Sunday, January 18, 2026

THIS! IS!! AMERICA!!!

The older I get, the more I fail to see the distinction between being stupid, and acting stupid. Or the importance of the distinction.

But Trump is certainly mad as a rook. There are arguments that everything is explained if you accept Trump is Putin’s fool. But correlation is not causation, and Trump is so far over his head he’s taking advice from anyone who has his ear. None of whom seem to even know how to get a bill introduced in Congress, much less how to shepherd it through. They all seem to think it is enough for Trump to just say so, in a post or off the cuff, for the entirety of the next three years. (Probably the real explanation for his aside to AP that we don’t need mud-term elections. Just leave Trump to do as he pleases, the way he does in his business. He really doesn’t understand any other way.)

A lot of Project 2025 seems to be the work of authoritarians. Are they aligned with Putin, or just sympathetic to them? Or he to them? You don’t have to be a Putin stooge to be running in parallel (albeit not in tandem) with Putin’s goals. Good old American xenophobia and allergy to “foreign entanglements” can look a lot like Putin’s strategy without at all being it.

It’s actually more comforting to see “devious and traitorous” instead of “demented and incompetent.” The former we can anticipate; the latter is chaotic. As“Incompetent” also covers corrupt and greedy, since Trump is now using his pardon power to accept bribes, and a cowed Congress to siphon money for himself (who is auditing that Qatar account for the proceeds from Venezuela oil?). If this serves Putin’s ends, that may just be Putin’s incredible good fortune. After all, Putin didn’t manipulate the electorate. He really did just get lucky.

And it really doesn’t let we, the people, off the hook to say that Trump sold his soul (and is selling the country) to the devil. We don’t really need to quibble over how we identify the calf the problem. The problem is Trump. The question is: what do we do about him?
That incident doesn’t (necessarily) benefit Putin, but it doesn’t hurt him. It does, however, illustrate what a soulless, self-absorbed monster Trump is. Which is perhaps a better way to understand him.

 Now do this one.👇

Autopen? Really? Scraping the barrel’s bottom already? And I love his constant demands for people to be arrested when his DOJ has racked up a record number of no bills in just his first year (the second doesn’t begin until Tuesday). He really has no idea what he’s doing, he just shouts like a thwarted child. A thwarted, clueless child. Speaking of which: I was wondering about the background to this. This seems to explain it. I assume Lang is the fellow who organized the protest for 🧊 that I read about yesterday. Looks like it went about as well as I expected. 😈

Which is really a reason for hope.
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