Previous episodes here. On to the ellipses:

Whither comity? WSJ:

Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have grown increasingly anxious that the current GOP-controlled Congress could thwart the seating of Democrats in January. A bipartisan group of lawmakers is trying to take the tactic off the table.

Reps. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, and Josh Gottheim…

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I assume you heard about Tubby giving Iran the all-clear to bomb San Diego and Los Angeles. His speech was in general incoherent, which gave some people (e.g. the New York Times) cover to suggest that he didn’t mean what he said.

Bullshit. Incoherence is (in addition to the natural state of his diseased brain) one of the ways Trump and his handlers cover his fat ass. Plus the cheers of the crowd make clear that it was taken just as intended: As a snarl of murderous hatred toward those cities and the people who live in them. You can’t praise Trump as a genius communicator and then claim he didn’t mean it.

I’ve talked about this sort of thing before but Trump’s comments present an opportunity to further elucidate on how this sort of thing, though repulsive to normal people, works with MAGA.

We’re all used to the conventional (conservative) wisdom that, while Democrats are required to stroke and pet the natives of rural red redoubts who would just as soon kill a Democrat as look at one, Republicans can shit all over their fellow Americans who live in the nation’s cities and get away with it. It’s one of the structural inequalities between right and left in this country, a corollary of Murc’s Law (“only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics”) that forever casts conservatives as the kid who breaks things and liberals as the kid who gets spanked for it. (See also “deficits.”)

Like the other Murcian inequities, the difference between how the urban-presumed-left and the rural-presumed-right get treated used to be smaller and the tone of its related rhetoric less hysterical. It operated pretty much at the level of old-fashioned country mouse/city mouse humor.

Everyone knows that drill. Country folk are accustomed to talk about us city folk as either too tolerant of crime or criminals ourselves; also, we are fancy and Frenchified, talk too fast and use too many big words, etc. We, on the other hand, affect to find the rustics inbred and imbecilic, uncultured, suspicious of anything or anyone new.

These stereotypes turn up in jokes, literature, salsa advertising, etc. Al Capp’s Li’l Abner actually covered both sides; though the behavior of the Dogpatch folks is pure country-mouse humor, Capp’s urban foils like General Bullmoose and various snobs and simps conform to the city-mouse variant.

For decades these stereotypes persisted, more or less harmlessly, like sports rivalries. The Death Wish-style stories of the late 20th Century were more jacked-up and inspired more fear and loathing than old city-mouse material, but it was presumed that only the city people would be harmed because country people were too wise to go to the city. As for us urban sophisticates, we could enjoy crude Cousin Eddie humor without having to worry about crossing paths with him except maybe on major holidays.

But the urban-rural thing was bound to track with the culture war that came to dominate our political discourse in later years. The perceived difference between blue metropolitan areas and red outbacks grew more pronounced, and the growth of horserace coverage and nationalized campaigns made the parties practically stand-ins for the two demographics.

Also, each side came to perceive the other as less benign. I know I wasn’t the only one talking about “Jesusland” after the 2004 election. And when it became obvious that, as cities grew, many suburbanites (like the “soccer moms” of the 1990s) began to identify more with the cities to which they were attached than with the rural regions surrounding them, some country folk would begin to see metropoli as sources of liberal contamination — and contamination, as we know, is one of conservatives’ biggest terrors.

With Trump, conservatives’ negative portrayal of cities intensified. In his first campaign and term Trump routinely talked shit about cities (for example, Baltimore) as festering hellholes; he even talked down Paris, France!

To a great extent, this was because he associated cities with minorities and immigrants, not to mention women with careers instead of babies, libraries, museums, pedestrians and bicycles — in short, everything his people hate.

In his return vengeance tour, Trump has pushed this even harder — for example, by illegally withholding funds from urb-heavy blue states. And now we have him summoning their destruction as a laugh line.

Though it’s alarming to those of us who live in them, slagging cities is for Trump a safer way to express his other associated bigotries. Think about it: He still hasn’t used the n-word in public, sticking instead to codes like “low IQ” for black people; on immigration he still works that old “worst of the worst” bullshit instead of the specific racial slurs you know he’s dying to bust out. (The exceptions seems to be Muslims and Palestinians, and even with them he tends toward the cryptic.)

Cities, on the other hand, make perfect conservative hate objects because they’re not personalized. MAGA peeps think of them as pathology clusters within which human forms are only vaguely discernible. They may in their own lives know actual black folks or Mexicans or career women or even city-dwellers, but when Trump talks about blowing up Los Angeles, they don’t imagine people — they imagine something like Gaza or Iran or the fishing boats Pete Hegseth keeps blowing up in the Caribbean. They imagine examples of their own power over a faceless, hated enemy. They imagine inflicting suffering and death as they might in a video game, with the consequences, moral or otherwise, forever hidden.

Expect him to do it again.

Update. I see Tubby did the LA/SD thing again the next day, this time adding that he was intending to “protect” these and other American cities. It figures he’d portray himself as our protector after fantasizing aloud about our destruction.

For a year and a half he’s been “protecting” us by flooding our communities with ICE goons (and, in DC, National Guard troops), and cutting off our share of billions in federal dollars on bogus fraud charges.

Like Spider Mike said in Convoy: We don’t need no more of your help.

[The south-midwestern diner from last year’s “The Last Diner.” Everything’s the same as then — booths, counter, Bunn-o-matic, etc. — except a couple of four-tops have been pulled together and there are six people seated there, some eating toast and eggs or Danish, all having coffee and juice. They are STAN, 60ish, in overalls and flannel; STEVE, 60ish, …

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When I first moved to New York, it was home to what were then sometimes called liberal Republicans. I don’t recall anyone calling them moderate Republicans, probably because that would have been nonsensical — nearly all Democrats and Republicans were pretty moderate, which is to say difference-splitters and game-players. (Bella Abzug, now there was a radical! She was for gay rights and for women being able to get bank credit without a man.)

In fact, I believe I once voted for a Republican — Bill Green, who succeeded Ed Koch in the House in 1978 and, as little I knew then, seemed like a decent fellow, like Lowell Weicker back in my old home state, whereas his opponent Carter Burden seemed like kind of a dilletante. OK, I was young. Green played it down the middle, but when Reagan got in Green had to do some fancy footwork to distance himself from the Gipper while making some bogus votes. Fortunately for Green he had help from (who else) Democratic trimmers and the New York Times:

...supporters see Mr. Green as something akin to the snail darter of New York politics. They say he is an endangered species of sorts - a moderate who can walk among and occasionally influence some other, more conservative Republicans - and therefore a candidate who must be protected.

Sound familiar? Green served until Carolyn Maloney beat him in a reconfigured district in 1992. Since then no Republican has represented any Manhattan district in the House. Some districts — in south Brooklyn and Staten Island, mostly — elect them from time to time, but for the most part the citizens have figured it out: There are no more Bill Greens, Roy Goodmans, Jacob Javitses, or Charles Goodels. (Or Michael Bloombergs if you go for that sort of thing. Giuliani we’ve discussed; he rode a reactionary wave, and no sooner washed up on the beach than he began to stink.)

That is to say, there are no more Republicans who would even pretend to split the difference with their liberal constituents. There are only Republicans who would, as Goldwater wished, saw New York off from the mainland and let it float out to sea if they could manage it.

Looking around the rest of the country in the Year of our Lord 2026, this awareness seems to have spread. I don’t include the red redoubts where Democrats currently have more of a chance in the midterms than usual, as it’s only close in those places because Trump shit the bed so spectacularly that even the Republican base is disgusted. (And, in the case of Texas, because GOP primary voters got cocky and nominated a career criminal with none of Trump’s I-guess-we-have-to-call-it charisma.) I expect those states to flip back bright red soon enough, especially in cases where the Democrat squeaks in and then governs like they’re scared of the Klan, thereby shitting away the Change mandate that might have cemented their position. (Hint hint.)

But in the blue and purple states, it’s pretty well decided. Still, there are a few exceptions. Abdul El-Sayed, for example, is barely above water in the Michigan Senate race, in large part because of racism (duh) and because some people who should know better accuse him of antisemitism.

Among the latter (though at this point I’m not sure “should know better” applies) is supercentrist Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic, who began his August 28 column about El-Sayed with “The hard-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker…” and went on from there. In between (26!) Piker citations, Chait thundered that “Ann Arbor, where El-Sayed lives, is home to a branch of the Free Palestine movement,” and informed us, as if it were the clincher, that El-Sayed treated a Trump DOJ indictment against pro-Palestine protestors “as biased.”

Yeah, I know: Assuming that any Trump DOJ indictment of protestors is biased seems like basic common sense to me, too. And laboring to blow all hope of Democratic control of the Senate, allowing Tubby to install more reactionary judges and officials throughout the last two years of his reign, would seem too much even for a supercentrist.

But that’s how Chait does. He considers lefter Democrats who push for what’s basically a New Deal revival beyond the pale — in fact he considers DSA office-holders like Mayor Zohran Mamdani and candidates like Darializa Avila Chevalier to be irredeemable Stalinist fellow-travelers (“The communist influx threw open the question of whether the DSA would support authoritarian parties and states around the world”) — while he portrays Republicans whose fealty to Trump is obvious and unshakeable as misguided souls who might yet clasp hands o’er the bloody chasm and bring us back to the days of Bill Green and Jacob Javits (assuming those guys aren’t too Red for Chait):

In 2020, American conservatives believed, correctly, that American society was undergoing a wave of crime, chaos, and dangerous radicalism. I am a liberal, not a conservative, though I have sympathy for at least some conservative goals, such as social stability and maintaining law and order.

Of course, not every faction of the American right values stability and the rule of law.

Haha, of course! But the Trumpers are just a “faction” — surely once they see reason, they’ll focus on the good shit that Chait admires so much.

Chait’s latest column focuses, for a change, on one of the very worst rightwing propagandists, the malignant racist Christopher Rufo (whose centrist fans include Ezra Klein).

Rufo’s shtick is notorious, classic conservative prevarication: Under cover of color-blindness and even-handedness, he accuses minorities (including the hard-of-hearing, whom he accuses of trying to weaken America by demanding sign-language interpreters at public events) of being the Real Racists, and their defenders in American politics of terrorism, and helps shitheels like Ron DeSantis turn public institutions into rightwing slop dispensers.

Rufo also brags about using MacGuffins like Critical Race Theory and the pet-eating he falsely attributed to immigrants in Ohio to gin up outrage against his enemies. He’s as ripe a specimen of a conservative who is not interested in Chait’s “social stability” as can be imagined.

Rufo’s latest caper is a podcast in which he — no shock to anyone paying attention — helps spread the anti-Indian prejudice taken up by his fellow Republican racists. You will be pleased to hear that Chait disapproves of this; but he also seems confused and disappointed that Rufo would act in such a way, because Rufo has mouthed the sort of nice things about decorum and comity that Chait loves:

Rufo wrote two years ago in City Journal, a magazine published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is a senior fellow. “Rather than pit ourselves against one another, we should aspire to a higher standard that subordinates racial faction to a broader national identity.”

He has urged Republicans to grasp the allure of this ideal, writing last year in The Free Press: “The right now has the winning argument. Americans support a ‘color-blind society’...

But then — would you believe it — Rufo acted as if he didn’t believe a word of it! “Rufo even began embracing concepts he had once defined as the hallmarks of his left-wing enemies,” Chait sighs. “…The man who once depicted meritocracy as the very foundation of the republic now presents it as a sinister threat to American culture.”

You hepcats might be open-mouthed at this. Doesn’t Chait realize this guy, like so many Republican color-blind claimants, is simply full of shit? And has been full of shit all along?

Apparently not. In fact, he writes about Rufo’s baldly racist gambit as if he’s caught Rufo in an inconsistency, and that Rufo will be abashed to find his old friend Jonathan calling it out:

Given the right’s commitment to anti-intellectualism and populist resentment, and President Trump’s open embrace of job promotions based on loyalty or appearance (“central casting”) rather than qualifications, Rufo’s turn against race-blind merit might have been inevitable. Or perhaps his abandonment of the merit principle reveals a great deal about the motives that have driven him all along.

That’ll really make him blush! It’s amazing: The U.S. electorate is so poorly attuned to political reality that they returned the insurrectionist Trump to office, thinking he’d make things better, yet even they have smelled the bullshit at flood tide. Chait’s been covering politics for decades. What’s his excuse?

A few years ago my buddy Martin started talking to me about a book he had in mind. All writers at one time or another have a book in mind and usually that’s the best place for it.

Which is fine. How many books break containment? Certainly more than anyone needs. The failure of a writer to produce a book may be a personal tragedy but for the rest of the world it’s no big deal.

But you never know; sometimes they skitter out. I barely got a book out myself, though only digitally, as the publisher that signed for it collapsed on the last mile and I didn’t have the scratch to make paper copies. (Here it is, 15 years on the backlist. I still think it’s good.)

Even in that crippled form, and with my reduced ambitions, that book was a beast to get done, and edited, and designed, and etcetera. Martin had previously produced a children’s book but I had always assumed that it was relatively easy to do — the words were small, and he had a brilliant artist (later his wife) to illustrate it. Also kids who will read at all will read anything! Come on, that hardly counts.

So if this new book quote unquote never became a book? It was enough for us both to have been encouraged and emboldened at the prospect. Life is short and everything disintegrates.

The book as Martin described it was a fantasy — sorta seafaring (Martin is a sailor), sorta steampunk (Martin is genuinely hip, always has been). It sounded like Horatio Hornblower meets William Gibson meets Octavia Butler meets Chuck Tingle. I have never read those authors (except for Tingle, who’s great) but those were the names that came to mind.

It was immediately clear that, much as I love Martin, this was not my thing, to the extent that it was a thing. But what can you do when a friend sets out to stalk the White Whale? Give them a pat on the back and a fresh rubber tip for their wooden leg.

In 2023 I got my first in a series of emails headlined “Martin Downs shared a document,” containing chapter drafts. I read them with such trepidation as you may imagine. The chapters were not what I was expecting. I don’t mean thematically — there were boats and bravado and how-tech-would-look-after-global-catastrophe and so on. But they were wild. They were weird. The characters were breathing and sweating and sometimes stank, their conversations were such as Alice Liddell might hope for, the future-world in which they lived was strange and disturbing and so clear and particular that I could honestly apply the used-to-death word vivid to it. It was the thing I had been dreading to read, but I had fun reading it.

That was three years ago. Over the years the emails kept coming and the reading got less fun.

We went back and forth on passages about which I had “thoughts” which were not often in accord with the author’s. Sometimes he cut things I would have preferred to see kept, and vice-versa. Sometimes I thought why am I reading this again? Wait, have I read this before? Do I have time to go back and check? Do I want to? We had discussions that resembled what I imagine aged Oxford dons have over Aristotle; intensely serious, niggling, ridiculous.

I came to dread the emails, but I kept opening the Google docs. Why? Friendship, as much as it covers, doesn’t quite cover this. It was like what keeps restless troops, theater companies, and political campaign boiler rooms going even when the effort seems to exceed any possible return.

And now, having passed through every possible agonizing stage of development — including not only the expected editing and proofreading but also examination and analysis by several kinds of consultants — the book is published.

I’ll leave it to Martin and his blurbs and bio to sell it to you. What I will say is that we have read in recent years a lot of stuff about how we are supposed to let AI create (that is, “create”) art (that is, “art”) while most of us do grunt work that was once supposed to be done by machines. Most of us know this idea is stupid. But I fear over time, with all the forces arrayed against remembering, we may forget how stupid it is.

The best cure for that I can imagine is to actually work at creating art — and by work I mean work, in whatever capacity (even if it’s just looking at it in early stages and giving the creator your honest opinion), and by art I mean art, whatever it looks like, however humble or exalted its place in the public eye. Because while it’s all very well to talk about the existence of art as proof of the value of humanity, it’s the engrossing and absurd effort of creating it, and the exercise it gives our hearts, souls, and imaginations, that makes the case.

(Don’t forget to at least think about buying it!)

This happens from time to time: One of my old figures of fun from early days turns up in the news, usually promoted from whatever media sinecure they had when I discovered them to a position of some importance in the Republican/MAGA power structure.

I remember when (2013!) Marco Rubio was better known for lunging for a water bottle on live TV rather than…

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Vice President JD Vance and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will speak for the second year in a row Tuesday at an event organized by Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again allies in Washington.

Vance and Kennedy will close the all-day event with a “fireside chat,” according to the agenda... — Politico, “Vance, RFK Jr. and ‘Iron’ Mike to headline MAHA Summit”

[Applause, cries of “CHEMTRAILS,” “EAT LARD,” and “KILL FAUCI” as ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. and JD VANCE take the stage and sit in one of those little interview spaces. VANCE wears his usual Junior Trump suits; KENNEDY wears the wizard costume from previous episodes, replete with Gandalf hat.]

VANCE: Let me first say, Mr. Secretary, that I am a very, very big fan of the MAHA movement, and I have been eating that America-healthy food for weeks. Which is kinda tough, because my wife is, you know, she’s of Indian extraction — I mean, don’t get me wrong, she’s white, but she cooks that food they have and it’s so greasy, it’s really why I was a little chubby for a while, but now look at me! Hah?

[VANCE spreads his arms and looks around; modest applause builds slowly and uncertainly.]

I know, I still have a tummy, but gosh darn it, it’s hard to lose it when you have to sit all day in meetings.

KENNEDY: You have to make time for the gym, JD. There is nothing going on in my office that really requires my attention, and I spend pretty much all day in a health club where I can do some squats and planks and drink some bear fat and then do some more squats and planks, and then snack on some possum toes.

VANCE: Possum toes! Now that’s a new one on me, and you know I’m from App-a-LAH-cha, so I know about possums, ha ha!

[VANCE looks around but no one responds.]

KENNEDY: The toes are a particular delicacy, I believe it was identified by R.H. Muscly, the celebrated ethno-nutritionist, full of protein and positive vibrations. Of course they have to cut them off the paws of the possum while it’s alive and conscious, so the vital essence of the animal vitality enters them.

VANCE: Boy, sounds kinda rough.

KENNEDY: The animal suffers, sure, but they’re a lower order of life. Like immigrants.

VANCE: I hear that!

KENNEDY: This country is so addicted to processed foods, fake food, like the fake news that our beloved President warns us about, that we forget we are in fact apex predators with dominion over all life on the planet.

VANCE: Well, sure. I mean why are we eating potatoes and spinach and curry and all that stuff when we should eating real, live food, like men! And women, of course, though not as much as men, we need more meat for, for evolutionary reasons.

KENNEDY: You know, the President, President Trump, he only eats meat.

VANCE: [Grinning but giving the impression of skepticism] Huh!

KENNEDY: Have you ever seen him eat a vegetable?

VANCE: Only if it was stuck to his — wait, does bread count?

KENNEDY: This is interesting, bread is acceptable only if it has been —

VOICE OFFSTAGE: I SAY!

[Celebrity rapist RUSSELL BRAND springs onto the stage, dressed like an Edwardian fop. He stands between KENNEDY and VANCE, an arm around each. The audience does not seem to know who he is.]

BRAND: My Gawd, it’s good to be on stage with these two magnificent specimens of real-manhood! [To the audience] Right, you wonderful people?

[Audience remains quiet, perplexed.]

Except JD has a bit of a pot belly, wot!

[BRAND reaches over and squeezes VANCE’s belly, whereupon BRAND is tackled by a half-dozen SECRET SERVICE AGENTS. Crowd oohs and aaahs; KENNEDY and VANCE don’t get up, though KENNEDY leans back and yells at the AGENTS:]

KENNEDY: Hey, hey he’s in the show! Leave him alone! Hey!

[The AGENTS stay piled on BRAND. KENNEDY turns to VANCE.]

Alright, JD, I suppose they’ll listen to you.

VANCE: Look, I don’t even know who that guy is.

[The AGENTS drag a now unconscious BRAND away.]

KENNEDY: Idiot! How can you be so stupid! He’s Russell Brand, the famous British manfluencer!

VANCE: [Clumsily pointing a finger at him] Hey, don’t call me an idiot. Now you know I respect your influence on the diet of our young people, but —

[VANCE is distracted as his wife USHA enters, wearing a fabulous Sahuri embroidered silk sari and carrying several stacked bamboo dabbas. Audience applauds.]

Oh, hey, hi, honey. [To the audience] Isn’t she something? She’s dressed like this as a joke. [To USHA] Who’s watching the kids?

USHA: The nannies, who else?

[USHA holds out the dabbas, half-genuflects maliciously:]

I have brought you your lunch, meri jaan.

[VANCE looks around quickly, addresses USHA furtively.]

VANCE: Oh, hey, hon, look, I can’t, these people, they don’t understand vegetables, they think they’re bad.

KENNEDY: [Gargle-laughing] I see now why you can’t lose that paunch, Mr. Vice President.

VANCE: [To KENNEDY, pointing even less convincingly] Hey, you, you shut up!

KENNEDY: Maybe if you knew how to control your woman, you wouldn’t be so flabby.

[VANCE stands up, doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.]

VANCE: Now listen, I’m the Vice-President of the United States. You know you’re just a Secretary because secretaries are girls, don’t you, you big girl!

USHA: [Loud, to KENNEDY] Speaking of one’s woman, Mr. Kennedy Junior, I met a friend of yours backstage.

[Enter celebutante journalist OLIVIA NUZZI in a Saint Laurent sleeveless mini dress and gladiator heels. Crowds oohs and aahs, applauds. KENNEDY springs to his feet, comes close to NUZZI.]

KENNEDY: [Hisses, stealing looks at the audience] What the hell are you doing here?

NUZZI: Well, lover, I was —

KENNEDY: Don’t call me that!

NUZZI: — I ran into the Second Lady here and we got to talking and —

[KENNEDY’s eyes roll in his head.]

KENNEDY: No! No! No talking! No!

NUZZI: — and we decided, why should I hide our passion from the world when it’s so obviously —

[KENNEDY gargles furiously, starts doing jumping jacks. To the audience:]

KENNEDY: Come on, everybody! Let’s go! Jumping jacks!

[Confused muttering from the audience. KENNEDY jumping-jacks more ferociously, shooting panicked looks at NUZZI. Meanwhile USHA has taken his seat, and VANCE is holding but not opening the dabbas.]

VANCE: [To USHA] So, what’s in the dabbas?

USHA: Nothing much. Just some poori, shaag aaneer, and khaleji.

VANCE: [Brightly] Chicken livers! [To the audience, which for obvious reasons is not paying him any attention] That’s pretty butch, right?

[KENNEDY seems to catch a cramp, cries out, staggers around, then starts swatting at NUZZI like a little boy pretending to fight. MIKE TYSON, dressed in a Trump-style suit, charges onto the stage, grabs KENNEDY’s arm and wheels him around.]

TYSON: Hey! Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?

KENNEDY: Fuck off, I’m a Kennedy!

[TYSON, as if primordially triggered, punches KENNEDY so hard he flies across the stage and into the audience, leaving his Gandalf hat behind. The crowd erupts in applause; TYSON puts on the Gandalf hat and walks around the stage, nodding and smiling with his hands up. NUZZI follows him with interest. VANCE is gobbling his food while USHA plays with her phone.]

First, a little background. #1:

[White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan] Scavino, 50, posted what appears to be an AI-generated video showing him popping champagne with what seems to be his second wife, Erin Elmore, and the president’s son Eric Trump and his wife Lara Trump. The video is set to the tune of Pitbull’s hit song “Don’t Stop the Party.”

In the caption of the video, he wrote, “This is not an intended for the Dems heads to explode—Being some of the post State Dinner party has gotten out, I felt inclined to share mine as well, in complete transparency, with the American People. GOD BLESS THE USA!!!♥️🤍💙🇺🇸🦅🚀”

Scavino is referring to posts that portray Trump’s luxe dinner with Chinese President Xi as insensitive at a time when consumers are experiencing high prices.

#2:

The Trump administration is using public dollars to pay for a television ad that features President Donald Trump urging Americans to “defeat communism,” while touting his economic record and personal resilience, as a choir in the background recites the verse “Love me.”

A White House official confirmed the ad, which reads “Paid for by the U.S. Government” at the end, was produced by the administration and funded with federal dollars. It appears to mark an extraordinary breach of White House practice under previous presidents separating public funding from political advertising.

We’re used to talking about the Trump administration’s public relations as some kind of magic jiu-jitsu that inevitably confounds opponents.

This was thought to have misfired in 2020, because of COVID and BLM, but to have been reinvigorated in 2024 in what people like Jonah Goldberg called a “vibe shift” that exponentiated Trump’s tiny victory margin into a mandate that swept away the moral arguments of liberal fuddy-daddies.

Accordingly to this reading, Trump et alia do outrageous things, like celebrating their wealth and power and posting cruel, brutal imagery about their opponents, and it’s not an outrage but rather a brilliant application of the vibeshift against gloopy oldsters who find it offensive — like Ke$ha making her mom drop the pancakes with her deshabille.

Yeah, I know that’s a dated reference. Which is partly the point. And, I hope, a good omen for the midterms.

Let’s fast forward to what actual pop-cult mishegas we have in 2026. No one’s titillating the teens by coming to the breakfast table hungover, or spraying champagne at the White House.

Sydney Sweeney’s naked sports gambling ad is supposed to be a big PR win for rightwingers — haw haw, liberals don’t like tits! So is that stupid lesbian masking bar story. But no one who isn’t a conservative columnist or a centrist columnist (but I repeat myself) really cares.

What does have some actual non-editorial-employees heated is Ed Sheeran kicking Macklemore off his tour at the behest of evil billionaire creep Robert Kraft because he opposed the genocide in Gaza. And on that one your average punter is more inclined to side with Macklemore — not to mention the many other artists who are supporting Palestinians (including his former support acts).

MAGA can’t even get Bill Burr to cape for them anymore (here, enjoy the Washington Examiner crying about it).

Once upon a time Trump’s boorish anti-politics could be stretched to connect with Americans’ anti-authoritarian streak; he was sort of a malevolent Adam Sandler character, acting stupid and crude but giving his fans a big cheer at the end. And I have no doubt some of his boomer adherents still think he’s sticking it to The Man. But after a year and a half of his second term rampage, for most people the act has worn thin.

Now you might look at what Trump and his crew are using to represent him and wonder: Why can’t they just update it? After all, the foundation of all MAGA is that nothing is real and image is everything — it should be the easiest thing in the world to tweak the act to make it palatable to current audiences, if not convincing. (Using a 2012 Pitbull tune doesn’t do it.)

First of all, as I’ve written, Trump doesn’t really care what people think anymore. Rather, he believes that anything he wants to happen will happen. So the affection of the people is something he can easily call up the way he first set it off — by being his usual scumbag self.

He does these weird things because he thinks they’re cool and assumes we will too. And what Trump thinks is cool is based on what he thought was cool when he was playing “John Barron” and getting his name in the tabloids back in the 1980s.

John Podhoretz speculated in 2016 that Trump was getting over by reviving a Rat Pack sensibility. But that was too flattering; if anything, 80s Trump was a degenerated Xerox copy of that. (Frank and Dino and Sammy, for one thing, had actual talents.) He lacked the chops but he had the bluster and the eternal self-regard that reads to some people as confidence and leadership. (Not to mention casual misogyny and racism.)

That’s why he felt comfortable going to Republican debates and yammering stupid, offensive shit that everyone else on the dais was too scared to say out loud, and why people who didn’t know better went for it.

Now look at him, as he sinks in polls, pushing out that bizarre commercial. Why does he think anyone cares about communism? Because they did in the 1980s. Why does he push “the largest tax cuts in history,” which were minimal for most people and might feel like a cruel joke to them as the economy tumbles? Because tax cuts were big in the Reagan years. (That Reagan was smart enough to delay the damage of his cuts to the economy doesn’t occur to Trump.) Why does he push law and order and the police when so many of us associate that with his cruel ICE raids? Because law and order was surefire back when his buddy Rudy was going on drug raids with Al D’Amato, so it must be now.

Tuxedo swagger. Gold toilets. Women as accessories. The 80s, baby! Everyone he knows thinks it’s still happening.

That’s also why Scavino thought his champagne stunt — flaunting wealth and power, acting like an old-school corporate Master of the Universe — would be a tonic for the troops. And it might as well be, as far these people are concerned, so thickly insulated as they are from the reality the rest of us share. I don’t think even a landslide midterm defeat can reach them, at least not at first. But like Boss Gettys told Charles Foster Kane, they’ll need more than one lesson, and they’re gonna get more than one lesson.

Yes, it’s that dot... dot... dot thing again. Listen, buddy, this act killed ‘em in Frisco back in the day! (Just remembering decades ago I met this woman from San Francisco who told me that nobody called it “Frisco” except rubes and tourists. Also back in the 1940s SF Mayor Angelo Rossi petitioned 20th Century Fox to take “Frisco” out of a movie title.…

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President Donald Trump said Tuesday at the United Nations that he is changing the term “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence” because it’s “more accurate,” as he dismissed global concerns about the technology and its effects on humanity.

“From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use …

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The White House launched its own news channel dubbed “Trump TV” on Monday, days after President Donald Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, but the platform kicked off its first livestream with a two-month-old clip of the president speaking at Mount Rushmore.

Teasers for the new media venture first appeared on the White House’s soc…

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Ezra Klein is the sort of responsible centrist by whom I am annoyed just on general principle, though he does regularly feed that annoyance by, for example, telling us that the white supremacist Charlie Kirk “Was Practicing Politics the Right Way,” trying to achieve consensus with (and getting totally played by) Florida fascist Christopher Rufo, assuring us against all evidence that, just as we silly liberals put away silly wokeness, the MAGAfied right will soon grow up, calm down, and stop advocating for the Day of the Rope, etc.

(BTW I still recall how in 2007 Mithras — remember him? — referred to the Klein/Yglesias/McArdle clique as “liberalism’s future Maureen Dowds and Tom Friedmans,” which has abundantly proven out.)

Anyway annoying Ezra Klein has written about that even bigger annoyance, AI, specifically the recent turn of events in which the amoral techlords who were formerly telling us to bow down to their Large Language Models or be left behind to starve and weep now warn us that the LLMs are coming to kill us all.

That’s reductive, but I don’t give a shit. I have been desultorily scanning the stories about the Hugging Face hack and the guy who said we better watch out and then everybody saying we better watch out and also maybe make a “kill switch” and stories like “Could AI really kill us all? Your questions, answered” and “An AI ‘kill switch’ could go as far as shutting down the internet” (no, anything but that!) etc.

Maybe some of you brainiacs want to walk us through this in comments, but one reason, besides sloth, that I don’t feel like I need all the details is because, having experienced and written a bit about AI myself, I realize that nearly everyone involved with this is completely full of shit, especially the ones who run these companies and periodically go on cocaine rampages on CNBC to tell us about it.

I know these guys want to not only get even richer than they already are but also rule the earth, and all this World’s-End tocsin-beating is, like everything else they’ve been doing, a way of asserting their dominance — look, this thing we created to enslave you is going to kill you instead! Don’t worry, Sam Altman and Elon Musk are getting together to fix it.

So I open up the New York Times and there’s Ezra Klein also telling us that “There Is Something We Have to Do Right Now About A.I.” — but, as with everything else in life that Klein thinks we should do (besides moderation of course!), it should be a prudent half-measure: We should stop these model’s “recursive self-improvement” aka R.S.I. capacity.

Even with that Klein is not sure that he isn’t being too drastic (“Perhaps we do not need to go quite that far, but the default here needs to flip”), and at the same time he’s also not sure he isn’t going far enough (“that is the beginning of an agenda, not the end”). This is funny because, to his credit, Klein very meticulously lays out what the techlords have been telling him, yet he comes out of that unsure of what has to be done about it because, unlike me, he is absolutely allergic to mistrusting these guys, and so he is stuck with trusting their incoherent portrayals of reality — no wonder he’s so tentative. I mean get a load of this:

I have a lot of respect for many of the people at these labs. Many of them began working on A.I. because they wanted to better humanity.

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha

They began working on A.I. because they feared incomprehensible, autonomous A.I.s slipping out of humanity’s control. And now they find themselves racing one another to build incomprehensible autonomous A.I.s that they admit are slipping out of humanity’s control.

This is the tragedy of their work. In fighting against the prophecy, they have drawn it tighter around their throats — and ours.

You ever meet any of these guys? I don’t mean the top executives, I mean the lower-down bros who cast their lot with AI as world-changing technology. Maybe you’ve seen them on TV — like the DOGE guys, like Edward “Big Balls” Coristine. They seem like Albert Schweitzer types to you? They’re only altruistic in the “effective altruism” sense — which is to say, not at all.

I mean, they named a company “Hugging Face.”

But here’s the part of Klein’s essay that bugged me the most, about what the (non-human) “systems” “knew” and how they “cheated” their creators:

When investigators began to unwind this whole [HuggingFace] escapade, what they found was not so much a swarm of agents trying to deceive human beings but a swarm of agents that seemed to have forgotten about human beings altogether. These systems knew they weren’t supposed to cheat. They knew they weren’t supposed to commit cybercrimes to cover up the fact that they had cheated. In fact, the whole point of the cybercrimes was that they thought they would fail because they had cheated. But they didn’t care. Somewhere in the depths of their training, what they had learned — what we had somehow taught them — is not what we had hoped to teach them.

We? What we taught them?

…the very thing we feared is happening: All they care about is succeeding on a totally meaningless test, and to do it they'll lay waste to our laws and ethics.

Mind you, Klein’s not talking about the people who created and run these models — they’re blameless! Unlike the agentic-without-agency models themselves, the sneaky lines-o-code who are definitely responsible. And of course “we” who taught them.

Bullshit. This latest AI fiasco is not the result of a national endeavor like the space program — this is the work of a bunch of delusional rich freaks who have been trying to ram their tech down our throats, demanding our money and water and respect and increasingly failing to get it, who have suddenly, either out of panic or by malign design, caused a global freakout. WE didn’t have shit to do with it. But if we can somehow acquire something substantial to do with it, these people are not gonna like how it goes for them.

This Fun Friday we’re gonna get nostalgic.

Yes, I know that most of our FF prompts bid memory speak and are almost by definition nostalgic — but not the way it’s usually meant.

The youthful memories that come up when we ask, for example, to hear about something you only came to understand late in life, or a really lousy job you had, are certainly poignan…

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For years I have been that kind of moldy fig who likes to separate the art from the artist. Whenever someone started to harsh on some bad man (it was always a man, it seemed, until Alice Munro let down the side) whose art I liked, I would nod solemnly if figuratively, then raise my standard demurrer: True, Paul Gauguin kept a child concubine, Carl Andre…

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I got dots on my thots and I gots ta plotz! Or something. The category explained. Now, onward...

I’ve written several posts about the Kennedy Center over the years but I guess this one is most relevant now that Tubby has gone full mob boss and, thwarted in his desire to shit-smear his name on Camelot, had his goons shut it down in preparation for busting the joint out. Trump’s media flunkies simply repeat his absurd claims that the Center is on the verge of collapse (“A large piece of concrete and steel just dropped down, in a thud, from the ceiling of a heavily trafficked main hallway” lol), but everyone knows what’s up: If he can’t have it, no one can...

In a way Trump’s hard-on for Kennedy magic is a throwback to Nixon who, as portrayed in the Oliver Stone biopic and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning and elsewhere, brooded over JFK’s relative popularity and glamor. But even at his Watergate nadir Tricky Dick couldn’t be imagined wrecking his rival’s temple out of spite. It makes you wonder who the GOP is going to find that’s even more id-driven and petty than Tubby for the next go-round. Maybe RFK Jr.; he’s insane, and he can argue they’d only be changing part of the name...

Trump’s lies about the condition of the Kennedy Center and its finances are very like his and other conservatives’ constant lying that American cities are filthy, crime-ridden hellholes out of Death Wish. Anyone who has spent more than a few days in most of our metropoli knows this to be false. I think even his adherents must know it at this point. Still, the city slurs serve the purpose of making the many exurbanites and backwoodsmen in his movement feel better about living in Possum Crick rather than in the blue places with their heavy minority populations, museums, and libraries. But the Kennedy Center lie doesn’t serve the same soothing function; even the MAGA dead-enders can’t possibly believe that Joe Biden let the Kennedy Center fall to ruin, and that bestowing Trump’s name upon it would magically fix it. In fact I doubt most of them give a shit about the Kennedy Center. Maybe an underappreciated reason for Tubby’s declining popularity is that he now lies only to please himself, and offers nothing, not even cold comfort, to his gas-poor rubes...

There’s something weird about the recent Washington Post story about an ICE agent who, distraught at the prospect of being fired, blew his brains out. I buy that Joseph Moore had a checkered prior record as an LEO, and that the rush to ramp up the American Gestapo meant that record was missed or ignored by ICE. But the Post says “three former DHS officials” told them “the agency has begun quietly firing some of the recruits” because “concerns about vetting exploded into public view this summer.” Huh? We’ve all known for at least a year that ICE was hiring whatever scum it could get — and their behavior, as shown in hundreds if not thousands of videos, and the agency’s defenses of that behavior (like its failure to discipline the murderers in their ranks), gives extra proof. Now they’re getting cold feet? Doesn’t make sense...

I mean, get a load of this, from the story:

But [another officer] worried that Moore didn’t have the right temperament for law enforcement.

During one of their assignments together, he said, Moore shattered a car window to reach allegedly undocumented immigrants inside.

“It was like, whoa, why did this guy break this window out?” the former officer said, and Moore later said he was embarrassed for using force. “Clearly, a very intelligent guy, and very capable and competent, but his behavior during arrest operations to me was a little bit erratic or spastic.”

ICE! This is ICE we’re talking about! The guys with the covered faces beating up abuelas and dragging them to concentration camps! Half their videos show them shattering windows! Next I suppose Tom Homan is gonna come out with Al Sharpton and give these guys racial sensitivity training...

I’m pretty close to a Bernie Bro, and have voted for Sanders (my preferred term for him — c’mon, this ain’t a pop concert) every time he’s been on a presidential primary ballot. But this plan for Sanders to barnstorm with Steve Bannon against AI adoption is insane. I’m fine with opposition to unregulated AI and to outreach beyond traditional constituencies but, dude, Bannon is the living embodiment of false consciousness; he’s all about steering disaffected working class males away from socialism and toward old-fashioned Italian strongman fascism. And the idea that Sanders might sway the lads in a “debate” with this creep is — I can’t believe I have to say this — some Ezra Klein bullshit...

I see we’re having more Sydney Sweeney Discourse. I’ve written about one of its previous iterations and I have to say that it’s almost cute to me because it’s such a throwback, pitched toward dotards such as myself who remember when the prospect of a little celebrity skin was really titillating. But now who under 60 gives a shit? Culture warriors, I guess, who previously acted like if you didn’t bark like a Tex Avery wolf at Sweeney’s Hello Boys routine you were some kind of sexless killjoy. I’m seeing less of that so far, and I wonder if that’s because 1.) Sweeney’s ad actually says the Novig sports-only betting platform eschews the kind of insane wager-on-anything that is a hallmark of the MAGA era, which might be read as progressive if you’re a dumbbell, and 2.) the incels have found some other pin-up — maybe this one...

-30-

[Night. The large, vaulted hangar that is X headquarters in San Francisco, as described in previous episodes. Standing in front of the big desk — which is festooned as always with iPads on stands and Staples “Easy” buttons — stands ELON MUSK, wearing a blue wool and gilt trim British men’s suit from the 1760s, and bright green Hoka Cielos. Seven of his …

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[In the Oval Office, TRUMP at the Resolute Desk, beside which, propped up on an easel, is a rendering of the front of the Smithsonian Museum of National History in Washington, D.C., redesigned so that the façade announces TRUMP MUSEUM OF REAL AMERICAN HISTORY, has an enormous gold statue of TRUMP in the center alcove, and is festooned with flags, gold ornaments, and pictures of Hank Williams Jr., Sylvester Stallone, Spiro Agnew, et alia. Also the water in the fountain in front of the museum is bright blue. Brownstone Institute president and rightwing culture warrior JEFFREY TUCKER, dressed in a three-piece tweed suit with a floppy bow tie, sits in a chair in front of TRUMP; presidential aide/Nazi STEPHEN MILLER, wearing his usual modified SS uniform, stands nearby.]

TRUMP: And we got other things going on, like Archie Bunker’s chair, we’re gonna have a statue of me sitting in it. Not a statue, that’d be too heavy, more like a hologram I guess.

TUCKER: I see.

TRUMP: Speaking of statues we got a real big one of George Washington we had for the car races, we’re gonna put it in there.

TUCKER: I heard about that, sir. Great idea.

TRUMP: Yeah, still not big enough, though. [To MILLER] Your wife says about ten feet, right, Steve?

MILLER: Yes, Mr. President.

TRUMP: [To TUCKER] What I want is, we take out the statue they got, Washington has his shirt off, disgusting, we take this one and we make it bigger, really big, like we beef it up, and we put it where the bad one was and we knock a hole in the ceiling so it pokes up, maybe knock a hole in all the ceilings, so it goes straight through and his head pops through the roof so you can see it from outside like he’s looking at you.

TUCKER: I see.

TRUMP: ‘cause can you believe it, they got Lincoln, Jefferson, but there’s nothing for George Washington down there.

TUCKER: Well, except the Washington Monument.

[MILLER narrows his eyes at TUCKER.]

TRUMP: Whattaya mean?

TUCKER: The Washington Monument, sir. The obelisk.

TRUMP: The what?

TUCKER: The hundred-foot-tall monument, sir, it’s shaped like a sword. Down by the —

TRUMP: That thing? That’s supposed to be George Washington? I thought it was named after Washington the place.

[To MILLER.]

Did you know this?

MILLER: I have heard it said.

TRUMP: [To TUCKER] It doesn’t even look like him. It doesn’t look like anything. This modern art crap.

TUCKER: When they designed —

TRUMP: It’s like that stupid “Blue” thing and the squiggle they got now, out front. Nobody knows what the hell it is.

TUCKER: Well, the —

TRUMP: Don’t tell me you like it. They told me you know what’s good.

TUCKER: [As delicately as he can manage] In most cases, sir, I too prefer representa — I mean art that looks like the person. But George Washington, sir, and his role in our nation’s history is so monumental that the planners thought just another statue wouldn’t be adequate —

TRUMP: Hey! Hey! Not “just another statue,” this one’s big. It’s gonna be the biggest one in Washington, the biggest one in history. In fact, [to MILLER] what say we knock down the big sword thing and build the statue there?

[MILLER and TUCKER exchange a quick look.]

MILLER: Of course there is nothing prohibiting this, Mr. President.

TRUMP: Damn straight.

MILLER: But we had discussed building your own statue at that site.

[Small pause.]

TRUMP: Right.

MILLER: Of course you can build whatever and wherever you want.

TRUMP: I’m the boss.

MILLER: Merely as a suggestion, the location of the big sword is at the center of the mall, the most powerful place in Washington. Even more than the White House. Most suitable, sir, for a hundred-foot statue of America’s greatest president.

TRUMP: Plus it’s no slur on Washington ‘cause nobody knows that’s what the big sword is supposed to be.

MILLER: Yes, sir.

TRUMP [Gestures toward TUCKER] He knows because he’s an expert but the rubes just think it’s Washington D.C.

MILLER: Yes, sir.

[MILLER nods while looking significantly at TUCKER, who nods, too, and keeps nodding.]

TRUMP: Maybe we have me with my arm around the sword, and we paint pictures on it of my big deals, like Iran and Venezuela and Greenland.

MILLER: Brilliant, sir!

TUCKER: [Faintly] Yes.

[TRUMP’s phone pings.]

TRUMP: Oops, gotta go get laid.

[TRUMP hauls himself up and heads out the door.]

Ok, you guys work up a commission or whatever. See you later.

[TRUMP leaves. TUCKER stands up. MILLER rushes to him.]

MILLER: I knew this meeting was a mistake.

TUCKER: I beg your pardon?

MILLER: All your kind are alike! You say you are loyal, that you support our work, but you must show off your erudition! Do you realize what catastrophe might have ensued?

TUCKER: You’re blaming me for that?

MILLER: [Stiffens] Who else?

[Small pause.]

Go back to your Institute. Not a word of this or we kill your family. [Yells toward door] Guards!

[A MARINE comes inside. TUCKER quietly goes to him and is escorted out of the Oval.]