The president's preening narcissism, again! By Hal M. Brown

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This is unformatted. It is always best to read my posts on Substack.

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This is what Trump posted on Truth Social at 5:26 PM last night. Here’s the text: "Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the Governor, along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before. The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst. She must have lost her talent as she got older. In any event, I would much prefer not having a picture than having this one, but many people from Colorado have called and written to complain. In fact, they are actually angry about it! I am speaking on their behalf to the Radical Left Governor, Jared Polis, who is extremely weak on Crime, in particular with respect to Tren de Aragua, which practically took over Aurora (Don’t worry, we saved it!), to take it down. Jared should be ashamed of himself!"

 This is making the news both in Colorado and around the country. Below, from, Colorado Poltics: This is from Time: It is making news in the homeland of the artist. This is from the British publication The Telegraph. Here’s the painting of Barack Obama: One might think that this is more than merely Trump resenting that President Obama’s picture seems to show him looking better than he does. Could it be that deep, deep, down in the murky morass of Trump’s unconscious he is jealous of the president who he calls Barack Hussein Obama? This is the dictionary definition of preen: (of a bird) straighten and clean its feathers with its beak: robins preened at the pool's edge | [with object] : the pigeon preened her feathers. • (of a person) devote effort to making oneself look attractive and then admire one's appearance: adolescents preening in their bedroom mirrors. • (preen oneself) congratulate or pride oneself: it did not prevent them from preening themselves on their achievement. The first person to use the term “preening narcissism” to describe Trump in an article was Pulitzer Preze winning columnist Jennifer Senior (Wiki profile) writing for The New York Times. It was in this article written during the pandemic: President Trump Is Unfit for This Crisis. Period. His narcissism is a grave danger to our health. The article was illustrated with a photo with this caption: President Trump boarding Air Force One in Florida on Monday. Reports over the weekend said the White House overruled government health officials who wanted to advise older people against flying. I was struck by one term in what she wrote, in bold below: And of course, it was at that same news conference that Trump infamously said, “I like the numbers being where they are,” in explaining why he was reluctant to let passengers, some of whom have tested positive for the virus, off the Grand Princess cruise ship floating off California (it has since been given permission to dock in Oakland). That news conference was, to me, the most frightening moment of the Trump presidency. His preening narcissism, his compulsive lying, his vindictiveness, his terror of germs and his terrifying inability to grasp basic science — all of it eclipsed his primary responsibilities to us as Americans, which was to provide urgent care, namely in the form of leadership. It’s preposterous for Trump to resist determining how widespread this epidemic is. Yet right now, the United States isn’t reporting how many people have been tested; the C.D.C. pulled the number from its website. Late last week, an extraordinarily detailed article by The Atlantic, counting state by state, put that number at only 1,895. In South Korea, the number was more than 140,000. (Which Trump dismissed as “sampling.” It was not. It was testing, straight and simple.) I wrote about Senior calling Trump a preening narcissist and posted it in Daily Kos: Trump was captured in one paragraph and one catchphrase by NY Times OpEd writer Jennifer Senior This is the illustration I made for this: What I wrote there had no particular content which was original with me. I just wanted to share her use of the term “preening narscisst” because it was the first I’d heard it and it described one aspect of Trump so well. It turned out that of the 1,700 pieces I posted on Daily Kos this one received the most recommendations (471) and it had 188 comments. I also wrote: "Don't rain on my pomade" president, the pathetic preening narcissist is getting his due with this illustration: I discovered this in this RawStory article: 'Nobody likes a bad picture of themselves': Trump rages that Obama painting is 'wonderful'. RawStory used a bad picture of Trump to illustrate this article: The least noxious and dangerous part of Trump’s narcissism is that it has to do with his appearance. If only he was just a strutting peacock dispalying his feathers or a crowing rooster ruling and impregnating all the chickens in a henhouse. Put another way, Trump thinks he is the cock of the walk. The origins of this idiom are somewhat unclear, but it’s believed to have originated in rural England during the 18th century. At that time, cockfighting was a popular pastime among farmers and other working-class people. The winner of each fight was considered to be the “cock of the walk,” or the top rooster in the pecking order. Trump, if he believed in God, would think he was God’s gift to women because he’s such a hunka burning love. Trump’s has many other characteristics besides narcissism that makes him the most dangerous president in history. I wrote about this here: Sadists ® U.S: Trump and The Dark Tetrad, By Hal M. Brown It should be obvious that Trump is an example of someone who has all of the traits of The Dark Tetrad: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism The most dangerous aspect of his narcissism looked at in isolation is that he believes he knows more about everything than anybody else. He has said that he has the biggest brain which to him means he is more intelligent than anybody else. He has surrounded himself with toadies who have far more knowledge in their areas of expertise than he does, but when Trump doesn’t agree with them they disagree with him at their peril.  

Addendum: 

 This was one of the comments I posted on my Daily Kos piece: Michael D'Antonio, the author of the book "Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success" and co-author with Peter Eisner of "The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence." wrote: ...the problem is not so much the President's overweening self-regard but his inability to recognize the needs of others. This problem, invariably a characteristic of the truly narcissistic... In the current crisis, the problem is not so much the President's overweening self-regard but his inability to recognize the needs of others. This problem, invariably a characteristic of the truly narcissistic, makes it difficult if not impossible for someone to put others first. In families, it can be evidenced by the parent who buys himself a new car when the rent is overdue. In countries, it is seen when a leader can't seem to see what people need in a moment of crisis. Whether he's throwing paper towels into a crowd amid death and devastation in Puerto Rico or mocking victims of sexual assault, Trump has shown himself to be callous with enough regularity that he has taught us to cringe when we see him in a moment where concern for others is required. Remember how he joked about crowd sizes when he visited a hospital after a mass shooting in El Paso? How about the time, at the beginning of his term, when he stood at a memorial for fallen intelligence officers and bragged about his own intellect? Compassion, which is the opposite of narcissism, is as essential to the presidency as any trait and presidents of both parties have shown it often. We all remember the moving responses from Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing, George W. Bush after the attacks of 9/11 and Barack Obama after the Charleston church shooting. It is something we have relied on from our leaders. It is also the piece so often missing from Trump's response to difficult times. This is the man, who, a Huffington Post video showed, needed an emotional cheat sheet for a meeting with survivors of school shootings. That the prompts encouraged him to say, "I hear you," is all the evidence we need to know that the White House staff recognizes that the President struggles when it comes to compassion.

How a few comments to a HUFFPOST article comparing Trump to Hitler is a snapshot of divided America, By Hal M. Brown (The article is about Trump's anti-trans rants, but comments may show that a lot of men suffer from castration anxiety.

 

I read The Nazis Made A Horrifying Move In 1933. I'm Terrified Trump Is Now Doing The Exact Same Thing.

“Until recently, the question remained theoretical. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that President Trump is running plays straight out of Hitler’s playbook.”

The author, Ali Moss has a Substack where she also published this article.

I made this comment on HUFFPOST:

Then I looked over the comments and got the idea for today’s Susbtack.

The comments section of HUFFPOST continues to be an accurate representation of the dichotomy of viewpoints between Americans. On the one side we have those who condemn the author of this article and the entire idea that transgender children actually are born that way. These posts are sometimes crude and angry. They sometime say any comparison of Turmp with Hitler is, not always in these words, Trump derangement syndrome.

On the other side we have people who agree with the author that what Trump is doing has horrifying similarities to what Hitler did. These commenters tend to be both well thought out and respectful.

I looked at the comments and found a thread in response to what Roberta Powell posted. She was responding to a comment I can’t see because it was removed:

You can read it below. There are several typos.

• Roberta Powell

  We are there. He has labeled the same people as criminals, nonexistent or enemies. LGBTQ, DEI, foreign born, the press, the universities, libraries and liberals are lunatics destroying the American dream. And just like 1933 Germany he found a violent minority who agree. He oiks very elserlyfound more that join him for their own gain. Hitler was not 80 years old. Trump is. Trump's Reich ls led by the elderly but enforced by the middle aged. They have no limits. What laws they do not remove they break. This is a far right lunatic political party with an opposition that sits back to let the right do damage and lose support. We know we are not represented in Congress by either party. Unless we join the right wingers we are alone. We are there. It is 1930 Germany here in the U.S.A. and a depression is being set up. It's going to get very bad here.

  • LAXMAN FIVE

    So you like males on female sports teams and in their locker rooms right liberal? Only a Nazi would be against that. Right.

    • Two term Papaw

      All three of them!!!!

      Meanwhile MAGA can’t afford groceries without a second low wage job

    • Roberta Powell

      It's sports. I see huge muscular "born girls" and dainty, feminine "born boys" being used as an excuse to destroy every freedom our ancestors fought for. It's insane. I don't see the point. Why force girls to compete with transgender boys? It's not fair. Any athlete born female could take hormones and go through surgeries and compete against girls according to Trump. And they are? Just to win a high school trophy? That's nuts. And when girls compete with boys the girls still win sometimes. I think that is your real objection. Get over it and try harder.

  • undefined undefined

    DEI is racist and a man can't be a woman princess.

    • Roberta Powell

      But they can! DEI and transgenders can do their jobs.

• Susan Ortiz

  Some how her trans 11 year old had the freedom of speech intact to address the crowd under this nazi regime. How does that work?

  • Trump's Fascist Regime

    Ask the Columbia university protesters...

• Daniel Pedraza

  30 minutes ago

  Of course he is. His own daughter said he sleeps with copy of mine kempf by his bed. The entire DEI fraud that is a major Republican talking point is just a clever way to move towards white supremacy That's all it is.

  • Halle Piño

    You think that's "clever"?!

    Seems pretty transparent to me.

• Beef Supreme

  Another woman emotionally manipulated by the Big Media Propaganda Machine into feeling terrified. How sad.

Roberta Powell replied to something I added to the comments:

Ha! How is Trump different than Hitler?

• Hal Brown

  The similarities outweigh the differences. Hitler was a stable psychopath. Trump is an unstable psychopath. I am writing my Substack and knowing if you are the person I think you are will add more to it.

Just added:

Trump has had so many big lies beside the one about him really having won the 2020 election that led to his re-election that there’s no one lie we can pick out as the biggest of the big lies. My choice is that the biggest election outcome defining big lie was that the reason he servived the assassination attempt was that God ordained this. When I saw the photo of him with his fist raised I knew he couldn’t lose. 

There were other big lies such as that the MAGA thugs who assaulted the Capitol were patriots. Trump has also managed to make the entire trans issue into a big lie. In the inconvenient fact don’t mater MAGA-sphere it is a big lie that there are only two genders. What the hell does the Mayo Clinic know?

As a psychoanalytically informed psychotherapist I see things like this through a Freudian lens. My analysis of why Trump’s anti-trans fear-mongering resonates with so many men is that they are insecure about their own masculinity. They have a deeply buried unconscious fear of castration. I would venture to speculate that this manifests itself in symbolism in their dreams.

This is how Wikipedia defines castration anxiety:

Castration anxiety is an overwhelming fear of damage to, or loss of, the penis—a derivative of Sigmund Freud's theory of the castration complex, one of his earliest psychoanalytic theories.The term refers to the fear of emasculation in both a literal and metaphorical sense.

Freud regarded castration anxiety as a universal human experience. It is thought to begin between the ages of 3 and 5, during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. In Freud's theory, it is the child's perception of anatomical difference (the possession of a penis) that induces castration anxiety as a result of an assumed paternal threat made in response to their sexual proclivities. Although typically associated with males, castration anxiety is thought to be experienced, in differing ways, by both sexes.

In the literal sense, castration anxiety refers to a child's fear of having their genitalia disfigured or removed as punishment for Oedipal desire

I wonder whether if there was the research into gender identity and gender reassignment surgery in Freud’s lifetime whether he would have considered how he interpreted dreams about castration.

It doesn’t take a leap of imagination to come up with a Freudian explanation about someone’s unconscious fears when they lied and obsessed about the size of crowds that came to hear them speak. Likewise, if someone depicted themselves in computer generated images as muscular superheros sometimes carrying big guns, you don’t have to be Freud to speculate about their unconscious fears. Fake pro-wrestling crap, and the very worst, his need to sexually dominate women… I could go on but I will spare you.

Read my recent Substacks.

The concrete Trump poured to destroy democracy is beginning to cure. How long will it take to be as strong as Hoover Dam? By Hal M. Brown

 

Kids and others sometimes write or make impressions in newly poured concrete sidewalks. This is from the web about the constructon of Hoover Dam: 

Once the bottom of the bucket opened up, it disgorged 6.1 m3 of concrete which was, generally, only a layer a couple of centimeters thick in that particular column. All this was done between June 1933 and June 1935The Hoover Dam concrete would cure in 125 years by conventional or natural methods. Crews, however, used some innovative engineering methods to hasten the process. Nearly 600 miles of steel pipes woven through the concrete blocks significantly reduced the chemical heat from the setting for the concrete. 

The construction of the dam was the result of a massive effort involving thousands of workers, and cost over 100 lives. You can look at my illustration and make you own analogy.

Above: Before and after drawings.

Trump has already poured the concrete which cements his role as a ruthless do-what-he-damned-well pleases dictator. Screw the courts, turn on the full-court press. (I don’t like to use sports metaphors, but this one was too good.)

He is testing the limits each and every day. All of those trying to stop him are like those who make their mark in cement sidewalks. The concrete will cure no matter what and whatever they did with court rulings in their favor or crowds at rallies like Bernie and AOC are holding or protests around the country. Democracy loving people are making their mark but the concrete is relentlessly hardening.

The inspiration for today’s Substack came from my comments to my friend Sabrina Haake’s Substack today: The Roberts Court created this monster.

Among the many other things which I wrote in the comments I wrote the following:

“Trump has poured the cement of his ruthless dictatorship. It is rapidly setting. Soon it will be as hard as the concrete in Hoover Dam. Before long nobody will bother taking Trump to court. Protests will not only be futile, they will dangerous.” 

Then I thought this was a good idea to expand on in my Substack.

Read my recent Substacks:

Sadists ® U.S: Trump and The Dark Tetrad, By Hal M. Brown (It should be obvious that Trump is an example of someone who has all of the traits of The Dark Tetrad: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism.)

Best to subscribe to my free Substack here.

Some perfectly normal people have sadistic fantasies about what they’d like to do or see happen to certain people. They may think about these things, they may write about them, they may talk about them to friends. In this poltical climate they may involve someone named Donald Trump. They may be realistic fantasies involving torture or may take a Dantesque turn and be about a special level of Hell designed by the quintessential sadist Satan for just that person and his cohorts.

It takes a uniquely psychopathological personality to share these fantasies with the world. It takes someone who fits into The Dark Tedrad. More about that later.

This is the RawStory article that led me to write today’s Substact:

Trump floats sending 'thug' Tesla vandals to infamous El Salvador prison

This is the Trump Truth Social post put online at 4:30 AM today.

The RawStory article cites this story in Foreign Policy Magazine.

Here’s an excerpt:

Former prisoners have told Cristosal, the human rights organization that I work for, that they were greeted at prison gates by guards who beat them and warned that they would not leave the prison walking.

Despite the Bukele administration’s well-documented human rights abuses, the president’s offer to the United States has the backing of a viral marketing campaign. The government brags about its harsh treatment of prisoners and high incarceration rates online. It has produced high-resolution photos and videos of detainees and prisons that are distributed to the media and used in news reports around the world.

At the center of Bukele’s propaganda is El Salvador’s now infamous megaprison, the Terrorist Confinement Center (known by its Spanish acronym, CECOT), which opened in 2023 and can house up to 40,000 inmates. It is still operating at half its capacity. Government handout images and content from choreographed press visits to CECOT have appeared below many headlines about El Salvador’s state of exception in the international press. Prisoners have shaved heads, tattooed faces, and wear all-white outfits—including white Crocs.

Foreign journalists reporting on the state of exception who fixate on CECOT are likely focusing on the wrong prisoners in the wrong prison. The middle-aged faces and full-body tattoos that appear in the footage from the megaprison suggest that they are gang members who have likely been in prison since well before the state of exception began. (Most Salvadoran gangs abandoned the practice of tattooing their faces years ago.)

Here’s more:

If the bodies of the 85,000 people detained without warrants bear any marks, they are more likely those of scabies and torture rather than tattoos. Testimonies gathered by Cristosal from former prisoners describe horrific overcrowding, disease, and systematic denial of food, clothing, medicine, and basic hygiene in El Salvador’s older prisons.

Cristosal and other human rights organizations have documented credible evidence of sexual assault and rape against women and children detained under the state of exception. The combination of harsh conditions and systematic physical torture has caused the deaths of at least 367 people, according to documentary, photographic, and forensic evidence gathered by Cristosal’s investigators. Salvadoran authorities deny that torture and killings occur in the country’s prisons.

I rather doubt Foreign Policy Magazine is on Trump’s morning reading list.

Back to sadism. 

If you are up on your Trump psychopatholgy you not only know what malignant narcissism is, but also know what the Dark Triad is. There have been many articles about Trump and the Dark Triad (here). I’ve written several including, most recently, this one:

Because many people who have traits of The Dark Triad also are sadistic another pesonalality type called The Dark Tetrad was added by experts. You may not know what the Dark Tetrad is.

It is worth knowing what the Dark Tetrad is. Here’s a definition from a Psyhology Today article:

The Dark Tetrad, also known as the Dark Quad, is a set of interrelated negative personality features: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism. The term is an expansion of the idea of the Dark Triad construct, which does not include sadism. In the last decade, researchers have noted a correlation of sadism with Dark Triad traits, with the result of the Dark Tetrad.

People with Dark Tetrad traits score high on measures of the following:

• Narcissism: A belief that one is special, particularly gifted, obsessed with themselves and that they are superior to others.

• Machiavellianism: A tendency to see people as a means to achieve one's own goals.

• Psychopathy: A condition characterized by a lack of affective empathy and the willingness to exploit others.

• Sadism: The tendency to derive pleasure from the pain or humiliation of others.

It should be obvious that Trump is an example of someone who has all of the traits of The Dark Tetrad. If you want to explore this further, here’s an article by Morgan Sinclair, PhD: Heart of Darkness. Trump isn't just Dark Triad. He's Dark *Tetrad*.

Read my previous Substacks here. Warning: They are dark.

On top of all the other shit blowing into our faces we are dealing with finding out it's hit the Wikipedia fan too, By Hal M, Brown

 .

A report from the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, accuses Wikipedia of anti-Isreal and anti-Jewish bias. It is titled “Editing for Hate: How Anti-Israel and Anti-Jewish Bias Undermines Wikipedia’s Neutrality” You can read it here.

The image the ADL used for their report’s illustration, above, is an AI created version of the Wikipedia logo blowing apart. I added Wiki’s real logo on the lower left.

This was discussed on ‘Morning Joe’ today. They interviewed the president of the ADL, Joseph Greenblatt. This was the first I’d heard about it. 

This was covered in the media (see Google News search here) but as you can see it wasn’t getting major attention from very many American publications. I am pleased that “Morning Joe” covered it.

This is the Executive Sumarry from the report:

ADL has identified extensive issues with antisemitic and anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia in multiple languages. These issues include 1) a coordinated campaign to manipulate Wikipedia content related to Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and similar issues, in which a group of editors systematically evade Wikipedia’s rules to shift balanced narratives toward skewed ones, spotlighting criticism of Israel and downplaying Palestinian terrorist violence and antisemitism; and 2) pro-Hamas perspectives informing Arabic-language Wikipedia content on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

ADL has found clear evidence that a group of at least 30 editors circumvent Wikipedia’s policies in concert to introduce antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias, and misleading information.

These 30 editors were much more active than other comparable groups of editors, on average, by a factor of at least two, based on total edits made over the past 10 years.

• The 30 editors were much more likely than other editors to communicate with each other on Wikipedia: they were as much as 18x more active in group communications than comparable groups of editors.

• The editors appeared to coordinate to change pages related to Israel, Palestine¹, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, downplaying Palestinian antisemitism, violence, and calls to destroy Israel while foregrounding criticism of Israel.

• These edits have ramped up since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and include the systematic removal of citations to reputable sources and tandem voting to keep content critical of Israel but remove coverage of Palestinian violence and terrorism.

In addition to this multiyear campaign by bad-faith editors to revise Wikipedia’s content on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ADL found evidence of biased and extremist content in Arabic-language Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s rules are not applied consistently outside of some English-language pages, allowing biased pro-Hamas content in the Arabic-language edition.

Pages related to Hamas in Arabic glorify the Palestinian terrorist organization and perpetuate pro-Hamas propaganda, while failing to follow Wikipedia’s rules for neutrality.

This report makes clear that Wikipedia needs to do far more to address anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias and coordination. Until it has done that, those who rely on Wikipedia – from Google Search to large language models like ChatGPT – must deprioritize Wikipedia’s content on issues related to Jews, Israel and the Middle East conflict so that they do not perpetuate this bias.

It should be a no-brainer to say that some subjects require considerable diligence to write a totally obective article about in Wikipedia or any other publication trying to be an encyclopedia, especially one that reports on current events, often within a few hours after they occur the way Wikipedia does. 

When it comes to the Middle East conflict I agree with the ADL that Wikipedia must get its act together before anyone can use it as an unbiased source. 

Consider what would happen if Wiki’s exhaustive entry of the Russian invasion of Ukraine gave credence to Putin’s claim that that the Ukrainian government were neo-Nazis committing genocide against the Russian minority in the Donbas, and said that Russia's goal was to "demilitarise and denazify" Ukraine. What if they went further and said, like Trump has, that Ukraine started the war?

The matter of Wikipedia in this instance has nothing to do with Trump and his manic effort to control the press. I haven’t seen any reports of him jumping on it to discredit Wikipedia because it accurately describes what he does. I doubt he knows how many members of both the media and the public count on it for factual information. This may change. Consider that in doing reseacrh for my Substack today I found this from a Fox News article published on March 7th:

Wikipedia co-founder calls on Elon Musk to investigate government influence over online encyclopedia

Excerpt:

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is calling on Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to look into whether government actors have infiltrated the online encyclopedia that he helped start over two decades ago.

"Hi @ElonMusk. Wikipedia co-founder here. May I ask you to determine what branches of the U.S. government—if any!—have employees paid to edit, monitor, update, lobby, etc., WIkipedia? Such operations should be defunded, if any. If there are *none*, we’d like to know. Agree?" Sanger recently wrote on X.

Sanger, who left the organization in 2002, has been a heavy critic of Wikipedia since about 2005, when he says the website began to drift into left-wing bias.

If what Larry Sanger is true this tarnishes the reputation of all of Wikipedia. It is not up to the government to investigate it. Musk and DOGE should keep their dirty hands off it. However, Wikipedia has to clean house themselves.

I often either provide a simple link to Wikipedia so people can learn more about a person or a subject. For example, above with ADL president Joseph Greenblatt, for readers who want to learn more about him I provided a link. In yesterday’s Substack I used quotes from Wikipedia from their entries on police state and martial law.

I have found entries related to Donald Trump to be unbiased. This is the main entry in a series of articles about him.

Trump would no doubt want the following from that entry scrubbed along with it’s internal links to other Wiki articles:

Trump is the central figure of Trumpism. Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racially charged, racist, or misogynistic. He has made false and misleading statements and promoted conspiracy theories to a degree unprecedented in American politics. After losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Trump attempted to overturn the outcome, culminating in the January 6 Capitol attackin 2021. In 2023, Trump was found liable in civil cases for sexual abuse and defamation and for business fraud, and in 2024, he was found guilty of falsifying business records, making him the first U.S. president convicted of a felony. After winning the 2024 presidential election against Kamala Harris, Trump was sentenced to a penalty-free discharge, and two other felony indictments against him were dismissed.

Trump began his second term by pardoning around 1,500 January 6 rioters, initiating mass layoffs of the federal workforce, and starting a trade war with Mexico and Canada. Trump's broad and extensive use of executive orders has drawn numerous lawsuits challenging their legality.

Trump has already been on a crusade to control the media. He has banned the Associated Press from press conferences using the excuse of their refusing to accept that the Gulf of Mexico has to be called the Gulf of America. Of course this is bullshit. The AP reporters are known for asking tough questions. (The AP style book which is used by many journalists has addressed the Gulf of Mexico vs. Gulf of America matter here.)

Wait for it, folks. How long before Musk sends his DOGE minions along with armed officers like he did at The United States Institute of Peace (read article) to break into Wiki’s San Francisco headquarters and kick out their staff and take over their computer servers? Of course, this could be problematic given this is San Francisco which is a sanctuary city, and Mayor Daniel Lurie might decide to order the SFPD to stop this.

For my recent Substacks about American politics click here.

For my readers as if we don’t have enough to worry about:

Keep New Bat Coronavirus On the Radar, Researchers Say

Trump and MAGA don’t want anyone to realize these are human beings: