I'd Like to Help You, Son, But You're Too Poor to Matter

      It's long been an article of faith, one backed up by consistent poll numbers going back at least eight years, that Trump's overall approval rating would never sink below 33%. That's the third of the electorate that belly-flops into mud pits south of Mason Dixon and thinks all Democrats are Socialists. That 33% is what used to be considered that rock-hard, insoluble base that would never turn away from Trump.

     But an American Research Group survey published the results of their latest poll this week that puts the lie to that. While they didn't reveal data points such as how many people were polled or what their methodology exactly consisted of, it showed that Trump's overall approval rating has officially sunk to 29%. His numbers on the economy sink even lower: Only 26% of Americans approve of the way he's handling it.

     Considering how uniformly horrible the economic numbers are, it boggles the mind that it's even as high as that and that the number isn't closer to 1% (and we know what economic strata that 1% comes from). But, let's take what we can get. Trump's approval numbers have shown a very slow but steady decline in recent years.

     Trump is telling voters with his classic cluelessness to pretend that he's on the ballot this year. This comes from Trump's unshakable belief that he's the greatest, most popular president of all time and that all polls stating otherwise are a "hoax" or "fake news". But like the old saying goes, "Be careful what you wish for because you may get it."

     Voters are indeed pretending as if Trump is on the ballot, if the sagging poll numbers for down ballot Republicans are any indication. Those Republicans who once clung to Trump with the tenacity of grim death are now dumping him from their campaign websites (Like Byron Donalds, for instance). They know he's dragging the party and their electoral chances down and are sluggishly trying to swim away from the suction of Trump's sinking poll numbers.

     And historically, Republicans have sneered at low poll numbers, saying things like, "We can't legislate by poll numbers". Which is true up to a point but after a while, when the numbers are alarmingly low and are consistent or get worse month after month, they cease being poll numbers and because a relentless, unavoidable Greek chorus.

     And Republicans have largely if not entirely given up on doing anything for their constituents. They know whatever they do will be too little or too late to affect the inevitable outcomes of the midterms. Pundits and pollsters had been predicting since last year that House Republicans would get creamed this November 3rd. And now, it's looking as if the Senate will be handed to the Democrats as well. Suddenly, formerly red states such as Kansas, Texas, Alaska, Maine  and Iowa (Iowa!) are more than in play.

     Senator John Kennedy was asked recently about the lack of Republican effort in the Senate to lower prices and his answer was shocking but not surprising. He was asked by Kristen Welker if the GOP had the juice to address inflation, he said,

     "Sure, if we wanted to,” Kennedy replied. “We can do anything we want to in reconciliation and ask the House to come back and do it. I’m not saying we will do that. Certainly based on our record of the last five or six months, it’s not likely.”

     In other words, "I'd like to help you but you're too poor and insignificant to help. And it's not as if doing so will help us this November."

I Like This New Thing

 

     Every time Trump says or does something stupid, which is approximately every time he exhales, there's the inevitable stepping on a rake effect. Take his new fascist initiative: Removing CNN's, MS Now's and Politico's press credentials, essentially banning these three major media outlets from covering the White House at the White House.

     Naturally, this resulted in a federal lawsuit launched by the aforementioned media outlets because revoking their press credentials, including their hard passes, banning them from even entering the White House, is a clear violation of the First Amendment. Trump pulled this shit once before in his first illegitimate term, when he tried to ban CNN's Jim Acosta. A federal judge put a stop to that immediately and Acosta's access was immediately restored.

     Trump's reason for this blatantly illegal act was he didn't like the coverage he was getting in the press (Hitler and the Nazis had a word for that: Lügenpresse, which even Trump's own supporters were using a decade ago). Authoritarian leaders hate the very idea of a free press because it's a conduit to the people and if the people knew the truth about your agenda, well... It generally doesn't end up very well for the dictator.

     But the MSM didn't just stop there at the lawsuit. Several of them did something that should've been done a decade ago: They responded by simply not covering Trump. Even Fox got in on the action. So, when Trump had a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open the helipad on what used to be the South Lawn of the White House, it was covered only by the White House's official video feed. Trump made some remarks and all anyone heard was eight minutes of static.

     The MSM,  in solidarity with their colleagues, decided to starve Trump from the attention he gets from the press by not sending the press pool. The press pool is a smaller detachment of journalists, photographers, videographers, boom mic operators and so forth that follow the president, that is, when we actually have one, so he's not followed around by the literally hundreds of other journalists on the White House beat.

     Because the fact is, although he'll never admit it, Trump needs the press that he's always sneering and howling at. He likes the attention they give him, an adulation and coverage that even Truth Social can't give him. He wants and needs their constant attention but not the disclosure that comes with it.

Good Times at Pottersville

Trump Is On the Ballot

 

     Since last year, when the wheels began falling off the GOP shit wagon, we'd begun hearing stories of Republicans being booed at whatever few town halls they hold when they have the courage to show their faces in public. And, wouldn't you know it, every such story I've read, every video I ever saw, involves a Republican.

     We're not talking about left wing agitators, either, liberal malcontents being bussed in by George Soros from out of state. These Republicans are getting yelled at, always for good reason, by their own voters, their own constituents. This is why more and more Republicans find themselves in a curious contradiction:

     Many of them want to go back to their districts and states and hit the campaign trail again but they're also reluctant to hold town halls and whistle stops because they know they're going to get heckled by their own voters. Almost all Republicans, including all congressmen, are left out there to dangle and twist in the wind. Their voters are angry with them and Trump has hardly freed up any money for them from his massive $400,000,000 war chest. He only cares if Republicans retain control of Congress because he's scared shitless he'll get impeached for a third time, which he surely will. He's even said as much more than once.

     You'd think this blowback would be good news for liberals and progressives. And maybe it is, at least in the short term before the general election in 2028. It was already a foregone conclusion that the Democrats will take the House by a huge margin, despite the idiots in the MSM claiming it's still a toss-up, and now Democrats have a better than even chance of taking back the Senate.

     It's always risky to form conclusions and make predictions based on a few cranks and malcontents at political rallies. Yet when they occur at a certain frequency, you begin to hear a definable voice of discontent and are able to identify a certain mood among the electorate, one that becomes too obvious to ignore. Eventually, the vox populi gets so loud even an ostrich with its head in the sane has to acknowledge it.

     Carpetbagger Roger Marshall of Kansas is one such case. A freshman senator, Marshall is running for reelection despite owning a house worth well over a million dollars in Florida. He was recently caught trying to list as a primary residence a house in Kansas that he'd already sold.

     Recently, Marshall took part in a debate with his Democratic opponent, Adam Hamilton, at the Kansas State Fair, Now, the Kansas State Fair is a quintessential American event and one that's usually a safe environment for Republicans.

     However in at least three different occasions, during the debate, Marshall was booed and heckled by the crowd. He tried to state that gas prices under Trump were lower than they were under Biden, which the people knew was a load of horseshit. Many of them, one can assume, were farmers who are outraged that diesel is now going for over $6 a gallon. When Hamilton said, "If you love $6 a gallon diesel fuel, you can thank Roger Marshall," the crowd burst into cheers.

     At one point, Marshall looked as if he was wishing Batman would rescue him with the sky hook that he'd used in The Dark Knight.

     At issue was also Marshall's penchant for going after his former patients, over 700, to be exact, in court for unpaid medical bills. 81 of those people were actually arrested and Marshall then charged them a loan shark-like interest rate of 18% (some owed as little as $101).

     And, at about the same time, Ted Cruz did an interview on ESPN during the UT vs Ohio State game and people behind him kept heckling him, some saying, "Ted, you suck!" Alex Bruesewitz, one of Trump's flaks, actually went on Twitter and asked Cruz to stop appearing on TV because he's hated more than AIDS in Provincetown.

     Cruz isn't up for reelection this year but if he was, he'd be in deep shit. Cruz hardly represents Texas any more than Marshall represents Kansas from his million dollar home in the Sunshine State (Cancun, anyone?). But people are getting sick and tired of the Republican Party lowering their standard of living, they're sick of the lies and disinformation. And, again, we're not talking about Democratic or Independent voters but solidly Republican voters who are smart enough to see there's something very wrong going on in this country.

     Trump has been going out and telling people, "Just pretend I'm on the ballot!". That's magical, right wing thinking but the real problem is that voters are acting as if he's indeed on the ballot because, ideologically speaking, he is.

     Republicans have spent over a year and a half shoving down their throats higher prices through ridiculous tariffs that even the right wing Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional, the One, Big Beautiful Bill that has nothing toward improving the lives of those in the bottom 99%. They've been promoting an unwinnable and pointless ear against Iran, which has resulted in record high gas prices. There's sky-high food prices, the Epstein files, Trump making $2.2 billion last year alone, the ballroom and arch, data centers. The list goes on.

     And even Republican voters who were stupid enough to vote for Trump three times are just smart enough to see the difference in their bank accounts, to know when their farms are getting foreclosed on, to know when their markets (such as soybeans to China) are drying up. Trump is selling the people a rotten bill of goods and Republicans have been Trump's salesmen.

     This is the year when the note comes due.

     So, yes, Trump's name is on the ballot, in a manner of speaking. And even incumbents like Cruz who aren't up for reelection are hearing the backlash.

A Quarter Century and What Have We Learned?

 

     9/11 happened over three years before I began blogging in early 2005. I've written about it on the anniversary several times and after a while, I ran out of things to say about it. One year, I simply listed the names of all 2977 people who'd suffered horrible deaths that day.

     I was working for an automotive/aerospace company's QC department on 9/11/2001. Not long after I got to work, those who had computers began getting the first reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center. The North Tower was struck first then roughly 45 minuets later, the South Tower. At first, all we got were static images, fireballs belching from two of the tallest buildings in the world. Then it was the Pentagon then United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

     Then the towers fell, even WTC 7, even though it wasn't on fire and hadn't been struck by a plane. The trauma just never seemed to end that day. 

     You don't need me to tell you it was the darkest day in American history, at least since Pearl Harbor. For the only time in its history, NATO invoked Article 5, which states that all NATO countries have to respond when another NATO nation is attacked. When you attack one, you attack them all.

     Largely because he bellowed into a bullhorn on a pile of rubble, we gave our "president" an unheard of 91% approval rating despite him sitting frozen in a tiny plastic chair in a Florida classroom for a full seven minutes when his Chief of Staff told him about the South Tower. We looked, naively, up to a Republican government for leadership and guidance during the most emotionally vulnerable moment in our nation's history.

     Bush commemorated 9/11 by releasing four paintings on Instagram, including that moment when Andy Card gave him the news (at least he nailed the vacant deer-in-the-headlights stare).

     That Republican government responded by attacking two nations that had nothing to do with 9/11 and suspending our civil liberties. 

     A quarter of a century later, we still haven't gotten all of them back.

     But for one brief shining moment, America was united and nearly all nations united with us in our collective grief. There was no partisanship, temporarily, there were no political parties. We were all Americans and we were all hurting. That was all that needed to be said.

     However political partisanship eventually creeps its way into everything. Even sacred cows become partisans. And how soon we'd forgotten the words of Ben Franklin, who'd written in the 18th century, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     New York City Mayor Mamdani was a nine year-old boy when 9/11 occurred. If you'd told any New Yorker back then that within 25 years, New York City would have its first Muslim mayor, you would've been locked up in Bellevue's psych ward.

     But, at the end of those 25 years, we're seeing an ugly partisanship cropping up around this special anniversary. A petition was advanced that would've barred Mayor Mamdani from the 911 ceremony in Manhattan. 

 

     Because partisan speeches and political grandstanding are forbidden from official 9/11 ceremonies, Trump decided to stay away from his native city and chose, for the second year in a row, to fall asleep at the Pentagon during their own ceremony. If he wasn't allowed to grandstand and turn it into a MAGA rally, if he wasn't allowed to make it all about himself, he wanted no part of it.

      Keep in mind, this 9/11 ceremony comes less than a day after a midterm convention in which Ted Cruz inveighed against Democrats and some onlookers shouted death threats. Trump unleashed a monster in 2015 and it's one he won't be able to put back in the cage when he finally leaves office.

Donnie Does Dallas!

 

      I've taken a very short sabbatical as campaign manager for Commander Greg Bovino to attend the president's latest MAGA rally, otherwise known as the RNC midterm convention in Dallas. Don't let the liberal media throw sand in your eyes when they show you thousands of empty seats in the nosebleed section of American Airlines Center. The place is packed with virile, masculine Republican men if Grindr crashing in Dallas is any indication. 

      So I decided to take some time off from the hottest, indeed, the only Republican presidential campaign in the country to show my support for the party that's been so good to me and my family. Unfortunately, not too many of the attendees remember my father Ambrose and his glorious quarter term in Congress. It was 1953, after all, when Republicans were men and other men like Roy Cohn were grateful for it. 

 

 

    The usual liberal pinheads will try to make hay over the fact that our pundits chose to put up a picture of Hasan Piker in tight underwear on the first day of the convention, which is not to be confused with actual homosexual intent. Although my kid brother Cecil made a disturbing comment when he looked up at the Jumbotron and sighed, "Ah, if only that was taken of him 25 years ago!"

    I've heard the president's speeches and was concerned to hear that he's offering $5000 to every American if the GOP retains both chambers of Congress. That payout will cost upwards of $1.35 trillion. Apparently, the president never foresaw that if that happens, he'll also be giving out $5000 to every liberal fathead that votes for a Socialist Democrat. But our president has always been renowned for his generosity and forgiving nature.

     The Trump dividends are not a bribe. A bribe is a bribe only when the money is actually paid out. The president has promised checks to Americans yet, oddly, not a single one of them ever got sent out. But that's not to say no checks ever go out. Just recently, it came out that the president's largesse resulted in $155,000 in bonuses to four staffers, including Natalie Harp.

      Matt Schlapp has been seen on the convention floor, trailing a conga line of very young men with disgusted looks on their faces. Of course, everyone is eager to hear the vice president's keynote speech at 8 tonight, in which, it's rumored, he'll advocate for the return of the Spanish Inquisition.

AMERICA FIRST

“I admit, I was fascinated by Adolf Hitler. He was a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend. I deliberately ignored all the warning voices inside me and enjoyed the time by his side, almost until the bitter end. It wasn’t what he said, but the way he said things and how he did things.” Traudl Junge

     Even Hitler's private secretary had her Road to Damascus moment after the war. When Traudl Junge discovered what the Third Reich was actually doing, she felt guilt after the war that she ever liked and admired a man she would call the greatest criminal in history. 

     But Junge, as a powerless young secretary, fell into the same trap that so many like her before and since- Failing to see the warning signs. She heard the shots ring out while she played with the doomed Goebbels children in the bunker and that was her wake up call to get out of Dodge. She had to learn from her Soviet and American interrogators about the crimes that Hitler had ordered done on his behalf.

     She had some moral fiber, in other words.

    That fiber is conspicuously absent in the sycophants that surround Trump like beetles around a pile of fresh vomit. Indeed, every morning when I wake up, I'm amazed that so many people in this country, both within and outside the government, are so completely in the tank for an incipiently demented, insecure person like Trump.

     Considering that 77,000,000+ voted for him in 2024, I think we can dispense with the word "cult". A cult generally encompasses a handful of people to perhaps hundreds or even thousands. 77,000,000 is pushing it. I don't know what to call this. Barring "mass hysteria", I don't think we have a word for it, yet. A "movement" doesn't quite capture why so many tens of millions remain so slavishly devoted to Trump. 

     Certainly there are alarming similarities between the people surrounding Trump and an actual cult, number one being that the Leader shall never be questioned. Cult leaders and authoritarian rulers all have one thing in common- They're weak men who brook no dissent and crush it whenever it rears its head. (For context, witness his ongoing war against late night comedians, especially Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel.) 

     But I have never seen this at any other time in American history and I'm sure anyone else reading this would have to make the same admission. Even if Trump still had all his marbles, and he obviously doesn't, this slavish devotion to one man would still be alarming. But when you factor in Trump's cognitive decline, it makes it look even more inexplicable and gives such unconditional devotion a carnival ambience. God only knows what's kept the calliope silent all this time.

     And much of this government, starting with the Congress and the Supreme Court, seems to be conveniently forgetting that the Founding Fathers built into the Constitution a system of mutual checks and balances on all three branches. Congress had long ago abjured itself of it its Article 1 powers just as much of the federal judiciary has similarly jettisoned its Article 3 powers. Checks and balances, as least when Trump is falling asleep in his chair behind the Resolute Desk, on the Executive branch's Article 2 powers has been degraded into a quaint notion.

     The ballroom and arch are classic cases. Legally, Trump cannot make any changes to Washington DC without Congressional approval and at least one commission. But Republicans are conspicuously silent about these vanity projects because they fear for their incumbency. These Republican profiles in cowardice are terrified Trump will say mean things about them on Truth Social and threaten them with primary opponents.

     And now, anticipating a bloodbath in the midterms, Trump is fast-tracking the construction of the arch because he knows Democrats will surely oppose him. (It's something of a miracle that Trump hasn't opted instead for a solid gold pair of golden arches). 

    The Supreme Court recently allowed construction on the ballroom to continue. Republican lawmakers may at least have personal fear to explain their cowardice but the Supreme Court doesn't have any fear of Trump because justices, and all federal judges, have lifetime appointments. The SCOTUS has given Trump almost everything he's demanding of them (aside from birthright citizenship and tariffs). The high court is driven by pure, blind ideology.

      And it amazes me that our government and how it's been conducting its business for the past year and a half plus is being dictated, and I use that word literally in every sense, by one man, as if it's being run by a mad king or, at best, just one branch of government. And the right wing devotion to Trump is absolutely inexplicable since he loathes even members of his own party.

     He recently told a group of Republicans, "Don't ask me to come to your districts" unless they were running a close race. He's hardly freed up any money from his $400,000,000 war chest to help vulnerable Republicans and the only reason he's trying to steal this election is not because he wants Republicans to maintain control of both chambers but so he doesn't get impeached for the third time ("If they win, I'll get impeached!")

     And the party that went after Hunter Biden for years over a board spot on Burisma and for selling a few paintings (Narrator: Hunter Biden was never part of the federal government) is turning a permanently blind eye to Trump's staggering, cartoonish corruption. Recently, financial disclosures revealed that Trump made a staggering $2.2 billion last year off the presidency, about a billion and a half alone coming from his cryptocurrency scam.

     

     And just 24 hours after Trump met with a corrupt jailbird of a Brazilian beef executive, Trump just magically found 300,000 metric tons of beef that he's planning on dumping on the American market, promising to lower beef prices by 25%. Originally, we thought it was going to be tainted beef from Argentina but as it turns out it's coming from Brazil. And, gee, wouldn't you know it, but the meatpacking company that will provide it just happened to have donated $5,000,000 to Trump's inaugural fund (for a scaled down indoor inauguration). That five mil is more than Google, Apple and Facebook contributed combined.

     And, obviously, he's cutting American cattle ranchers out of the action just as he had soybean farmers.

     Meanwhile on the right side of the aisle: Crickets and tumbleweeds.

     It's yet another example of Trump's American First mantra being revealed as the hollow bumper sticker slogan it always was. Anyone with one functioning eye and a pair of neurons can see that with Trump, it's always Trump First. Or, at best, Russia First. Israel First. Saudi Arabia First. North Korea First. Hungary First. Argentina First.

     And, now, Brazil First. 

     Never America First.