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There is too much Trump everywhere, that is the underlying truth. All of the good-hearted yearn for the days when that dotard is no longer forced into our consciousness every day, as he pulls society down around him.

Until then: lookit this asshole:

Lutnick: "If you are gonna mess with the United States of America and its economy and you're right adjacent to our northern border, it was really disrespectful. When you treat Donald Trump disrespectfully, he knows it. And that's what happened. It's just sad the way Canada has treated us."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-09-02T13:26:49.853Z

This specific brand of horseshit is not horseshit solely because it is coming out of the mouth of the Secretary of Commerce, nor is it horseshit because it is related to Donald Trump.

It is a priori horseshit. If your mayor said it, if your golf partner said it, if your mom said it, it remains a gleaming, glistening heap of horseshit, complete with the cartoon flies and stink lines: anyone who says that they are punishing you for your reluctance to kneel was going to punish you regardless.

Ignoring that the trade war with Canada was unilaterally and without provocation initiated by Donald Trump as a direct consequence of Trump breaking the trade deal that he had signed in 2018, the premise that disrespect to a nation state (or its leader) is inherently an attack on sovereignty is juvenile nonsense. The clearest evidence that this rationalization is ineffective and boorish is that Trump himself spends large non-AI-slop/dozing-off-on-live-TV portions of his day disrespecting nation states (or their leaders).

Which disrespected leaders do not respond as Howard Lutnick (a uniquely corrupt individual and verified Friend of Jeffrey) does, with a mewling HOW DARE YOU shuck and jive, on account of such leaders’ measurable amounts of self-respect. How they do respond: measuredly, careful not to grant the premise any legitimacy, careful not to further inflame the situation, and careful to mask what a fucking idiot they think Trump is.

Diplomacy (in the sense of the manner in which nation-states communicate with each other) is far above my head and rightfully so, as it is and has been for centuries a skill that is taught and practiced. In fact, part of the reason diplomacy is taught in schools is that diplomats are non-political appointees, traditionally (up ’til recently) continuing to serve regardless of which party wins the White House. This training is not only aimed at how to talk to the other side, but how to take the goals and intentions of policy makers and transmit them with the rough edges sanded off.

In other words, if Trump allowed to diplomats to do what they are trained to do instead of sending Lutnick (or Scott Bessent or Markwayne Mullen) in front of a camera and perform for an audience of one, he might actually have a few wins to brag about.

Alas, he does not. And will not.

And for Lutnick? Lutnick is just another dillweed who figured that the millions of kickbacks would be worth never eating a meal cooked by strangers again, for reason of spit.

This whole thing may well have blown over before I hit publish. Hell, it might be nothing but a memory by lunchtime. In any event, if you’re keeping track of the clownish indignities Donald Trump has perpetrated upon himself, you can now add “smuggled out of Turkey in a catering truck“.

There are many delightful aspects to this particular humiliation: it involves his Qatari bribe plane being insufficiently Air Force One-y, the realization that he used the WH press corps AND his own staff as a decoy for the (alleged) would-be assassins, and finally, it’s just a terrible terrible optic for the most vain man in the world. Donald Trump, all six foot eight and a trim 205 pounds of him, a man whose chiseled face has been the only thing both mountains and currency have been begging for for decades, blubbering with fear as he is herded into an aluminum box that smells like bologna.

Outstanding.

And yet, questions arise! Given that the deliberate de-professionalization of every system of government that has been the crusade of this iteration of the Trump Administration, is there any such thing as “a credible threat”?

Obviously there remains the entirety of the military-industrial complex (diversifying into tech), and the military/intelligence footprint of the United States is as big as it ever was. But Trump and the TV hosts who manipulate him have been pruning military personnel for reasons as diverse as not being a man and not being a white man.

And those who remain, those who can pass a lie detector test while testifying to Trump’s awesome handsomeness, do not give the impression of competence. Be it targeted prosecutions being tossed by angry judges or the reluctant refusal of a compromised Supreme Court to rubber stamp un-Constitutional executive orders, be it losing a war of choice, no Trump toady comes off as good at much. Many of them come off as lucky each morning not to catch their business in the zipper of their trousers.

So then, if a rumor of the Trump Administration receiving a “credible threat” to whichever plane Trump was planning to fly on, then I scratch my head, as I don’t trust the intel gathering, the analysis or the presentation to POTUS.

It seems just as likely that someone sitting at a desk got an email insinuated that Trump said he thinks there is a threat from Iran and so if there is not a threat in the inbox by the end of day, then someone might be too woke to be coming back to the office tomorrow.

Even that the “credible threat” made it to the Oval without getting shot in the face by an ICE agent in a gaiter and two-sizes-too-small tactical gear beggars belief.

It just seems to me to be less than responsible to report such matters in the context of the assumption of expertise on the part of the Administration.

Further to this right-before-bedtime Bluesky post:

A fun new problem of my middle age is "What to do with rage?"

— Brent Cox (@titivil.bsky.social) 2026-07-31T01:39:11.899Z

The rage I am thinking of is not the rage at the motorist who nearly ran you down in the crosswalk, or the teen on the subway who won’t move her bags from the seat for an obviously-pregnant lady. Naturally rage springs forth from such things, trickles of indignation and disapproval.

Neither am I referencing the feeling at the end of every day that the list of the things you wanted to do is longer than the list of things that you did, and the creeping feeling that the idea of working hard so that the day will come that you can seize the moment and squeeze every last drop out of life was a deliberate lie all along. That’s just the human condition. People who have that figured out are weirdos.

More like this: you see a news story, and you skate right past it because skating right past things is what you’ve been doing all along, but then your brain unbidden sucks the context out of it and you realize: only truly evil people would do this, or allow this to happen, or to live through this and shrug. Helplessness in the face of the open embrace of historical-atrocity levels of evil.

Cognitive dissonance as big as a cloud, terminally gaslit. None of this was supposed to happen and we keep turning to each other and confiding, “None of this was supposed to happen,” and then going on our way, right into all of this insisting on happening.

Basting in the Trump nonsense in the face of all this–Trump isn’t causing the slow degradation of all things, but he is certainly hastening it. And being an American at this point in the history of the planet is like being forced to accompany Nero on cello as he fiddles. My mere existence aids and abets these American atrocities, and sometimes it all percolates into calcified rage.

The realization that the world you leave will be a far worse world than the one you were born into. It makes me a little sad, but, well, you can’t write about rage and omit the word incandescent.

And the rage-iest part? Knowing that you’re not alone in this, that this terrible terrible place is a small part really bad people and a much larger part wondering when it’s time for something useful to happen with all the rage.

You may have heard: this week progressives had a good primary election in New York State. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani adroitly endorsed DSA candidates who had a shot at winning, and did not endorse candidates who did not have a shot at winning. The endorsed candidates won, upsetting two sitting Congressmembers.

You may also have heard that this electoral success is a bad thing, some sort of war on the Democratic Party.

I don’t want to link anyone up (as I am not here to ruin anyone’s day, in this instance), but here are some thoughts I’ve stumbled across in my media diet.

We are witnessing MAGA equivalent of destruction of Democratic Party through election of progressive Socialists… We need moderates.

We, what?

I say this with no ill will or animosity: if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination.

All of us are a little frustrated with the Democratic Party. But you don’t blow it up. That’s what MAGA has done.

Before we get too deep into this, causation and correlation are getting a little confused here, as is the conflation of running against incumbents with hating the party. (To be fair, a not-insignificant portion of friends/acquaintances actually do hate the party, on grounds of not even pretending to try.)

Also, each of the three races in question had different realities on the ground, and at least one of the candidates (Brad Lander) would’ve won easily without the endorsement, but hackles have raised, and relatively normal fellow citizens are sharing bonkers sentiments.

In any event, this is a bit of a bummer, on the level of hating it when Mom and Dad fight, or maybe mom and one of those racist uncles you wish that your aunt would just divorce already. It makes a little more sense to hear “Democratic Party establishment” when the wailers say “Democratic Party,” as the portion of the electorate excited by Mamdani-aligned candidates may not actually hate the Party per se, but they sure as shit hate the establishment, purely on the grounds that in the rare instances that the establishment has not been complicit in the atrocities committed in the Trump era, they have not put up much of a discernible fight.

Plus there’s the whole beholden-to-billionaires difference of opinion: the establishment wants to keep the wire transfers from billionaires coming in, and the “socialist” voters want the billionaires taxed if not jailed.

There was little chance that this generational shift (if it happens) inside the political party would be painless, and, as they say, hit dogs holler. (Do not hit dogs, FWIW.)

At the end of the day, if the moderate Dems really wanted to avoid this fate, then they would have chosen candidates who would get more votes in the primary.

And if the moderates are “preparing for war” against a bunch of fellow Democrats, then they better hope and pray that they’re even a little bit less toothless than they have been against Donald Trump.

This goes back a bit, but way back in the days of the first Trump administration, there was a joke tweet that seems eerily prescient in hindsight. You can find a straightforward write-up of the event as it happened here, but to summarize: in 2018 journalist/socialite Michael Wolff’s first Trump book, “Fire and Fury,” was published, and it contained what at the time seemed to be juicy Trump revelations (Trump has a terrible diet! Trump is weird!). Amidst the hoopla, a talented Twitter satirist tweeted a (satirical!) excerpt from the book.

The tweet has been deleted, but through the magic of technology, I can tell you that it looked like this:

At the time, many thought that not only was the tweet actually from the book, but that the facts revealed were facts — that Trump believed that there was a Gorilla Channel, that Trump thought the Gorilla Channel was boring, that Trump would say such a thing as “the way you hit that other gorilla was good.”

Of course it was not true, even though it was 100% plausible. It was satire.

Why is this relevant now? Trump’s birthday (80 years young!) approaches, on Sunday, June 14, and on such day, Trump is throwing himself a $60 million dollar birthday party, consisting of people punching each other in the face.

It’s just the Gorilla Channel. There’s not really anything more to unpack than that. Are there other ominous portents contained in the original tweet: Hastily constructed structure on the South Lawn? Yup. Leaning in to whisper encouragement to the gorillas? Super yup. Super yup. But of all the ways Trump has endeavored to befoul and despoil the United States of America, this is at its heart the Trumpiest.

Above all, Trump is an uncurious ignoramus who can only be stirred into anything resembling joy by: (i) the trappings of wealth; (ii) perving after ladies (and girls!); (iii) being told what a special big boy he is; and (iv) violence, whether wanton, cruel or both. Finding himself in circumstances in which (i), (ii) and (iii) are unavailable to him–say, in the middle of the night, in the White House bedroom–it is in those quiet moments of the soul that dreams of a Gorilla Channel rattle around in his empty, senescent head like two or three loose BBs.

And now, on this milestone birthday, he is creating his very own Gorilla Channel, just for him, his friends, and anyone paying his new friend, Paramount, for an SVOD subscription. Oh it’s largely paid for by the punching people in the face company, and sponsors like Bud Light and Monster energy drinks, but it was willed into being by Trump, for whom this gutter spectacle, this assault on the People’s House, is his idea of a good time.

None of this about Donald Trump is not disturbing, like so much else about Donald Trump. But Donald Trump is not the only one yearning for his Gorilla Channel. No matter the awkward flimsy hagiography bestowed upon the “sports” concern involved, it has been always been popular, just like Bum Fights was before it.

The Gorilla Channel tweet was never real, but the Gorilla Channel has always been there, just waiting for its audience to find it.

Yesterday was the day that James Dolan, who is not likeable and who owns the New York Knicks, has decided that the fans of the New York Knicks must be punished.

Not content with poisoning Game 3 of the NBA Finals with the bitter, spiteful, self-regard of his old pal Donald Trump, Dolan declined to provide screens for a planned watch party outside the stadium, scant hours before tipoff.

The Trump miasma was bad. The Knicks were never out of Game 3, but they were cold nonetheless. The Knicks lost but were not walloped. The toxic Trump residue continued to be effective on Wednesday, as the Spurs closed out the half of Game 4 with a 27 point lead.

But just as a sell-out MSG’s-worth of booing could not keep Trump from dozing off, the tenacity of the Knicks could not be held down by the combined effort of the San Antonio Spurs and the NBA Referees, as New York rallied from down 29 late in the third quarter to a two point victory.

In discussing his decision to screw over fans of the franchise he owns, Dolan blamed the mayor and the NYC Police Commissioner, which is, on the face of it, feckless. Dolan claimed to want a bigger watch party, which bigger watch party he did not lift one rich finger to cause. Mamdani’s response to the canceled watch party was to arrange for the game to be telecast on all the city’s link kiosks.

When James Dolan cancels the watch party outside MSG, we bring the watch party to you.Thanks to the @nba.com, Knicks Game 4 is now playing on dozens of LinkNYC screens across our city.LGK.

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@mayor.nyc.gov) 2026-06-11T01:57:17.291Z

It’s early for speculation as to the real reason Dolan lashed out at fans, as the ink is barely dry on the morning edition of the New York Times (which of course contains no news on the greatest NBA Finals comeback of all time, as they go to press at 6m the previous day). Some say that Dolan is mad that his good, sleepy buddy got booed into the Hudson River, which spoiled Dolan’s very special Presidential time. It’s also quite possible that word of Mayor Mamdani’s appearance on Pablo Torre Finds Out, in which Mamdani failed to mention that Dolan was smart or handsome, reached Dolan, and Dolan reacted in kind.

My working theory as to why Dolan, in the midst of an historic NBA Finals run, decided to do all this? James Dolan is a dick.

This moment, of widespread joy and civic pride and all the small positivities that come from that, to which moment Dolan is expressly unwelcome, may well turn out to be the moment that James Dolan is Jokerized into running for president of the United States.

Which would be hilarious.

Knicks in five.

Even as day breaks on the Knicks’ surprisingly dominant Game 1 win in the NBA Finals, I wonder: Why do people dislike Knicks owner James Dolan?

Is it because his family’s ugly midtown stadium Madison Square Garden enjoys a criminally generous tax deal?

Is it because of his Big-Brother inspired chokehold on MSG attendance (even by former players)?

Is it because his shitty bar band is a tribute act to other tribute acts?

Is it because he decided that the one thing the Vegas Strip needed was a perpetual eyesore?

I may have figured out the answer.

Lost in the hoopla over Trump claiming that he’ll visit MSG during the NBA finals (which hoopla mostly consisted of slavering over the possibility of Trump getting booed right out into the middle of Eighth Avenue on national television) was that Jim Dolan was asked for comment on the story. The invitation for Trump was apparently from Dolan, so it’s a fair question for a journalist to ask and Dolan to respond with a perfunctory No Comment. But no comment is not the Main Character way, and accordingly nor is it the Jim Dolan way.

“I’m a member of Mar-a-Lago, and I support him as a friend,” Mr. Dolan said. “And you don’t have to agree with everything that he’s doing in order to support him. And he’s, by the way, our president, and I don’t understand people who wish our president to do badly. Why would you wish your president to do badly? It’s like wishing that your milkman will bring you sour milk.”

It is a non-apology apology, dripping and limp. Dolan acknowledges that some don’t like some of the things the president is doing, but fails to mention which things, or if Dolan is one of the some who don’t like them. He then slams the brakes with a by-the-way that vilifies the things-not-likers for not liking things, like an alibi for a crime Dolan was never accused of.

It is as if Dolan has had media training, but he got bored halfway through and then got mad at the media trainer for boring him, so mad that Dolan instructed the MSG camera-thugs to make sure that God-damn media trainer never steps foot into his stadium, the stadium that Dolan earned all by himself, by dint of his talent, brains and dedication.

The incoherence of Dolan’s quote is matched only by the late-hours online communications of the fellow who Dolan supports as a friend, and as a dues-paying member of his friend’s dacha.

Dolan’s statement is Dolan trying to share a little Jim Dolan magic, but then remembering that nobody likes him, so then to hell with everyone.

And that is why people dislike James Dolan (and sorry fellas, they do and they will): he is not likeable.

Look, I don’t know if you’re the sort to read a headline, but I think I’ve discovered a positive use-case for AI, and it’s one that those fleece-wearing techbro DOGE-erlords haven’t even thought of yet. Not as a trial balloon, not as a steel man, not even as a false flag.

Now, it may sound like something against fleece. Understandable. I mean, I used “fleece” as the runway for my little run at ad-homineming the men and… woman (?) who are the authors of this sea of tech we are wading through, sometimes up to our knees, sometimes up to our armpits, sometimes we even have to hold our noses! So all that grotty tech doesn’t go up our noses!

So yeah. Fleece. Like those fleece sleeveless quarter-zip vests all the tech- and tech-aspirant folk started wearing 10 or 15 years ago. Which is strange if you think about it: was it really that cold in all the co-working spaces and incubator campuses back then that one had to wear an extra layer? A layer without anything that covers your fingers, your nose or the top of your head (which is of course where all your personal heat escapes, if you are in an over-airconditioned open-concept Slack-mine).

I mean sheep are great! Though they are scary, with their cloven hooves and their sideways eyeballs, all very Satan-y. Which is maybe where this all came from? The Satan part? Like, in 2010, some coding edgelord went on Fark (in a fleece) and said, “I will certainly solve poverty and starvation, just as soon as this micropayment app makes me a centi-billionaire. Almost certainly,” and then all the good-hearted were like, “SATAN! FLEECE! ACTUALLY, JUST FLEECE, IS WHAT I MEANT TO SAY!”

Jesus, if that first edgelord had kids at the time, those kids would almost surely be old enough to vote? Definitely drive. Vape? Is there an age limit (lower) for vaping?

Yeah no. Maybe no more of the fleece thing, from me, on a going-forward basis, on account of I, like most of you, can do better!

Anyhow.

So the positive use-case for AI? It makes life hard for dudes named Al. These dudes, they see all the headlines? “AI uses more power than Australia.” “AI perfects schizophrenia injection.” “Savor those bananas while you still can, because AI has decided they will be destroyed forever.” Dudes going by Al have got to feel pretty bad after a decade or so of reading that!

This is of course very good news for all of you who have an Al in your life whom you despise!

I just wanted to put this in writing, because the fog of war (excursion?) is too thick and swirly, the coverage too careful, to keep the actual narrative of what the fuck just happened in my head.

So. Way back when, Donald John Trump became president, by virtue of a combination of fuckery and a rotting, sclerotic body politic. In the four years of that presidency, he perpetrated all sorts of evil and moronic shit, but was prevented by institutional guardrails and a lack of imagination from actually destroying the world. Even his effort to install himself as Dotage King was foiled by a generally flaccid effort to do so.

During this dark time, Iran was a minor issue for him. Mostly, he was pissed off that a previous, decidedly non-Caucasian president signed an arms control deal curbing Iran’s capability to manufacture nuclear weapons. He didn’t invade Iran or anything, but he did unilaterally break the agreement, which had been working. But then COVID happened and everyone danced in the streets when he lost the 2020 election.

Flash forward four years: Trump is unhealthier and smellier, plus also president again. Whether Trump decided he no longer wanted advisors to tell him no ever again, or only sincerely corrupt and subservient people could bear to be in Trump’s employ, he tapped a cadre of truly broken people for Cabinet level positions, including a TV host Secretary of Defense with a White Nationalist tattoo and a deep insecurity–all aligned with Trump in his desire to do stupid shit, like promoting measles and murdering protesters.

It was murder that really caught Trump’s eye. Even before the murdered protesters, he had the TV host start murdering Central American fishermen at sea and claiming they were drug smugglers (as if murdering drug smugglers was somehow permissible, legally or morally). Anonymous boats go boom, the video plays for Trump (on TV), and no one impeached him, so that feeling he felt when people died because of his say-so–Trump decided he would like more and more.

But while he was getting off on that, he realized that he was mortal, as various parts of his body were necrotic, so he was worried about his legacy. Sure, he was obviously the most handsome, smart and popular man in human history, he told himself, but he had not refashioned the entire planet in his own image. As an extra, more murdering!

Iran was the obvious solution. Nobody liked them, plus they never got what was coming to them in his first term. So, despite the fact that the US and Iran had been negotiated arms control measures, they had a little Twelve Day War in the summer of 2025–death from above it was. Israel started it–a week’s worth of missile attacks at Iran’s nuclear development facilities and scientists, and US stuck a toe in at the end with a couple Tomahawks.

Trump declared total destruction of Iran’s nuclear program. The international community declared that the bombings had no legal basis. And Iran declared that the US was a shitty negotiating partner.

The destruction of Iran’s nuclear program was was so total that that weapons talks resumed in 2026. These talks ended up being super useful to Trump and his TV host Secretary of Defense, as they served to distract Iran from Trump’s surprise (sneak) attack of Iran, this time targeting heads of state and schoolgirls.

The start of the Big Beautiful War was (EST) a Friday night going into Saturday morning, so that Trump could not only get his murder fix but also ruin everyone’s weekend.

It was a decapitation strike, combined with a sneak attack, all very Geneva Conventions-y, and all overseen from the Winter War Room, which is basically a couch fort at a Mar-a-Lago AYCE. Death rained from the skies, said the TV host to the TV cameras, and Trump, watching TV giggled girlishly.

A bunch of Iranian leadership was killed right off. Also killed (schoolgirls notwithstanding) were the minor officials that were hoped to fill the leadership vacuum in a more pliant fashion. The US shrugged and started asking around if anyone had any missiles they weren’t using at the time.

Trump and his little Trumpies did not bother to conjure a (fake) rationalization or a (fake) end goal. One of the little fellows must have been students of history, as the strategy seemed to be to let the very serious news outlets project rationalizations/end goals and then argue about them until they got tired and forgot, which saved the trouble of having to worry about morality or Constituitionality or anything like that.

A week in, in order to please Trump with more murder and more perfidy, a US submarine sunk an Iranian frigate. The frigate was in a whole other ocean, returning from a naval exercise in India.

Trump won his little murder war so resoundingly that the global economy starting circling the drain.

Defeated Iran did what every wargamer from the past 30 years knew Iran would do if threatened: asymmetrically attack US allies in the region, and choke off shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Exactly two people alive were caught off-guard by this obvious and inevitable response: the murder President, and the TV host he hired to be bloodthirsty and sadistic.

Only a little less obvious was that the US suddenly needed an ally other than Israel to be involved–Israel was really good at indiscriminate bombing campaigns, but it didn’t so much care about all that other stuff. Trump had not consulted with or advised NATO, or the Saudis, or really anyone at all. They certainly knew about it, as Trump’s Mar-a-Lago opsec was tantamount to yelling state secrets at each other across a ballroom, but they were not asked if they thought it was a good idea, or if they would consider helping with the murder. So Trump took a brief pause from berating and alienating allies in order to cajole, beg and threaten allies into lending a hand.

They said “Fuck you” without even thinking about it, and once they did, they found more elaborate and fun was to say “Fuck you.”

This led Trump to do what Trump does best: mumble at how poorly Trump has been treated, repeatedly, disjointedly and in front of cameras. He was poorly treated in that the allies didn’t help, he was poorly treated because he never needed the allies help, he was poorly treated and please will the allies help, and he was poorly treated because he never asked please will the allies help.

And it’s been a month now, and he commanded network television time last night in which to–no one can quite tell? The NYT and the like sane-washed the speech into something resembling coherence, but that’s the lives they have chosen. What he actually did was do his tight-19, an art performance of his greatest social media posts, all while looking and sounding markedly not well.

But! He got his murder, and plenty of it! His sycophants clapped and compared him to Jesus, and the news that Boomers consume nervously tiptoed around this single fact, which is the fact that I am writing this in order to keep in my head:

Donald Trump wants to write his name in gold in the history books, and also Donald Trump wants people to be murdered because he decided that they should be murdered. He doesn’t care if he starts either or both of a global depression and World War 3.

He wants what he wants and no one in either party in a position to stop him has the courage to do so.

Maybe the surest sign that Blogs Are Back Baby! is that I feel the need to share these few sparse sentences.

In the past months I have started and deleted one or two posts a week. Each of the dearly departed were some flavor of “The world sure is miserable out there, miserable in ways that not only exceed any memory I have of the general misery of the world, but also nearly every conception I had of how miserable the world could become.”

And I am writing this on an afternoon in which employment is spiraling and brent crude is spiking while a war with no rationale continues, giving a quick lunchbreak snapshot into whole new levels of misery waiting around the corner, like the Easter Bunny, but with a scythe instead of a basket of eggs.

I have no need to write things any more than you have any need to read the things I don’t need to write, but I enjoy the process. And I use it to apprehend increasingly meaningless times, which meaninglessness interferes with the whole mechanism of apprehension, which means I go to bed each night feeling even worse.

I mean.

Take care of yourself. Be someone’s friend. Find space for novelty.

And keep your receipts.