CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 150th Edition. Why Karoline is departing. Donald Trump's Weird Obsession with monuments to himself. The Invincibly Ignorant.

Trump looking out of the window of Air Force One with Natalie Harp, Sunday, September 7, 2025, before landing at LaGuardia Airport in East Elmhurst, New York, to attend the U.S. Open Men’s Championship, a shocking waste of public money.

Yesterday we discussed the departure of Karoline Leavitt from the Trump Administration.  Also yesterday, two different articles appeared purporting to give her reasons, both of which are pretty interesting.  Between the two, the article in The New Republic struck me as a bit more credible.  It's here:

Karoline Leavitt Quit Because Trump Was Driving Her Crazy

Trump is a pathetic man baby pretty much and shows what happens with a privileged kid is raised to become a spoiled brat.  Of course, his parents realized that which is why they sent him to military school, but it didn't work to straighten him out.

What very well may have worked would have been a hitch in the service, but that, as is well known, didn't happen. That omission is probably part of the reason that the pathetic man has such an inferiority complex today.

Anyhow, TNR holds that Leavitt had been looking to depart her role as Big Liar for Der Fibber for some time and was burnt out from her role. The straw that broke the camel's back was Trump repeatedly calling her on her maternity leave to find out when she'd leave her children and come back to serving him.

If true, that makes Trump even more of an asshole than we already knew him to be, but it's pretty credible.

And it's also perfectly credible that Leavitt was burnt out.  Explaining the sea of lies would be a huge burden.  And, for normal people, having children is really sobering.  I've often said that's when you really become fully adult.  While I think Leavitt's role in the administration in particular and American society overall has been completely despicable, she may have made that leap.  She is Catholic and the burden of her sins for Trump may have just grown too large.

The Daily Beast, on the other hand, holds that Leavitt decided to leave when she was left on the "decoy" Air Force One when Trump was smuggled out on a lesser aircraft.  He took with him, apparently, Pete Hegseth, Natalie Harp, Dan Scavino, and Walt Nauta.  Marco Rubio and Bessent were left to go down in flames if Air Force One was actually targeted.

Unlike a lot of the commentary on this, I don't think it was  unreasonable for Trump to make the switch, although like the CIA I'm not crediting Israeli intelligence on this one much.  But if Leavitt was really left to die on the decoy, that's inexcusable.  But it's not really clear that she actually was.  You would think this would be easy to determine, but it hasn't been.  She may not have been on either plane.

Anyhow, the DB reports she was upset about being left on the decoy plane, and as a mother of two, she should have been.  And if true, and we don't know that it was, that would be a despicable thing for Trump to have done.  

This puts Executive Assistant to the President Natalie Harp back in the spotlight.  There's already piles of rumors about here which are unlikely to be true, but it doesn't help.

Trump just can't accept defeat on anything as he's a spoiled brat.  He also has surrounded himself with sycophants like flies surround shit, and much for the same reason.  Its not surprise therefore that the flies on the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted on Thursday to add an inscription bearing President Donald Trump’s name to the building’s exterior,  It'll read:

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump,’

The plaza where it's located will be outright named for Trump.

Well, maybe.

More likely the same court that told the administration to remove Trump's name from the building for being illegally pasted there will say "hold on, buckwheat" and stop it from occurring.

This does, however, bring up a topic that many people have been pondering and which was just discussed on NPR's Politics:

How Trump's focus on his legacy drives his decisions

NPR doesn't quite put it this way, but there's something downright weird about Trump's manic campaign of building crap, and it has been crap, and naming stuff for himself.

Trump's about to die.  It's a fact simply because of his age.  Around 15% of American men live to age 85.  He's 80.  He could literally die any day simply due to old age.  Having elected such an elderly man was foolish.  

While its purely speculation on my part, I strongly suspect that Trump is worried about his impending death, and I can see why.  He's lived a horrible life.  He openly worries about going to Hell, but he doesn't do anything to arrest that chance.  Reforming at age 80 isn't easy, particularly for a man whose on to his fourth wife, if you consider it a real marriage.  That's part of the reason, I'd guess, he's surrounded himself with people like Paula White, who believe in a diluted version of Christianity, or even one that's perverted the actual message of the Gospels.  There's almost nothing that Trump routinely does or says that are Christian in nature, but those religious figure surrounding him don't seem to rebuke him on his behavior to the extent that we can tell what hey do.

The people that Trump has surrounded himself with probably give him a modicum of assurance that his soul is A Ok, but he doesn't seem convinced.  He shouldn't be.  Anyhow, I wonder to some extent if he believes in the next world, in any form, at all.

His manic construction would suggest not.  He desperately wants to be remembered for something, and childish monstrous architecture seems to be what he's hit on.

It won't work.

Most of the things that the Romans built are gone.  The Coliseum is still around, but very few people know which Roman Emperor caused it to be built.  Most of the Trump crap will simply come down, and indeed it needs to.  The stuff he's pasting his name to will all be renamed.

It's vanity, and it's sad.  And expensive.

I've really gone after Trump on this site and people who voted for Trump and his sycophants. Just the other day I posted, in regard to Mike Lindell's bid for office:

Lindell had no chance of winning the primary as only the stupid and ignorant would vote for him.  That's what happened.  He's not accepting that however, claiming, in true Trump/MAGA style that there were "irregularities".

Lisa Demuth won the race with 43.4% of the vote.  Lindell did bring in 32.5% of the vote, which some have been shocked by.  One person asked if his supporters were stupid. 

Well, probably a lot of them are.

Let's be honest about stupidity, as the country has a real stupidity problem right now.

The United States has always had a strong anti intellectual streak, which endorsed the native intelligence of the common man. Frankly, it's been one of the problems the country's always been afflicted with. But at the same time, up until now, there's never been an era in which education was despised. Right now, we're seeing a lot of that. The reason is fairly simple. The really intelligent, through technology, have made it possible for the stupid to have a voice.

Which brings us to the bell curve.

Human intelligence it not really very well understood, even today.  Perhaps in some ways we don't know that much more about it than we ever did.  Btu what we do know is that in an average population, there's a mean.  Half the people are above it, and half below it.

More than that most of the people are somewhere on the middle part of the curve.  But if you divide it into thirds, 1/3d of it is considerably above the rest in terms of intelligence, and 1/3 considerably below.  Like Larry David's skit lampoons, we let the bottom third vote.

Therefore, it'd be somewhat fair to say that Lindell's 1/3d of the Minnesota vote represents "the stupid ones", and to some extent, it actually does.  While some of low intelligence would have voted for other candidates, Trump uniquely appeals to stupid.

He also uniquely appeals to the ignorant, which is not the same.  And that's where the story of intelligence gets complicated, particularly in voting.  I have a friend, for example, whose highly intelligent, but completely disinterested in politics.  He still votes.  A lot of rural people I know are big Trump supporters, not because they're dumb, but because they listen to their neighbors and they've all collectively bought off on BS Trump conspiracy theories.  As part of that, however, I'll note, that they're mostly poorly educated.

Anyhow, take the dumb, the ignorant, and the poorly educated together, you probably have at least 33% of the population.  Technology makes the difference.  In prior eras, those people were influenced by the smarter and the well educated around them.  Now, they're influenced by themselves.

After this, I got a first hand glimpse of how really intelligent people can be MAGA through ignorance.

A person I know, who is definitely highly intelligent, but very narrowly focused, and very focused on religious matters, sent me something on one of the millennialist religions that was influenced by Christianity, but which isn't Christian.  He follows stuff like that extremely closely.  This brought up in my mind something I just saw elsewhere on "post truth Christians".

The reason I note that is that I always find such statements to be sweepingly overbroad.  When people speak about "Christians" and societal, cultural or political matters, the mere use of the term is incorrect.  The MAGA Christians contain a strong element that doesn't regard we Catholics, the original Christian religion, as Christian at all.   The "post truth" Christians, in the article I saw, are Evangelical Christians. Well, informed Catholics have regarded them as post truth for their entire, and short, existence.

But my friend, who is alway studying what Muslims, Jews, the LDS, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Seventh Day Adventists are doing, doesn't realize that and I should have appreciated that.  He frankly just assumes that all Christians have the same view on everything, for the most part, and by extension that the Christians around Donald Trump are all the same, and just like us.

Anyhow, I tried to explain to him how people like Johnson and the group are part of the New Apostolic Reformation and how Doug Wilson figures  the nation should be Calvinist.

He clearly doesn't believe that.

And that gets back to this.  Amongst those who loyally back Trump are a bunch of people who aren't dumb (there are  bunch who are dumb), but almost invincibly ignorant.  The really do think Reagan is just like Trump and people are worried about Trump because he's a "conservative".  Mike Johnson is just a religious guy.  Charlie Kirk just a zealous layman.  Doug Wilson just the tweed wearing vicar of some local Protestant church.

It's a view of the world like its portrayed on The Waltons, or if you want it a little racier, Spencer's Mountain.

It's dangerously naive, but nearly impossible to penetrate.

Some ignorance, and I suspect more than a little bit of that here, is wilful.  It's an example of the tail wagging the dog in quite a few people.  I suspect my friend knows that the Trump administration is a dumpster fire, for example, but he voted for it twice under a sincere conviction that it seeks to advance Christianity against the enemy of secular humanism and Islam.  When the war with Iran came he was ecstatic.  When Israel was decimating Gaza he was all in on it.  Now he's finding that even in his own family people don't hold these views.

Admitting that you're wrong is a hard thing to do. Trump can't do that.  Neither can a lot of his backers.

Speaking of ignorance:

That one speaks for itself.

In terms of really bad news, military student Phillips P. O'Brien, who has been warning that rot is setting into the U.S. military, is now at its worse shape since World War Two.

He cannot be discounted.

I noted in my entry yesterday that we haven't seen a sailor's rebellion since the last days of the Vietnam War.  As also noted, at that time, the military was in horrible shape.  I'd find it hard to believe that we are in worse shape now as opposed to then, frankly, but I am concerned that we're in bad shape.  We may be seeing an over bloated military in a state of advanced decay.  We're certainly losing the war against Iraq.

I'd note, on this, Trump wouldn't be the only one to blame, along with Hegseth.  I would go back to 2013 in regard to the acceleration of the decline in the U.S. Military, when women were first allowed into combat roles (yeah, that again).  Barack Obama was President at the time. He also was when transgendered troops were okayed, which was insane.  So here we can actually blame Obama for something.

But it isn't that alone.  As noted here recently, keeping a bloated, if shrunken, big military after the Cold War was a mistake.  That allowed the US to engage in quasi colonial wars, which was a mistake. Rather than fix things, Trump, via Hegseth, has given in fully to a bloated military and, while keeping women in combat roles openly, begun in backdoor sabotage on a cultural basis and started to try to convert it into the New Model Army.

Finally, as predicated, each day brings a flood of new mailers.

Yesterday had its usual crop.  Notable amongst them was a Chuck Gray one claiming he kept "men" out of "girls" sports.  A very non political female friend of mine had a fit over that as she views female sports as women's sports.

I've received that mailer before. The thing that's really odd about it is that it shows a great big fat dude with facial stubble winning something over female athletes, but the due looks oddly like the cartoon portrayal of J. D. Vance you see around sometimes.

Hmm. . . 

In my friends case, her 12 year old daughter picked up the mail and asked "what's that supposed to mean"?

We also received here, on the same day, a large flyer calling Gray "California Chuck Gray" and pointing out that he's from Los Angeles.  

Well, fair enough but the artful illustration of him wearing a short brimmed straw Fedora and a Hawaiian shirt, all done electronically I'm sure, was a bit much.  I'm sure that he doesn't have either.

Also, it oddly made him look like what Westerners imagine elderly men in Florida to look like.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 149th Edition. Abandoning Ship.

Labels: 1970s, 1972, 1973, 2020s, 2026, Chuck Gray, Donald Trump, Karoline Leavitt, Lies, Military, Personalities, The Madness of King Donald, The Second Trump Administration, U.S. Navy, Washington DC Vandalization, Zeitgeist

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 149th Edition. Abandoning Ship.

The first significant administration departure.

Karoline Leavitt is leaving her post as White House Press Secretary.

There's going to be a lot of speculation as to why she did this, but let's credit what she said. She's 28 years old, and just had a baby.

Her second.

Her husband is 32 years her senior.

Leavitt is a Catholic, as am I, but she's completely ignored the Catholic injunction against lying.  Lying on serious matters is a serious sin.  Personally, while I can not know her mind, I think she knows she's a liar.

I think she likely knows at this point, at age 28, that she needs to reform and repent.  Her first child was born out of wedlock with her current husband, Nicholas Riccio.  The second was born within the union.  Her affiliation with Trump has locked her into a web of lies for which she'll always be remembered.  Indeed, while this blog entry is somewhat forgiving, most pundits will not be, witness:

Karoline Leavitt Will Soon Lie Somewhere Else

From The New Republic.

I bet she knows that, and that it's time to get out while she can.  Get out, confess, and get clear.  Even at that, the burden she has of repenting from such a public life of outright lying is a heavy one.

I bet she tackles that.  A tell all book will be forthcoming. . . it'll be out before Trump leaves office at the end of this term, if old age doesn't take him to his reward, or lack of one, before that.

Well, may she find a path to peace. She needs it. 

So do her two children.

It won't be easy, overall, we might note.  Lots of people eventually confront their sins and reform, but very few have to confront the public record of it, which in the modern age lasts forever.  Leavitt is, as The New Republic notes, an outrageous liar and that will follower her the rest of her life.

Indeed, if you look at people who had really vile roles serving really vile people, and Leavitt's role has been vile and Donald Trump is a vile person, it's really hard to find anyone who overcomes it.  Albert Speer probably came as close to it as anyone, but even he, as charming as he was, never really did.  Georgy Malenkov, part of Stalin's government, completely fell after Stalin and eventually became a Russian Orthodox Lector, a sort of clerical position in the Eastern Rite churches.

The American things, of course, is to try to convert your infamy into a sort of fame, which is always sort of pathetic.  Monica Lewinsky is the prime example.

Well, as noted, my guess is that Leavitt, while home raising her children, will start working on a tell all book.  By the time its released she's  reveal, I'm guessing, how she never loved Donald Trump.

I also bet that Trump, right now, lives in fear of what that book will reveal.

Mini Mutinies.

Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln have been trying to jump overboard to their deaths.  

At least those are the reports, confirmed in at least one case by the spouse of a sailor who tried to do just that.  "Big T" Pete Hegseth called the reports "fake news", with the Trump administration branding anything that is actually true as fake.

The ship, launched in 1988, has experienced food shortages, moldy showers, broken toilets, dead laundry facilities, and a lack of basics necessities such as soap and toothpaste during its ninth month deployment.

It's interesting in part because such conditions, while appalling, would not have been that much out of the norm in earlier eras.  Sailors just endured it.  But then, they endured a lot of similar conditions in daily life.  People were, in fact, tougher than they are now.

But it's also interesting as it might reveal something else going on.

The lats time the US Navy had really serious shipboard problems of this type was during the late stages of the Vietnam War, when the USS Kitty Hawk and the USS Constellation endured mutinies the Navy has refused to acknowledge as mutinies. These were serious events and they came at a point in time at which US military morale was at its lowest point since the Mexican War, during which time it had such low morale in some quarters that troops had deserted to join the Mexican Army.

The problem had expressed itself first in the Army, with the Army starting to experience everything from quiet disobedience in Vietnam to some outright revolts in the US.  The Kitty Hawk incident occured in 1972 with the Constellation event happening the following year.  Nothing like that has happened since.

The Kitty Hawk had a hard Vietnam War deployment of eight months before it was ordered back into combat and the event began.  That's notable, as the Abraham Lincoln has been out nine months.

Also notable for the 1972 and 1973 events is that everyone had completely lost faith in the Vietnam War by that time, and frankly in the military itself.  Rarely noted during the revision of the history of the war, the Vietnam War had destroyed the American Army as a combat effective force.  The US was lucky that none of our adversaries attempted any sort of additional war at the time. We likely could not have successfully contested one.

Servicemen who served in peacetime Navy before the Second World War were sort of their own breed.  A lot of them were tough careerist for whom the Navy itself was their home.  Set in that era, the movie The Sand Pebbles does a good job of showing what their view was like, and of course it came from a novel by a veteran who had served in that time.  A sort of oddly nostalgic look at the same thing, but set in 1973, is Cinderella Liberty, one of two sort of cynical Navy movies released that year, the other being The Last Detail.

During World War Two sailors, most of whom were wartime volunteers, knew what they were fighting for.  In the Cold War, for the most part, they did too.  Mutinies came when that was no longer clear.

It sure isn't clear now.  American servicemen aren't serving in a just cause and all of the military actions during the Second Trump Administration have been illegal, with one, the boat destruction off of South America, constituting murder of the targets.  The current war shows ever sign of being endless and pointless, and the men know it.

Some honorable commanders have simply resigned.  Enlisted men can't do that.  Serving in an illegal war on a ship that's a craphole, they're serving an administration in which many of them are not the right kind of people, as the administration sees it.  US resources are now really stretched on top of it.  All in all, what's going on board on the USS Abraham Lincoln isn't a good sign.

Toy boats

Part of what's not very honorable is the insane playing along which amounts to marking time until Trump is out of office. The Navy is doing that with the Trump Class of big missile cruisers which King Donny wants built.  Termed "battleships", because Trump knowns nothing about this topic and apparently thinks that battleships are nifty, rather than rendered obsolete decades ago, the CBO estimates that if built they'll cost the country $275B over 30 years.

They won't be built.

They are already costing the country money however.

Like the ballroom, this will keep dragging along until Trump is retired or falls face first in a Big Mac, at which time it'll be terminated.

Monuments to failure

On costs, it's now estimated that all of Trump's D.C. projects will cost nearly 1B.

The country doesn't have this kind of money and we know it.

Had Joe Biden proposed spending 1B on D.C. renovations, Republicans would be howling around the city crying "fiscal responsibility!" and people like Gray, Ranser, and Friess would be warning about the republic being on the verge of ending.  The Wyoming Freedom Caucus would be howling.

Not one Republican is going to say a word about this.

Part of the outrageous nature of the expense is what the administration is planning on.  Building is expensive and tearing down is expensive also.

The Democrats can be planned on to have angst about the expense of tearing things down as its expensive.  They already are.  Additionally, the Democrats remain dedicated to the law, whereas the GOP does not.  The GOP knows that as well and is no doubt planning that the process of tearing crap down will be tied up by worries about the expense and legalities of it.

Well, on this one, the next President should in fact take a page out of Trump's book.  Within an  hour after the inauguration the Corps of Engineers should be ordered to remove whatever has been constructed of the ballroom with in 24 hours, tear down what ever has been built of an arch within the same time frame, and de-guild the bronze statues, even if it means their destruction, with in six hours.  By the end of the 24 hours all the gold or gold appearing nicknacks in the White House ought to be removed to the bunker and the entire thing filled with cement. The reflecting pool should be drained and the Rhino Lining torn up.

Contracts with anyone who contributed to these atrocities should be cancelled and the entities barred from future government contracts.  

Radical reconstruction.

Replacement?

People are already wondering who will replace Leavitt as Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.  Fortunately, Wyoming offers the perfect solution.

By Tony Webster - Flickr, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=169386648

Chuck Gray.

Chuck loves Donald Trump more than Karline Leavitt ever did.  Chuck would never leave.  And he already as experience as a spoken media figure, having had a radio show on his daddy's radio station, and he is a really experienced liar.

Leavitt said some really outrageous stuff while she was spokesman, but they don't hold a candle to the sting of accusations that Chuck retouinely hurls out. Why he'd be calling people communists, Marxist, fascist, abiogenist,dogmatist,lutist, prologistableist, dramatist, in no time.

His only disadvantage would be that he's not a woman.  Most of the recent ones have been.  On the other hand, he's not married and he can't get pregnant (shoot, he's never even seen with women, or men, or mammals) so he won't be going anywhere.

And this gets him out of having to pretend that he's a Wyomingite nad having to buy all that Westerware.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 148th Edition. The Aerodrome: Substitute. The C-32A and Donald Trump.

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 148th Edition. The Aerodrome: Substitute. The C-32A and Donald Trump.

The Aerodrome: Substitute. The C-32A and Donald Trump.: It's been revealed (leaked?) that Trump flew out of Turkey not an an older Air Force One, as he'd claimed, but on a C-32A . The C-32...

We'll note something that wasn't noted when this was originally posted.  The report of an Iranian threat was from Israel. The CIA regarded had "low confidence in the report.

Hmmm. . .

Well, it's not like most of us have to worry about such threats in general.  I guess I can't, therefore, gauge the reaction to it.  It is interesting that man with such fatalistic comments about the threat of death earlier has this reaction. .   or is it?  We're sometimes told that when threats happen, as in the January 6 insurrection when Trump tried to go down to his fellow Confederates, the Secret Service will completely take over.

It also sort of puts the whole who goes, and who risks getting killed matter, in a different light.  Or does it?

Well, with all of this, I don't believe there was ever an Iranian threat.  I suspect that Israel was picking up background noise from Iran.  It's not impossible that a rogue Iranian unit might have attempted to assassinate Trump, and of course he made himself an Iranian target by participating in the assassination of their leadership.  But I bet there was never a central effort to do it.

Indeed, it's not in their best interests.  Iran is a lot better off with Trump in charge.  The incompetence of the Trump Administration and the abject cowardice of the Republican Party has proven to be their best ally.  They'll dictate terms to us by November which the Trump Administration will accept.

Substitute. The C-32A and Donald Trump.

It's been revealed (leaked?) that Trump flew out of Turkey not an an older Air Force One, as he'd claimed, but on a C-32A .

The C-32A is a militarized 757.

This would indicate that the Iranian threat against Trump must have been deemed fairly serious, which would necessarily give rise to the question of whether or not the threat still exists.  

This behavior would suggest it does:

We didn’t have Avenger air defense missiles in Kuwait and Jordan and Saudi Arabia, but Trump has them at his Bedminster golf club

While I'm a frequent Trump critic, and don't even believe he's actually a legitimate President, I don't blame the efforts to sneak Trump out on another plane if the threats were deemed credible.  I do regard the stationing of AAA at a New Jersey golf course to be questionable while we're running out of AAA in the Middle East due to Trump's illegal war there.  He could just skip golfing or risk it.

Perhaps of more interest is who was put on the catering van to make the switch in aircraft with Trump. They were Dan Scavino, Walt Nauta and Natalie Harp.  The only one you may have heard of is Harp, whose a tall blond fitting into the general Trump harem appearance profile and who has some sort of flunky job with Trump.  The White House Press Corps rode the substituted Air Force One back as did some senior White House officials.

Now, I'm not saying everyone should have been on the 757.  I do find it interesting that the figures who were allowed to ride the substitute C-32A were not really important people.  I'm also not saying that Harp and Trump are doing anything illicit, although I do find Harp to be an odd figure.

I also wonder if every President would have taken this option.  I suspect not, but I suspect some would have.

I'm also noting how embarrassing this is. The claimed most powerful military in the world has been defeated by Iran, whose Air Force is so depleted it rarely gets anything in the air, although contrary to some claims, it has during this war, having put an F-14 in the skies on at least one occasion.

It's an existential defeat.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 147th Edition. Have we reached an "Is Paris burning?" moment?

Labels: 119th Congress, 1940s, 1943, 1944, 1945, 2020s, 2026, Beer Hall Putsch, Disease, Donald Trump, It was because of COVID 19, law, Lies, Ötzi, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Second Trump Administration, World War Two, Zeitgeist

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 147th Edition. Have we reached an "Is Paris burning?" moment?

Is Paris Burning?

Something remarkable happened last week.  Charges were dismissed against a former Olympian for vandalizing the reflecting pool. Anyone who looked at the story knew the charges were false.  Indeed, they were so patently false that anyone who sincerely believed them would have to be regarded as a dim besotted delusional

The really remarkable thing, however, is that the dismissal document basically admitted that.  It pegged the source of the reflecting pool problem as what it is, a bad Rhino Lining job.  That's stunning.

And what's more stunning is that, after a couple of days, Trump was complaining about the charges being dismissed.

That might mean we've reached an "Is Paris burning?" moment.

On August 1, 1944 Dietrich Hugo Hermann von Choltitz was appointed as the military Governor of Paris.¹  The appointment came two months after the Allies had landed at Normandy and mere days before the Allies landed in Southern France.  Already it was obvious to astute German commanders and the gig was up.  Indeed, just two weeks prior some of them had attempted to blow Hitler off the face of the Earth so that they could affect a coup and work towards a negotiated settlement of the war.

On the same day, August 15, that the Allies landed in southern France, the French police in Paris went on strike.  On August 19 the city erupted in a general insurrection.  On August 23 Hitler ordered that the city be completely destroyed before it fell into Allied hands.

Von Choltitz didn't do it.

In fact, he stayed in Paris and surrendered.

Dietrich von Choltitz with Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque and Jacques Soustelle in the M3 Scout Car after the fall of Paris.

How is this relevant to our current situation?

Well, Von Cholitz had been a loyal commander up to that point.  But he did know right from wrong.   And he was clear eyed.  He could see the Allies would win.  He could see that there'd just been an open attempt to overthrow the government.  He chose to openly disobey his orders rather than perform them, which is why Parish was spared destruction.

This appears in a way to be what just happened.

A couple of weeks ago a Trump cabinet official admitted, for the first time in a television interview, that Joe Biden won the 2020 election (he hasn't been seen, to my knowledge, on television since). That was a direct attack on the foundational myth of the Trump interregnum.  Basically, it was an explosive device placed in Der Fibber's aircraft that failed to go off, or perhaps that figures throwing a lifeline out to reality as he can read the handwriting on the wall.  The act of the Justice Department's lawyers, however, was an outright "we don't care what outrageous lie Trump told we're not doing it" moment. It was outright rebellion.

And Trump's reaction to it has been anemic, or as he likes to say, low energy.  He's complained about it like a toddler.

While this is going on, the Senate has made it fairly clear that they won't confirm Todd Blanche if there's any risk of the Trump judicial slush fund going forward, and some are making it clear they just won't do it.  Of course Wyoming's Senators, the outgoing Cynthia Cyberbucks Lummis and John Stern Look, Lim Noodle Barrasso are supporting Trump.  They can be planned on supporting Der Fibber right up until its not politically convenient to do so, at which point they'll reveal that they never loved him.  Be that as it may, Harriet Hageman has shoved Trump out of the pickup in order to vote against the appropriations bill with the SAVE Act in it, even though Trump endorsed her. She might not have to fear Trump endorsing anyone else, although a late in the day switch to John Holtz might be amusing (it won't occur).

Suddenly, rather obviously, disobeying Trump is really setting in.  The bloom must be off the rose and the stinkweeds starting to set in.

Die Alter Kämpfer

A big event in Nazi Germany, for Nazis, was the annual November 8 gathering in which they celebrated the failed Beer Hall Putsch.  The last time Hitler attended was November 8, 1943. After that, the war just was going too badly.

Stalingrad had been retaken by the Red Army in February.

The purpose of the annual gathering was like any nostalgic event, even though it celebrated events that weren't really all that far in the past.  Hitler's speech on that occasion was fiery.  He'd never be back. Nazi Germany's end was approaching pretty quickly, even if at that point the public didn't realize it. Some in the German military already did, however, and were actively looking for a way to put an end to the regime.

This past week Trump's Alter Kämpfer in Congress, now a diminished set, gathered in true Nazi style to berate Dr. Anthony Fauci.  Many outsiders have been baffled.  They should not have been.  The Nazis have gathered to relish their past and to remind themselves of their hatred of the Jews, or, in contemporary terms, to gathering around one of their great myths, COVID was a fib and Anthony Fauci is a monster.  

The public large reacted with, eh?

Frankly, Rand Paul shot the last bolt of credibility he had left, having gained some during the descent of Thomas Massie, who dared to take on the Epstein files.  Now that's gone. But he's not the only one.

Still, you can see the Alter Kämpfer rally one last time around around the Blutfahne.  In spite of it all, the seas of dead, see they were right all along. . . except they weren't.  But that hasn't stopped such figures as Ken Pendergraft from coming out, in his case, to say see, we weren't "knuckleheads". 

No, you were anti scientific ignoramuses and we all know it.

This same spirit is part of the reason that all of a sudden Reichsgesundheitsführer Kennedy has been fully released.  Kennedy is a complete nutcase and a quack.  For the most part, the Administration has kept him under a lid so he couldn't be too destructive.  But now, like Stephen Miller, he's been loosed as there's nothing left to lose and maybe the deluded can be deluded again.

Kennedy is back out there unleashed making statements against vaccinations.  Over the weekend he said that Lyme disease and  came from gain-of-function research, stating:

Lyme disease almost certainly came from these experiments and is now devastating our country.

That's idiotic.

The 5,300 mummified body of Ötzi the Iceman contained the bacteria that causes Lymes disease.  Genomic tracking can trace the disease back 60,000 years.

Genetic tracking of RSV shows a common ancestor between human RSV and bovine respiratory syncytial virus (BRSV) to have existed 921 years ago.  338 years ago is the point at which human RSV-A and RSV-B split from their shared ancestor.  That would  make it a newish disease, compared to Lymes anyhow, but it's not a result of "gain of function research".  It's a result of agriculture.

Das Ende

As we progress towards the fall election, and on into next year, we can look for these trends to accelerate.   Der Fibber, just like Der Fuhrer, has an accelerating mental health collapse. That is making him more and more erratic.  His policies are failing and he will lash out as they continue to fail.  A war he was supposed to easily win is being handily lost and dragging on.  Heads will roll.

But disloyalty will now increase. Already some out in the field are openly disobeying Der Fibber and no longer working towards Der Fuhrer.  At the end, in 1945, even Himmler was looking for a way to betray Hitler and cut a deal of his own.  We can bet that Vance and Rubio contemplate such a means out every day, and probably every hour of every day.  Traditionally, in a lame duck term, cabinet ministers begin to flee as soon as the midterm results are in.  In this administration, that will happen in spakes as people hoping for a political or administrative future look for a way to surrender, and to distance themselves (with tell all books) from Trump.

The true believes, of course, people like Stephen Miller, will remain, and their influence will accordingly grow.  The next two and half years are going to be chaos.

January to May 1945 were the bloodiest months of the war in Europe.

Fußnoten

1.  I've generally tried to avoid comparing the Trumpites and Trump's administration to the Nazis, but frankly it's impossible not to do so now. 

I had originally avoided calling the administration fascist, but it is.  It has all the classic features of fascism and it's perfectly comparable to fascism in early fascist Italy while democracy was still liming along a bit. That's right where we are at. The question is whether we descend further into it, or pull out. Right now, it looks like we might actually be able to pull out.

It's often debated if Nazism is fascism or sui generis.  It certainly has fascist elements at a large scale.  What really distinguishes it is the degree that Nazism was autarkic where as fascism favored state capitalism.  Strong elements of both are present in the Trump administration's economic policies.

The other defining characteristic of Nazism that was lacking in fascism was the absolute racial hatred that was a feature of Nazism.  Both it and fascism are extremely nationalistic, but fascism doesn't really feature racial hatred to anywhere near the same degree as Nazism.  Racial hatred has been an increasing element of Trumpism as time has gone by and it has members who outright advocate for making the United States a white Protestant nation.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 146th Edition. What does the SAVE Act, Groypers, A coup in progress, Dominionism, Women staying barefoot and pregnant, and the Lumpenproletariat have in common? A movement, it's leaders, and it's really dim backers.

Labels: 2020s, 2026, 2026 Election, American Puritanism, Democracy, Harriet Hageman, Immigration, law, Lies, Mike Johnson, Republican Party, The roles of men and women, The Second Trump Administration, Women, Zeitgeist

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 146th Edition. What does the SAVE Act, Groypers, A coup in progress, Dominionism, Women staying barefoot and pregnant, and the Lumpenproletariat have in common? A movement, it's leaders, and it's really dim backers.

Puritans headed to church in early colonial North America.  Only male views really counted, all other religions including Christian ones were not tolerated, church attendance was mandated by law, sports were discouraged and prohibited on Sunday, but alcohol and married conjugal relations were approved of.  The world the way that Doug Wilson, Mike Johnson and Pete Hegseth would have it.

Donald Trump has been having a major hissy fit that the Senate will not take up the SAVE Act.  Senate Majority Leader Thune says the votes just aren't there.

Let's hope, and pray, they are not. 

According to the misleading GOP propaganda, all the SAVE Act would require is that registered voters go to the polls with photo ids.¹  That's simply not true.

It does require that, but it also requires that in order to vote at all, you present, when you register, with proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport.  The majority of Americans do not hold passports.  Indeed, up until very recently you could visit our nearest neighbors without either, until international paranoia changed that.  A lot of people can't find their birth certificates, and getting one is a major pain that a lot of people won't bother with if they're challenged on this.

This, moreover, disproportionately impacts the poor and women, but it hits everyone else as well.

Americans are notoriously mobile.  They move for jobs, work, and just to move.  A lot of people eventually lose their vital records. If you move from Los Angeles to Austin, for example, you might have lost your birth certificate along the way.  Those keeping track of them are amongst those who are most likely to be well established. The same for getting certified copies of the same.  If you are working a low paying job, finding the time and the cash to get a certified copy won't be easy.  

Women, moreover, are by far the most likely to be impacted, with poorer women most of all.  This is because women are most likely to have changed names.  A woman may have been born Alice Jones, but upon getting married, she may be Alice Smith.  Now a birth certificate won't do. A marriage certificate will also be required.

But what if Alice is in that group, like Rachel Rodriguez-Williams was until recently, when she suddenly changed her name form her hyphenated, semi woke, moniker to just Williams (neatly avoiding the problem, perhaps, of her not being a WASP).  She may have a birth certificate showing her to have been born "Sanchez", and a marriage certificate showing where Williams came from, but there's very unlikely to be an official document showing "Sanchez-Williams". That's simply a convention she likely adopted.

For that matter, I've known professional women who used their husband's last name as their own for professional reasons, but their maiden name for work in which they were well established.

The fact of the matter is that the SAVE Act would take out a lot of women voters.  It would particularly take out a lot of black and Hispanic women voters.

And all to address a problem that doesn't exist. We know for a fact that the number of non citizens voting in this country is miniscule.  Chances are much higher than some of the handful of "illegal" votes are actually legal, rather than there being hoards of illegal voters going to the polls.

And the GOP knows this as an absolute certainty.

So, what's up with this?

Well part of it is that the GOP is using the Nazi Party playbook of 1932, or more accurately the 1932 Nazi Playbook Plus.  The Nazis hadn't actually been in power, yet, in 32, so they could legitimately claim they were going to fix inflation, etc.

But a lot of their campaign was that everything was the fault of the Jews.  

The GOP has no successful record this term to run on.  Everything it ran on has failed or turned out to be lies.  The Republicans didn't run on "I'm going to raise your taxes in a hidden way, boost inflation, and start a new war with no plan on how to win it" but that's what they've done. So, now, in order to try to stay in power they need to create bogus issues.  Communist and aliens are running amok, they claim.

No, they are not.

But it's more than that, or may at least may be more than that.

And here's the big clue:

House Speaker Mike Johnson says he grows more confident "with each passing day" that the GOP will retain control of Congress because:

This is a God thing. We have intercessory prayers who are on the ground at the Capitol praying.

That's right.  They are confident that God will intervene.

Well, praying for a just victory in anything is certainly not immoral and even laudatory.   Praying for victory is certainly not unheard of.

Most Christians in this context, however, would at least add the proviso to their prayer that they win, "if it be God's Will".  Many more, however, would simply pray that God's Will be done in the election, and leave God's desires up to God.  

Frankly not doing so here involves some rather shocking propositions, not the least of which is that those seeking God's intervention are asking God to return control of Congress to a political party that doesn't really exist in its old form, and instead to one which does not welcome the immigrant, as commanded by the Bible, rewards the wealthy, which is cautioned against by the Bible, launches unjust wars illegally, which is certainly immoral and which is headed by a serial polygamist, a condition which is completely immoral.

How can they do that?

They are doing that as people like Mike Johnson and some of the fringe elements of the Evangelical far right that are surrounding this administration sincerely believe that they have a Divine mandate to bring about an Evangelical Christian United States.  Johnson claimed that God was making him a new Moses. He wasn't kidding about believing that, he does.

Now, Moses didn't lie to the Jews, but at least Johnson seems to think that his status allows him to lie to advance the cause, a shockingly anti Christian view.  Others around Trump who hold these views don't openly express this as much, although Paula White has pretty clearly stated that she believes, or claims to believe, that God has created some sort of exalted role for Trump, but that doesn't mean they do not hold them.  Some fairly clearly do.

But why would they sabotage voting for this goal?

Two reasons, the first being the obvious one, the second being a less obvious one that we're suggesting, but frankly can't prove, yet.

The first reason is that the Republicans can't win an honest election, and they know it.  The panic on that is really starting to set in, and we're beginning to see, for the very first time, some Republicans putting distance between the GOP and themselves.  Harriet Hageman just did that by voting against the budget reconciliation bill even though it means she's bucking Trump.  That almost certainly must mean she's looked at polling data and knows that she's in political trouble.  People backing the SAVE Act are hoping that if a lot of female and poor voters are knocked out of the electorate, they stand a better chance.³ 

They're probably right on that, but maybe not quite as right as they suppose.  

So, the second reason?

It's the next step on the advance towards an Evangelical Christian state.  

How so?

Some in his movement believe that women should not be allowed to vote.

The best example of this is Idaho based minister Doug Wilson, whom Pete Hegseth is a fan of.  Wilson asserts that women should only be allowed to vote if they are the head of a household.  In Wilson's view men are of course the default head of households.  I suppose that this would really only come up if a woman was left being a widow, sort of.  

Now, while a skeptic can see all sorts of ways around that, in an Evangelical Christian State they wouldn't exist.  People aren't going to be allowed to shack up, and they're not going to be able to easily divorce either (and they certainly aren't going to be marrying a member of their own gender).²  So, if couples are going to do what comes naturally, and what naturally results occurs, at a bare minimum the original type of Common Law Marriage will come about.⁴ 

So gals won't be voting, at least not very darned often.

And if the SAVE Act passes, the next step has occurred.  A lot of women simply won't be voting.

And of course, women who won't be voting, won't be standing for elected office either.

Sound extreme and conspiratorial?

It is, but people like Johnson in the Evangelical right around Trump are extreme. And many are engaged in a conspiracy to steal the 2026 election right now.

At least Wilson is honest about his goals.

Which takes me to the lumpenproletariat.

The last few years, as an observer of local politics, I've been watching the collection of individuals who support the far right in this state. They come from all walks of life and backgrounds, but they disproportionately come from the lower middle class/poor boundary, and are very often rather badly educated.  This isn't always true, but where it isn't t here's some demographic information that sort of predicts their views.  A not inappreciable number are women.

Some are just highly rural. Rural people in this state tend to be badly educated on politics and extremely conservative in an unthinking way.  If you discuss things closely with them, they often hold views diametrically opposed to the people they're backing, they just don't realize what the people they're backing support.⁵   This has long been the case and can be demonstrated all the way back to the 1930s when the Democrats saved ranching while the ranchers were pissed off at them.  What I've noticed about this, however, is that younger ranchers and farmers no longer fit this mold.  The GOP may have a lock grip on Baby Boomer ranchers, but it doesn't have one on Gen X and Y ranchers.  The bloom is beginning to fade from the rose on this one.

Others who are at least somewhat educated tend to have very strong and identifiable religious views sounding in the Evangelical far right or in the LDS.  That demographic favors a much more traditional role for women than is currently common, and frankly would probably be okay with women losing their vote if that helped restore the pre 1940 status quo ante of domestic life.  Natrona County legislator Jayme Lien, for example, is a Mormon who notes that: "Outside of her legislative role, she identifies as a homeschooling mother and works as a homemaker/working mother, and has historically assisted with her family's concession business at local events like the Central Wyoming Fair and Rodeo"

Am I saying something is wrong with that weltanschauung?  No, I am not.  Indeed, the irony of much of this is that on some things I agree with the underlying traditionalist view, while being horrified by the attack on women in public and business life.  What I am saying, however, is that people vote for a candidate not really appreciating that candidate's weltanschauung, and then are surprised when we get results that reflect that.  Most women in Wyoming do not identify as homeschooling mothers, and for good reason.  If all of a sudden they get policies that favor that, and the crop of Charter Schools that have popped up recently are barely disguised religions schools, they shouldn't be too surprised.

A person shouldn't leap to conclusions either.  A highly devout LDS family in my neighborhood has a crop of election signs up all favoring the moderate thinking Republicans.

Beyond that, however, are a group of people that are just pathetic.⁶   Some women are amongst them and at least one is a candidate this year. She simply has nothing in her life other than the biggest political crush going on a WFC candidate.  She's literally do anything for him, and in fact has been excusing his rather upsetting court record.  These people are the Rosa Luxemburgs of Republican far right.  The revolution they're seeking is going to dump them like a box of rocks should it succeed, but in their pathetic semi impoverished poorly educated lives, they can't see it.

Were women to be disenfranchised from voting by the SAVE Act, and they lose their votes, and if their male fellows in the same demographic were to, they probably wouldn't even care. They're besotted the way Luxemburg was with Communism.  It's all they have.

Clara Zentkin and Rosa Luxemburg, 1910.

Footnotes:

1.  At one time, it might be noted, the GOP adamantly opposed the concept of a national ID which would have fulfilled all of these rolls as well as being a Social Security Card.  This was probably always a good idea, but they've traditionally hated it.

2.  I'm not in favor of easy divorce or same sex unions either.  This is part of the way that the GOP has managed to gain power.  People who have real conservative views on these things and many others, as well as strong religion based views, have found themselves voting for the Republicans as morality seems to mandate it.  This has been hotly debated in Catholic circles as many well informed Catholics are horrified by Trump and his administrations, but at the same time felt they had no other moral choice.

Personally, I've never voted for Trump and the last three election cycles have voted for the American Solidarity Party.

3.  While it would be folly to count on it, one thing the GOP hardly seems to notice that Republican voters are not very highly motivated as a rule and a lot of the remaining GOP voters may very well fall into a lower middle class/poor class that is barely motivated to go to the polls, while man y Democrats are highly motivated.  The GOP could actually hurt itself.

4.  Barely noticed, some in this camp are opposed to pharmaceutical birth control, which at least observant Catholics also are.  I note this as in this context, it emphasizes not only a preference for marriage, but an absolute need and mandate for it.

5.  At least in Wyoming, which is the least religious state in the US, most ranchers are actually adherents of the American Civil Religion. Whether  you disagrees with their views or not, you'd find that in regards to sexual morality most only oppose homosexcuality, and are fine with everything else.  Accordingly, they'd be horrified by policies that opposed pharmaceutical birth control or mandated common law marriages, the latter of which they have a particular interest in defeating.  They also tend to be very provincial and intensely dislike monied interest buying up agricultural land, which the GOP is just fine with. 

In short, they're actually either moderate Republicans or moderate Democrats in their actual world outlook, but don't put much thought into it.

6.  I'm not going to go into two remaining categories in detail, but there are two more.

One is the Groypers.  They really detest women, while longing for them at the same time.  Basically pathetic early 20s basement dwellers, they sort of lust for women that they can't have, and as a result, they don't like real world women.

This group, best characterized by Nick Fuentes, feels that women and minorities have deprived them of their rightful place in society. They don't like women, and they don't like Jews.  If women lost the right to vote, that'd serve them right, in their view.

The other are the flat out weird and stupid.  These people have always existed, but before the Internet they didn't really have a voice. They sure do now.  They don't necessarily oppose women voting, but they tend to think the whole world is one giant conspiracy.

As an example of that, I saw an instance in which a far right wing candidate attempted to defend another who has fallen into ill repute, only to see a third party race in to declare that all opposition to the far right is involved in a pro pedophile, chem trail, anti agricultural conspiracy.  That's flat out nuts, absolutely everyone kind of backed away from the entire topic, but it shows how wacky things have become.