CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 142nd Edition, 25th Amendment Watch, 22nd Edition. Worry.

If you aren't afraid of what's going on with the United States government and Donald Trump's increasingly demented brain, you should be.  We've really entered the Twilight Zone on this one.

Tom Nichols, the columnist for The Atlantic, nailed it in this MS Now interview, in which he stated: 

Nichols: It’s almost like we have a relative in the room, and there’s something deeply wrong with him. And we’ve all agreed not to talk about it. But there is something deeply wrong with him.

His friends know it, his critics know it. His staff, I’m sure, knows it. The world knows it. World leaders know it. And most importantly, our enemies know it, which is why they don’t take him seriously.

Nobody hangs on his words. They kind of do, but mostly out of freakish curiosity to see what kind of wild thing he’s going to say next, not because his words have any inherent meaning or reflect policy.

You know, I spent years teaching students that when the president speaks, it’s policy, and you must pay attention when the president speaks because nobody can contradict him.

Now, you know, are we really cutting off all trade with Spain? Who knows? Maybe. Maybe not. It might have just been a stray electron, you know, careening around inside his brainpan. Who knows?

But this is really dangerous because in the middle of all this stuff—and we can laugh about, you know, the Islamic Republic of Japan and all of that—but he made several statements about an ongoing war that the United States is losing. And no one’s even trying to pretend that they can make any sense of it.

And I’ll just add one last thing that you just brought up.

If this were any other president, this would be a national crisis. I mean, Joe Biden got somebody’s name wrong, and it was headlines. The president gets all kinds of things wrong, completely, you know, is out to lunch at an important NATO summit, and, you know, it’s Wednesday.

This is a crisis.  

Trump's brain was really on full display over the past week while he was attending the NATO summit.

During a public meeting with Zelensky, he referred to him as Putin.  For that matter, he claimed:

We had 11 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan.

The same man who can't get out of the war claimed:

In one day, we could knock down every single bridge in Iran. There's not a thing they can do about it ... if we have to, we'll take them out. They have desalinization plants. We'll take them out if we have to ... maybe we'll take over Kharg

Attacking desalinization plants would likely be a war crime.

On the bogus Red Scare:

I would be the greatest communist in history. I'd be right up there with Leneeen.

On Spain, which he liked the next day or day after:

Spain is a wasted cause. We don't want to do any trade business with Spain anymore, by the way. I'd like to cut it off. Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. Cut off all trade with Spain, please. Including visits. We don't want anything to do. They're hopeless. Bad

And on IEDs.

The roadside bomb is a bomb that goes on when you're driving your little around, and it goes on and you have no legs, no arms, and no face.

The latter, I'd note, is typical for Trump in this stage.  He talks about something that everyone else in world knows more about than he does, and then gives it a toddlers explanation.  A week or two ago he discovered that the word dumb is spelled dumb.  He was so pleased to discover that. Apparently he really believed that most people thought it was spelled "dum".

That last item should worry us in and of itself  A President ought to have a trusted advisor to tell him, "look Donny, the entire f*****g world except you knows how that word is spelled.

Instead, we're on a roller coaster in control of a man who has the mind of a toddler.

July 11, 2026

On his recent trip to be ignored at the NATO summit, in Turkey, where the participants have tired of the raving octogenarian, Donald Trump switched airplanes as Qatari One lacks the full set of countermeasures that the two Air Force Ones have.  It took the Press about a day to figure that out, which wasn't all that difficult, particularly as the lame excuse was that it was going to a U.S. Airbase in the UK so the airmen there could admire it.  Nonetheless, the Administration is now suing over the story breaking.

The story further developed, basically, that the Iranians, after having their complete leadership killed in the first hours of the war might revisit the tactic on Donald Trump, which is the very reason that nations at war do not do this.  A more likely story, however, is simply that there's an intelligence assessment that it was a risk, which it obviously is.  When Trump was called on the real reason for the airplane's diversion he at first sort of brushed it off, but by yesterday he no longer was.

Now we're getting this:

This is flat out absurd and frankly nobody believes it.  Given the sort of missiles this would entail, it threatens what amounts to a nuclear strike on Iran.  

Frankly, this entire episode is a massive example of playing a stupid game and winning a stupid prize.  Trump made himself a target by assassinating or allowing the assassination of the Iranian civil government.  If they aren't targeting him, and frankly they likely aren't, it's because they deem it in their best interest not to, and not because the US would retaliate, but because it's in their best interest at this point to have the country lead by a distracted demented fruit loop.

For what it's worth, a President can't give a "if they kill me, do this" order.  Once the President dies, his role as Commander in Chief dies with him.  This could only occur if the next President authorized it.  If a President was assassinated by a foreign power, there'd be some sort of military retaliation, but this wouldn't be it.

The real danger here, however, is that Trump went from "m'eh" to absolute panic in the space of a day.  He's getting extremely erratic and he's not going to get better.  Normally if a threat like this was made parties would be getting ready to invoke the 25th Amendment.  We're now so used to this it's just another day.

July 22, 2026

Green New Scam where we were scammed. The whole country was, I wasn't scammed. I got it right from the beginning… they were saying wind was so wonderful, so wonderful, except you couldn't, watch your television, they wanted to watch the debate. Donald Trump against Sleepy Joe Biden. Nobody could watch it because the wind wasn't blowing. Remember that?

Everything about this Trump babble is completely erroneous.

Seriously, he needs to have the 25th Amendment applied to him.  That it isn't, is reckless in the extreme.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 142nd Edition, 25th Amendment Watch 21st Edition. The Vietnam Rag, Red Scare Editions.

Labels: 25th Amendment Watch List, Barack Obama, Communism, Conscription, Donald Trump, Red Scare of 1919, Red Scare of the 1950s, Socialism, The Madness of King Donald, Vietnam War, Vladimir Putin, Zeitgeist

25th Amendment Watch, 20th Edition. The Frontotemporal Dementia Edition.

Labels: 25th Amendment Watch List, Conspiracy Theories, Donald Trump, Introspection, J. D. Vance, Mental Health, National Conservatism, Science, The Madness of King Donald, The Second Trump Administration

The Aerodrome: Air Force One, Aircraft boneyards, Arizona (Tucson), Boeing 747, Boeing VC-25B, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, RAF Mildenhall, United States Air Force, United States and Israel v. Iran

The Aerodrome: Missing a rather obvious upgrade. Was; The Aerodr...: The Aerodrome: Boeing VC-25B Bridge. A shameful flying monument. : This blog was never intended to be political, but in the age of Donald T...

Missing a rather obvious upgrade. Was; The Aerodrome: Boeing VC-25B Bridge. A shameful flying monument.

The Aerodrome: Boeing VC-25B Bridge. A shameful flying monument.: This blog was never intended to be political, but in the age of Donald Trump, which will go down as the most corrupt political era in U.S. h...

So Trump went to the NATO summit in Turkey and, at some point, it dawned on somebody that this meant he was a stone's throw from Iran. . . and that maybe Air Force One made for a good target.

Frankly, the war in Iran has been very surprising in numerous ways, including htat much of what had always been predicted about such a war just did not occur, at least so far.  For instance, it had always been assumed that Iran would activate sleeper cells in the US if a war occured.  Right now, given that nothing occurred, we have to assume that Iran either has remarkable restraint, or it doesn't have sleeper cells  Nothing has happened.

Closing the Strait of Hormuz should have been no surprise at all, but what has been a surprise is Iran's resilience to attack.  People thinking that defeating Iran would be easy were always completely delusional, and indeed it won't happen unless the US commits troops the ground in very large numbers, but country's ability to just shrug off repeated attacks is really impressive.  It's engaged in some major missile offensives during the war and even now has only used a faction of what it has.  Early beliefs that all its launchers were taken out proved to be completely erroneous. 

Anyhow, while Trump was embarrassing the United States in Turkey the negotiations, such as they were, between Trump's son in law and the equally unqualified former lawyer and real estate figure that Trump has charged with this matter, fell apart.  J. D. Vance, occasionally saddled with trying to get the ink dry on some settlement, isn't working on it and is instead touring around the country making stupid statements in from of the Screw American Voters Act.  Trump used the opportunity, in addition to insulting Spain, to insult the Iranians, who were already pretty much ignoring him.

The it dawned on somebody that the new Qatari Royal Coach lacks electronic countermeasures, unlike the other jets in the Air Force One stable.

Oops.

Given that, one of the old Presidential buses was flown over to haul Trump around and the new one was flown to RAF Mildenhall on the excuse that the airmen might want to see it.

Yeah, a big airplane. What a treat for airmen.

The real reason, of course, was that it dawned on somebody that given as the plane has no countermeasures if the Iranians took a shot at it, only luck and fancy maneuvers, maybe, would keep the giant plane in the air.  And as Donald Trump murdered the head of the Iranian state, worrying that the Iranians would figure that turn about was fair play isn't irrational.  For that matter, even if the Iranian state might not attempt that, there's plenty of irregular forces in the region that might not particularly love Donald.

So, the US has sunk $400,000,000 into this dubious gift and it isn't as capable as the older aircraft.

As earlier reported here, when Trump vacates the Oval Office, which he has no legal right to be in already, the new Air Force One is supposed to be going to a Trump Presidential Library.  What a joke.  And an expensive one on the American taxpayer.  

Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution states:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Congress has so suspended its duties that getting anyone to enforce this clause seems like a lost cause right now, but maybe in a future presidency somebody will dust the document off, walk down to Congress, dope slap the whole body until the current deadwood leaves (John Barrasso, looking at you) and people who actually will do their job reappear.  Should that occur, this airplane should not leave the Air Force inventory.  But what to do with it is another question.  $400,000,000 have been spent on it. 

There are already two new Air Force One's being built.  Those ones will be properly equipped.  The existing Air Force Ones already are.  Hopefully not another dime is spent on this one.

But that, frankly, puts it in the domestic hauler category.  I suppose it could be used for that, save for the fact that it's a national embarrassment. 

Given that, my prediction is that it will be junked.  I don't think it'll ever go to a Trump presidential library, assuming one is every built  Trump's already 80 years old and every morning when he wakes up the Grim Reaper is there asking how he's feeling.  It won't be used by a future President, and it's not going to be used by the Air Force for anything.

It's just a waste.

Boneyard of the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona.

It'll go to top men.  Top men.