Beyond the cringe
Graduation at West Point was carefully organized so Trump would not have to walk down a ramp clutching the superintendent's hand and spend the next week explaining over and over how treacherous it was. Nor was he ambushed by a glass of water. So that's good.
This time it was mental rather than physical decrepitude. He began reading a speech but soon got bored as dyslexics do, and began free-associating about the real estate developer William Levitt, repeating a story he told at the University of Alabama. Apparently Levitt, the modest man responsible for Levittown, Long Island and Levittown, Pennsylvania (and therefore for Malvina Reynolds's "Little Boxes"), bought a large yacht and married a much younger "trophy wife" but it didn't bring him happiness. "It didn't work out too well, but it doesn't -- I must tell you. A lot of trophy wives. Doesn't work out. But it made him happy for a little while, at least, but he found a new wife..." No, Melania wasn't with him but I'm sure nobody noticed. Just as nobody noticed when he told the same pointless story to a gathering of Boy Scouts in 2017. Do you suppose any of those Scouts were in the USMA graduating class?
Before going off script he denounced "nation-building crusades to nations that wanted nothing to do with us, led by leaders that didn't have a clue about distant lands." And he worked in the lie he repeats about Russia stealing hypersonic missile technology during the Obama administration.
There was so much gibberish that this sentence has been overlooked: "The job of the US armed forces is not to host drag shows, to transform foreign cultures, but to spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun." I thought that was the stated reason for all those "nation-building crusades" into Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention CIA interventions where the people elected governments that corporate America disapproved of, like Iran and Guatemala. And inserting ourselves into civil wars in Korea and Vietnam. And I suppose the impending liberation of Greenland from Danish tyranny. A military so awesome that everyone else will run away.
Foreign policy is not Trump's strength. Neither is anything else, but that's another issue. It turns out that ending the fighting in Ukraine is harder than it looks. He tried bullying President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office but that didn't work. Then he tried "Aw, c'mon, Vlad, for me?" and that didn't work either. He's out of ideas. "This is not my war. This is not a war that would have happened if I were president. Something's going to happen and if it doesn't I just back away and they're going to have to keep going again," he complained to reporters. "We're in the middle of talking and he's shooting rockets into Kyiv and other cities. I don't like it at all." Have you tried telling him the Levitt story? "He's killing a lot of people. I don't know what's wrong with him. What the hell happened to him, right?" If you can't trust the man who throws his opponents out windows, what kind of a world is this?
It looks like the Trump-Putin bromance is O-V-E-R over. Trump says he's handing the negotiations over to Pope Leo. In my fantasy world, the pope ends the fighting on terms Ukraine can live with and wins that Nobel Prize that Trump would trade his bone spurs for. And all the stored-up rage about the "so-called pope" comes out.
He warmed up with an all-caps Memorial Day rant that didn't mention veterans or America's war dead but seethed and snarled about immigrants and judges and mentioned rapists twice. (Very significant, as a psychiatrist would say.)
Imagine -- "21,000,000 MILLION PEOPLE." There must be countries that are depopulated. He later deleted it because the reception was less than enraptured. My warped radical left mind is amused.
He also estimates that "BILLIONS OF DOLLARS" are being expended to investigate the foreign students that Harvard refuses to identify ("radicalized lunatics, troublemakers all"). Speaking of mad expenditures, FBI deputy director Dan Bongino is re-opening investigations into two very important cases, who leaked the SCOTUS Dobbs decision and who put the cocaine in the White House during Biden's term. America is clamoring for answers. Listen closely and you'll hear it.
The Big Billionaires' Benefits Budget Bill has to pass the Senate now. One of its more contentious items is the amputation of eight million people from Medicaid just as the Republicans are nervously preparing for the 2026 midterms. Mike Johnson isn't worried, though -- those people are what Alfred P. Dolittle would call "the undeserving poor." "We are the party that supports human dignity and we find purpose in dignity and our work, " Moses explained with a straight face. "The morality of what we're doing here is precisely right." More important, "It comports with all the public opinion polls." God and Gallup, it's a no-brainer. So why is Derrick Van Orden insisting that it won't cut Medicaid? He and his pals can wimp out on town halls, but you can't hide from the ballot box.
Unlike old, senile Joe Biden, Trump didn't hang around West Point to shake hands with every graduate. He was in a hurry to go play at Bedminster, where he shared this hilarious picture of another golfer being attacked by a swan.
Also not clocking in for work is John Fetterman, who says, "I just want to be in a room full of love." Definitely does not sound like the Senate chamber. He has missed 18% of votes since being elected and told the New York Times he would rather spend time with his family. Fortunately there's a solution: resign and let Governor Shapiro appoint someone who isn't struggling with the aftereffects of a major stroke. Maybe a Democrat this time.
Leonardo Garcia Venegas was at work in Foley, Alabama when the ICEstapo rolled up and began arresting "illegals." Garcia Venegas, who was born in Florida, began documenting the raid when they knocked his phone out of his hand. He produced the fancy new Real ID the government has invented and they told him it was fake and handcuffed him "hard," as he told Telemundo. Hours later he was released after giving his Social Security number. "To have our skin color has apparently become a crime," said his cousin, also a citizen. She just noticed?
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