Trump says he’s been indicted.

I’m having popcorn with real butter and a fine boxed rose.

What are you having?

“Why should you go to jail for a crime someone else noticed?”

Just a reminder to all of the MAGADONIANS out there who are convinced that if someone on your side is getting indicted, it must be the fault of someone else.

Let’s be honest with each other for once. It’s not that you don’t think that Donald Trump had committed or is capable of committing crimes. The thing that ticks you guys off is that he’s actually getting caught. His superpower was his invincibility. It made it possible for him to poke libtards in the eyes and get away with it. Take that away and what have you got?

That’s the problem you have to wrestle with. It’s not that you can’t still run Trump as a candidate. Let’s dispose of that nonsense right now. The Constitution doesn’t prohibit an indicted or convicted felon from running for president. He can even win.

The United States isn’t going to chuck him in solitary confinement until his trial like they do in Russia. If he’s indicted, he’ll get all of the benefits of due process and a trial by a jury of his peers as any other private US citizen. He’s just another guy indicted for a white collar crime. He’ll get an opportunity to plea deal. He might never serve a day in jail. He might just be under house arrest without access to social media in a sand trap on some Saudi golf course for the duration of his sentence. It doesn’t mean he can’t still be president if elected.

But you guys are still furious. I’m not sure why this is. No, we don’t have a vendetta. No, he’s not the most investigated president in history. That would be Bill Clinton and all they ever got on him was that he lied about a blow job between two consenting adults. Personally reckless? Yes. Unconstitutional? Hardly. I mean NO. Lying about a blow job wasn’t unconstitutional.

If Trump went away, that would be ok with us. His anticipated indictment only makes him noisy. He’ll get even MORE attention, which he loves. He’ll whine and rage and threaten and cast blame at others. It will be one long stream of hurt, pain, lies, anger and shrieks of impending vengeance when he takes back the White House.

But he will be powerless to withstand the slow grinding wheels of justice that we are all subject to. He will be that emperor with no clothes. If you still want to vote for that bloated, orange, possibly treasonous criminal, don’t let us stop you. Just stop with the foaming at the mouth for him. Try to be a little more mature. Remember that the second amendment is currently allowing everyone unfettered access to firearms but that in the end, you don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell against the US military’s arsenal of riot control goodies.

*****************

One other thing: I see an awful lot of people on Twitter who are defending Russia and want Russia to defeat Ukraine. I’m not making any predictions here. But I do wonder how anybody with a sense of self-preservation would want the defeat of a free, democratic nation to Vladimir Putin.

Russians don’t have a choice about their government. Their elections are shams. No, THEY really are shams. They don’t have freedom of speech. They can get thrown in jail instantly for calling a war a war. Their news media is completely state controlled. At least YOU have a wide variety of media choices. They don’t. They have a couple of marquis cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow where life looks pretty and normal. The rest of the country isn’t so nice. Roads and general infrastructure is crap. And everything is owned by oligarchs. They grabbed everything that wasn’t tied down in the 90’s and now your chance of being wealthy beyond your wildest imaginations is impossible unless you own some national natural resource or industry in Vladimir Putin’s fiefdom. Everyone else is shut out.

Regular people hold no opinions that will get them into trouble. Unlike the US where anyone can say any mean, hurtful, biased, uninformed moronic opinion that can start an insurrection, such opinion is forbidden in Russia. There is no political opposition to Putin. His opponents are poisoned, shot in the back, fall out of windows or are sent to hard labor penal colonies. There are few appeals and if you are arrested, you will be convicted in all but the rarest of circumstances. There are no plea deals. You can’t even criticize the Russian Orthodox Church. In short, a Russian citizen accepts his lot in life, keeps his head down and claims to be “not political”.

Russians can be forcibly conscripted and sent to the front in Ukraine. It’s hard to know how much equipment they actually have or how well they are trained. It’s possible that we don’t have the full picture.

But we do have the head of the Wagner Group, Prigozhin, complaining that his men don’t have ammunition as they try to hold down Bakhmut. That really happened.

We see hundreds of thousands of men fleeing Russia before they were conscripted last fall. That really happened.

Russia destroyed Mariupol and continues to bomb the shit out of other cities in Ukraine. That really happens and with the destruction of the Nova Khakova dam, we see even more destruction of infrastructure by Russia.

We see a constant stream of prime ministers and presidents and military officials show up in Kyiv to act like an unofficial bodyguard for Zelenskyy. THAT really happens.

All these things actually happened. The various news sources can spin them any way they like but they still happened. The consensus is that Russia is a shit show and is a millimeter away from being declared a state sponsor of terrorism.

So why does anyone in the US on social media want to be rooting for these guys to win? Why would anyone in their right mind want to live under the iron fist of Vladimir Putin? I mean, that is what you want, isn’t it? You want to live like a dog to be kicked around by a ruthless psychopathic dictator? Or do you make the mistake of everyone who falls for the siren song of dictators and think that the hammer is only going to come down on the liberals and the elites while you’ll end up on top again?

A dictator like Putin is like Sauron. There is only one guy at the top and he doesn’t share power- with anyone. The only reason you are mindlessly supporting the guy’s brutal destruction of another country is because you have never been to Mordor.

Shouldn’t you check it out before you decide you want to live there?

Ping me when there’s news

No offense, media people, but I’m not interested in another story about whether Annoying Orange is going to be indicted. Maybe I’m an outlier on the left of center side of the great divide. It’s not that I don’t think it’s vitally important. It is. In fact, it’s so important that it should be discussed a bit more seriously about how awful it is.

There’s no doubt in my mind that TFG is going to be indicted. There’s no doubt that when all the facts come out about January 6 and Georgia and the Mar-a-Lago presidential library and swimming pool, we are all going to be thoroughly shocked. Yes, even you, MAGAdonian. (Sounds like a dinosaur from CD my daughter had when she was 6.)

But do we need to hear from half a dozen lawyers everyday analyzing Jack Smith’s poker face? Or how many times Mark Meadows has appeared on everyone’s bingo card? This has been going on for months now. Years even. We’re going to get there. It’s just that when I listen to my couple of hours of news a day, I want to hear about Ukraine. Or Canadian wildfires. These days, I’m getting more out of the German DW YouTube channel and BBC.

Take a break for godssakes. When he’s indicted, make it breaking news. You can break an indictment as many times as you want. Just give it a rest with the watch parties. It’s getting boring. Meanwhile, there’s a busted dam and air quality alerts.

Do that News thing.

D-Day -1

Tomorrow is the anniversary of D-Day. Here’s a little refresher on the greatest invasion ever:

The parallels to the war in Ukraine are hard to miss. D-Day was the decisive day of the liberation of Europe. Zelenskyy is this century’s Churchill. England, America, Canada, the French military diaspora, the Resistance all coordinated their activities to make it happen.

Trying to predict when the Ukrainian counteroffensive is going to happen is like trying to predict the Second Coming of Christ. No one knows the hour or the day. And if you do know the hour and the day, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense asks you to say nothing on social media.

Perhaps unrelated, there is interesting new activity with new players outside of Ukraine. It’s fascinating. We’re probably only seeing the tip of the spear. Another interesting development is an uptick of appearances of Maia Sandu, the president of Modova, with many NATO allies. She made an appearance with Zelenskyy in Kyiv last week. In the last couple of days, Victor Orban of Hungary and Kaia Kallas of Estonia have met her in Chișinău. It looks like Moldova has officially taken a side, which could be complicated because there is a Russian presence on its northern flank in Transnitstria where it borders Ukraine. We’ve seen leaders of NATO countries meet with Zelenskyy in Kyiv acting like bodyguards. I’m wondering if the same thing is happening in Moldova. Sandu could be a massive pain in Russia’s neck and getting her out of the way would make it easier to prevent Moldova from providing assistance. Keep your eyes on Moldova.

D-day was brave, it was bloody, it was horrifying. There was no other way to free Europe from occupation, fascism and genocide.

And any day now, we could be watching it happen all over again. But this is the 21st century and ingenuity may play a bigger part in this than just sheer brute force. What that will entail may already be happening. The ideal situation would be for the Russian army to collapse along with Putin’s regime. That probably has to happen before the war is over. Is that possible? I guess anything is possible.

Slava Ukraini.

Shiny Happy People

It’s time we talked about the effect that Christian fundamentalism on reality TV has had on American culture in the last two decades. The most recognizable representatives are the Duggars but the Institute of Basic Life Principles that they were affiliated with is just a new manifestation of the older high control sect or cult. Let’s start there and then let’s move on to one of these organizations that flies under the radar but has a HUGE treasure chest with which to influence politicians. I’m referring to the LDS church aka the Mormons. We’ll leave the Mormonization of American Culture for another day.

I think I’ve mentioned this before but a my aunt used to look with a skeptical eye at the Duggars and 19 Kids and Counting and say, “One of these days, one of those Duggar kids is going to write a book”. She was right. Earlier this year, Jinger Duggar Vuolo wrote a book about growing up with the IBLP in a large family. Jinger’s book was revealing from the point of view of how the IBLP affected her mental health, her education and her spirituality. She’s embraced a kinder, gentler side of Christian fundamentalism now. It retains a lot of the features of the more extreme variety but she has more control over her behavior, clothing and relationship with god. She dropped a few bombshells about the IBLP but for the most part, she went easy on her parents.

Amazon Prime dropped Shiny Happy People today, a new documentary about the parents who got onboard the IBLP train and what it did to their children. Jinger’s sister, Jill Duggar Dillard, gives us the rest of the story. It’s must see TV.

One of the people interviewed for this documentary is a professor of sociology who studies reality TV. Right at the beginning of the documentary, she lays out what makes shows like the Duggars, Sister Wives, Kate plus Eight and The Kardashians so compelling to some audiences. For one thing, reality TV tends to pull in a conservative audience that is drawn to defined gender roles and behaviors, and are likely to be conventional thinkers. I can vouch for this. I have zero interest in reality TV and have only seen the Duggars out of curiosity after my mother went on and on praising Michelle Duggar for the obedient score of children she had, their remarkable self-control (aka their broken wills), and their musical abilities. So, I had to see what fresh hell these Duggar people were putting their kids through and it gave me flashbacks of my own childhood. Except for the zillion kids part.

My mother absolutely worshipped the Duggars and she wanted the rest of us to love them too. She wouldn’t shut up about them. I’m so glad that the IBLP wasn’t a thing when I was growing up because I’m pretty sure she would have signed us up. Instead, I became a child hostage to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The JW’s are very similar to the IBLP except in two areas: they don’t advocate their members to have a lot of children and they were ok with children going to public schools as long as they didn’t stay any longer than the law demanded and didn’t participate in anything that might be considered “worldly”. That term covers a lot of territory and keeps JWs out of politics. Keep that in mind if you watch this documentary because it’s an important distinction.

My mother always told everyone that she wasn’t a very good JW. Except EVERY JW doesn’t think they are good JWs. It’s part of the cult’s way of indoctrinating its followers. You can never do enough to guarantee your salvation at Armageddon. She managed to convert half of her family, no mean feat, so she was certainly good enough.

I think she was an extremely good JW. She loved the tyrannical aspects of the religion. She embraced submitting to authority and obedience. We attended long boring meetings on Sunday’s, personal indoctrination studies on Mondays, book Bible studies on Tuesday’s, Theocratic ministry school on Thursday and occasionally a house to house on Saturday’s. The one Meeting I can’t remember my mother ever attending was meeting any of my teachers on back to school night. That wasn’t important to JWs because we were all going to go into full time pioneering when we were old enough to get out of high school. Or get married. College was out of the question. I have cousins who were also child hostages of the JWs. None of us became JWs. The JWs should never have let us go to public school. We weren’t quite as separated from the world as the Duggars. Nevertheless, my mother out JWed her siblings with her relentless zealotry and when Armageddon didn’t come on her schedule, she left the JWs and joined a different fundy religion that was just as obsessed with the end times but offered the Rapture feature that the JWs lacked. (Ask me about Rapture clauses in wills)

I was lucky. Even at a young age, my spidey sense was telling me there was something wrong with the way JWs fixated on their conversions. My little brain was taking notes and stubbornly wouldn’t give in to indoctrination. I decided when I was a very little girl that living the rest of my life in a suffocating religion just wasn’t my bag, baby. I was told that I could do whatever I wanted when I was old enough to leave home but until then, I had to do exactly what I was told and never be defiant. Deal.

The reason why I’m bringing this up is because our culture is just now starting to get a clue about just how influential the Duggars and shows like theirs were in the past two decades. They hit the scene the decade after Ruby Ridge and Waco. The IBLP was particularly strong in the south where there was a lot of resistance to desegregation. The IBLP’s founder, Bill Gothard, convinced his followers that they could go back in time to when men were men, women knew their place, and children were beaten with a rod to save their souls. They are clean cut, modest and look like they came right out of the 50’s when America was great, depending on who you are. The men in IBLP are patriarchs screwing their way to dominion over the rest of us with their tribes of children. Their women sign themselves into covenant marriages that make no-fault divorce extremely difficult to get. And their children are homeschooled with their own curriculum and indoctrination materials. That’s how their stuck in the 50’s worldview gets propagated to a new generation.

Does any of that sound familiar? The attack on birth control, the submission to a strongman, the movement to control what is taught in school or get rid of public schools altogether?

Did you know that the IBLP has its own para-military wing? Oh yeah. They’re into that.

It’s a pretty good documentary. You’ll be fascinated to know just how insular, abusive and emotionally damaging these kinds of religions are. And you can see how the oath keepers, proud boys and MAGA contingent have taken some of those principles and run with them.

Fortunately, some of those IBLP child hostages are grown ups now, sounding the alarm. “Hey, America, let us tell you what they have planned for you. You’re not quite woke enough yet.” Good for them. They put family relationships on the line to give us an insider account of what Christian Nationalism is all about because it was people like the Duggars that helped it go mainstream.

Shiny Happy People is now available on Amazon Prime.

Oh yes Republicans would like to cut your social security and Medicare.

Kevin McCarthy said as much today. Note that the Trump tax cuts that added $2 trillion to the deficit is *not* the subject of his proposed panel to investigate where to cut.

Here’s the exchange from Fox:

McCarthy: “We only got to look at 11 percent of the budget to find these cuts. We have to look at the entire budget. The Congress has done this before after World War II –“

Harris Faulkner: “Why didn’t you see the whole budget?”

McCarthy: “The president walled off all the others. The majority driver of the budget is mandatory spending. It’s Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt.”

Faulkner: “And he wouldn’t let you see? Wow.”

“But what about Ukraine??”, they whine. “What about public schools??”

First, if you can claw back the trillions of dollars we spent on a stupid, unnecessary, unjustifiable war in Iraq, then you can voice complaints about the comparatively meager few billions thrown at Ukraine. Until that day, zip it. Zip it good.

And if you want to take public schools away from parents who are unqualified or unwilling to homeschool their kids, go right ahead. I can’t wait to point them to your house with their pitchforks and torches.

The fact is that the wealthy libertarians who want to run everything in this country did not sign up for financing even a tiny fraction of your retirement back when they were merely a twinkle in their daddies’ eyes. If you didn’t work hard enough to fund your old age, that’s on YOU, sucker. You shouldn’t have been slacking in your 20s. Hard work! That’s what you should have been doing. Socking away every spare penny, living in a trailer if you had to, and not have any sex whatsoever that could result in extra mouths to feed. You should have thought of that.

I guarantee that’s how some of them see you. They really don’t GAF that you paid into social security and Medicare and the SURPLUS fund, to add insult to injury, all your GD life.

They got theirs. And apparently, they got yours too when they raided the trust fund through their bought and paid for representatives who sold everyone a story about rich people being burdened, nay, oppressed and robbed of all their worldly goods by all those horrible, life depriving income, capital gains, estate, corporate taxes.

OH the YUMANITY! Who will rid them of those meddlesome entitlements??

Well, it won’t be Biden. He took them off the table.

So, I guess it will be up to Kevin McCarthy and his freedom caucus to break the chains that bind the donors.

Don’t you feel the cool breeze of freedom blowing through your hair or is that just the cold shoulder from the MAGA contingent?

One Tiny Mistake…

Submitted by a lurker:

Ron Wears Lady Clothes… pic.twitter.com/PLC2shlfU0

— C3PMeme (@C3PMeme) May 25, 2023

Whatever you do, DON’T forward this or post it on another social media site or make it go viral in any way.

Evil people want to shove a sock down doctors’ throats

Hey, remember that 10 year old rape victim in Ohio who couldn’t get an abortion because she was too pregnant the day a 6 week abortion ban went into effect? She ended up going to Indiana for an abortion. In Indiana, the doctor who performed the abortion submitted the paperwork to report the rape and then did the procedure. I don’t know if it was surgical or medical. Probably medical.

Then that doctor, Caitlin Bernard, talked to journalists about how serious this case was. A 10 year old was going to be forced to give birth to a baby that was a product of rape. A 10 year old

10.

People all over the country were outraged and justifiably so. A 10 year old is too young physically to have a baby. It’s not her fault that the hormones switched on before her bones caught up. No 10 year old is capable of consenting to sex and most have no idea what sex is unless they’ve grown up in a brothel. This was a clear case of rape of a minor. But it made no difference to the state of Ohio. (We’ll get to what the state of South Carolina said about women yesterday in a minute).

Anyway, Dr. Bernard was breaking the glass when she talked to reporters. What was about to happen after the USSC cavalierly overturned Roe last year has played out exactly as doctors predicted. Women have been denied life saving care in states where abortion is outlawed. We are talking about women who literally have to be dying before they can get an abortion. The laws are written so vaguely that doctors are afraid they’ll lose their licenses if they take any steps to intervene. There are states where Ob/Gyn’s are fleeing. In Idaho, the shortage is so severe that hospitals are closing their maternity wards. Women who can’t get abortions for fatal fetal abnormalities are forced to carry to term only to watch their babies die a couple of hours later. Women who choose to go to other states face long drives and expenses they don’t have the money to cover. There are other stories of lives deliberately upended by having children at the wrong time, tended to by women who had to stop their educations or add another mouth to an already overcrowded house in a time when SNAP benefits are being terminated or reduced.

There are partners killing their girlfriends who returned from their abortions in other states. There are women whose friends are being sued by former husbands.

In South Carolina this week, the swing vote thar ended debate on the 6 week abortion ban said this:

“At some point in time, the right of the state to see the unborn child born does take precedent over the woman’s right to her body,”

Yeah, they said that out loud. Well, I guess they’ve said that out loud for 50 years now. Except now, the fruits of their labor are becoming well known and manifesting in a wide variety of unpleasant ways.

They can’t have that. They don’t want you to know how many women’s bodies have been damaged, how many women’s lives have been permanently changed, by the end of Roe. Even the Supreme Court didn’t want to hear about the expected fallout to women’s lives when they heard from lawyers on the matter before they pulled the plug on Roe. What do women lives have to do with abortion??

They just want to bury those truths. The flood of those truths are going to make the consequences of the undeniably religious, punitive and cruel actions of Republican legislatures, governors and AGs look bad. It will get too much attention. It will burst the bubbles and let reality intrude on the Republican voters that in a frenzy of mob mentality imposed these heartless laws on women and reimposed biology as destiny. It might make those voters question those votes.

That’s why the state of Indiana’s AG brought Dr. Bernard’s behavior to the state medical disciplinary board. She was in danger of losing her license to practice medicine because she talked to journalists. They voted instead to fine her and put a letter of reprimand in her permanent record. Rokita, the Indiana AG was furious that she spoke out and had an “agenda”. I hope she appeals. There can be no greater agenda than to protect her patients and ensure they get the best medical treatment. That is what she did. She pulled the alarm on these cruel laws because they threaten to harm her patients.

Her fine is $3000. I’m sure she can pay this but why should she be faced with a fine for exercising her free speech rights? She followed the rules, submitted the required paperwork and deidentified the patient. There was no violation of privacy.

For this, the voters who wanted to end Roe harassed her, accused her of lying and demanded a retraction. Speaking the truth cost Dr. Bernard. And it will have the effect of stifling the speech of any other doctor who sees something or has to refrain from treating a patient due to these arbitrary rules.

That’s the point. Shut them up so the politicians and their voters can pretend like nothing bad has happened. Just let the women who are affected go out there on their own without their providers backing up their stories.

It’s evil. Just evil. The people who are doing this to women and the voters who thought it was a good idea to put women back in the nursery are just evil people. But now they’ll be protected from knowing just how evil they are.

But it’s too late. The truth is out there. Pregnant women in Idaho will need to drive long distances to give birth. There will be more unwanted children. Can’t hide that. There will be more murdered women. That’s the kind of thing that true crime addicts get off on. There will be women who will eventually die from lack of treatment. It’s going to happen just like it did in Ireland and Poland. I’m not sure how you can hide that. One day, some pregnant woman will be part of an extended family and the next she’ll just be gone. Permanently.

Voters are eventually going to know. You can’t make women invisible even if you clamp down on publicizing the horrors of their medical treatments.

And it’s too late for another reason. Mifepristone is going to be as available as candy all across the country. You can stop the companies who make it from selling it. You can stop drug stores from carrying it. You can stop abortion clinics from distributing it.

But you can’t stop educated, motivated and trained women from making it. It will be as ubiquitous as fentanyl pretty soon and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it.

Then it will be less of an issue for women who get accidentally pregnant. The pills will be there.

Pretty soon, the only women who will be injured, die and made sorrowful will be the pregnant women in the midst of a miscarriage, or carrying a baby with no kidneys or a baby whose medical condition pose a grave threat to their carriers. Or it will be a little girl who doesn’t even know what’s happening. It will be one hard story after another and everyone will know someone.

Tina Turner (1939-2023)

She never ever did nothin’ nice and easy. She started out easy and did it nice and rough.

She had great legs.

We’re going to miss her.

How to beat Trump.

I would be very surprised if media outlets didn’t already know the answer to this question. I’m beginning to think the outrage response to the CNN town hall is part of some tag team wrestling event. They’re trying to generate anger so viewers keep tuning in for the next time Trump sucks the oxygen out of the room.

But you know, I don’t want to live through another 5 years of Trump bogarting our attention, wrecking the economy, giving parts of Ukraine to Putin, signing a national abortion ban, and pursuing his enemies with a red hot fury. Do ANY of us need that?

Fascism is like getting a case of drug resistant gonorrhea. There are always going to be some vulnerable people who are drunk on power who can be lead to let their guard down by some sleazy guy who knows how to sweet talk them. Then, once they have the infection, it starts attacking, destroying some pretty important organs. It will wreck havoc and cause permanent damage before it gets under control. And that guy who gave it to you? He won’t GAF that part of your life is destroyed. It will be YOUR fault that you didn’t protect yourself. Just like you wouldn’t put a mask on or support universal background checks. Every time you allow him and his buddies be aggressive without consequences you make it that much easier for him to infect your body.

So, how to defeat him? Let’s first talk about what doesn’t work. Paul Waldman who writes for WaPo wrote this thread this morning that explains why Kaitlin Collins drowned in a sea of bullshit yesterday. Click on the tweet to read the whole thread:

1. One thing last night made clear is that not only doesn't "fact-checking in real time" work on Trump, it's actually JUST WHAT HE WANTS. Allow me to explain…

— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) May 11, 2023

Basically, his power is to flood the questioner with a firehose of lies, never directly respond to the question, and make fact checking irrelevant. It is a performance of sociopathic aggression. That’s why he appears to be unstoppable against someone as well prepared as Kaitlin Collins. She brought a knife to a gunfight. They’re not even engaging with one another. So the town hall was a pointless exercise if the purpose was to get Donald to play by the rules of traditional journalism. You can’t do that with a guy who has been repeatedly rewarded for all of the manifestations of his cluster B personality disorders. He feeds off of ripping journalists to bloody gobs because he is a predator.

Now, let’s talk about the other side of this problem: his base. What is it they are getting from this? Bryan Mast, Republican congressman from Florida tells us exactly how Trump gets their attention and loyalty:

Brian Mast spitting truth on CNN:

"The full weight and force of the federal government was exercised to subvert an election." pic.twitter.com/PQpPz5WjKn

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 11, 2023

To summarize, his base loves him because he doesn’t back down from a debate, he doesn’t read from a script, therefore, he’s authentic, he tells them what he thinks and how he feels, he projects strength, international adversaries fear him.

Facts are stupid things that rational people use to make sense of the world. His base can’t relate to them. It’s all about getting up in your grill as a red faced, angry, belligerent asshole. They like that he’s an asshole and gets away with it.

So, what is the number one method of undermining your political opponent? You attack their strengths.

This will mean journalists will have to do some unorthodox things, things that will be unpleasant to watch. I’m not going to give any ideas away but I can think of three or four off the top of my head that would sap his strength. If you have been watching the January 6 hearings, you’ll already know a couple of ways to do this. It would be pretty easy to throw a misophobe off his game. Unnerve him, make him anxious. Have you ever seen that clip of Trump freaking out over a loud bang at a campaign stop?

You know why he didn’t testify at E. Jean Carroll’s trial? It’s because he didn’t want to be confronted in public about the statements he made in his deposition. They’re damning. I don’t think for one second that attorney Roberta Kaplan fears him in the least. It wasn’t just facts that won the case for Carroll. It was Trump’s feeling of entitlement. His arrogance. His attitude of being untouchable. A good attorney would have worked with that. That’s why he didn’t even show up at court. She would have been speaking directly to his image of himself. It wouldn’t have been pretty. He knew it. He’s a coward.

Anyway, if you’ve been to middle school, you know what to do. As Julia Ioffe says about Vladimir Putin, he needs to have his nose bloodied before he’ll back down. You can’t bloody Trump’s nose with facts. You’re going to have to fight dirty. And smile sweetly for the cameras as we all watch.

Get Nicolle Wallace to do it. I’d pay to see that.