“Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.”

I have yet to hear any of the "journalists" who peddled the idea that Biden is senile raise the possibility that Trump is at least demented. If there's one thing that's obvious it's that they're OK with our national security being shredded or packaged and handed over to Putin and the other billionaire dictators. Twenty six Republicans aren't going to hold against Trump, we are screwed but no where near as much as those who live in Ukraine or Taiwan or, I have no doubt, Poland and Latvia. I don't know how the House of Saud are going to work this but I know they will. I think their overtures to Iran are proof of that. I wouldn't give Israel's chance of surviving the concerted opposition of Putin, Iran and S. Arabia since they jointly own Trump.

I demur more than disagree. I really don’t think the M-IC will allow Hegseth to be SecDef. The Senate has already shown it isn’t interested in deferring to MAGA (which is far cry from saying the Senate is suddenly peopled with Bernie Bros, but still…  

I think the real test will be when Trump starts imposing tariffs, and how the Congress responds. They have plenty of power to stop Trump on that front. Whether they exercise it is another matter.

I do think Gabbard and Gaetz and Hegseth will be too much to swallow. Noem at Homeland Security is bad enough; but Gaetz has no support in the Senate; Gabbard is a serious security risk; and Hegseth is too useless to place over the operation of the Pentagon.

OTH, Rubio will be SOS, and not only useless but dangerously so.

Times is gonna get real hard, and everyone is gonna to blame everyone else for it.

While I think about it, I wonder that no one has drawn a connection between the rise of MAGA and Trump to a culture that tolerates school shootings and mass violence by unstable persons with easy access to firearms. I was reflecting on my high school experience when the school felt it had to hire private security (this was long before school districts in Texas employed a police force for their campuses). The need arose from a half-day of school violence in which no one was harmed, no property was damaged (except for a paper sign being set on fire), and about half the students (those on lunch break at the time) got a half-day off from school. It was a big deal at the time, but barely worth trying to explain 50 years later, in light especially of the violence at schools in the first two decades of this century.

You can’t take Trump out of his context, and that context is not the campaign Kamala Harris ran, or the decision of Biden to withdraw his nomination.