his appearance belied his ridiculous claims that he needs a White House ballroom with drone ports on top and blast proof windows to keep him safe at events but somehow has no problem standing in an open field surrounded by people from all over the world (many from countries targeted by his tariffs and his immigration crackdowns) in a stadium with multiple entrances and an army of hourly event workers.

My former colleagues were the production staff that brought you the World Cup Halftime show and post game celebrations. I have worked on shows with them in event spaces all over the country and we all know that no matter how many security sweeps the Secret Service does, there is no way to make such a situation 100% safe.

Especially a stadium built on the Mob owned swamp land of North Jersey.

I have personally seen caterers unknowingly slip into side doors in convention halls with carts of food after the Secret Service has locked down the building; it happened once, innocently enough, at President Obama’s second inauguration and I was the one who alerted the officers to the potential breach.

Trump was not concerned, as he too knows that no public building can ever be completely secure and his request for a ballroom is more about his own future grifting and hold on power than Executive Branch safety or his personal fear. That is not to say he is brave but to point out his stated reasons for a ballroom are not his true motivation.

Even if he was afraid for his own life, his desire for constant attention would override it.

His narcissism and need for adulation will always win out. Trump craves attention like most people need oxygen. He wants to get high, hit on women and have music play when he walks into a room. Those three elements form his Holy Trinity - at least in public life.

In private, it turns much darker and more nefarious - and much of that is to keep the public image he has always profited from afloat. His demons work in concert with his defects.

Never before has one man been so thirsty, so desperate to watch the world revolve around him. If it means he must burn it down to get his wish than so be it.

His mind has no care beyond himself, and the human suffering this will cause will be hard to quantify. It already is, but we must not stop trying.

We cannot become numb to the insanity or the heart-wrenching tragedy he is foisting upon the world. We are watching wildfires consume forests in southern Europe, filling the skies with fiery terror and ash, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes; the largest peacetime evacuations since World War Two.

From France, Italy and Spain to Canada, it feels like the Northern Hemisphere is burning up all at once, and in many ways it is. The U.S.A.’s official response is to deny climate change even exists and push for more consumption of fossil fuels. Trump has appointed lackeys at the EPA and dismantled effective climate science programs within our own government. As our risk increases, our ability to mitigate and respond to threats is not only hampered, it is being hamstrung; in the interests of appeasing the oil and gas industry that is causing all of the calamity.

Even as his own actions in the Middle East cause oil prices to skyrocket and the world economy to endure endless tremors, POTUS stokes all this chaos with his nonsensical, punitive tariffs which harm the American consumer and alienate our trading partners.

Donald Trump is the biggest threat to the global economy in this century. We are all paying more because of him. He is also shrinking the stability needed for economic growth, and replacing industry and job creation with data centers and crypto scams.

We often hear that Trump governs by instinct. While this may be partially true (he has no real interest in the mechanics of governance, it’s all just an opportunity to profit personally and exact retribution on his perceived enemies), we must understand that is the same instinct that allowed him to hit on a 12 year-old girls in the lobby of Trump Tower.

Or cheat on every wife and business partner he’s ever had.

Donald’s so-called instincts told him it was within his purview to walk into the dressing rooms of teenage girls participating in his beauty pageants, and spend decades assaulting women and girls in New York City and Palm Beach.

He even attacked his own wife (and mother of three of his five children) violently because he didn’t like the scar the plastic surgeon she recommended left on his forehead (after scalp reduction surgery to help mask his baldness).

DJT spent his entire adult life laundering money for various mob figures and bankrupting his Trump-branded businesses, while cheating those who had the misfortune of subcontracting with him out of their livelihoods by refusing to pay invoices and then hiring lawyers to defend his actions in court.

He ripped people off for sport. That has been a family tradition dating back to his father, Fred Trump Sr., who was a tax cheat and a racist - and who ultimately had to get his lawyer to defend against Donald’s attempt to rewrite his father’s will and make himself the sole beneficiary of his fortune and real estate empire.

Sr.’s impulsive and incompetent son did not succeed but after the patriarch passed away Donald coerced his siblings into selling the company they now co-owned, ultimately squandering much of his portion of the $700 million payout on various businesses, including his failing casinos.

Had he put the $400 million he had received from his father in an index fund he would have made much more money than he ever did in his own ventures, and most certainly had he and his siblings held on to the properties Fred Sr. had spent a lifetime building they all would have been much wealthier in the long run.

Of course, Donald has never made more money in his life than he has in the first year and a half of his second term in office - now that all the guardrails of propriety have fallen and he is using the government to enrich himself and his children.

Were it not for a coterie of hand-picked corrupt DOJ and FBI officials, Trump’s criminality would be on full display for the world to see and act accordingly; instead we got the slow drip of the heavily redacted ‘Epstein files’, and an avalanche of distractions designed to lessen their impact and the public’s ability to comprehend the full scope of the horror.

Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General and Trump’s ‘former’ personal lawyer, helped make a lot of this coverup happen - and was so audacious in his attempts to help Trump hide from his own criminal past, he interviewed and then transferred Ghislaine Maxwell to a cushy prison, giving her special perks to buy her continued silence and complicity.

A commutation of her sentence may be around the corner as well.

Our acting AG was all smiles at the WHCA dinner as well Friday night, as a mentalist enlisted him in the art of psychological illusion, though Blanche is seemingly already an expert in this field.

Trump likes to call his rhetorical style ‘the weave’ but it is actually the result of jumbled synapses fed a steady diet of several stimulants including Adderall, Benzodiazepines, and Diet Coke chasers for the better part of four decades.

POTUS is an addict - and our inability to fully recognize that fact is to the detriment of both our nation and the world at large. Innocent people are dying because of his defects of character. There will be many more to come because of his defunding of Medicaid alone, not to mention the Iran war he started with no idea how to finish.

Donald’s destructive cuts to our nation’s healthcare system, which will disproportionally effect many of his own rural red state voters, were enacted to extend and deepen tax cuts for the billionaires who put him in office; mostly men who are happy to watch the world burn in exchange for record profits, deregulation and consuming natural resources with impunity, while facing no consequences for pollution and over consumption.

Proximity to power and the ability to leverage that influence for your own financial gain has become the coin of our twisted realm. The intoxicating thrill of all this access is seen clearly in the Botoxed cheeks and Chiclet smiles of the agro-odious tech titans as they stood behind Trump at his second inauguration.

We should’ve done a better job of saying ‘what the hell are they even doing there?’, instead it was almost accepted that they had purchased the POTUS and now we were we are all paying the price.

In many ways that was the moment in which the sanctity of our representational democracy was lost and its vertiginous effects continue to hamper a proper response, as if the outrage got stuck in our throats and the scream turned into a muffled cough.

It is now up to us whether or not this is a temporary or permanent condition.

We must raise our voices in collective outrage and use every means of peaceful protest and non-violent action to demand accountability, and stop the purloining of our government.

The GOP is actively stripping voters of their rights and gerrymandering congressional districts, most especially in the Deep South, to further disenfranchise Black voters and allow Trump’s preferred flavor of white Evangelical MAGA candidates to be the only item on the menu.

A chicken-fried Christofascist meat and three for mediocrity.

We must not play along, but take to the streets and demand change before it is too late.

The surest sign of an unevolved man is the constant blaming of others for his own problems. The President is always playing the perpetual victim.

Few instances so fully illustrate how unfit Donald Trump is to serve as POTUS than his awkward participation in this week’s dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base.

He audaciously slurred out to the assembled press when speaking of the fallen soldiers, ‘All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon’.’

Putting words into the mouths of those who can no longer speak for themselves seems to almost hold a place beyond sin. It is not only disingenuous and disgusting, it compounds grief. I can think of nothing crueler for the families of the brave deceased U.S. service members than to have their sacrifice turned into spurious talking points by an addled and incompetent leader, who merely saw the ceremony itself as a pit stop on his way to a MAGA campaign rally in Georgia.

Can you imagine having recently lost a loved one in the Iran war and have Trump diminish both their sacrifice and your own family’s personal tragedy by comparing his illegal Iran war death toll to those in Vietnam or Afghanistan, as he did both online and in front of the White House press, referring to soldiers killed in action as ‘only 18 in two wars’.

A number that he immediately ordered the Pentagon to revise down to 14 by claiming the four soldiers who were killed in Jordan last week by an Iranian missile barrage died after his (now broken) MOU cease-fire was announced in June.

Easily one of the most despicable moments a presidency that has plenty of them.

Especially when it comes to our service members who have made the ultimate sacrifice, and who he referred to as ‘suckers and losers’ during his first term when he refused to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery to honor the Marines who died at Belleau Wood in the First World War.

Trump wants to lower number of deaths in his Iran war because the loss of life to him holds no more value than a golf handicap - to him it is just about keeping score.

It reminds me of his refusal to let the Grand Princess cruise ship with Covid infected passengers dock in San Francisco during the early days of the global pandemic because he didn’t want the twenty-one infected passengers to ‘double the numbers’ and make him look bad.

The global pandemic went on to claim over a million American lives, in no small part because of Trump’s ego and incompetence, and his desire in March of 2020 to deny reality (because he thought it would hurt his reelection chances) and the threat we were facing as a nation.

We must not allow his war in Iran spin out of control in a similar fashion.

POTUS is in over his head; any escalation at this point will only lead to more death and destruction, and will not make the region or the world any safer. It will in fact make it far more dangerous.

As will allowing Saudi Arabia to have access to enriched uranium, as Trump had his Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, sign off on a deal to provide KSA this week. (Trump later walked back his initial approval by stipulating that KSA must recognize Israel and join the Abraham Accords.)

As it stands Trump, his sons, and son-in-law Jared, have deep ties to Saudi Arabia (and MBS) financially, at the same time this deal is on the table with the U.S. government.

Most notably, a 63 billion dollar development deal with Dar Global to build Trump branded hotels, golf courses and condo towers in Diriyah; the Saudi government-owned real estate project is not only a conflict of interest, it is essentially a bribe that may set off a nuclear arms race in the region.

Not to mention that Westinghouse Electric, who would be directed to receive the Saudi contracts for building light water reactors, which gives KSA a path to uranium enrichment, is majority owned by Brookfield Asset Management.

That is the same private equity fund that bailed out Jared Kushner when his 666 Fifth Avenue Manhattan building’s mortgage was due, taking out a 99 year lease covering Kushner’s 1.1 billion dollar building debt.

The Qatari government was a major investor in Brookfield - and were on the receiving end of a naval blockade shakedown enacted by Kushner when he served in the White House during Trump’s first term.

The Qataris had initially refused to bail out Trump’s son-in-law, who bought the Manhattan skyscraper at the height of the market in early 2007 and found himself underwater with the property after the cataclysmic real estate crash of 2008.

The prissy princeling had majorly overpaid but when his father-in-law became POTUS he deftly used the levers of geopolitical skullduggery to bail himself out.

Now the First Family are all cashing in - and the world will be a worst place for it.

If this all feels too complicated, allow me to simplify - Trump and his family are cutting deals with the country that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers hailed from, and where some of the folks who organized and funded the largest terrorist attack in U.S. history still walk free two months before the 25th anniversary.

Imagine if those hijackers had a dirty bomb in their possession when they piloted hijacked jets into the World Trade Center Towers or the Pentagon.

That’s the sort of thing you want your government to make sure never happens, not to make it even potentially likely because POTUS stands to personally profit from providing the possibility of a nuclear Saudi Arabia.

Corruption is always corrosive, but sometimes it has the potential to be catastrophic.

This is one of those times.

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