For some MAGA manly men, Hegseth's sexual assault and drinking charges are badges of honor worthy of a medal, by Hal M. Brown

Click above to enlarge images of medal Hegseth might have been awarded.

 

Republicans Look Past Sexual Assault, Alcohol Allegations Against Pete Hegseth

Reading this led me to react the with title of this blog and to spend some time trying to make medals to illustrate it (above) to show the kind soldiers in a sick toxically masculine military might be awarded for sexual assault and drunken behavior. Trump and card carrying members of the phallocentric manosphere encountering soldiers sporting these medals would shake their hands and say "thank you for your service."

Popular culture has glamorized the hard drinking womanizing man whether a he's a soldier, detective, or some other heroic figure who solves the crime and catches the bad guys or makes a ton of money.

This is all related to Trump's phallocentric beliefs. I wrote about this here: Trump is a delusional unhinged sadist living in a phallocentric manosphere.

I have no way of knowing for sure what rocks Pete Hegseth's boat, if you'll excuse an expression more appropriate for a former Navy man. My impression of him is that he is like many men who consider heavy drinking to be a sign of masculinity. I also think he believes that women exist to satisfy the needs of men. I don't know whether he thinks their role in life is to wait on men hand and foot or gratifying male sexual desires.

How he fits into the concept of toxic masculinity remains to be seen. Wikipedia's definition of toxic masculinity begins:

The concept of toxic masculinity is used in academic and media discussions to refer to those aspects of hegemonic masculinity that are socially destructive, such as misogyny, homophobia, and violent domination. These traits are considered "toxic" due in part to their promotion of violence, including sexual assault and domestic violence. Socialization of boys sometimes also normalizes violence, such as in the saying "boys will be boys" about bullying and aggression.

I wonder what he'd say if someone asked him what he thought about the photos related to his hero below:

What does it say about someone (usually a man, Marjorie Taylor Greene is an exception) who finds excuses to show off their muscles?

For that matter, what does it say about RFK Jr.? Of course he's not in line to become Secretary of Defense.

Trump isn't about to pull a Hulk Hogan and rip off his shirt on TV. I am sure he wishes he could. He has to content himself with issuing AI created images of himself and seeing people waving flags with him as a Rambo character on them. He has to pleasure himself with being able to inflict his toxic masculinity on the nation. 

It isn't just muscles, or even gender, that makes someone toxically masculine. It is a set of beliefs that might makes right. It is an abiding desire to exercise authority over others. We can speculate that it is rooted in feelings of inferiority which began in childhood, but this hardly maters when these people get power. 

Kash Patel and Steven Miller, just for two examples, aren't muscle bound hunks. Women like Pam Bondi and Linda McMahon may have many characteristics of toxically masculine men. At its worst toxic masculinity can include a sadistic personality. This is when cruelty, inflicting pain on enemies, becomes the point.

Previous list of blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

Drill, baby, drill: Three words that may show Trump isn't mentally all there. By Hal M. Brown, MSW

In Trump ‘s “Meet the Press” interview with Kristen Welker, not only did Trump demontrate a callous disregard for the feelings of those he promised to deport (see my blog about toxic masculinty from yesterday) he uttered three words that were so unrelated to what he was talking about that at the least I would describe them as a mental glitch. This is the sort of odd juxapostion of unrelated thoughts he has called “the weave” which he brags that linguists said it was brilliant. It is has also been suggested this is an indication of his having early dementia. 

This is the exchange:

KRISTEN WELKER:

So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail?

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

For what they did — 

KRISTEN WELKER:

Everyone on the committee you think — 

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

I think everybody — 

KRISTEN WELKER:

– should go to jail?

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

– on the — anybody that voted in favor — 

KRISTEN WELKER:

Are you going to direct your FBI director — 

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

No.

KRISTEN WELKER:

– and your attorney general to send them to jail?

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

No, not at all. I think that they’ll have to look at that, but I’m not going to — I’m going to focus on drill, baby, drill.

KRISTEN WELKER:

When you say that, it carries weight though. You know, you’ve tapped these people to lead the Justice Department and FBI — 

As you see above Welker ignores this and brings him back to the subject. You can read this in the entire transcript here.

While it is true that “drill, baby, drill” has been a line he has used in his rallies it makes no sense for him to say that this will be the focus of the first day he’s in office. At the least, this is an unserious response when a thoughtful person would have said that he’d have other far more important things to deal with that whether certain people should be going to jail. If he wanted to keep the topic on the matter of jail, he could have said it was far more important to free the people he calls patriots who are incarcerted.

At the worst this may be an indication of early dementia. I can’t imagine that as Trump thinks ahead to what he will do 

The point is that “drill, baby, drill” not only doen’t have anything to do with the issue being discussed, high gas prices aren’t even currently in the news. It wasn’t a major issue in the final months of the campaign. In fact gas prices are down on average for the US as a whole, with the price of gas falling in 38 out of the 51 states over the last week.

Trump clearly want to change the subject. I think this is because he knew he was lying through his teeth and had every intention of making sure he wreaked vengeance on as many of his enemies as possible. He wants to make them suffer the indignity he suffered having to sit through the E. Jean Carroll trial and much worse. That trial was a nothing burger to him because even though the basic charge was sexual assault it was a civil trial. 

It isn’t only his saying “drill, baby, drill” that lead me to question Trump’s mental condition. Consider these two rambling responses to Welker:

KRISTEN WELKER:

Let me ask you about something you’ve referenced a couple of times in this interview. I asked you last time we sat down for an interview if you were going to pardon yourself. You said no. But now that President Biden has pardoned his son Hunter, are you reconsidering? Might you pardon yourself?

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

I didn’t do anything wrong. I — I was given the option, and the lawyers told me — a very specific lawyer. I don’t have to go into who, but very high up in the — in the administration, said, “Sir, if you pardon yourself, you’re going to look guilty, and you did nothing wrong.” Oh, I had that option. I could’ve saved myself a lot of legal fees. But it turned out that I was right. Look at what’s gone on. Everything’s being dropped. I still have a — Fani Willis, Fani, a total hoax. That’s a total hoax. Every — it’s all being dropped. It’s all been discredited. It’s been dropped. There are those people that say, and this would be the first time in history, that all of those fake indictments, they were — they were going after a political opponent. There are those that say that I actually did better in the election because of it. Now, that would be a first. I think you would agree because normally, that’s like, you go back to the microphones, you say, “I’m leaving right now. I will leave office. I’m going back to my family and I will fight for my name.” Well, I had to fight for my name in public because I didn’t leave office. But no, I didn’t want a pardon. And I didn’t want to pardon myself. I had the option to pardon myself.

Here’s another one:

KRISTEN WELKER:

Let me ask you about some of this new reporting. NBC News is reporting that President Biden is considering giving preemptive pardons to the likes of Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, and Anthony Fauci. If President Biden doesn’t issue those pardons, do you think they are going to wish that he had? Are they going to be — 

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

I don’t know.

KRISTEN WELKER:

– pursued?

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:

I can tell you this about Cheney. And she’s a so-called Republican. I think she hurt the Democrats terribly. When I saw that Kamala put Cheney out on the campaign trail, I said, “That’s the end of Kamala.” I really did. I thought it was a terrible move, especially if you’re a Democrat. But Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps. So the unselect committee went through a year and a half of testimony. Wait. They deleted and destroyed all evidence of — that they found. You know why? Because Nancy Pelosi was guilty. Nancy Pelosi turned down 10,000 troops. You wouldn’t have had a J6 because other people were guilty. The people that said that I attacked two Secret Service agents in a car, I grabbed one around the neck. I was then rebuffed and I grabbed the other one. These are two of the toughest men anywhere on the planet. And they happen to slightly younger than me. You know, just a little bit. Let me just tell you. They testified. They said it was total bullshit. And all of this stuff came out. People lied so badly. Now, listen, this was a committee, a big deal. They lied. And what did they do? They deleted and destroyed a whole year and a half worth of testimony. Do you know that I can’t get — I think those people committed a major crime.

For a period of time I was one of many mental health professionals who went public saying that there was good evidence Trump had early dementia. My colleague in the Duty to Warn movement, it's founder Dr. John D. Gartner was interviewed by Chauncey DeVega in Salon in March noting the signs of "accelerating dementia."

I was the clincial social worker referred to and quoted in this Chauncey DeVega column in Salon:

I also wrote: I’m not the only mental health professional who says that Trump needs a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness and The debate may help determine if Trump has dementia and it may also demonstrate whether or not he has mania.

Here's a Google search with links to many more articles about this.

Then I began to think that maybe, as those who defended him said, what I saw as symptoms were just Trump being Trump. I was trying not to allow my opinion of Trump as a dangerous demagogue to influence my clinical assessment. As a psychotherapist I am qualified to opine on psychopathology, but I am not a neurologist with expertise in teasing out signs of early dementia from other behaviors.

Now I am not so sure. Maybe speaking in “the weave” isn’t as brilliant as Trump says it is. It could be a sign of dementia after all.

Previous list of blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

If only the entire country could divorce itself from a toxically masculine regime, By Hal M. Brown. MSW

 

I came across this in today's NY Times (subscription):

You can watch the video clip shown above here.

In the Times article the following is revealed:

Mr. Kennedy added that as part of an “anti-aging protocol from my doctor,” he also receives testosterone replacement therapy. “But I don’t take any steroids,” he said. “I don’t take any anabolic steroids or anything like that.”

The lines between supplementation with T.R.T. — a common practice among older men — and steroid use can get blurry for some because they are dealing with the same hormone in vastly different quantities. 

This kind of display of musculature is just one more representation of the toxic masculinity that has taken over the political scene thanks to Donald Trump. He obviously isn't about to allow himself to be photographed shirtless. He's convinced his cult that he really looks like the AI created superhero images he promotes.

We also had Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg making noise about fighting each other in a cage match. Jumping juvenile Jehoshaphat, these are grown men!  See: Billionaire brawl: all the latest on the cage match between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The cage match was cancelled (read article) with each man blaming the other. I expect on pay per view people would have tuned in.

More about Elon because, well, just because he's at least for now one of the most influential Trump whisperers. He made the best of a bad situation in 2022 and was able to joke about it saying publication of bathing suit photos were a good excuse to go to the gym (see article) when photos of him shirtless went viral.

Of course we had Trump beating Vince McMahon in a fake wrestling match and shaving his head. I won't subject you to photos of that. I also won't bother publishing photos of a horseback riding shirtless Putin.

Another toxic male Trumper who I doubt you pay any attention to, though you've heard his name, is Alex Jones who does the InfoWars website. He also likes to put shirtless photos of himself showing his muscles online.

Then we had Hulk Hogan literally ripping his shirt off to show off his muscles during Trump's final rally. Again, I won't subject you to including them in this blog.

I can see a woman doing this at a Trump rally. In fact, a woman was escorted out of a Trump rally after flashing her breasts in the stand. 

It is hard to image that we would have a president who would do what he did in these two photos:

Can you imagine a self-respecting woman doing the same thing?

Wikipedia's definition of toxic masculinity begins:

The concept of toxic masculinity is used in academic and media discussions to refer to those aspects of hegemonic masculinity that are socially destructive, such as misogyny, homophobia, and violent domination. These traits are considered "toxic" due in part to their promotion of violence, including sexual assault and domestic violence. Socialization of boys sometimes also normalizes violence, such as in the saying "boys will be boys" about bullying and aggression.

Wikipedia does not have a page for toxic femininity,  but it is a concept in psychology and social science. It has a very different meaning than toxic masculinity. Consider:

Toxic femininity refers to the adherence to the gender binary in order to receive conditional value in patriarchal societies. It is a concept that restricts women to being cooperative, passive, sexually submissive, gentle, and deriving their value from physical beauty while being pleasing to men. From VeryWell Mind.

Toxically masculine men, whether they have rippling muscles or, like Trump and Steven Miller (left), aren't muscle men, still have toxic male beliefs. For example, they tend to lack empathy and are prone to bullying. They often are sadistic and enjoy inflicting pain or discomfort on their enemies. In the past few days we saw Trump's total lack of empathy when talking about deporting entire families including children when only one or both parents were here illegally. Without weight lifting hardened biceps this is Trump flexing his muscles as saying "look how tough I am." 

This is Trump interviewed by Kristin Welker on Meet the Press (watch video here) talking about eliminating birthright citizenship and deporting entire families:

PRES.-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: Well, that way you keep the – well, I don't want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don't break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.

KRISTEN WELKER: Even kids who are here legally?

PRES.-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: Well, what you've got to do if they want to stay with their father – look, we have to have rules and regulations. You can always find something out like, you know, "This doesn't work. That doesn't work." I'll tell you what's going to be horrible, when we take a wonderful young woman who's with a criminal. And they show the woman, and she could stay by the law, but they show the woman being taken out. Or they want her out and your cameras are focused on her as she's crying as she's being taken out of our country. And then the public turns against us. But we have to do our job. And you have to have a series of standards and a series of laws. And in the end, look, our country is a mess.

This is just plain sadistically sick. How anyone with any sense of morality can read or watch Trump saying this thinks he is a decent person staggers me. How someone who says "Trump is a Christian" can utter these words with a straight face is a sad sign of the times.

In 2021 Adam Sewer of The Atlantic wrote a book about the Trump administration titled "The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America" with the first part of the title becoming a frequently used phrase to describe Trump's inhumane policies.

Cruelty is part and parcel of toxic masculinity. Trump and his ilk thrive on knowing people are afraid of them. This is not just because of the power they have over their lives, but potential victims know that they take satisfaction in being cruel.

Numerous articles like 7 Subtle Signs of Toxic Masculinity in a Relationship give advice to people who have men like this as their partners. If only it could be simple for an entire half of a democracy loving country to get a divorce. It could go into couples therapy to get help to gain the insight and self-esteem to get a divorce from a toxic partner. It is as if half the country has been forced into a marriage with a toxic, and abusive, partner. 

Previous list of blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

There won't be a mea culpa big enough for those trying to normalize Trump if you're wrong. This means you, Jon Stewart. By Hal M. Brown

 

This RawStory article, "Trump's plan to jam through appointments enters new 'extreme' phase: says expert" prompted me to react.

Excerpt:

The plan already being discussed among a group of House Republicans involves Trump dismissing the Senate “against its will,” which would allow him to stack the government with whomever he chooses in the resulting "recess," wrote Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional law professor at Yale University. 

“This is flagrantly unlawful,” he told readers in an op-ed published Friday in The Atlantic. Even more than that, Amar said the threat from House Republicans should be exposed as “an autocratic move that is not just unlawful but contemptuous of constitutionalism.”

The scheme, according to the Yale professor, would see House Republicans manufacture an “illusory” disagreement to spark the president’s adjournment power.

“First, the House of Representatives would pass a resolution calling for a recess,” he wrote. “The Senate would then (in all likelihood) refuse to pass the resolution. Trump would then declare the houses to be in ‘disagreement’ and adjourn both houses for as long as he likes.”

The "recess-appointments spree" would ensue from there, Amar said.

He noted the other Washington maneuver gaining traction that Trump could pull to get his nominations through the finish line – through a Senate vote to recess itself after the incoming president’s inauguration, “allowing him to unilaterally make a series of ‘recess’ appointments.”

“That plan may formally be legal, but it is plainly improper,” Amar wrote.

My reaction:

What would keep Trump from pressing the fast forward button on becoming an American Hitler? If he is thwarted in his nominations by Congress his next step could be to dissolve the body permanently.

Whether Congress would stop meeting if ordered to do so would remain to be seen. If they did meet and voted against him he could ignore their votes.

This would certainly lead to mass protests and there's a good chance it would cause him to declare a national emergency and invoke martial law and order the armed forces to break up demonstrations. People  likely would die if his orders are followed. The Kent State Massacre would look like a picnic. 

The big if is whether the military would go along with this. If they decided not to this could lead to a quiet, that is a non-compliant coup, or an active coup. 

If it was a active coup, instead of tanks protecting the White House and attacking Congress they could be surrounding the White House with cannons pointing at it.

 

If all this came to pass, the generals would install a temporary president. I don't see Trump as being literally arrested. Trump, protected by the Supreme Court for these acts, could not be prosecuted but this would be still be a coup. 

Despite being protected by the Secret Service faced with an overwhelming force military would not be engage in battle. They would have no choice but to stand by if the White House was surrounded and soldiers demanded Trump be surrended or they would enter and remove him. 

Thus Trump, if he didn't leave voluntarily, would be physically removed by a cadre of soldiers who would allow his Secret Service detail to accompany him. They'd all be flown to Mar-a-Lago in a military transport, not Air Force One. The Supreme Court would probably call an emergency meeting and declare that this was unconstitutional, which it would be, but they'd have no power.

New presidential elections would be called to be held in six to nine months. Trump would be allowed to run but the elections would be supervised by the military and be fair. If the people who believed Trump's promises that he'd make their lives better decided they wanted a ruthless dictatorship the generals would have to accede and allow Trump to become president again. 

I would hope that by this time enough gullible Trump voters would have realized they'd been betrayed and misled, and that this was not what they voted for. Thus iff he did end up running he'd lose. The Republicans would be given a second chace to free themselves from Trump and MAGA and nominate someone else. This would also give the Democrats time to have an open convention and hopefully nominate a better candidate than Kamala Harris.

Of course Trump is making sure he is portrayed as Mister President-to-be Nice Guy Normal as evidenced by his meeting with President Macron to celebrate the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral today and having a a 60 Minutes interview with Kristen Welker tomorrow.

Maybe all of this glory will mute Trump's dictatorial desires to exact revenge against his enemies and spitefully ram though the 2025 Agenda to turn our federal goverment into a heartless freedom-chipping machine where people are like dead trees and would be reduced to wood chips and disposed of. 

I think Jon Stewart is naive and misguided when he rips into the media for scaring people about Trump (read article).

Excerpt:

Jon Stewart decried the media’s panicked coverage of President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming second term, saying that it’s not helpful to get the public “s***ting our pants this early.”

Before interviewing Vermont senator Bernie Sanders on his latest Weekly Showpodcast episode, the Comedy Central comedian, 62, opened the hour acknowledging that America is currently in a “transitional period where we are not sure about whether the ground we are standing on is solid.”

“Although the news media seems convinced that we are the Roadrunner and the Coyote and the Coyote has run over the cliff, and we just looked down and realized there’s nothing under our feet and now we are plunging to our deaths,” Stewart quipped in reference to the famous Looney Tunes characters. “Because the news media is always very circumspect.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen when Donald Trump takes over,” he said, adding that while “we should be prepared” for all outcomes, “I don’t know how helpful it is to get us s***ting our pants this much, this early.”

Using a metaphor to describe his feelings about the Democrats losing the election, he said: “In the joint custody agreement that we now have in America, the kids are going to live with Dad for the summer and you just have to f***in’ eat it.”

Jon, I hope you think about this. There is good cause for freedom loving Americans to be (no asterisks) shitting in their pants. Stewart's summer with Dad won't be merely three months of Hell. It will last at least four years.

There is a very good chance Stewart and everyone else trying to normalize Trump are dead wrong. Maybe in the next year or two they will rue the day they helped people let their guard down and helped pave the way for the end of the American experiment in democracy. 

Dishonorable mention for trying to normalize Trump: Joe Scarborough and MikeBrzezinski for going to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring, and kudos to Rachel Maddow for calling them out on this.

Trump, not merely through his words, but through his nominees, has shown us what he wants to do. There will be no mea culpa big enough to come from people not taking this seriously.

Previous list of blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

Why Christofascist Hegseth is so important to Trump, By Hal M. Brown

 

To answer the question in my title: the reason Hegseth is so important is the last part of the word Christofascist. Forget the Christo, it is the fascist part that counts. For a fascist leader to succeed he must have control of the military which must be led by committed fascists. 

As of today, Trump is all in on Pete Hegseth - (the image above his Truth Social is my AI) and well he should be. He needs him. Perhaps more than anyone else in his administration Trump needs to have a yesman as Secretary of Defense.

The Senate dare not disagree. After all, he claims to have a mandate to do whatever he wants to do with the country. Of course, Homer Donald, you did not win a mandate....

Putin can more or less honestly claim he had an electoral mandate. Hitler eventually did have an electoral mandate. Trump insists that he also has a mandate. Of all his many lies this may be the most egregious. With his claiming a mandate he is justifying everything he intends to do to drastically change the way the country is governed. 

In the process of staffing his government prior to taking office he is facing his first test. He is getting minimal, but significant, pushback from enough Republicans in the Senate to stop some of his nominations. This gets me to the following:

The words above jumped out when I saw them in the Salon article 

Trump ushers in a Christian "deep state": MAGA moves to gut the Constitution.

I don't see the danger of the United States being governed by something like a Taliban with nukes and 3,400 fighter/jets, even though we see articles like another article in Salon:

How Christofascists became the heart of the MAGA movement

The reason I take issue with this is shown in the photo above. The two people flanking Trump may be Christofascists, but Trump is only a transactional Christofacist. He's no Mullah 

Hibatullah Akhundzada.

As long as Trump is president, Christian Nationalism will not be as dominant as people like Hegseth and others in the movement want it to be. Trump is basically a transactional person in all ways and I have little doubt that he is an atheist. He fakes being religious, but what anybody with any sense knows what he is really thinking when he's posing for pictures with religious leading praying over him especially if he hasn't had lunch yet.

This is from a Pew 2020 poll: "Most Americans don’t see Trump as religious; fewer than half say they think he’s Christian."

There are no indications that Trump has any kind of religious faith. Whether or not Trump stays in office until he dies the presumed next in line to lead the nation as president, or by then the position may have another name, is J.D. Vance. My impression is that he's as transactional as Trump and when it comes to Christian Nationalism. I think his views are more nuanced. He went from being an athiest to an orthodox Catholic. Read the following:

J.D. Vance Used to Be an Atheist. What He Believes Now Is Telling.

He’s not an evangelical Christian. He’s a Catholic—of a very specific type.

It may be especially relevant that Vance is married to a Hindu. 

Where does this leave the country? If we are not on the brink of becoming a Christofascist country we are well on the road to becoming a fascist country of a type unique to America. Fascism is simply defined as an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government. For us to become truly fascist Trump has to geld Congress.

What we have in common with nascent fascist regimes is that the rising dictator plans to centralize power under the leader and turn any elected governing body into a ceremonial rubber stamp for public consumption. For example Wiki tells us the following:

Greater German Reichstag (German: Großdeutscher Reichstag) after 1938, was the national parliament of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Following the Nazi seizure of power and the enactment of the Enabling Act of 1933, it functioned purely as a rubber stamp for the actions of Adolf Hitler's dictatorship — always by unanimous consent — and as a forum to listen to Hitler's speeches. In this purely ceremonial role, the Reichstag convened only 20 times, the last on 26 April 1942. The President of the Reichstag (Reichstagspräsident) throughout this period was Hermann Göring.

Likewise Wiki tells us that the Russian Federal Assembly since the 2003 elections, the Federal Assembly (of Russia) has been referred to by analysts and observers as being a rubber stamp institution.

What all countries that turned into fascist regimes have in common is that they had a military to back them. Trump needs Hegseth to make sure, or try to make sure, that the military does his will. If Trump has to pray with Hegseth and say it is God's will to obey his commands he will do it.

So far Trump is only on the verge of ignoring what Congress, particularly the Senate, may do to thwart his plans. He's a psychopathic megalomanic and doesn't tolerate people who stand up to him. It remains to be seen whether he'll play the democracy game if some of his nominees don't get approved by the Senate. 

I have no doubt he has advisors like stone-cold sociopath Steve Miller who will explain to him that as president he has incredible power and shouldn't put off using it and take the first step to neutering Congress by doing what he can to force them into recess to make his appointments. If he can't manage to pull this off I can see him going full bore dictator and declaring a national emergency and initiating martial law. He couldn't get his crowd to do it,  but now could order soldiers to shut down the US Capitol. 

This would be the final test of whether the line against tyranny will hold and stop the forces of fascism. It would be up to the military to decide whether they are loyal to a person or to the Constitution. 

The Capitol isn't far from the White House. Military leaders would be faced with a stark choice. Instead of watching tanks heading to the Capitol Trump could look out the window and see them with their cannons pointed towards, not away from, the White House.

Here are more of the images that came up when I looked for Trump and Hegseth hugging. Note that none of the hands look right. Bottom right is closest to real but Trump's fingers a too long. I dediced to look into this and found a couple of articles.

Why AI-generated hands are the stuff of nightmares, explained by a scientist

Why Are AI-Generated Hands So Messed Up?

Previous list of blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

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