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Trump Dictatorship and All Things Politics

Opinion piece from the New York Times. Headline says it all by now. Who could argue: “We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.”


Our Petty, Hollow, Squalid Ogre in Chief​


Though I tend to think it’s usually a waste of space to devote a column to President Trump’s personality — what more is there to say about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man? — sometimes the point bears stressing: We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.

Markets will not be moved, or brigades redeployed, or history shifted, because Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were found stabbed to death on Sunday in their home in Los Angeles, allegedly at the hands of their troubled son Nick.

But this is an appalling human tragedy and a terrible national loss. Reiner’s movies, including “Stand by Me,” “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally…,” are landmarks in the inner lives of millions of people; I can still quote by heart dialogue and song lyrics from his 1984 classic, “This Is Spinal Tap.” Until last week, he and Michele remained creative forces as well as one of Hollywood’s great real-life love stories. Their liberal politics, though mostly not my own, were honorable and sincere.

To which our ogre in chief had this to say on social media:

“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

I quote Trump’s post in full not only because it must be read to be believed, but also because it captures the combination of preposterous grandiosity, obsessive self-regard and gratuitous spite that “deranged” the Reiners and so many other Americans trying to hold on to a sense of national decency. Good people and good nations do not stomp on the grief of others. Politics is meant to end at the graveside. That’s not just some social nicety. It’s a foundational taboo that any civilized society must enforce to prevent transient personal differences from becoming generational blood feuds.

That is where history will record that the deepest damage by the Trump presidency was done. There is, as Adam Smith said, “a great deal of ruin in a nation,” by which he meant that there are things in almost any country that are going badly wrong but can still be mended. Foolishly imposed tariffs can be repealed. Hastily cut funding can be restored. Ill-thought-out national security strategies can be rewritten. Shaken trust can be rebuilt between Washington and our allies.

But the damage that cuts deepest is never financial, legal or institutional. As one of Smith’s greatest contemporaries, Edmund Burke, knew, it lies in something softer and less tangible but also more important: manners. “Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us,” Burke wrote. It is, he warned, through manners that laws are either made or unmade, upheld or corrupted.
Right now, in every grotesque social media post; in every cabinet meeting devoted, North Korea-like, to adulating him; in every executive-order-signing ceremony intended to make him appear like a Chinese emperor; in every fawning reference to all the peace he’s supposedly brought the world; in every Neronic enlargement of the White House’s East Wing; in every classless dig at his predecessor; in every shady deal his family is striking to enrich itself; in every White House gathering of tech billionaires paying him court (in the literal senses of both “pay” and “court”); in every visiting foreign leader who learns to abase himself to avoid some capricious tariff or other punishment — in all this and more, our standards as a nation are being debased, our manners barbarized.

I wonder if we are ever getting them back — and if so, what will it take. As Trump was unloading on Reiner, James Woods, probably the most outspoken Trump supporter in Hollywood, lovingly remembered Reiner as a “godsend in my life” who saved his acting career when it was at a low point 30 years ago.

“I think Rob Reiner is a great patriot,” Woods said Monday on Fox News. “Do I agree with some of, or many of, his ideas on how that patriotism should be enacted, to celebrate the America that we both love? No. But he doesn’t agree with me either, but he also respects my patriotism.” Woods is right, but how that spirit of mutual respect and good faith can be revived under a man like Trump is a question he and the rest of the president’s supporters might helpfully ask of themselves.

The Reiner murders took place on the same weekend that an assailant, still at large, murdered two students at Brown University, and when an antisemitic massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, gave every Jew in America a pit-of-our-stomachs sense that something like it may soon happen here again, as it did in Pittsburgh seven years ago. It’s been only three months since Charlie Kirk was shot in cold blood in Utah, and barely a year since the health care executive Brian Thompson was murdered in Manhattan by an alleged assailant who is now a folk hero to the deranged reaches of the left.

This is not a country on the cusp of its “Golden Age,” to quote the president, except in the sense that gold futures are near a record high as a hedge against inflation. It’s a country that feels like a train coming off the rails, led by a driver whose own derangement was again laid bare in that contemptible assault on the Reiners, may their memories be for a blessing.

Happy Hanukkah, I guess.

——————————————————————————————————————-

It was good to hear what James Woods said about Rob Reiner. I went to school with Woods, and his political tweets remind me of the ball buster I knew decades ago. Tweets that have been disgusting for the most part, just a troll for MAGA. I guess even a genius can be sadly mistaken, his IQ being in the 180 range. So I was glad to hear him speak this way, actually sounding human for a change; I don’t have to feel so ill of him.


View: https://x.com/JesseBWatters/status/2000754643865891146
 
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Just the past few days: A social media posting about Rob Reiner that clearly demonstrates the president of the United States is very seriously mentally ill. That posting was written by a sick, sick individual(see: https://www.nationalreview.com/the-...reaction-is-a-sign-of-something-deeply-wrong/). Even by Trump standards, it was jaw dropping. It felt different somehow. Beyond the pale from a man whom we didn’t think it possible for him to go lower. Well, not sure about that last part, lol. And then last night. Where we had the chance to see what a weak, insecure man sits in the Oval Office. Most of us knew that already, but this speech was something to behold. Cracking under the pressure, we may yet see this man removed in a straight jacket.

Ihttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/what-presidential-panic-looks-like/685307/?gift=jya-z5lTntURuSFdyDPB2dWuykzo4pMX0BTWAFAVvDU&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.

When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address. He was clearly working from a prepared text, but it sounded like one he’d written—or dictated angrily—himself, because it was full of bizarre howlers that even Trump’s second-rate speech-writing shop would probably have avoided, such as his assertion that inflation when he took office was the worst it had been in 48 years. (Why did he pick 1977 as a benchmark? Who knows. But he’s wrong.) He read the speech quickly, his voice rising in frustration as he hurled one lie after another into the camera.

We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns? Shut up, you fools, the economy is doing fine. (And if it isn’t, it’s not his fault—it’s Joe Biden’s.) Foreign-policy jitters? Zip it, you wimps, America is strong and respected.

In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy.

I consider myself a connoisseur of Trump’s speeches. I’ve watched them and live-tweeted them for years because I think Americans need to see what kind of man sits in the Oval Office. But even by Trump’s standards, this was an unnerving display of fear. I can only imagine America’s enemies in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran smiling with pleasure as they watched a president losing his bearings, berating his own people, and demanding that they absolve him of any blame when things get worse.

His rant contained no news, other than an example of his contempt for the U.S. military, whose loyalty he thinks he can purchase with a onetime $1,776 bonus check. This is projection: Trump has shown his willingness to be bought off with gold bars and trinkets, and he may think that the men and women of the armed forces are people of equally low character.

This was not a holiday address from the leader of a great democracy to its citizens. This was a desperate tin-pot leader yelling into a microphone while cornered in his palace redoubt. The president has been unraveling for weeks, and his speech tonight, like Trump himself, was unworthy of America and its people.
 
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Red said:
Just the past few days: A social media posting about Rob Reiner that clearly demonstrates the president of the United States is very seriously mentally ill. That posting was written by a sick, sick individual(see: https://www.nationalreview.com/the-...reaction-is-a-sign-of-something-deeply-wrong/). Even by Trump standards, it was jaw dropping. It felt different somehow. Beyond the pale from a man whom we didn’t think it possible for him to go lower. Well, not sure about that last part, lol. And then last night. Where we had the chance to see what a weak, insecure man sits in the Oval Office. Most of us knew that already, but this speech was something to behold. Cracking under the pressure, we may yet see this man removed in a straight jacket.

Ihttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/what-presidential-panic-looks-like/685307/?gift=jya-z5lTntURuSFdyDPB2dWuykzo4pMX0BTWAFAVvDU&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.

When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address. He was clearly working from a prepared text, but it sounded like one he’d written—or dictated angrily—himself, because it was full of bizarre howlers that even Trump’s second-rate speech-writing shop would probably have avoided, such as his assertion that inflation when he took office was the worst it had been in 48 years. (Why did he pick 1977 as a benchmark? Who knows. But he’s wrong.) He read the speech quickly, his voice rising in frustration as he hurled one lie after another into the camera.

We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns? Shut up, you fools, the economy is doing fine. (And if it isn’t, it’s not his fault—it’s Joe Biden’s.) Foreign-policy jitters? Zip it, you wimps, America is strong and respected.

In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy.

I consider myself a connoisseur of Trump’s speeches. I’ve watched them and live-tweeted them for years because I think Americans need to see what kind of man sits in the Oval Office. But even by Trump’s standards, this was an unnerving display of fear. I can only imagine America’s enemies in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran smiling with pleasure as they watched a president losing his bearings, berating his own people, and demanding that they absolve him of any blame when things get worse.

His rant contained no news, other than an example of his contempt for the U.S. military, whose loyalty he thinks he can purchase with a onetime $1,776 bonus check. This is projection: Trump has shown his willingness to be bought off with gold bars and trinkets, and he may think that the men and women of the armed forces are people of equally low character.

This was not a holiday address from the leader of a great democracy to its citizens. This was a desperate tin-pot leader yelling into a microphone while cornered in his palace redoubt. The president has been unraveling for weeks, and his speech tonight, like Trump himself, was unworthy of America and its people.
Click to expand...
Very well said
 
Amazing.

www.usatoday.com

Trump's crazed address was as unnerving as Biden's debate | Opinion

In what was technically a primetime address to the nation, President Donald Trump spent 20 minutes on the evening of Dec. 17 yelling into a camera.
www.usatoday.com

Folks, the cheese has officially slid off our president’s cracker.

In what was technically a prime-time address to the nation, President Donald Trump spent about 20 minutes on the night of Dec. 17 yelling into a camera, hollering red-faced about how incredibly great everything is, when things in America are decidedly not great.

It was a torrent of lies and exaggerations ‒ about the economy, about prices, about immigrants ‒ that must have caused dozens of fact-checkers to spontaneously combust.

The lying, of course, is to be expected from Trump. But what stood out was his frenetic, angry delivery. It was like he had somewhere to be and was hacked off that he had to deal with some speech thing. The 79-year-old seemed incapable of pacing himself and sounded, frankly, like an angry, unhinged old man.

The untrue pablum ‒ “we have achieved more than anyone could have imagined,” “we have broken the grip of sinister woke radicals in our schools,” prices are "all coming down and coming down fast” ‒ flew from his mouth with a raised voice and a snarl. This was not an unpopular president seeking to calm voters and assure them that better days are coming. This was an angry loon, a street corner ranting nonsense with the cadence of someone reading possible side effects at the end of a pharmaceutical commercial.
 
Meanwhile, another Trump appointed lunatic is a busy beaver, deciding how soldiers should relate to God, and how they should not relate to God. Such nonsense from a man most military officers have zero respect for, and whom they regard as a nutcase.


Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday he is overhauling the military’s chaplain corps, which provide religious and spiritual support to members of the armed forces and their families, saying he intended to target “new age” concepts.

“In an atmosphere of political correctness and secular humanism, chaplains have been minimized, viewed by many as therapists instead of ministers. Faith and virtue were traded for self-help and self-care,” Hegseth said in a post on the social platform X.

“If you need proof, just look at the current Army Spiritual Fitness Guide. In well over 100 pages, it mentions God one time. That’s it. It mentions ‘feelings’ 11 times. It even mentions ‘playfulness,’ whatever that is, nine times. There’s zero mention of virtue. The guide relies on new age notions,” he added.

Hegseth later added that he had “a directive right here that I will sign today to eliminate the use of the Army Spiritual Fitness Guide, effective immediately.”

“These types of training materials have no place in the War Department. Our chaplains are chaplains, not emotional support officers, and we’re going to treat them as such,” he added, using the Trump Administration’s preferred name for the Department of Defense.

Hegseth, no stranger to pushing for change at thePentagon, told the military’s top officers earlier this year that he did not want to see “fat generals and admirals” or overweight troops anymore.

“Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” Hegseth said. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon leading commands around the country and the world.”

“It’s a bad look. It is bad, and it’s not who we are,” he continued.
 
Red said:
Amazing.

www.usatoday.com

Trump's crazed address was as unnerving as Biden's debate | Opinion

In what was technically a primetime address to the nation, President Donald Trump spent 20 minutes on the evening of Dec. 17 yelling into a camera.
www.usatoday.com

Folks, the cheese has officially slid off our president’s cracker.

In what was technically a prime-time address to the nation, President Donald Trump spent about 20 minutes on the night of Dec. 17 yelling into a camera, hollering red-faced about how incredibly great everything is, when things in America are decidedly not great.

It was a torrent of lies and exaggerations ‒ about the economy, about prices, about immigrants ‒ that must have caused dozens of fact-checkers to spontaneously combust.

The lying, of course, is to be expected from Trump. But what stood out was his frenetic, angry delivery. It was like he had somewhere to be and was hacked off that he had to deal with some speech thing. The 79-year-old seemed incapable of pacing himself and sounded, frankly, like an angry, unhinged old man.

The untrue pablum ‒ “we have achieved more than anyone could have imagined,” “we have broken the grip of sinister woke radicals in our schools,” prices are "all coming down and coming down fast” ‒ flew from his mouth with a raised voice and a snarl. This was not an unpopular president seeking to calm voters and assure them that better days are coming. This was an angry loon, a street corner ranting nonsense with the cadence of someone reading possible side effects at the end of a pharmaceutical commercial.
Click to expand...
This almost needed its own thread. This was beyond unhinged, this was firmly in paranoid dementia territory. He is rapidly losing his grip on reality. It is still amazing how afraid his side is of him, that they won't even think of facing facts and ousting him from his position. The democrats at least acknowledged that Biden was going downhill fast and replaced him, with a much worse candidate. But the republican cult draw is so strong no one will take any action against him regardless of what he does or says. It is mind-boggling in the extreme.
 
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