Thursday, October 30, 2025

🦆

Trump is a lame duck trying desperately to not look like a lame duck.  He’s not planning for tomorrow; he’s thinking about the next ten minutes.

It’s really as simple as that.
It’s a very easy case to make, and a very hard one to pass into law. But America is fucked up that way.
I was part of the internal Trump administration team trying to convince the president to end the shutdown in 2018 - 2019 — for 35 days — before people went hungry, workers lost pay, and government services collapsed.

Here’s what I learned: he doesn’t give a shit.
No shit, Sherlock.

Jessica Tarlov:
It continues to be the height of embarrassment that our allies know that Trump is made happy if you treat him like a toddler playing dress-up and give him the crown that he covets or have a merch stand with his branding.
Or just whisper sweet nothings in his ear:
"I was struck when the president said that he gave this a 12 on a scale of 10 for being a great meeting, and that they made a lot of progress and 'We're very close on some important things,'" Baker quoted. "That's almost word-for-word the things he said when he met in Alaska with Vladimir Putin. I was there in the room for that, he said. It was a 10 out of 10, not 12, but it was a 10 out of 10. 'And they made a lot of progress. And we're very close on some really important things.'"

Trump visited Alaska to meet with Putin and lobby for an end to the war in Ukraine.

"And of course, we all know what happened after Alaska, which is nothing," said Baker. "So, you know, you've got to be careful about overevaluating how much this will be worth. If it means, though, that there is sort of a, kind of a truce in a way, that there is a less hostile relationship for them now."

The exchanges, he said, are less hostile and less volatile, and that's the only real progress.
Xi said:
Xi, speaking through an interpreter, carefully acknowledged Trump's presence at the peace signing while subtly undermining his narrative. "During your visit to Malaysia, you witnessed the signing of the Joint Declaration on Peace along the Cambodia-Thailand border, and you provided your support," Xi stated, before asserting China's central role.

" China has assisted Cambodia and Thailand in our own way to resolve the border dispute, and we continue to promote peace talks to address other pressing issues in the region."
What Trump heard:
“The sun shines out of your ass and the tides go in and out at your command. You are the reason the world turns and the seasons change. Surely no one has ever achieved the magnificence of you”
And just when you think Trump is the only one dangerously divorced from reality: Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder would reject “Springtime for Hitler” in favor of that as the worst piece of fiction possible. That also makes Trump look like a serious thinker. 
Just an odd side note: this brainless twit is running for the GOP nomination for Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Basically the state bookkeeper. A position that has nothing whatsoever to do with tax policy (that’s the Lege). What he’s advocating here is to completely defund Texas public schools, an idea so incandescently stupid even the Lege would never consider it. (The current officeholder tried to get the Lege to use the surplus funds, garnered from school district property taxes, to return that money to the schools 3 years ago. The Lege declined, and used the money claim its wise policies had produced it. I think most voters bought it.) But Huffines is trying to win in the GOP primary. “Low information voters” would credit them with too much knowledge. Pretty sure this is because of the OBBB you said would be the last bill Congress would need to pass in his term. And I’m also pretty sure the Speaker of the House is a Republican, and isn’t letting Republicans negotiate with Democratic House members.

Let me wedge this in before we get to the last one:
Thanks. I needed that. All right, last one:
Sure, sure:
Joanna Coles, The Daily Beast's chief creative and content officer, described how Trump appears to be struggling on his own to climb up and down stairs while "officials waiting below held their collective breath not out of awe, but out of risk assessment."

It became clearer as he descended the steps from Air Force One that he "might suddenly fall away" as he made several stops along a tour through Asia.

And after 60, she explains, "a fall is the express lane to decline."

But the biggest difference between Trump and the other aging presidents before him is that he seems to lack a partner to help him.

"President Donald Trump, 79, doesn’t stride off planes anymore. He negotiates with them," Coles writes. "And on this latest Asian tour, the person whom we assumed would be at his side, Melania, the world’s most famously disengaged First Lady, was once again conspicuously absent. One begins to wonder if she’s in hiding, or holed up writing a sequel to her memoir. Either way, the man is alone."

It's clear he needs some extra help, she adds.

"Let’s drop the pretense: Trump needs a companion. Not a Secret Service agent, not an aide with a golf bag or a nuclear football, a proper, old-fashioned companion. The kind elderly countesses once employed to push them around the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, fetch their shawl and gently spoon them bouillabaisse," Coles writes.

"He doesn’t need another campaign manager. He needs an aide to keep him upright and make sure he leaves the stage via the correct exit."
Preferably as soon as humanly possible.
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