Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 3, 2026

The Madness of King Donald. The 25th Amendment Watch List, Ninth Edition. Trump is insane and the end of the United States as a great nation.

 

Trump is insane.

What's more, Trump is insane and everyone knows it.  World leaders know it.  His opponents know it. And, moreover, his supporters, know it.

He's driving us over a cliff, and everyone knows that.

He's the last pathetic gasp of the Baby Boomers, as we endure a nation by the Baby Boomers, Of the Baby Boomers, and for the Baby Boomers, enduring the legacy of a government attacked by Ronald Reagan and brought into fruition by Dixiecrats.

I've predicted that the 25th Amendment would be applied to him, and moreover, his mere presence in the White House was really a smokescreen for National Conservatives.  If I was right, the moment now appears too late.

The United States has come to an end as a great nation.  

It might be able to rebuild, but it won't be what it was.  Nore should it be. A nation stupid enough to elect Donald Trump is no longer great.

The question is, how much damage do we allow him to do?

And I say "we" advisedly.  Stuffed suits like Dr. John Barrasso and castrati Mike Johnson aren't going to do anything.  His cabinet has people like scared Scott Bessent in it, who sound like they're terrified to be in public, or people who cheerfully shovel his oratorical vomit.  Congress could act, but the make up the GOP in Congress is 100% eunuchs who roll over to have their bellies petted by Trump or go into the corner scared and pee.

The nation's leaders have completely failed it.

The question is not, at this point, how can this be salvaged.  It cannot. The question is how much can be saved so that there's something to rebuild from when we reemerge in 2028 as a minor power, second rate nation, despised by the world.

The only thing, and it is the only thing, than can really save the nation now is mass protests.  An epic strike that shut the nation down completely would be something the Republicans could not ignore.

We don't even seem to have the guts for that, however.  We haven't seen anything like that since the 1960s and early 1970s.  

We aren't much of a people anymore.

Ironically, however, the wet dream of Donald Trump to be remembered as somebody, darned near anybody, will also fail.  He'll be remembered for being a fat, spoiled, mentally ill, child who ruined his nation with the help of ignorance.  His ballroom will not get built.  His Arc will not either.  Greenland, which he will steal, will be set free.  Melania will escape back to Europe to hide the disgrace of having associated with the man.  The Trump family will bankruptcy itself into oblivion.

Cont:

Okay, something's happened.

Trump at Dovos said the United States “won’t use force” to take Greenland, but repeated his dumbass claims that the US needs it for  national and international security. He said he would be “appreciative” if the world acquiesced to his desire to take over the territory. “Or, you can say no and we will remember.”

What does all that mean.

Sometime over the last 24 hours somebody got to Trump with news that if he went any further, they were invoking the 25th Amendment.  It's about the only possibility.

The others might be that Congress would really move to impeach, or the military was prepared to tell him to pound sand.

But something happened.  He was full batshit crazy over Greenland as of yesterday, and now he's not.  He was apparently actually set to over a bridge too far and something held him back, for now.

The man needs to go.  This is a chance for national redemption, but it won't last long.  Those who were set to invoke the 25th, if they were, need to carry forward and do it.

Cont:

Hmmmm. . . Air Force One returned and landed due to an "electrical issue" prior to his gong to Davos.

That "electrical issue" was probably a direct communication that if he went to Davos and indicated war was coming he better stay in Switzerland.

Cont:
And I know so many people from Switzerland. Incredible place, incredible brilliant place. But I then realized that they're only good because of us.
The dimwitted emperor.

We barely dodged a bullet with this guy, remove the idiot now.  Apply the 25th Amendment.

January 22, 2026

Trump at Davos:
Usually they say, 'he's a horrible dictator-type person.' But sometimes you need a dictator.

So are we really still playing around with this?  Trump admits he's a dictator, and its obvious to everyone he's demented.   There's no excuse left whatsoever for favoring this man remaining in office.

Let's reprise where we are, after the last several days.

Let's start off with this.

Ever since Congress demanded the Epstein files be released, most of which have not been, nearly every day brings a new horror.  We started off with an invasion of a foreign power and removal of its head of state with no Congressional authorization, which is flatly illegal.  In spite of the widely lauded praise for that, the raid only removed one man and his wife, while killing a bunch of people. The Socialist regime that man headed remains fully in power. Some may say its cooperating with Trump, but why would one criminal regime not cooperate with another if it benefits them both?

We were told at the time that we needed to do this as Venezuela was exporting drugs to the U.S.  As soon as we kidnapped the leader, however, we were told that it was a great oil producing opportunity for the United States, and we are in fact seizing tankers and selling the oil, with the funds put in a bank in Qatar, outside those prying eyes in the U.S.

No sooner had that been accomplished than Donald Trump brought us right to the end of war with NATO, believing his own propaganda that the rest of the world would sit by if we seized Greenland, just as Germany thought nobody would fight over Poland in 1939, and Argentina thought the UK wouldn't fight over the Falklands in 1982.  Indeed, the Falklands example is a particularly good one as the UK was actually moving toward an arrangement with Argentina before Argentina invaded, which ended that for all time.

While this was all going on, an ICE agent shot Renee Good three times killing her in Minneapolis.  The mayor spoke out and now the mayor and the Governor are under Federal Criminal investigation by a corrupted justice system.  Career Federal prosecutors are being fired, and even one of Trump's handpicked flunkies had walked out, although not over that.

Trump decided to go to Davos to lecture the Europeans, but as soon as his plane took off it returned with an "electrical problem".  

Uh huh.

When he got to Davos suddenly he was no longer going to invade Greenland, but he was sticking to tariffs. . . until he suddenly didn't.

What message did the would be caudillo get when that plan returned.

There's a lot here to digest, but what we know is that Trump's actions do not benefit the United States and, as Mark Carney has stated, he's destroyed the post war order.  The principal beneficiary of his actions is Russia, and nearly Russia alone  The Russians may have pulled off the greatest example of spycraft of all time, but assisted by an American electorate that was made legitimately bitter by post 1973 events and made ignorant by actions of the much praised Ronald Reagan.  

Reagan, to medical professionals, was showing signs of Alzheimer's in his second term.  He was 83, however, and out of office when he admitted it to the public.  His last public appearance, however, was in 1994, a couple of years after that, which is one that people who have viewed it lament.  His appearance at that point in time wasn't any worse than Trump's right now.

Trump's behavior in the last two months has been nearly manic.  Oh, let's be honest.  It is manic.  He very clearly, no matter what else is going on, has dementia. There's no question whatsoever.  One person who knows him well, lawyer Ty Cobb, has stated:

I think there’s been a significant decline. He’s always been driven by narcissism. But I think the dementia and the cognitive decline are, you know, palpable, as do many experts, including many physicians.

Cobb also stated:

I don’t think there’s anybody outside of the United States who believes that Trump is sane.

So that's exactly where we are.  We have a demented chief executive whose minions are not releasing a major file which his name shows up in, in violation of the law.  His mind is complete mush and he launched us into one small war with little effect and nothing to be proud of, and nearly launched us into a major war with NATO which, in spite of our hubris, we may very well not have won (the U.S. hasn't actually won a war cleanly since the end of World War Two).  Even if we had won it, which is not assured, it would have involved combat with Canada and occupying Canada would have entailed a terrorism campaign against the US that would kill Americans at home.  Any such war would have besmirched our reputation forever and the world order has already been irreparably harmed to the detriment of Americans.

The man is insane and needs to be removed.

The question is why he isn't already gone.  We can be quite assured that if there were sufficient votes, J. D. Vance, who sees his political fortunes evaporating by the minute and his current name likely to go down like Goering's would support it.  So would Rubio, who has been mysteriously absent recently.  But invoking the 25th Amendment would require the Vice President and a majority of the 15-member Cabinet ot declare the President the batshit crazy Trump unable to perform his duties.  That means eight out of fifteen would have to go along with it.  Those cabinet members are:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio

Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth

Attorney General Pam Bondi

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins

Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick

Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem

Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Lee Zeldin

Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard

Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe

United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer

Administrator of the Small Business Administration Kelly Loeffler

Chief of Staff Susie Wiles

We took a look at whom we thought might be willing to act to save then nation some time ago, but frankly every day that goes by makes this worse.  For example, we thought that Bessent might be willing to go along, but by now he's so tainted by the shit he's had to spout out because Rubio, probably, is refusing to do so, that for many of these people they're at the point where they're just going down in defeat in the bunker.  A few of these people, in addition, are really bad people and hardcorse believes in what they're doing.

So, until he's drooling and hitting on Kristi Noem, this is just going to get worse.

Congress could act, and if it was a Democratic Congress it undoubtedly would.  Trump's only in office as Joe Biden moronically believed that his own dementia was somehow not there, a common trait of those who have dementia and the electorate blamed the Democrats for a lot of things, like inflation, that were outside of their control, and some things they really didn't like, like the whole transgender thing, that they were in control of.  A totally befuddled Trump still knows that this November the GOP is going to be punished for the economy, for average people, getting worse, and he can't gasp that people really don't care if fat cats get fatter, which is the only sort of economic news that means anything to him.  By this point in time an American electorate, which has a notoriously short memory, sees ICE in the streets, ICE shooting women in the head, Trump insulting the entire world, and their economic future going down the toilet.  His plan is to try to disrupt the 2026 election, or even suspend it if he can, which he can't.

A sane group of Republican members of Congress would act right now to impeach Trump, like they did when Nixon was in office. But current Republicans in Congress are nearly all anemic castrati, with those at the top, like John Thune and John Barrasso providing prime example.  Barrasso couldn't find his courage if he'd deposited in a safe deposit box.  They're depending on the Democrats taking control i November so they can return to the more comfortable role of complaining about Democrats, and if the country goes in the shitter in the meantime, well at least they can hope to retain their careers.

January 24, 2026

A former Trump staffer from his first term is expressing concern that he'll launch a nuclear war, and reveals that in his first term the country came close to a war with North Korea.

January 26, 2026

While the country reeled from the shooting of Alex Pretti, the Mad King Donny was musing on the ballroom that will never be built.

Absolutely insane.  Blood  literally in the streets and this doddering buffoon is babbling about a structure whose refuse is going to be shoved into a big pile by a D11 and then dumped in a refuse pile.

How pathetic.

The NYT editorial from yesterday:


January 28, 2025

We stopped the conflict between Cambodia and Armenia. It was just starting and it was a bad one.

Donald Trump.

Cambodia and Armenia couldn't fight a war against each other if they both wanted to.

His mind is completely shot.

And with that really weird comment, we'll close out this portion of the roller coast ride with Mad King Donald.

February 3, 2026

King Donny hasn't seemed to notice, but his endorsement is becoming the golden kiss of death all over the country.  This past week a solidly Republican Senate district in Texas voted overwhelming for the Democrat, the Trump  endorsement meaning nothing.  In Wyoming Megan Degenfelder is sort of nervous, rather obviously, about Trump's embrace, and she should be.

Which brings us to this:


Trump has been going after Thomas Massie as he's not a Trump toady like crazy.  He's criticized the marriage before, which is pretty rich for a man of Trump's obvious disregard for the meaning of marriage.

Massie replied.

Who knew Carolyn would also get free rent in Trump’s head when she married me! I guess that’s just one of the perks. secure.thomasmassie.com/donate

Friday, January 30, 2026

Wednesday, January 30, 1946. Roosevelt Dime.

 


The Roosevelt Dime was introduced on what would have been the late President's 64th birthday.  The design replaced the Mercury Dime.


Plans for honoring Roosevelt on the dime commenced very soon after his death.  He's been on the dime so long, I actually can't recall every seeing any other design, although I'm sure that I have.

By TUBS - This vector image includes elements that have been taken or adapted from this file:, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15952232

Transcarpathia (Ruthenia) became the Zakarpattia Oblast of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.  The region of Ruthenia is obscure to Americans, but the Ruthenian Catholic Church is fairly well represented in the U.S. as a significant Eastern Rite branch of Catholicism.

The United Nations passed UNSCR calling on Iran and the USSR to resolve the crisis caused by the Soviet invasion of Iran.

Last edition:

Sunday, January 27, 1946. Die Rückkehr der Demokratie

Monday, January 26, 2026

Thursday,, January 26, 1911.

The United States and Canada entered into their first reciprocal trade agreement.

The US, of course, wasn't governed by a senile chief executive, and for that matter, the chief executive at the time was not given unfettered powers.

Glenn H. Curtiss made the first sustained seaplane flight, taking off from San Diego Bay in his D-Hydro-Aeroplane and then landing on the Pacific Ocean off San Diego.  Meanwhile, Roger Sommer set a new record for number of passengers on an airplane, flying five passengers in France thirteen miles.

Life magazine, which came out at odd times of the week, came out.


The cover illustration was by James Montgomery Flagg, and it wasn't one of his better ones.

Last edition:

Wednesday, January 25, 1911. Honduran Revolution.

The legal lesson of 2025? Thank God for the swamp Turns out the court system makes democracy really hard to get rid of.

 

The legal lesson of 2025? Thank God for the swamp

Turns out the court system makes democracy really hard to get rid of.

Friday, January 9, 2026

Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat: An open call to Greenlanders, and musings.

 


An interesting blog entry by a native Montanan.

Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat

An open call to Greenlanders

I note this in part because she's a nature writer, and native Montanas are close to nature, like native Wyomingites.

Indeed, I've tended to find since Donald Trump reared his New York overfunded balding head that real Trump backers in my home state either lack education, or tend to be imports.  I know part of that is a really harsh judgement, but I don't find too many natives, in any demographic, who are fire breathing Trumpites who are exceptions to this rule.  There are, I'd note, educated Trumpites here, for sure, but they tend to be imports.  

I think people know what the unrestrained wealth and exploitation mean to Wyoming, and that helps explain it.  Wyomingites are, if they are real Wyomingites, conservative/libertarians but not populists really.  

Imports who move here, however, including some who claim to be us, or want to be us, often are Southern Populists at heart.  Indeed, a couple of years ago I was out in the sticks and saw a giant Stars and Bars flying above somebody's camp tent, something that, when I was young, would stood a good chance of having been ripped down by any native passing by.  

I've written a lot about how we got here.  The question now, is how we get out. We'll be getting out, one way or another.  The question is, however, whether a rational conservatism can emerge that's free of the horrific elements that Trump has interjected into what's passing for conservatism now, or whether it will pass the way the way that French conservatism did after Vichy.  I think, frankly, the latter is more likely.

If conservatism can survive Trump, which frankly I very much doubt, when it reemerges it's going to have to rebuild a lot nationally and internationally that Trump and his minions have utterly destroyed.  More likely, however, what will emerge after this era is a renewed liberalism countered only by a somewhat middle of the road liberalism.  Again, France provides the model.  After the Second World War the French Third Republic was dominated by the hard left, including a very powerful communist party, countered only really by a centrist to liberal centrist Catholic party.  The French right died. 

I suspect that's the country's political future, in a way.  Starting in 2026 the Democrats will regain the House and, if Trump is still in power, provide a block to an outraged and increasingly insane Trump.  By 2028, the Senate is likely to go Democratic too, assuming it doesn't in 2026.  The White House will have a legitimate President following the 2029 election who will almost certainly be a Democrat.

That President, whether he's Republican or Democrat, and who won't be J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio, is going to have a big task in front of him.  Part of that will be to repair the international damage done by Trump. 

Not all of it will be capable of being repaired.  A western world that had depended upon the U.S. to be the world leader of Western ideals will never, and I mean never, trust the U.S. again.

But the U.S. will also be much diminished in the Western Hemisphere, in spite of what Trump, Vance, and Rubio think.  In South American a new block will emerge, likely with former major rivals Argentina and Chile as the leadership, but with Brazil, a massive country in extent and population, more significant than the U.S.  Canada will be regarded as a serious, educated, intelligent nation by the Europeans.  The U.S. will still have weight in the world, but in the way that France or the United Kingdom do now, save for Asia where the U.S. will still be a major presence.  We will have been forced to look to the Pacific, as so many in the past have urged us to do in the past, by Trump and the Republican party soiling our relationships with our intellectual home.  

Basically, we will have been the kid that left home, got into drugs, and embarrassed everyone. We'll be the Hunter Biden of Western nations.

Domestically, we're going to have a lot of repairs to do.  A new President will quietly accept much of what Trump has done in immigration.  The damage done to trade economics will likely have repaired by them, the tariffs having by then settled into an economic background as part of a new system which will not generate all that much in income but which countries are by then used to.  Businesses won't come back to the U.S. due to them, and the Rust Belt dreamers will have gone on to despair.  The Agricultural sector will be barely reviving, I'd guess, from a Trump induced economic collapse by that time.

The U.S. will return to environmental and conservation sanity and begin to try to make up lost ground and lost damage, in part because its role in the world will have been so decreased that it will have no choice.  Fools who insisted that we had to grab Venezuelan oil as China was going to will wake up and find that China will, by 2028, be using largely electric, not gasoline, vehicles. Europe won't be far behind, and a U.S. auto industry that will wish to sell will have advanced in this direction, with U.S. consumers, less enamored with a 19th Century economy than Donald Trump, will have as well.

If Trump's "Travis, you're a year too late" petrol pipe dreams will have achieved little, and they will, perhaps a revival of nuclear power might actually make a difference.  Like many of Trump's policies, or those who used Trump to gain position, that policy on the margin of his larger policies, would be beneficial.  The pipedreams about coal and oil, however, will go nowhere and already are going nowhere.  Indeed, Wyoming's coal fortunes, so desperately pinned on Trump, are going nowhere at all, and the price of oil in the state is down in the disastrous levels.

In larger things, people sometimes ponder the existential "problem of evil", that being why does God allow bad things to occur.  A common answer is that God does not allow it unless a greater good can come out of it.  While I don't want to go so far as to claim to detect a Devine hand at work here, I wonder if a bit if we're going to see something like that occur.

The country that comes out of Trump Drunk in 2028 with a bad hangover is going to be a much lesser nation.  Maybe that's a good thing, particularly of Europe, where we derived our culture from, revives to claim a larger place.  We'll need to get used to being told what we will do, and like a bratty teenager, which we've proven ourselves to be, we'll have to get used to that.  Our Evangelical Puritanism which most Americans assume is Christianity will have taken a sharp hit.  Our botching foreign wars will end as nobody will really trust us much as a solo actor.  Nations that need alliances, and many do, will look to us only in concert with others, which will make them safer. Taiwan and South Korea will look to Japan, and perhaps to Australia. Europe will look to ourselves.  Nobody will care one wit about us, and we'll have to look, pleadingly, to everyone else.  Our environmental destructivism will start to come to an end.  Our cultural imperialism will come to an end, as nobody will admire a country that could produce such vile characters as Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, or Jeffrey Epstein.  Our absolute lust for the wealthy, that came in with Ronald Reagan, who looks less and less like a hero, will come to an end as well as we have to face a Republican ramped up budget crisis the only way we can, taxes, and taxes on the wealthy.

Not all of Trump's legacy, including the tiny positive portions of it, or the negative massive aspects of it, will go away.  Trump has destroyed the post World War Two United States.  But the country itself will survive, and rebuild, and probably be better than it was before.  

Perhaps the U.S. can get back to being the U.S.

Oh, and Greenland will be independent. Americans won't really be welcomed there.  The U.S. military won't be there.