Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Raskin submits bill for a commission

It’s been clear for months that Donald Trump is unfit for office. I declared him mentally unbalanced in late 2015 or early 2016 over dinner with my parents, fergawdsakes. Democrats on Tuesday finally decided to get the net. Or at least create a process for building one.

Heather Cox Richardson writes:

With the House back in session today, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill to establish an independent commission to evaluate the president’s mental state. The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution establishes a process by which either a majority of the Cabinet or a majority of a body created by Congress to evaluate the president’s fitness can declare that a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” In a press release, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee expressed concern about “Trump’s escalating erratic conduct.” The bill has fifty Democratic co-sponsors.

Rasking is leaning on this wording from Section 4 of the 25th Amendment (emphasis mine):

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Raskin’s press release elaborates:

“The Constitution explicitly vests Congress with the authority to create a body that will guarantee the successful continuity of government by responding to presidential incapacity to discharge the powers and duties of office. We have a solemn duty to play our defined role under the 25th Amendment by setting up this body to act alongside the Vice President and the Cabinet. This body should have been set up [by] Congress when the 25th Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1967. We have 535 Members of Congress but just one President and this body is a necessary element of successful continuity of government. Congress should act now to establish a permanent and standing Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office.“

You know why we need one and why now:

“Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows as he threatens to destroy entire civilizations, unleashes chaos in the Middle East while violating Congressional war powers, aggressively insults the Pope of the Catholic Church and sends out artistic renderings online likening himself to Jesus Christ. We are at a dangerous precipice, and it is now a matter of national security for Congress to fulfill its responsibilities under the 25th Amendment to protect the American people from an increasingly volatile and unstable situation,” said Ranking Member Raskin.

Richardson adds:

Trump’s deteriorating mental state has become impossible to overlook, but Republicans are making excuses for it. Cabinet members, who owe their positions to Trump and who likely recognize they will never rise to such power again in a merit-based system, will probably not question Trump’s mental acuity. But Raskin’s measure will force Republicans in Congress either to vote for an independent commission to evaluate Trump or to own his increasingly erratic behavior themselves.

Not exactly. Republicans having to vote assumes this bill ever sees the light of day in a Trump presidency. This isn’t the first time Raskin has filed such a bill. He filed one on May 1, 2017 and again on October 9, 2020. Both died in committee.

House Republicans will again kill this bill in the cradle. Even if by extraordinary circumstances House Republicans don’t, Senate Republicans will. Even if by extraordinary circumstances Senate Republicans don’t, it would have to survive a Trump veto in both chambers. Even if by even more extraordinary circumstances the bill becomes law, a concurrent resolution of Congress is required to activate the Commission, the president must agree to submit to the examination, etc.

Then there is this last paragraph of the 25th Amendment:

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Don’t hold your breath. Raskin will get one day’s worth of press from this move. The country won’t get one nanosecond of relief from the lunatic in the Oval Office.

Dan Pfeiffer says that the MAGA influencers turning on Trump actually does matter:

The clips of Trump getting ripped by his former allies have gone viral on social media and become a source of schadenfreude for Democrats and others disgusted by Trump.

It finally feels like the walls may be collapsing around him.

But the press and pundits have been quick to rain on our parade, pointing to polls showing that MAGA voters are sticking with Trump, with nearly 9 in 10 supporting the war in Iran. I think this analysis misses the point, misunderstands how the modern media ecosystem works, and understates the short- and long-term damage to Trump.

He looks at the voters’ reaction to the Iran war:

The assumption is that MAGA Republicans are America First isolationists in the mold of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, while non-MAGA Republicans are traditional establishment types who love Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and anyone with the last name Bush.

It’s more complicated than that. MAGA is not a philosophy or a worldview — there is no specific ideological agenda. MAGA is now a proxy for loyalty to Trump. It means you wear the red hat, figuratively or literally. This explains why these voters stick with Trump even when he violates the most essential principles of his own agenda. They were against forever wars when Trump was against them, and they’re for forever wars now that Trump has started one.

This is correct. However:

Democrats always wonder how Trump gets away with saying and doing things that would fell any other politician. It’s not as complicated as it seems. Trump doesn’t have magical powers or sell his soul to the devil (he never had a soul to sell).

Trump’s political protection racket is powered by a massive media apparatus that amplifies his message, attacks his critics, and never finds fault with anything he does. It rushes to his defense, hammers anyone who steps out of line, and helps him communicate not just with his base, but with the less overtly political voters who powered his 2024 victory.

This media apparatus lets Trump tell his story to his people on his terms and dictate the terms of the political debate. That aggressive media loyalty has been the signature feature of his political success over the last decade.

That is gone now. Trump is taking heat from some of the loudest, most influential voices on his side. It means he has to watch his flank. It means other critics will be emboldened, and negative views of Trump will reach large swaths of Americans who have tuned out traditional media.

This level of intra-party dissent also makes it harder for Trump to get the troops in line to pass difficult legislation — like the hundreds of billions in funding for the war — and will almost certainly dampen GOP turnout this fall. This seismic shift in the MAGA media will have political consequences far beyond a short-term effect on Trump’s polling. His greatest strength has become a weakness.

He points out that while many of Trump’s most loyal followers may stick with him no matter what Kelly or Carlson say, there are those who are casual or occasional supporters who don’t like Democrats of the mainstream media who are exposed through clips and viral pieces who may very well be persuaded by those people who they believe are “in the know.”

He believes this is a real problem for Trump. I hope he’s right.

This essay on Fox news is by a once very powerful conservative:

America’s self-proclaimed national conservatives spoke of Orban’s Hungary as an oasis of traditionalism amid the wasteland of an ailing, liberal and decadent postmodern Europe. And some American politicians appear to have bought into the myth.

To be clear, it is a myth. Orban’s champions on this side of the Atlantic may well consider his illiberal court-packing, crony capitalism or restriction of free speech an acceptable price for their desired social utopia. Yet for all the talk of reviving faith and family through statist intervention, Hungary’s religious participation and birth rates under his rule have declined right alongside the rest of the West.

Of course, had any of the breathless pronouncements of Hungary’s unique virtue been true, they’d be a reasonable basis for personal affinity … but not for U.S. foreign policy. Shared values can be a useful entrée into deeper cooperation with allies and partners. But to the extent that values have played a central role in successful U.S. foreign policy, it has been in service to, and aligned with, our strategic interests.

Clearly, Orban’s fawning servitude to authoritarians doesn’t reflect American values. But far more importantly, his government’s fealty to Moscow, its willingness to be a gateway into Europe for China’s predatory machinations, and its deepening ties with Iran run counter to America’s interests.

These allegiances ought to matter a great deal to American conservatives who, quite rightly, expect European allies to carry a greater share of the burden of deterring threats to our shared Western interests.

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy observes that America “will need a strong Europe to help us successfully compete” with strategic adversaries. But Europe’s tremendous progress toward greater burden-sharing on defense has come despite Hungary’s defense budget shrinking by 6% last year and Orban’s active opposition to European Union support for Ukraine. While other allies have decreased their reliance on Russian energy, Orban has doubled down on Hungary’s dependence on Russian gas. And in 2024, he struck an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” with America’s foremost strategic adversary, the PRC.

Orban’s Hungary offered America little in the way of strategic alignment, let alone “moral cooperation.” Today, the highest shared value between Americans and the people of Hungary is the right to choose our own leaders, freely and fairly, without foreign or domestic interference….

— what seems to have motivated Hungarian voters is a distaste for the crony capitalism and corruption that have weakened Hungary’s economy and the image of its ruling party. Their next prime minister is, after all, a product of that ruling party who campaigned on addressing Hungary’s economic woes rather than just scapegoating them. I suspect Hungary’s voters will, in turn, judge his government on whether he succeeds in doing so.

Watching this from Kentucky, it is hard to understand how some on the American right thought that staking U.S. influence on the outcome of a parliamentary election in a small, central European country was putting America’s interests first. To the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage — not its social policies — align with America’s strategic interests.

The future course of U.S.-Hungary strategic alignment under the new government remains to be seen. But to the extent that Hungary’s next leaders behave with less obeisance toward our adversaries and a more serious focus on our shared interests, Washington may be wise to welcome this change.

Who wrote that? None other than the gravedigger of democracy himself, Mitch McConnell.

I won’t belabor all the reasons why he should be begging for forgiveness for all he did to destroy our democracy at home. But perhaps there are some out there whose consciences will be pricked just a little bit to read that by one of the most powerful leaders of the GOP of the last half century. Maybe…

Axios reports:

Over the last two weeks, Trump has tested the loyalty of MAGA’s Christian base with a series of extraordinary provocations.

• It began on Easter, when Trump threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants and bridges in a profanity-laced Truth Social post, and signed off with “Praise be to Allah.”
• Two days later, he warned Iran that “a whole civilization will die tonight” — appalling some of his closest former allies, including Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Candace Owens.
• On Sunday night, Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV — the first American-born pope — as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” furious that Leo had condemned his threats against the people of Iran. Within the hour, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure — healing a bedridden man, flanked by bald eagles and the American flag.
• The image drew rare condemnation from MAGA loyalists, including allegations of blasphemy and even demonic possession.

Trump’s attacks on the pope — who is far more popular than he is — could prove self-destructive in the midterms.

There’s more about the rest of his coalition falling apart but the attack on the Pope is worth looking at more closely. He said in his post that he doesn’t think the Pope should criticize the president. But he went further in a phone interview with CBS News:

“He’s wrong on the issues,” Mr. Trump said of Pope Leo. “I don’t think he should be getting into politics. I think he probably learned that from this.” 

[…]

The president also remarked that he believes he has “done more for the Catholic Church than any president in the last hundred years.” He said, “During COVID I gave them billions of dollars. They were gonna go under. I gave them billions of dollars for education and that’s not the right way to treat somebody that’s been so good.”

The Catholic Church was going to go under if he didn’t step in? What in the world is going on here? As he’s descending into dementia and panicking about his presidency failing on every front, his mendacious narcissism is becoming more and more audacious and absurd.

This is not unprecedented in history although we haven’t seen it quite this bad in a long time. Consider the following leaders:

Caligula (r. 37–41 AD): Known for extreme megalomania, he declared himself a living god, demanding to be worshipped. He allegedly ordered soldiers to collect seashells as “spoils of war” after a botched campaign against Neptune and humiliated the Senate by dressing as various deities, including Venus.

Domitian (r. 81–96 AD): He was the first to formalize his divinity, requiring subjects to address him as Dominus et Deus (Lord and God).

Commodus (r. 180–192 AD): Paranoiac and deeply narcissistic, he believed he was a reincarnation of Hercules. He fought in the arena as a gladiator and demanded the city of Rome be renamed after him.

Diocletian (r. 284–305 AD): Ended the pretense of republican government, forcing courtiers to prostrate themselves before him (kow-tow) and wear elaborate robes to establish himself as an Eastern-style god-king. 

Charles VI of France (r. 1380–1422): Suffered from “glass delusion,” believing his body was made of glass and would shatter. He wore specially reinforced clothes with iron rods and forbade people from coming near him, forcing his courtiers to act as if his fragility was reality.

Princess Alexandra of Bavaria: Believed she had swallowed a glass piano as a child and would move sideways through doors to avoid breaking it.

King Ivan IV (The Terrible) of Russia: Known for severe paranoia, he often forced his boyars and subjects to engage in erratic, sadistic behavior to demonstrate loyalty.

I think this is where we’re going. He’s certifiable.

Update — It gets worse:

Bash: President Trump is attacking the pope in a phone call with an Italian newspaper. He said this about the pope: he doesn’t understand and shouldn’t be talking about war because he has no idea what’s happening.

President Trump went after Giorgia Meloni. She had said that his… pic.twitter.com/mmZjDZCenL

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 14, 2026

Bash: President Trump is attacking the pope in a phone call with an Italian newspaper. He said this about the pope: he doesn’t understand and shouldn’t be talking about war because he has no idea what’s happening. President Trump went after Giorgia Meloni. She had said that his attacks on the pope were unacceptable. President Trump responded, saying it’s her who is unacceptable…

Yikes…

Yesterday, Trump “explained” that he had thought the blasphemous image he posted right after he slammed “Leo” as he casually calls the pope, shows him as a doctor not Jesus. Nobody believes him, of course, because it’s ridiculous. (In fact, had he said that he thought it showed him as a alien from another planet endowed with superpowers, it would have been more believable — especially with the demagorgan floating above his head.)

Anyway, this is the reality of Trump the caring doctor:

Andrew Harnik has been awarded the White House Correspondents’ Association award for excellence in presidential news coverage by visual journalists for the following photo: pic.twitter.com/YqU7ub6liL

— Matt Rice (@matt____rice) April 13, 2026

It really does say everything. Everything.

Remain vigilant

ProPublica identified at least 75 people across multiple government agencies who worked to safeguard the 2020 election results against Donald Trump’s “stolen election” narrative:

The people we identified as resisting attempts to overturn the 2020 results have been replaced by roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of such people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election denial movement. Experts warn that shows the movement has merged with the federal government.

These new officials could influence how Trump reacts to the upcoming midterms as polling shows Republicans are approaching what could be a significant electoral loss, with the president’s approval rating nearing record lows, and public concern growing about the weak economy, the administration’s mass deportation effort and the war on Iran. Seemingly in preparation to head off such a blow, Trump has stepped up his efforts to “nationalize” the 2026 elections, saying that Republicans need “to take over” the midterms. Democrats who monitored Trump’s attempts to block his 2020 loss have begun to question whether he will allow a “blue wave,” particularly if it flips control of a House of Representatives that impeached him twice in his first term.

ProPublica’s examination reveals new details on how the president has unleashed his loyalists to transform elections. This includes the background of this year’s FBI raid in Georgia to seize 2020 election materials and how they are using federal resources to search for noncitizens voting. Ultimately, ProPublica’s reporting shows how thoroughly and expansively the Trump administration has overhauled the federal government into what some fear is a vehicle for making sure elections go his way.

We are heading into cornered animal territory. Don’t think otherwise.

Experts say 2026 will serve as an unprecedented stress test of the integrity of American elections.   

“Our election system withstood” Trump’s “attacks following the 2020 election,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections, “but this will be an even tougher test, with more election deniers having access to federal power than ever before.”

Treat this as real. Be vigilant. Attend regular meetings at your local Board of Elections to keep an eye on possible subterfuge.

ProPublica isn’t the only outlet keeping watch. Here are a couple from Democracy Docket:

Election-denying GOP lawmaker, anti-voting group target New York’s voter registration system

Election deniers in Trump admin pushing ‘more powerful tool’ to probe voter rolls, report finds

“Just a normal human”

Something has shifted. Not completely shifted. But shifted.

You see it in the polling. Donald Trump’s support is cratering. His legitimacy is draining away.

Our friend Darcy Burner explains:

For the most part, people stop at red lights even when there is no cop in sight. They stop because they accept that traffic laws make sense, that the system is fair enough, that the rules apply to them the way they apply to everyone else. Multiply that by every American filing a tax return, every soldier following an order, every bank honoring a check, every foreign central bank parking its savings in U.S. Treasuries. None of that is force. All of it is built on consent, on the consent of the governed.

Consent is what makes force cheap.

It is the legitimacy subsidy that runs underneath every powerful regime in history, and it is the most undervalued asset on any government’s balance sheet. With it, you can run a country on a normal-sized police force and borrow money at four percent. Without it, you need East German numbers of secret police and you pay fourteen percent.

Force at full price is ruinously expensive.

Trump is ruined. He’ll never admit it, but it’s true. “He is not consolidating power,” Burner writes. “He is spending the subsidy that made his power cheap, and he is spending it fast.”

Five rush hours a week, I see it out on the streets and the overpass where Sign Guy performs since Trump attacked Iran and sent fuel prices soaring. I wrote up an incident report last night for organizers of a weekly street-corner sign protest:

I’ve seen a marked increase in middle fingers in the weeks since Trump attacked Iran. And of course they’re braver about it when I’m out there solo. I’ve noticed that these betrayed MAGAs are easily triggered. But tonight was highly unusual. 

Along with the usual honks, waves, and hand signs, the posing for pictures on the bridge and the passersby thanking me, this happened tonight.

Moderately heavy westbound traffic about 5:15 pm. A logo’d work truck in the fast lane. I didn’t catch the name (might have been a personal company). One driver, and one passenger (pretty sure). 

Going about 35 mph, the driver opens his door, steps out onto the running board, and screams at me over the roof, “Get off the bridge, you fucking asshole! … something something.” 

I watched over my shoulder to make sure the truck didn’t take the next downtown exit, planning to double back. 

My sign this week simply reads: PLAN NOW FOR YOUR $5/GAL STAYCATION

Sign Guy deliberately avoids mentioning parties, personalities or policies. But that’s not enough to ward off misdirected anger. The MAGAs know Trump has betrayed them. And they really resent any reminders, even oblique ones. Except perhaps among fellow MAGAs.

About that, Open Letters by Mersault recently infiltrated a MAGA focus group with intent to disrupt. Turns out, disruption was unnecessary. The 11 subjects and one imposter were on the same page.

“What letter grade would you give Trump?” the moderator asked. Final tally: 6 Ds, 6 Fs.

Economic Pain is Central

“When I see the price of groceries and gas, I want to scream.”

“Food and fuel prices are skyrocketing. Absolutely outrageous.”

“We go to Walmart every week. The exact same items increased exponentially every single time.”

“My main concern is inflation. The prices for food and gas.”

“We go to war in Iran and the prices just keep going up… but my bank account is shrinking.”

“It is affecting us personally.”

“I can’t even afford daycare.”

“I want to be a stay-at-home mom, but I have to work… how do you do all those things?”

“The job market… opportunities are very hard right now.”

“My mom’s on Social Security, and she worked for the federal government for 25 years. She does have Medicare and that doesn’t mean she’s a, what do you call it, freeloader. And Trump was like, oh we don’t have money. What did he say? We don’t have money for this anymore? I almost rolled over. I was like, are you kidding me? People pay into this so that they can retire… she’s 73, she can’t get a job now, you know.”

About that congressionally unsanctioned Iran war:

The Iran War Is a Failure

What they said:

“The war in Iran is unnecessary. My brother was in the Marines. I wouldn’t want him to die for this… it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

“What happened to America first? Let’s take car of our own before we start blowing up other countries.”

“He actually said we needed to get over it… and he was very flippant… ‘we don’t have money… we’re at war’… I was like, are you kidding me?”

“First and foremost, I wholly 100% disagree with what’s going on with Iran… it’s been a disaster and completely contradictory to what he ran on… no more wars. Propaganda machine at its absolute finest…”

“I’m just intellectually insulted by being told… by Fox News… that this was justified.”

“It’s so much like a war for oil… like the speech last night said, if we’re producing all this oil and all this energy, so why do we care what goes on over there?”

“I’m very disappointed right now with the war in Iran… and how he treats our allies in Europe.”

“It’s about the integrity we used to have as a country… we used to be able to have diplomacy and negotiate and not bomb the negotiators… And I just kind of feel like we have slid… now we’re the country you can’t trust… we used to be the good guys.”

“All of the… foreign affairs… the way that he speaks and certain actions that he takes… in some senses, I regret my vote.”

Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein was another sore point. The group was not buying that Trump wasn’t involved. “It does feel like a mockery,” said one. “I voted Republican for Christian values… and now it’s turned into something completely different.”

He sold them out. They know it. Even if they won’t admit it in public but will in a “safe space.”

And they were done pretending everything was fine.

And while the themes had been broken promises and failed execution, there was something else that caught me off guard.

They were sick of him.

His behavior. His character. The constant divisiveness. The everything-is-about-him fatigue. The social corrosion. The sense that the country just feels worse to live in.

What they want now, one subject offered, is “a normal Republican candidate and not a Donald Trump crony… just a normal human… that’s all I want.”

I titled this post “The Great Divorce.” The title comes from a 1945 novel by British author C. S. Lewis. The plot involves ghosts consigned to Hell (or Purgatory), imagined as a vast grey city where it always rains. Some of them take a bus trip excursion to the outskirts of Heaven. They might, if they choose, remain and experience joy there. If they still can. In the most memorable scene, a heavenly woman, Sarah, speaks to her husband-ghost, Frank. She appeals for him to stay. But he cannot let go of earthly bitterness and his need to manipulate her. He, or what’s left of him, will return to the Hell he’s embraced. Sarah’s joy is undiminished in Heaven. His melodrama cannot touch her there.

A quick summary:

Frank’s character is a complicated metaphor for the way humans use pity and self-loathing to manipulate other people, though he only appears toward the end of the novel. In life Frank knew and was loved by Sarah Smith, and would take advantage of her love by pretending that she’d hurt his feelings. Indeed, Frank has a long history of pretending to be sad in order to make other people feel guilty—even as a child he would do so. In the afterlife, Frank appears as two different ghosts, one small (the Dwarf), the other tall (the Tragedian). The Dwarf represents Frank’s inner life: his self-hatred, and his manipulative tendencies. The Tragedian, on the other hand, represents the “image” of pain and sadness that Frank tries to project in order to make other people feel guilty. Thus, in the afterlife Frank takes on a form that externalizes the psychological processes by which Frank would try to “blackmail” Sarah into feeling sorry for him.

Trump began his MAGA movement by giving supporters others toward whom to misdirect their anger over miseries real, imagined, or manufactured: immigrants, liberals, “wokeism,” a Black president, etc. But while these MAGAs are done with Trump, they are not done with the grievances that led them to him and that he exploited.

Mersault writes:

So this is not the moment to exhale.

They hadn’t abandoned all their beliefs.

They still wanted hardline border crackdowns driven by exaggerated fears about who was crossing, repeating inflammatory claims about “rapists and murderers.”

They still clung to a “pro-life” identity while ignoring the very real human cost of Republican policies that erode care, stability, and survival for the very people they say they value.

They still invoked “freedom” to reject vaccines, masks, and other public health measures, elevating anecdote (“I know someone who had a heart attack a week after the COVID vaccine.”) over overwhelming scientific evidence.

They still gave oxygen to conspiracies about stolen elections and hidden cabals of Democratic elites running child-trafficking rings out of pizza parlors.

They still distrusted expertise and institutions, except when those same institutions confirmed their own biases.

“They may be ready to fire the CEO, but not abandon the business model,” Mersault concludes. Any more than Frank can let go of needing to control Sarah or Rupert Murdock can let go of stoking hatreds. MAGAs need to control the country, their lessers, and any others.

Sign Guy dancing on an overpass with PLAN NOW FOR YOUR $5/GAL STAYCATION set off Reckless Endangerment Guy in a big way. (And I mean, he was out of control.) He still needs someone else to blame for his own disillusionment. Even with Trump’s favorables in the golden toilet, his political enemies remain. With Republicans facing a 2026 wipeout, it’s possible we’ll see more hysteria.

(h/t SS)

We’re all on a star trek

What Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch saw when she looked back at Earth was not the beautiful, blue marble celebrated in photos from decades-old Apollo missions. What struck her more was all the blackness of space surrounding it. She had a revelation. Not unlike what William Shatner experienced, only different, but just as profound.

When in 2021 legendary Star Trek actor, William Shatner, 90, took a ten-minute, sub-orbital flight aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket, it reduced him to tears:

Shatner: I saw the spaceship coming through the blue, and an instant later it was through the blue; this bullet exploded into the blackness of space, so in that instant I saw the blue suddenly disappear, and suddenly space is smack up in my face. I saw death there. The suddenness with which I looked at that blackness, I thought, “whoa, suddenly you go out there and then you’re dead.”

People often cry when they first see Earth from space, space philosopher Frank White wrote in his 1987 book, “The Overview Effect.”

Shatner told NPR:

“I wept for the Earth because I realized it’s dying,” Shatner said. “I dedicated my book, Boldly Go, to my great-grandchild, who’s three now — coming three — and in the dedication, say it’s them, those youngsters, who are going to reap what we have sown in terms of the destruction of the Earth.”

Koch saw that blackness too, the same blackness surrounding the Artemis II capsule. She realized we are all astronauts. On a lifeboat.

“Planet Earth: You. Are. A. Crew.”

when christina koch said ''You. Are. A. Crew.'' she literally summed up a whole philosophy in one line. like humanity is one crew on this planet and we either make it together or we dont. this aint just a moon mission tbh its a message for all of us down here.

— B. Mohammed (@BMohammedl) April 11, 2026

The bar is low for running a failed state

One reason people go to protests like No Kings is the reassurance they give that you’re not alone when the world feels like it’s going to hell around you. Even for MAGAs threatened by the presence of taco trucks and Mexican roofers. It’s why MAGAs go to Trump rallies. As the woman told a reporter, “He [Trump] says what I’m thinking.”

Matt Bai provides a touch of that in between mass rallies with a Rolling Stone piece about “the mind-blowing incompetence” of the Trump administration in its 2.0 incarnation. Trump learned in his first term that for his purposes (having nothing to do with actual governing), competence just got in his way:

Competence — and by that I mean the most fundamental, entry-level, don’t-blow-up-the-world kind of competence — was more of a thing in the first Trump term, when the president cycled through a series of senior aides, old-line party and military types, who saw themselves as buffers between Trump and the various agencies. Four years in exile liberated Trump from all of that. His second-term team comprises mainly fringe players and pugnacious pundits, people more comfortable with pancake makeup than managing complex bureaucracies, for which they have nothing but contempt anyway. It’s a bold experiment, but one that seemed ill-fated from the start.

Except for the nihilistic thirst Trump 2.0 has for destruction.

Exhibit A:

Put it this way: When Trump finally replaced Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin, a former plumber and MMA fighter who keeps intimating that he’s been some kind of secret military agent but can’t talk about it, every sane person in Washington applauded as if this were the second coming of James Baker in his prime. That tells you all you need to know.

Guys like that are all you need to preside “over a failed state.” It’s been a long road.

We know now that George W. Bush’s decline into chaos wasn’t merely a temporary nadir for the right. It marked the end of a 40-year run for neoconservatism and ultimately led to Trump’s hostile takeover of the party. Similarly, whether MAGA outlives Trump as a viable political force won’t only depend on whether it can still appeal to some slim margin of white voters. It will also depend on whether Republicans can shake the image of a party that seethes with contempt for government but is fundamentally unserious about running it.

You mean like “trickle down economics” unserious? Or “make the pie higher” unserious? Or “A whole civilization will die tonight” unserious? America’s problem is broader than the Republican Party. We as a people are “America elected Donald Trump president twice” unserious.

Federal court dismisses Trump defamation case

Another Trump lawsuit bites the dust (The New York Times):

A federal judge on Monday dismissed President Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the publisher of The Wall Street Journal over its report of his lewd birthday greeting to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Judge Darrin Gayles in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida said in his decision that Mr. Trump had not “plausibly alleged” that The Journal published the article with actual malice, meaning that it knew what it was publishing was false, or had acted with reckless disregard as to its accuracy. He dismissed the complaint without prejudice, allowing Mr. Trump to bring the same claim again.

Trump will try, of course, or find some less-monetary way to exact his revenge on the Journal, the Times, or other outlets that publish news he finds unflattering. It costs him money to bring such suits, but it costs his enemies to defend against them, so that works for Trump.

Now if the MAGA rubes still supporting Trump will stop donating to his lawsuit funds, maybe these frivolous lawsuits will dry up before Trump’s dessicated corpse does.