Not to be a bummer, but we talked about this topic a month ago. Then again, I’m just some rando blogger. Let Ronan Farrow lay it out with more gravitas. This from last night.
The White House just issued a sweeping federal directive transforming how dissent might be policed in the US—here’s why civil liberties groups are so alarmed. pic.twitter.com/jaBPotLjV3
“Working from a fever dream of conspiracies, President Trump has launched yet another effort to investigate and intimidate his critics,” is how the ACLU responded:
“After one of the most harrowing weeks for our First Amendment rights, the President is invoking political violence, which we all condemn, as an excuse to target non-profits and activists with the false and stigmatizing label of ‘domestic terrorism.’ This is a shameful and dangerous move. But the President cannot rewrite the Constitution by memo.”
Here’s the problem with that sincere ACLU statement. Donald Trump doesn’t care who he targets. He doesn’t care about what’s false. Or stigmatizing. He’s not shy about throwing around labels like “domestic terrorism.” Or about what’s shameful or dangerous.
He cannot rewrite the Constitution with a memo? Trump’s actions clearly demonstrate that his sense since being reelected is “Constitution? What constitution?”
In honor of the great Jane Goodall, here are new chimpanzee babies at the L.A. Zoo:
Vindi and Yoshi are showing off their new bundles of joy! 🍼
The two new moms have joined the rest of the troop in the large outdoor yard at the Chimpanzees of Mahale Mountains exhibit and are proudly giving the other chimps (and zoo guests) a good look at the newborns! pic.twitter.com/1rQY1dOp4b
Yoshi & Vindi continue to bond with their infants amongst the troop at Chimpanzees of Mahale Mountain! 🍼 Stop by their exhibit and see these new babies. #SavingWildlife#LAZoo#Zoopic.twitter.com/t2rY25VyqO
The first unnamed female infant was born to 35-year-old female Yoshi (YO-shee) and 26-year-old male Pu’iwa (P/ʊ/-ee-vuh) on Aug. 20, which also happens to be Pu’iwa’s birthday. This is Yoshi’s third offspring and Pu’iwa’s first. The second yet-to-be-named female infant was born on Sept. 9 to first-time mother eighteen-year-old female Vindi. Animal caregivers report that Yoshi and Vindi and their infants are all doing well and bonding.
“We’re thrilled to welcome the newest members of the troop!” said Candace Sclimenti, curator of mammals at the L.A. Zoo. “These are significant births for the Zoo and both are welcome additions to the dynamic, multi-male, mixed-age troop which closely mirrors the species’ natural social structure in the wild. Not only are these births vital for the well-being and social composition of the chimpanzees in our care, but they also play an important role in supporting the broader population in AZA accredited zoos both genetically and demographically.”
Chimpanzees are native to the forests and grasslands in east, central, and west Africa ranging from Senegal to Tanzania. Along with gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos, chimpanzees are great apes. They are one of the closest genetic relatives to humans. Chimps communicate using a wide variety of facial expressions, gestures, and vocalizations. Chimpanzee height ranges from 3.5 to 5 feet; weight ranges from 70 to 150 pounds. Males can be up to 20 percent larger than females. Their life expectancy is 50 to 60 years.
Chimps in the wild live and travel in troops of 30 to 80 individuals led by a dominant male. Challenges to the dominant male are common and the group leader typically changes every three to five years. Chimps live in a “fission-fusion” society, breaking into smaller temporary subgroups (fission) during the day. Smaller groups have a better opportunity to find sufficient food. In the evening, they reunite (fusion) to build nests and sleep. Larger groups offer better protection against predators. At the L.A. Zoo, chimps practice their own fission-fusion, breaking into subgroups during the day to either lounge in the penthouse or head out into the main habitat to enjoy the waterfall. They reunite at night in their sleeping quarters.
Chimpanzees are classified as Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Threats include human-wildlife conflict and other human activities including poaching, hunting, deforestation, and more. Although chimpanzees are protected in 34 national parks and reserves, those laws can be difficult to enforce in remote regions.
Also this… go Dodgers!
The LA Zoo cheers for the @Dodgers in the World Series! ⚾️ Here's a friendly wager: 💙 If they win, the Toronto Zoo swaps their Blue Jay logo for a condor! 💙 If Toronto wins, we’ll change our logo to a Blue Jay!
Trump: "I don't think we're necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war, I think we're just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We're going to kill them. They're going to be, like dead." pic.twitter.com/55NQXpZ0jf
Since he returned to office nine months ago, President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts. But his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart.
A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump’s orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders — regardless of whether the 43 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in 10 strikes so far were indeed running drugs.
The administration insists that the killings are lawful, invoking legal terms like “self-defense” and “armed conflict.” But it has offered no legal argument explaining how to bridge the conceptual gap between drug trafficking and associated crimes, as serious as they are, and the kind of armed attack to which those terms can legitimately apply.
The irreversible gravity of killing, coupled with the lack of a substantive legal justification, is bringing into sharper view a structural weakness of law as a check on the American presidency.
That’s certainly true. It’s very hard to stop an ignorant sociopath with immunity and pardon power from doing anything he wants. The presidency has a tremendous amount of power that most presidents have to use judiciously or risk losing the support of their party and the American people. Trump has no such restraint. He cares little for public opinion having found that he can just lie about it to soothe himself and his loyal followers and the Republican party establishment is his most eager enabler. He does what he wants and the law is basically irrelevant:
But administration officials have clammed up when asked for the legal analysis to support their assertion that there is a legal state of armed conflict that makes the killings lawful.
Even in closed-door congressional briefings, according to people familiar with them, officials have provided no detailed legal answers. They are said to have cited drug overdose deaths of Americans, and stated that Mr. Trump decided the country was in an armed conflict with drug cartels. They are also said to have pointed to the part of the Constitution that makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces, without much further elaboration.
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former top Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said Mr. Trump’s actions demonstrated an indifference to law that threatened to hollow it out.
“Nixon tried to keep his criminality secret, and the Bush administration tried to keep the torture secret, and that secrecy acknowledged the norm that these things were wrong,” Professor Goldsmith said. “Trump, as he often does when he is breaking law or norms, is acting publicly and without shame or unease. This is a very successful way to destroy the efficacy of law and norms.”
This is the systemic weakness Trump has exposed. If one is completely shameless and has the support of a cult-like following, there really are no barriers. Who is going to stop them?
In peacetime, targeting civilians — even suspected criminals — who pose no threat of imminent violence is considered murder. In an armed conflict, it is a war crime. International law accepted by the U.S. military says that, as do U.S.laws.
That seems pretty clear cut to me. He is murdering civilians and bragging about it. He nods to some kind of legal rationale by saying they’re drug dealers but it isn’t and he doesn’t care about that anyway. He is so drunk with power, as are his henchmen, that he believes he can kill anyone he chooses for whatever reason he sees fit.
In the case of the Venezuelans, he is trying to drive Nicolas Maduro from office because Marco Rubio and his Venezuelan exiles are promising him access to Venezuelan resources. The CIA is targeting Colombians in order to destabilize the Petro government and Trump doesn’t like him because he has a “fresh mouth.” And mostly, Trump just wants to demonstrate his willingness to kill anyone he chooses in the belief that that will make the world bow to his will. That what “peace through strength” means.
The law cannot restrain someone like him and now that he’s proved that it’s hard to imagine that he will be the last to use these powers for their own corrupt ends.
That’s just wrong. Trump is too ignorant to know the truth which is that free trade was always GOP doctrine until he came along. Reagan certainly did NOT believe in tariffs which is clear in the speech from which the ad in question was taken:
Here’s the original clip of Ronald Reagan from April 25, 1987, where he delivered a complete and total rebuke against tariffs. Trump is calling Reagan’s words in this video “FAKE” and “fraudulent.” They’re 100% real. And the original clip is actually far worse for Trump, as much… https://t.co/koi1Udz77Bpic.twitter.com/ZchQyPWPfU
If that’s an endorsement of tariffs then words have lost all meaning.
The beef from the Reagan Foundation, which started all this, was that the ad “misrepresents” Reagan’s address and Ontario’s government “did not seek nor receive permission to use and edit the remarks. I guess they were afraid Trump would get mad at them so, like every other Republican institution in America they abandoned every principle they, and Reagan, ever had in order to keep him happy. It’s enough to make you sick.
Here’s the ad in question which most certainly does NOT misrepresent Reagan’s speech.
The words that are directly taken from the speech are as follows and not not in any way change the meaning:
I’d love to know who told Trump that Reagan loved tariffs. It makes me laugh (mordantly) at the thought of it.
By the way, here’s another clip of Reagan condemning tariffs and praising Canada:
This exchange confounds me. Why would a popular Democratic politician fail to understand the obvious synecdoche/metaphor of Trump demolishing a historic wing of the White House to raise a huge, gaudy tribute to his monarchical pretensions while the government is shuttered and there is massive distress across the country?
I know for a fact that regular people know about this and they care about it. Seven million of them came out to express that last weekend. And yet we get this robotic response from the likes of Gretchen Whitmer:
I just wonder, from your vantage point as a governor of a state, what are you making of that split screen?” Psaki asked.
“Well, as I have talked to people, I’m telling you right now, no one is worried about building a ballroom in Washington, D.C.,” Whitmer replied. “What they want is to make sure that they can feed their kids next week. And the longer the shutdown goes, the more precarious it gets for people.”
The governor said most Americans are “never going to step foot in a ballroom over the course of their lifetime.”
“But what they do every single day is try to feed their kids, make sure that they get a job to show up to, make sure that they don’t hit a pothole on their drive to work and they have to take money out of their rent or their child care to pay to fix their damn car,” she continued. “That’s why we got to stay focused on the issues that matter to people.”
People are worried about the destruction of the White House which symbolizes the destruction of our country, including the economy. Doesn’t she understand that??
Brian Beutler addresses this phenomenon in his newsletter today and it’s really great. He talks about the art of persuasion. (I urge you to read the whole thing.)
How often over the past, say, five years have you found yourself confused to see something small, local, fringe, minor in the scheme of thing become a dominant issue in political discourse?
How do people in Georgia come to care about whether San Franciscans honor Founding Fathers with school names and statues? Why do voters who’ve never met or interacted with a transgender person decide they’ve learned everything they need to know about a politician based on whether they respect (or how they talk about) other peoples’ gender identities? By what process do people who watch Fox News or hang out on Twitter or consumer wellness content transform from normies into zealots?
Strident views can arise seemingly out of nowhere the same way trends do. People of influence drop them intentionally into the cultural slipstream then fan and fan and fan them until they’re ubiquitous enough to make us incorporate them, one way or another, into our identities.
This is something Republicans in particular understand about opinion formation, and, thus, persuasion. Democrats by and large do not.
Everyone I’ve asked, from all walks of life, had a visceral reaction to this week’s images of physical wreckage at the White House. Nearly all of them understood intuitively that if Joe Biden or Barack Obama had spent bribe money to bulldoze the East Wing, their presidencies would have ended. They knew enough about politics, in other words, to intuit this difference between how Republicans and Democrats react to shocking developments.
I suspect most elected Democrats had the same visceral reaction you and I did to those images. But they largely suppressed their indignation. They did not treat it as an emergency (i.e. a political opportunity) and reverted instead to their own, socially-constructed, default opinion that Regular People™️ would not care.
It is self evident to them that their feelings about what’s happening in the world, their instincts about what constitutes important news, are unreliable barometers of public sentiment. The fact that they’re upset about something doesn’t imply the voters they need to persuade will care. To the contrary, as out of touch elites, it’s likely that our fixations are of no interest to Joe Sixpack. They can not imagine that Joe Sixpack has few fixed views and is mostly just glancing around for cues about what’s important and what to think about it. They don’t reason that if people in Georgia can be made to care about school names in San Francisco, those same voters can be made to care about the White House reduced to rubble.
This gets to a phenomenon that seems confusing to those of us who know that democratic policies are far more likely to address the economic woes of the average Joe while the Republicans make everything worse. I think a lot of people are simply confused that Democrats often sound like they think Americans are selfish, myopic people who care about nothing but money. I know it annoys me anyway. People are more complicated than that and can hold several ideas in their heads at the same time, especially if leaders offer them different ways of thinking about things.
As Beutler writes:
I’m not saying Democrats should ignore laboratory findings about what matters to voters, or what voters want to hear. I want these stickers affixed to everything Donald Trump has made more unaffordable. I want people who lose their health insurance because of Trump on the news and in 30 second ads. I want people to think of him as Mary Antoinette or a modern-day robber baron. I want it to become socially awkward, a sign of supplication, to make excuses for the economic havoc he’s wreaked. It should be a sign of loserdom and weakness to blame Trump’s failures on Joe Biden or mysterious saboteurs or even the business cycle.
But none of this has to come at the expense of pouncing when he makes a mistake that has nothing to do with wallets and bank accounts—when he fantasizes openly about dumping shit on citizens exercising first amendment rights, or orders his defense attorneys, who now run the Justice Department, to pay him a quarter-billion dollars in taxpayer money.
Or when he demolishes a priceless historical artifact to build a gilded monument to himself.
It’s foolish to be dismissive of people who care about what Trump is doing to the country and that’s how Whitmer sounds to my ears. She could have incorporated all those thoughts Beutler names together because they are all of a piece. His destruction of the economy, our democracy, our history, our place in the world — all of it.
Take advantage of those things that have great symbolic value and put the Republicans on the defensive. They know Trump’s acting like a spoiled prince, doing what he wants without any sense of the optics or the timing anymore. Democrats should pounce on all of it — and repeat the charges over and over again. Make it a matter of conventional wisdom that he is a demented old tyrant and those people who are disengaged or just on the sidelines not knowing what to think will drift in the Democrats’ direction.
The first body washed ashore on Trinidad’s northeastern coast soon after the United States carried out its first strike in September on a boat in the Caribbean. Villagers said the corpse had burn marks on its face and was missing limbs, as if it had been mangled by an explosion.
The tides deposited another corpse on a nearby beach days later, drawing a wake of vultures. Its face was similarly unrecognizable, and its right leg appeared to have been blown off.
The bodies have fueled a mystery that is gripping parts of Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean nation that is within sight of Venezuela’s coast: Who were they? Did a U.S. strike kill them? Will more bodies appear on Trinidad’s beaches?
Good God.
Trump said yesterday that he’s not going to try to get a declaration of war, he’s just going to kill bad people. And that’s what he’s doing.
COLLINS: Today you pardoned the founded of Binance. Can you explain why you did that?
TRUMP: Which one was that?
COLLINS: The founder of Binance
TRUMP: I believe we're talking about the same person, because I do pardon a lot of people. I don't know. He was recommended by a… pic.twitter.com/yl8WKhfmyt
Q: “You pardoned the founder of Binance…Did it have anything to do with his involvement in your family’s crypto business?”
Trump: “I do pardon a lot of people. I don’t know. He was recommended by a lot of people…A lot of people said he wasn’t guilty of anything.”
He says every day that Biden didn’t know who he was pardoning…
And he knows perfectly well that this man is responsible for boosting his fortune by billions of dollars.
Trump: "I don't think we're necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war, I think we're just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We're going to kill them. They're going to be, like dead." pic.twitter.com/55NQXpZ0jf
Trump: "I look the other night, Saturday night, Portland is burning to the ground and these people are saying it's just friendly stuff. The whole place is burning to the ground. So we'll take care of that one. That's like an insurrection more than it is anything else. Portland is… pic.twitter.com/2EnqqiNCVI
Q: “The same day you established this task force back on January 20th was the same day you pardoned the January 6th defendants.”
Trump: “I’m very proud of that.”
Q: “Just last weekend, one of them was charged with allegedly threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries…Do you worry that your actions back on day one undermine what this task force is trying to accomplish?”
Trump: “No.”
Trump: "Quiet! You're really obnoxious."
Reporter: "I'm not obnoxious, I'm trying to ask a question.”
Perfect adult behavior. Every mother in America must see this great leader as a role model for her children.
Trump: "By the way, a friend of mine called us the other day and he said 'I'd like to contribute any shortfall you have because of the Democrat shutdown. I'd like to contribute any shortfall you have with the military.' Today, he sent us a check for $130 million. It's gonna go… pic.twitter.com/uMC3QItFbA
Trump on No Kings: Even the garbage deal this weekend, which was embarrassing to them, the crowds were not big. Those crowds were not big at all… They are professional agitators, we're finding out who is paying them. pic.twitter.com/elre2aaqzd
The White House is now devoting at least 60 percent of its time shitposting on social media and now on official White House web sites. It gets worse and worse every day.
There have been many tyrants in this world. But I think we may be breaking ground by having the most ignorant and demented lunatic of them all, enabled and supported by a staff of bored, teenage bullies.
This brilliant compilation of Fox News clips came over the transom this week. I’d never heard of comedian Bill Jubran, but he had to work to assemble this.
“Do people really not see they are playing you?” Jubran asks.
No. No, they don’t. They are too busy being played by people who feed their prejudices for profit. Fox is by now a legacy player in the decay of our democratic republic. When its talking heads are not hyping wars on everything, they’re feeding viewers’ perception that the world, the news, and everyone unlike them is biased against them.
Fareed Zakaria considers the differences in how the cultural erosion of trust manifests on the left and on the right:
A 2023 study by Sung In Kim and Peter A. Hall confirms this pattern: When citizens perceive the system as unfair or biased, they shift preference from neutral process to direct, personalized rule. Leaders who present themselves as fighters rather than referees — who attack courts, media outlets and bureaucracies — gain credibility precisely because they reject the system’s pretense of fairness.
Trump’s rise also exposes a deeper divide between left and right populisms. Kim and Hall find that when people see unfairness as personal — my job, my income, my future are unfair — they turn to right-wing populists, whose rhetoric frames their pain as betrayal by elites and outsiders. When they see unfairness as social — society treats others unfairly — they gravitate to left populists, who promise redistribution.
My home, my family, my church, my school, my bank account & my guns, etc. That me-first perspective on the right rejects the social contract that is the very foundation of self-rule. “There is no such thing!” as society, Margaret Thatcher famously declared. You don’t need to tell Donald Trump twice. It’s every man for Donald Trump.
The left (and our nation’s founders) accepts that a peaceful society involves human cooperation. Although unfairness exists, ameliorating it where possible is a worthy goal, as is defense against the aggregation of power. The right sees that as a crime against survival of the fittest, Darwinism fundamentalists otherwise reject. Unless it’s convenient.
Leaked photos from the battle damage assessment. (I kid.)
In sort of pre-weekend wrap-up, Kevin Kruse on Thursday provided a summary — I was going to type “Bluesky summary” and reconsidered — of Donald Trump’s recent crimes against the republic:
Over the past week, the president said the DOJ should pay him a quarter billion dollars, bulldozed half the White House to build himself a gaudy ballroom, bragged about murdering civilians in international waters, pardoned some more criminals, directed federal prosecutors to indict his opponents …
… called several African American politicians “low IQ,” called all Democrats terrorists, insisted the 7 million Americans who protested his regime were all paid, showed a video of him flying a jet and dropping shit all over them, sent $40 billion to Argentina to prop up a fellow dipshit tyrant …
… threatened to invade every state in the US, renewed his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and vowed his people would prevent it from happening “again,” bragged about illegally slashing programs Democrats like, said he would send disaster relief to a state because it voted for him …
… severed economic aid to Colombia in a tantrum, threatened to crack down on NYC, announced drug prices would be coming down “500 percent,” claimed Pete Buttigieg tried to fix the air traffic system with “glass wire,” and committed probably a dozen other crimes we’ve already forgotten about.
Also this week, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled state legislature on Wednesday passed yet another in along line of heavily gerrymandered congressional maps. (I attended the Democrats’ Tuesday rally against it.) Republicans redrew the map because, as one Republican admitted, Trump asked them to. A court ordered fair map resulted in a 7R-7D split in 2022. Republicans quickly redrew it to 10R-4D once the GOP gained control of the state Supreme Court. This one looks like 11R-3D.
Team autocrat is not done either. Former Trump adviser Steve “Two Shirts” Bannon gave an interview this week to The Economist . Bannon declared that there is a plan for running Trump for a third term in 2028:
Asked if the 22nd amendment could prove to be a hard barrier to remaining in the White House, Bannon expanded: “There’s many different alternatives. At the appropriate time we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there is a plan, and Trump will be the president in ‘28.”
Don’t rule out a military dictatorship.
Ok this is getting creepy. In #Strongmen, I state that propagandists present autocrats' actions as "sanctioned by a higher power" and the fruit of "divine blessing." https://t.co/Ubbgylx2D0
Trump may have timed his unsanctioned demolition of the East Wing of the White House as a thumb-in-the-eye response to millions of opponents taking to America’s streets last Saturday. But that’s unclear. Nor is the origin of his obsession with building a ballroom over four times the size of the one at his tacky Mar-a-Lago resort. One friend suggested it stems from his visit in 1987 to the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, USSR.
As for his wanton destruction of the East Wing with no apparent attempt at preservation of historically significant accoutrements or consultation with preservationists, a friend from New York reminded me Thursday that that is Trump’s style.
The 1929 Bonwit Teller and Co. flagship store that once stood where Trump Tower stands in Manhattan was designed by the same architects who designed Grand Central Terminal. When it reopened in 1930 as Stewart Bonwit Teller, the owners worked with world-famous artists. “Starting in 1936, the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí regularly decorated the windows with spectacular installations.” But when the future president acquired the building, Artnet notes:
This part of the history of art and of New York City appears to have eluded Donald Trump. And that’s not all: the developer wasn’t even willing to save the artworks inside the building from destruction, breaking a promise to the renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is nearby, because profit and time were dearer to him than culture.
[…]
Close to the top of the 11-story building there were two limestone relief panels of two nearly naked women brandishing large scarves, as if dancing, in which the Metropolitan Museum of Art had expressed a strong interest for its sculpture collection. The Metropolitan, one of the largest and most important museums in the world, had also wanted to add to its department of applied 20th century art the six-by-nine meter, geometric-patterned bronze latticework that hung over the entrance at Bonwit Teller. By all accounts, Trump had agreed to donate both, if his workers were able to remove them from the walls.
Trump reneged the way he promised his new ballroom would not touch the existing East Wing. As my friend put it, his “goons” ripped down the panels in the middle of the night.
In truth, Trump’s biographer Harry Hurt III confirmed, Trump himself ensured that the workers were told to remove the bronze latticework over the entrance with blowtorches, separate the friezes from the walls with jackhammers and break them off with crowbars, and throw them down into the interior of the building where they shattered into a million pieces.
And on Trump’s “execrable taste,” Paul Krugman replies:
I’ve read uncountably many articles about Trump and his motivations, and I continue to think that one of the most insightful is a piece by Peter York, published early in Trump’s first term, titled “Trump’s Dictator Chic.” York is an authority on the design and décor choices of modern despots, from Saddam Hussein to Ferdinand Marcos to Nicolae Ceausescu. He noted that despite the vast differences in their cultural backgrounds, the palaces of despots all looked very similar: Gigantic rooms confected with massive amounts of gold, glass and marble, clearly in imitation of Versailles.
[…]
So the ballroom is a sign, not just of Trump’s personal vulgarity, but of the collapse of small-r republican norms. Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can. L’etat, c’est moi.
He can and he did. Only this time, it was property Trump did not own. You did.
I think we know that but it’s good to see the White House acknowledge it. Recall this on the day after Charlie Kirk died:
Q: My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. How are you holding up?
TRUMP: I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get… pic.twitter.com/Jrw4j2fnVZ
Q: My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. How are you holding up?
TRUMP: I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get for about 150 years. And it’s gonna be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.
It’s as close to a temple for God Trump as he can get:
