I’ll take a wild guess that you cringe every time your phone buzzes with a news alert. This week has been particularly busy (although, given what awaits us during the next eight months, it will surely look tame in retrospect). If you’ve had trouble keeping up these last few days, I’m here to help. Let’s just skim the cream of the slop:
* Trump was outed anew for praising Adolf Hitler. As reported in a new book, Trump extolled the Nazi mass murderer in conversation with John Kelly, his chief of staff. Kelly recalls, “(Trump) said, ‘Hitler did some good things.’ I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, (Hitler) rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world. And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.'” Kelly was amazed that Trump somehow “missed the Holocaust” during his Hitler assessment, and Kelly found it “pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theatre” of World War II.
Trump persisted, though. He told Kelly that he admired Hitler insistence that his senior aides and military generals be totally loyal. As Kelly recalls in the new book: “I pointed out to him that the German generals as a group were not loyal to him, and in fact tried to assassinate him a few times, and he didn’t know that.” (Ponder that one again. Trump didn’t know that German generals detonated a bomb next to Hitler on July 20, 1944, an historic milestone that’s well known to non-imbeciles.)
Kelly says that Trump “was shocked that he didn’t have dictatorial powers” as president. But Trump and the people around him now are working to correct that problem if enough voters hire him again. As Mark Esper, one of his former Defense secretaries, said this week, “He wanted to deploy active-duty troops on the street of Washington, D.C., and suggested actually that we shoot Americans in the street. That’s kind of more of what you’ll see.”
* Trump moved swiftly this week to take over the Republican National Committee, installing his dingbat daughter-in-law in a top post and triggering mass firings, as part of his master plan to get his paws on the RNC’s money, to use it as his personal ATM. I’d expound on this further, but ex-Republican strategist Rick Wilson has the best take. It’s a pitch-perfect homage – with only minor dialogue tweaks – to the infamous scene in Goodfellas when the mob guys seized control of a restaurant:
“Now the RNC’s got Donald as a partner. Any problems, they’re on their own. Trying to run a national political party? Fuck you, pay me. Trying to help state Republican parties to win races down the ballot? Fuck you, pay me. Need money for something other than Trump’s legal bills? Fuck you, pay me. RNC email lists getting burnt out and producing less revenue? Fuck you, pay me. Major donor program suffering because all the cash is going into the Trump Famiglia? Fuck you, pay me.”
* Fascist-adjacent Sean Hannity said yesterday on Fox News that life under Trump was better four years ago. Referring to President Biden and the Democrats, Hannity said: “They cannot run on ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?'”
Um. If memory serves, four years ago this month, Covid bodies were being stacked in refrigerated trucks because hospitals were overwhelmed; Trump was saying “The risk is very very low” (March 11), “We’ve stopped it” (March 12), “I don’t take responsibility at all” (March 13), “We’re doing really really well” (four years ago today), “The only thing we haven’t done well is get good press” (March 17); and we were afraid to go food shopping. When we got home, we were wiping down our groceries. I particularly remember that it was challenging to wipe down potato chip bags.
Or perhaps memory is dead in the United States of Amnesia.
* Brian Butler, a former Mar-a-Lago flunky, known in federal court documents as “Trump Employe 5,” went public this week to reveal that while FBI agents were busy looking for stolen classified documents in Florida, he was loading some of those boxes onto a plane bound for Trump’s New Jersey country club. (Is the FBI following up on this? Or has this story died already?)
This quote, in his CNN interview, says it all: “For (Trump) to get up there all the time and say the things he says about this being ‘a witch hunt’ and everything…This is not a ‘witch hunt.’…He just can’t take responsibility for anything.”
* A data and software engineer, a former Trump hire named Kenneth Block, has authored a new book, Disproven, which blows to smithereens the big MAGA lie about a stolen 2020 election. That lie is old news. What’s new is that Block has gone on record attacking the lie. He was hired by Team Trump in the waning weeks of 2020 to find voter fraud – and over and over again, in swing states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, he found absolutely nothing. As reported on Monday in The Washington Post, Block says: “The claims of fraud that were made were not just wrong but were demonstrably wrong.”
My favorite detail: He was paid $800,000. “Block recounts that he demanded to be paid upfront for his work because Trump famously did not pay contractors.”
* Trump cavorted at Mar-a-Lago this week with one of his favorite dictators, Viktor Orban of Hungary. A little background on that guy: He has spent the past decade systematically rigging the voting process, sowing distrust of international institutions and “elites,” courting Vladimir Putin, whitewashing Hungary’s past abuses (including Holocaust complicity), rewriting textbooks and school curricula, assailing the independent free press by bullying it into submission and outflanking it with multi-platform propaganda. The result is a quasi-state disinformation machine, and a victorious war on objective reality.
You may have missed Trump’s huzzah for Orban this week: “He says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it.”
Are we Americans so deaf and numb that we can’t hear or see what’s happening here in plain sight? Don’t answer that.