That Laura Loomer is even in the news shows how off the rails this country is. By Hal M. Brown

 

Consider this Google News search for Laura Loomer. 

I like this story from The Times of India in part because of their illustration.

Click above to enlarge image.

Groypers are a group of alt-right and white nationalist activists, provocateurs, and Internet trolls.

 Look at Loomer's Wikipedia profile. Read about her background and history and ask yourself why this woman is even relevant.

Consider how Loomer became so newsworthy.

This is how her profile begins:

Laura Elizabeth Loomer (born May 21, 1993)^[1] is an American far-right^[a] political activist, conspiracy theorist,^[b] and internet personality. She was the Republican nominee to represent Florida's 21st congressional district in the 2020 United States House of Representatives elections, losing to Democrat Lois Frankel.^[2][3] She also ran in the Republican primary for Florida's 11th congressional district in 2022, losing to incumbent Daniel Webster.^[4]

Loomer has worked as an activist for several organizations, including Project Veritas, the Geller Report, Rebel News, and InfoWars. She has described herself as being "pro-white nationalism" and a "proud Islamophobe",^[c][d] and gained notoriety as a result of being banned from numerous social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, payment processors, vehicles for hire, and food delivery mobile apps for various reasons, including violating policies on hate speech and posting misinformation.^[5][6][7][8]Loomer has also been banned and removed from events, and had press credentials revoked, for harassment and causing disturbances.^[8][9]

Donald Trump sought to hire Loomer to his presidential campaign in April 2023, but his senior campaign advisors successfully discouraged Trump from doing so.^[10][11][12] By September 2024, some Trump supporters and others expressed concerns about Loomer's continuing presence around and influence on Trump.^[13][14]

It buggers the imagination how Trump could even let her be involved in his campaign, let alone fly on a plane with him. If he'd taken the time to read her Wikipedia profile it would have given him as much information as an FBI background check. 

Who knows whether he had fantasies like this about her:

Because Loomer has been lambasting Elon Musk she's been stripped of her Blue Check on X (read article).  

Excerpt:

"The elephant in the room is that Elon Musk, who is not MAGA and never has been, is a total f------ drag on the Trump transition," she wrote on X. "He's a stage 5 clinger who over stayed his welcome at Mar-a-Lago in an effort to... be the point man for all his accomplices in big Tech to slither in."

After Musk accused Loomer of "trolling for attention," she unloaded on him in response.

"Telling the truth isn't trolling," she said. "You bought your way into MAGA 5 minutes ago after Trump almost had his head blown off in Butler... we all know you only donated your money so you could influence immigration policy and protect your buddy Xi Jinping."

Shortly after this, Loomer had her official blue check verification badge removed, and she also reported being stripped of her paid subscribers.

Just an aside: Although I know that calling anything "stage 5" is bad because with cancer stage four is the worst, her using the term prompted me to look up ""stage 5 clinger" and it turns out it is a "thing." 

Here we have someone whose net worth is a meager $10 million at war with Elon Musk. It is like the isaland of Nauru declared war on the United States. She's still on X (here), but even if Musk kicks her off entirely she still has her own Rumble website and a Facebook page.

If she is exiled from X it will only heighten media coverage of their feud.

This being said, it is fascinating and pleasing to me to see someone like Loomer engaging in a no holds barred dispute with Elon Musk and more than just holding her own. She is as good as he is at hurling insults. 

Here we have the richest man in the world, who just a few days about was being called President Musk, paying attention to someboy who, in a sane world would be a nobody making the news. Perhaps he also wants to play kissy face with her.

This all takes attention away from the most important stories. These are about how Trump and his cadre of "the cruelty is the point" psychopaths are about to wreak havoc on our democracy.

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Trump is like an insecure bully trying to scare everyone by doing a cannonball into a crowded swimming pool, by Hal M. Brown

 

Below is the article in RawStory by Travis Getty that inspired me to put together this AI illustrated blog:

'Red meat for MAGA': Trump said to be prepping 'early shock-and-awe campaign' in new term.

Yesterday I wrote about deadcatting and how Turmp is throwing dead cats on the table to distract from all the publicity Elon Musk is getting and squash the speculation about who really is the president.

Making sure everyone knows he is president rather than Elon Musk is only part of what is motivating him to want to take headline grabbing action on his first day in office and then what he will do during his first days and weeks as president.

If you were lucky enough to go to swimming pools with your friends when you were a kid you probably watched some big bully try to show off by doing a cannon ball in the the midst of everyone in the pool and frighten the smaller children.

I think this is akin to what Trump is doing. He wants to be cheered on by MAGA and instill fear in his enemies.

He thinks he can emerge from the pool as some kind of superhero.

Thanks to AI I could offer you the images which show how Trump would really look if he did this rather than how he wishes he could look.

We actually have a president who sees himself as reincarnation of Superman (as if he'd adhere to The Man of Steel's credo with truth, justice, and the American way actually meaning what it was supposed to mean). 

You don't need to be his psychoanalyst to know that Trump imagines himself to be a masculine superhero with extraordinary powers. He has sold his digital cards depicting himself as a muscle bound Superman.

That so many people could vote for someone who has these delusions is an insult to the intelligence of millions of Americans. Trump also insulted voters by not keeping these fantasies to himself but by sharing them. 

Lots of kids have fantasies about being a superhero. When I was young I used to fantasize about being Mighty Mouse. (His theme song tells about his credo. Click here to hear it and watch a 20 minute episode.) This no doubt says a lot about me. 

These are people who might even buy the AI images below:

All of Trump's current blustering is an attempt to to show the country, and the world, how powerful he is and that he is not someone anyone should consider messing with. Below on the left is how he sees himself and on the right is how I and many others see him.

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Trump is thowing dead cats on the table to divert attention from the President Musk meme. Expect more deadcatting and beware of wag the dog. by Hal M Brown

 

I discovered that the metaphor about throwing a dead cat on the table to divert media and public attention was an actual political strategy when I read this on BlueSky:

I tried to use AI to make an illustration for today's blog that wouldn't be too upsetting. I am a cat lover and have had a dozen wonderful cats in my family in my life. My first was Bibby who was part of our family past the time I went to college (shown with my sister, Jenifer), and my next cat, Demetrious who, like Bibby lived to be 23.

What Trump has done has been effective. Instead of all the furor over Elon Musk being president and Trump being his puppet, we have Trump threatening to annex Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, send federal troops into Mexico, and execute as many prisoners as possible, making the news.

The following is from Wikipedia:

The dead cat strategy, also known as deadcatting, is the political strategy of deliberately making a shocking announcement to divert media attention away from problems or failures in other areas.^[1][2] The present name for the strategy has been associated with British former prime minister Boris Johnson's political strategist Lynton Crosby.

While he was mayor of London, Boris Johnson wrote a column for the 3 March 2013 edition of The Telegraph in which he described the "dead cat" as a piece of Australian political strategy about what to do in a situation in which the argument is being lost and "the facts are overwhelmingly against you".^[3][4]

There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don't mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, "Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!" In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.^[1]

Johnson employed the Australian Lynton Crosby as his campaign manager during the 2008 and 2012 London mayoral elections, leading to press speculation that he was the "Australian friend" in the story.^[5][4]

Only at the very end of the Wikipedia article is Donald Trump mentioned. It should be updated.

Rodwell notes the term later finding a place in media coverage of the "outrageous pronouncements" made by Donald Trump during the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries and his later presidential transition in the United States,

Just because Trump has used deadcating to take attention away from Elon Musk this doesn't mean that Musk can't do the same thing to regain the limelight. 

Today Musk is in the news for suggesting cognitive tests for goverment officials. The thing with this is that while there is a legitmate concern about people with dementia serving such a mandate would be impossible to initiate. Still, his suggesting it makes headlines and discussed on TV news.

It was even covered in Pravda.

Deadcatting is similar to how polticians use wag-the-dog:

Wag the dog is a political term for the act of creating a diversion from a damaging issue usually through military force. It stems from the generic use of the term to mean a small and seemingly unimportant entity (the tail) controls a bigger, more important one (the dog). It is usually used by a politician when they are in a scandal, in hopes that people forget about the scandal and focus on the more important issue. The phrase originates in the saying "a dog is smarter than its tail, but if the tail were smarter, then it would wag the dog."^[1] The concept has strong intersections with many other aspects of Diversionary foreign policy, particularly the rally 'round the flag effect, as wag the dog actions tend to both distract and seek to bolster support through these actions. (Wikipedia)

You may be familiar with this term because it was the name of a film:

Wag the Dog is a 1997 American black comedy political satire film starring  Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro.^[1] Produced and directed by Barry Levinson, the film centers on a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer who fabricate a war in Albania to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal.  (Wikipedia)

Wag the dog is arguably far worse than deadcatting when it comes to Donald Trump. If he wants to divert attention from a failed policy, broken promises, or any of his political troubles, he could actually invade a county. 

This is also from Wikipedia:

During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, President Clinton ordered missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan shortly after the story broke, drawing comparisons with the film and popularizing usage of the phrase.^[5] During impeachment proceedings, Clinton also bombed Iraq, drawing stronger "wag the dog" allusions.^[6] With the scandal still on the public's mind in March 1999, his administration launched a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. These action drew more attention to the phrase, growing its popularity.^[7]

It has been used multiple times for former President Donald Trump. First, in April 2017 when he conducted airstrikes against Syria during an investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections,^[3] and again in January 2020, after a U.S. airstrike assassination of Iran's General Qasem Soleimani occurred during first impeachment trials of former President Trump.^[8] 

That's it for today.

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah.

I post my blogs on Stressline.org where you can subscribe (for free everywhere) and on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches.

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Will Susie Wiles ever see the White House Chief of Staff office? My guess: Not if she tries to limit Musk's influence. By Hal M. Brown

Will Susie Wiles go from being one of Trump's closest and trusted advisors to be vaporized by Musk's Starlink satellite disintegration ray?

This is from an AP article published the day after the election about her:

She can control some of Trump’s worst impulses

Wiles was able to help control Trump’s worst impulses — not by chiding him or lecturing, but by earning his respect and showing him that he was better off when he followed her advice than flouted it. At one point late in the campaign, when Trump gave a widely criticized speech in Pennsylvania in which he strayed from his talking points and suggested he wouldn’t mind the media being shot, Wiles came out to stare at him silently. 

Trump often referenced Wiles on the campaign trail, publicly praising her leadership of what he said he was often told was his “best-run campaign.”

“She’s incredible. Incredible,” he said at a Milwaukee rally earlier this month.

Will she have staying power?

In his first administration, Trump went through four chiefs of staff — including one who served in an acting capacity for a year — in a period of record-setting personnel churn.

A chief of staff serves as the president’s confidant, helping to execute an agenda and balancing competing political and policy priorities. They also tend to serve as a gatekeeper, helping determine whom the president spends their time and to whom they speak — an effort under which Trump chafed inside the White House.

Trump once called her "the Ice Maiden." This was in his victory speech in Palm Beach, Florida. He said “Susie likes to stay sort of in the back, let me tell you. The Ice Maiden. We call her the Ice Maiden." (Reference: Susie Wiles: The ‘Ice Maiden’ operator who will be Trump’s chief of staff, Irish Times)

Lest you forget, these were Trump's chiefs of staff:

Amanda Marcotte referred to Susie Wiles in her Salon column 

Elon Musk can easily use Donald Trump's greatest advantage against him 

Trump isn't fooling anyone by saying Elon Musk's "not going to be president"

It appears Trump's nominee for chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is aware it's bad news to let Musk worm his way into being the shadow president. Despite all the mainstream media hype after Trump created "DOGE" — the Department of Government Efficiency — cooler heads noticed that this Musk-led initiative is not a real government agency, but a "presidential advisory committee." These are unpaid and powerless groups, often formed to avoid real change by giving make-work to activists and donors. President Joe Biden did it to shut up people calling for Supreme Court expansion and it's a safe bet that Wiles had the same goal in creating DOGE. 

Alas for her, Musk has Twitter and he uses it the same way Trump did in his first term, to rile up supporters and create so much noise that those who are putting the leader on "ignore" are forced to kowtow to whims frequently spouted in the hours when more sober people are sleeping. Musk is doing what he became unbelievably wealthy doing: stealing other people's ideas and passing them off as his own. In this case, he's swiping Trump's strategy of using Twitter mobbing tactics to work around the bureaucratic obstacles. While it didn't work this time, in terms of actually stopping the bill, it's hard to ignore that Republicans, having spent years kowtowing to Trump's narcissism, are turning their practice towards lavish public obsequiousness to Musk. 

For her sake I hope she hasn't be selecting drapes for her White House office. She may not even make it until Jan. 21st. If she gets in Musk's way she could be another lamb sent to the slaughter following in the footsteps of of Matt Gaetz. This lamb won't be slaughtered because of public opinion or GOP Senators seeing it as a beyond the pale nomination. It will be because she made the mistake of getting between Musk and Trump. She could end up as a lamb burger like those which, fittingly considering this is where Musk is from, are popular in South Africa, for example at the Capetown restaurant below and many others.

I post my blogs on Stressline.org where you can subscribe (for free everywhere) and on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches.

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What''s the deal with Trump wanting the Panama Canal back and Canada to be a state. It's all about his being threatened by the President Musk meme. By Hal M.Brown

How long before Trump starts wearing the MAGA Panama hat? I want bragging rights for predicting this if he does.

President Theodore Roosevelt wore a Panama hat when he visited the Panama Canal. Will Turmp wear his own version when he goes there if he can take it back? My hunch is that Trump felt he needed an issue to change the subject from people saying Musk was really the president. Maybe we'll see Trump wearing a MAGA Panama hat.

Just as I was starting to write this Jonathan LeMire said this on MSNBC - "when the Time Magazine cover drops" about a Time cover about Elon being president. I was going to write that I really hope they have a snarky cover showing President Musk. Trump pays attention to Time Magazine covers! I made this to post on X using the X logo to cover Trump's face.

I don't follow X having moved to BlueSky (here) but being able to do things like this is the only reason I use it.

Back to the Panama Canal story...

Trump's bringing this up pretty much out of nowhere except the convoluted recesses of his warped mind demonstrates that even though he is about to be sworn in as president he is still deeply insecure. The bloviating macho man has always had an Achille's Heel and it is having a superior macho man take the limelight away from him.

Another Trump weakness is having a woman make the news like Stormy Daniels did by mocking his masculinity and E. Jean Carroll did by forcing him to endure day after day in court. I think that every minute he spent in court he was seething inside and was plotting his revenge.

People make fun of Trump's dancing and although I haven't seen Musk dance at a Trump rally, he does dance in his own energetic odd way. Here's a video

He also can enthusiatically leap quite high, apparently, as shown below, not pleasing Trump.

Musk often wears his black Colonize Mars t-shirt and in this photo he looks like he could be using levitating powers to actually start the journey.

As far as who the real macho man is, Musk is the richest man in the world. Trump is rich and just got back on the Forbes 400 list, but he's nowhere near as rich as Musk who is worth 10 times as much as he is. As far as another common, albeit phallocentric, measure of masculine prowess, Musk has 12 children. Critics question whether Trump and Melania even share a bedroom. Musk just had a baby.

Trump wants to round up undocumented people who want to live here and be productive members of our society.  He wants to depict them as evil so he can be say he vanquished them and saved innocent true Americans from being victims of horrific crimes. Musk wants the immigration problem to be resolved but his focues is on how much it costs.

Musk wants to be known for DOGE and saving the goverment and Americans billions, but he also is passionate about sending people to inhabit another planet. Instead of wanting to be known for helping to cure cancer he tried to cut funding for children's cancer research. Wanting to rocket off to Mars just isn't as glamorous and manly an accomplishment as curing cancer. This is why you won't see Trump making this an focus of his presidency.

Trump has made many promises he is unlikely to be able to keep. People are not particulary patient. They want to see lower grocery prices as soon as he takes office. Trump has to make good on his Hitlerian rhetoric about rounding up immigrants and deporting them. He wants this to happen overnight. Of course it won't and the endeavor which will be marked by ineptitude will be met with a lot of blowback and bad publicity. Trump is setting himself up for failure. So what does he do? He decides to take the Panama Canal back.

On top of this he has also once again brought up the idea of buying Greenland.

There is something so utterly self-defeating about Trump interjecting Panama and Greenland into the news coverage that I can only clincally explain it by positing that the viral President Musk meme has hit his Achille's Heel and hobbled him so he is totally off balance. He is desperate for a diversion. He want to show how powerful he is. He's decided that one way to do this is to pull a Putin. He wants to annex land, in this case a canal, and Greenland, and even the entire country of Canada making it our 51st state. 

He tried unsuccessfully to antagonize Prime Minister of Canada so perhaps this is why he took on the president of Panama. He's trying to sell this idea on Truth Social:

I can't keep up with the images about President Musk that I see posted in social media. Below are just a few of them.

These are mine:

I doubt very much that Trump sees any of these. I admit I enjoy making them and in all modesty think his wearing the "I'm the boss" t-shirt is one of the best I used AI to create. 

To say it is all over the news is an understatement. Consider this simple Google News search for President Musk.

Click above to enlarge image

Trump is that he's the most transparently self-revealing president in my lifetime. This sounds like a complement considering that he has also lied more than any president or presidential candidate this needs some explanation. Most of his lies reveal something about the inner workings of his mind. This goes for many of the words he types on social media and utters when he goes off the teleprompter when he speaks. 

There was a time when mental health professionals were criticized for trying to diagnose Trump without assessing him in person. By now I hope those who lambasted us realize that we have so much information about his psychopathogy it would be a kind of malpractice not to diagnose him. 

Trump is a malignant narcissist who is a dangerous to our democracy. In addtion he meets every critera for being an examplar for the Dark Triad.

Trump, who lacks a semblence of empathy, has a sadistic streak. So do others like Stephen Miller and his choice to head the immigration round up Tom Homan. Like with Trump, the cruelty is the point. Being cruel makes them feel tough and manly.

Related:

Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski on plot to take Greenland: 'We have not expanded our country in 70 years'

"Corey, what do you make of Trump's threat about the Panama Canal?" Newsmax host Logan Ratick asked the Trump adviser.

"Yeah, once again, this is President Trump focused on America first," Lewandowski explained. "We sold it for a dollar, which was just the most ridiculous thing that anybody has ever seen."

"And so it's time to make sure that our independence and our dominance on the world stage is back in play," he continued. "He's talking about maybe Greenland from a historic perspective coming as part of the United States, taking back the Panama Canal so that China doesn't have its influence there."

"This is a president who is making outside-the-box announcements to put the world on notice that, once again, the United States is the dominant world superpower."

I post my blogs on Stressline.org where you can subscribe (for free everywhere) and on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches.

The halbrown.org platform includes a Disquis comment section. To use it you have to register on Disquis. Go to bottom of blogs and click sign up with Disquis.