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Jesus, as they say, fucking Christ.

Right on cue, here are the push alerts from the 3 major newspapers lmao

— Erick Fernandez (@erickfernandez.bsky.social) 2026-01-21T14:36:52.904Z

Trump this morning gave his Davos speech which was notable for many things, one of which was not his reassurance that he won’t use force against Greenland. This was meant, as you can see above, with the full might of international news organizations sending push notifications that Trump will not use force against Greenland.

This is frustrating, because, words have no fixed meaning to Trump.

Trump thinks that “affordability” is a “fake word” coined to spite him, he thinks that numbers can be reduced by more than 100%, he is astonished and delighted by the word groceries, which is a word neither astonishing nor delightful, just an item he’s never had to buy himself his entire life.

Hence, taking Trump “at his word” is lunacy.

This is not even about his lying, which–apologies to every news organization in America–he does consistently, habitually and without a single scruple. This is above and beyond his pathological dishonesty: a playing field in which everyone, his allies, his victims, everyone but him is constrained by a mutual consensus that words mean things, and that speech is considered as binding as actions.

For example, if an individual says, “I like the color purple,” then the audience to those spoken words can rely on the fact that the speaker has given more than minimal consideration to their feelings about the color purple, and has determined that the color purple is by gosh fine by them.

When Trump says, “I like the color purple,” those are just sounds coming out of his weird little mouth that may mean that he does like the color purple, or he noticed something purple out of this corner of his eye (the back of his hand?), or just that it seemed like a funny thing for him to say.

To attribute geopolitical assurances to  damn sentence out of all the other sentences  tumbling out of him is naive, and for a journalist to do so is malpractice.

And this is above and beyond the aspect of Trump’s reign in which he talks like a gangster, where threats are always implicit and never fixed in a manner in which it could be entered as evidence. See:

Attn news commentators: Trump saying he could use force to obtain Greenland but won’t is not Trump saying he won’t use force to obtain Greenland. It is Trump using force as a threat to obtain Greenland. That is why he mentions it.

— Philip Bump (@pbump.com) 2026-01-21T14:16:18.480Z

Living through this is hard enough without be gaslighted by the grown-ups we’ve relied on to explain the events of the current day, the journalists who are being outwitted by the profundity of Trump’s mental decline.

What a year these past weeks have been.

I went to bed the night of Friday, January 2 feeling weirdly hopeful for the months to come, and then Trump started sploshing his Trump everywhere, starting in Venezuela (which was the news that confronted me seconds after waking up on the 3rd), and now not two weeks later Trump is having his brownshirts murder Americans in the street.

So here: have a little victory.

There is this wedge of cheese. A double cream brie.

I got it at Stew Leonard’s on New Year’s Day, which is a dumb but satisfying tradition we have–going to a Stew Leonard’s on a day when you know no one will be there. Because Stew Leonard’s is awesome but feels like Times Square on normal shopping day.

But back to the cheese.

It is a wedge, cut instore from a larger cheese and then packaged for individual sale, wrapped in food grade plastic cling wrap. Nothing out of the ordinary about that. The problem presented, however, by the ordinary practice of wrapping cheeses and cheese-like comestibles in cling wrap is that, once you remove the item from the cling wrap, it is impossible to rewrap the item in the cling wrap.

Why would this be a problem? The problem is the label. The label–traditionally a paper sticker with print on one side and adhesive on the other–is, also traditionally, affixed to where the ends of the cling wrap are gathered, which then seals the cling wrap to the point where there is no chance that the packaging will open itself (generally frowned upon in the grocery trade). But when you open it, tearing off the label, the label gets all messed up, and rips a bunch of the cling wrap with it.

Basically, you have your bit of cheese for a snack, and now you have a big naked slap of remaining cheese and the shredded remnants of the cling wrap, useful for nothing other than landfill.

I have also experienced this issue with some bakeries, like She Wolf, who use a sticker to seal the bag, which sticker is affixed to a clear plastic panel on the bed, which rips into little pieces upon opening, leaving a giant hunk of baguette or Pullman in a bag that is compromised beyond use, and so you have to improvise with NYT bags and rubber bands or else your delicious bread will be a doorstop/hockey puck in scant hours.

But Stew Leonard’s has solved the problem!

Check this shit out:

Perhaps not super clear from the photographs, but instead of a paper sticker, Stew’s is using a plastic sticker whose adhesive is not as muscular as a paper sticker.

Hence, you can use the plastic sticker to reseal the cheese in the event that you don’t eat the whole thing.

Possibly other outlets are doing the same. It would not surprise me. But Stew’s has always been an innovator in the space, notably with regard to animatronics. (Obligatory shout out to Jungle Jim’s, another high achiever in this regard.) So Mr. Leonard, if that is in fact your name: THANK YOU.

This is not a problem that has ever cost me a wink of sleep. However, the solution to the minor problem is welcome and worth sharing. And, I can say with some confidence, this small victory may well be the largest victory of calendar 2026 to date.

Further to the previous post: even more acts have consciously uncoupled from the Kennedy Center, which Center was perfectly fine until Donald Trump smeared Trump all over it.

The situation reminds me of this post of Hamilton Nolan’s How Things Work from earlier this month titled “If He Builds It, Tear It Down,” providing a prescient bit of advice on how to digest these news items.

As soon as Republicans leave the White House, the next president should tear it down.

Nolan is writing about the ballroom that Trump commanded to be built on top of what used to the the East Wing of the White House, but it applies universally to all such fuckery.

It should be noted that Trump’s pathological obsession with slapping his name on stuff and/or turning DC into a gilt-bomb of Mar-a-Lagocity has nothing to do with the animating forces of his current administration–to wit, Stephen Miller’s genocidal bigotry, Russell Vought’s monomanical intent to murder all non-military aspects of the federal government, and Marco Rubio’s ultimate goal of withdrawing America from any international entanglement outside of the Western Hemisphere. Building ballrooms and statue gardens and curating armrests is what Trump is spending his time on, when not leading dear-leader sessions or slurringly rambling at the press corps. It’s what he cares about, and it’s what distracts him from any care or concern over the actions of his administration.

All the evil shit, like disappearing citizens and blowing up innocent fishermen? That’s his day job. Picking out gold leaf is what he does for love.

This would be a bit charming, were not evil twisted men manipulating him into committing atrocity after atrocity. (And were he not deeply evil himself.)

Fortunately:

The pendulum is going to swing hard, motherfuckers. Hard enough to smash those walls into dust.

Subscribe to Hamilton Nolan! He’s a top-notch writer, and he occasionally allows himself to share exhortations with the reader, which I find apt and useful. You won’t regret it.

That Trump insists on refashioning institutions in his own image is largely not permitted is besides the point–refashion he will, as surely as Andrew Cuomo slapped his dad’s name on the Tappan Zee bridge. And even when he names something after himself on a legitimate basis, it is an act that bespeaks cringe and not confidence.

Obviously the political will to oppose this bloated namifying, if it exists at all, should be expended on more dire tendrils of Trump’s fascism (disappearing our neighbors, codifying racism and bigotry, conducting illegal wars, etc.). And yet.

Over the holidays, musician Chuck Redd, who has hosted a Kennedy Center Christmas Eve concert called Jazz Jam since 2006, canceled this year’s show on five days’ notice. The reason given was Trump’s decision to (awkwardly) rename The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts after himself.

In response, Trump toadies did what Trump toadies always do: issue performative statements and threaten legal action. Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi issued a statement that claimed:

Any artist cancelling their show at the Trump Kennedy Center over political differences isn’t courageous or principled—they are selfish, intolerant, and have failed to meet the basic duty of a public artist: to perform for all people.

And the Trump-installed president of the Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell, issued a statement in the form of a letter to Rudd.

If you are not familiar with Richard Grenell, he is a longtime consultant/GOP functionary who found his true calling when he realized that lickspittling Donald Trump was the road to success. Since then, he has been ambassador to Germany and Director of National Intelligence, and, early in the second Trump administration, integral in securing the release of the Tate brothers from Romania, where they had been held on charges of sex trafficking and rape. Grenell is truly the utility infielder of Trump sycophants.

Grenell’s “letter” to Rudd is a brief couple hundred words of character assassination with a nod to “certain elements of the left” and a threat to sue. And in case you were wondering, the Trump-led Kennedy Center is doing just great:

Our innovative KC Speakeasy—an intimate rooftop after-hours venue featuring live jazz—has consistently sold out, attracting diverse audiences and revitalizing the genre in exciting ways.

The most interesting aspect of the legal threat is its arbitrariness. The grounds for such action cited are Rudd’s “dismal ticket sales and lack of donor support, combined with [Rudd’s] last-minute cancelation,” which seem to be two valid claims forced to share a studio apartment against their will, and the amount of damages sought–“$1 million”–is entirely unsupported, although a nice round number.

Further, and I speak from experience, customarily when performing artists agree to perform at a venue on a future date, this exotic legal mechanism known as a “contract” is employed, which sets forth the terms of agreement on things like, time, place, compensation and–I’m not kidding–what happens if one side or the other cancels the show.

In any event, while consisting of more words than Trump would ever read in one sitting, the letter remains a limp attempt to look busy for Boss Trump, and an even limper swing at bullying Rudd and artists like Rudd who would just rather not.

Trump toadies claim that these are “political” acts. I think that is only vaguely true. If Rudd or any future artists cancel with stated motivations of opposition to policies (and there are a lot of rancid policies to choose from), then sure! Political act. However, opposition to Trump pathologically insisting that the entirety of American society must be Trump-branded isn’t a political decision, it’s a personal decision. Rudd (et alia) aren’t opposing anything Trump has done other than make it about Trump. They are refusing to bend the knee to the self-proclaimed emperor.

As a person who has made art in the past and intends to make art in the future, I say that the assertion that there is a “duty to perform” on behalf of a “public artist” is fucking horseshit, and any outlet that repeats such assertion without a modifier is not very good at their job. There are no obligations or duties intrinsic to the act of making art, and to claim otherwise is to tell on one’s self. The outrage of the toadies is aimed at the refusal of others to toadie, no matter what “duties” they claim.

To insist that an artist must perform for you is unabashed, late stage fascism. Only dictators insist that an artist must appear and entertain the dictator and his court, and only the most fragile dictators, afraid of what the future may hold for them, will threaten an artist with penalty for failing to do so.

And toadies notwithstanding, slapping his name on shit will not convince people that Trump is any less shitty as a president (or a person!), and will keep us all busy re-renaming things once he has shuffled off this mortal coil.

What is at stake here is not our compliance, but rather their own self-regard. Trump can seize all the power, Trump can impose his moldy will on the institutions of the government, but Trump and his stans will never get what they truly want: respect and adulation. No matter how hard they wishcast a Trump Reich, they will never be beloved. The great artists of the world will never perform at their whim, let alone treat them as anything but sad soulless uncouth motherfuckers.

Right on to the students of Saeed Jones:

Just finished office hours and when I tell you every single student started their meeting by saying how excited they are about Zohran. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them so hopeful. One student said “I needed a win.”

— Saeed Jones (@theferocity.bsky.social) 2025-11-05T18:56:49.922Z

I don’t know if it’s a win I needed as much as a sense that actual normal Americans are ready to fight. Because the slow motion, full-society gaslighting that is Donald Trump is making off with increasingly large bits of everyone’s sanity, with each passing, atrocity-filled week.

But back to Zohran Mamdani, and the qualities that made him Mayor-elect: simply, he’s a charismatic guy who made a point of campaigning for something and not against something, to represent a constituency that he actually cheerleads.

Eric Adams’ New York was a grim hopeless place in which the poorest of us had to make sacrifices for the comfort for the richest of us. (For that matter, Andrew Cuomo’s NYC was a placed he was raised in 50 years ago and avoided ever since. And Curis Sliwa’s still has “muggers” on the subway.) Mamdani’s New York is not a storybook or a fairy tale. It is the New York that all but the billionaires actually live in, and Mamdani is one of us, gleefully.

And underlying his charismatic embrace of Gotham, is an innate competence, as Frank Rich describes:

A smart, focused guy who listens to others and welcomes tough questions; who is transparent and consistent on the core political convictions that guide him; who is not an ideologue or a glib Pez dispenser of consultantspeak; and, no less important, who knows what he doesn’t know.

The significance of mayoral win is not just the W on the board. It’s the restoration of certain qualities of public figures that have been consigned to the Trumpheap of history: honesty, wisdom and hubris.

Whether “my team” wins or loses–I don’t think in such terms. In fact I think that (along with all the other ways that our society is broken) thinking of governance as some sort of tribal warfare is profoundly bad for society, a bloody zero-sum game that no one ever wins.

I think the election of Mamdani is good for me, as I like Mamdani, but good for every normal person in this city, who is animated by anything other than spite and greed. It’s good for his legion of volunteers, it’s good for his reluctant voters, and it will good for all those who embraced the bigotry of Cuomo.

Hell, it’s even good for Donald Trump.

You have been afforded the opportunity to be sick of hearing the name Zohran Mamdani. He is running for mayor, so if you live here, you have seen his signage, maybe received a door-knock. He is good at social media, so you may have shared/liked/followed. Also the establishment hates him, so you also may have seen a take or two–or even stories framed as news coverage–about the dangers of Mamdani becoming mayor of the largest city in America.

You may even have heard his name, mispronounced, on the lips of the man whose joyless demand that he be given Gracie Mansion as his birthright was interrupted by losing the primary to Mamdani. But whatever: fuck Andrew Cuomo, that soulless evil piece of drizzling shit.

Me, I voted for Mamdani this morning, and am very excited by his candidacy, not only for the future of the city I live in, but for the effect that having an elected official like Mamdani would have on the vibe, nation-wide. Here’s why:

Zohran Mamdani is running on the premise that if New York can be better, it can also be better for everyone in New York. The wealthy are taken care of in this city, and they always have been. But for decades, under Republican and Democrat administrations, the sole benefit for anyone other than the wealthy has intentionally been the satisfaction that at least the wealthy are taken care of. Public housing is a shambling mound of neglect, our school system has to fight for scraps from billionaire-led charter schools, and our infrastructure crumbles as edifices to the wealthy are built. This is not the worst city to be poor in, but it is a bad city to be poor in.

And Mamdani’s proposals to address this–which are as much FDR liberalism as they are socialist–offer solutions more than the unserious band-aids of tax credits, or reduced-fares. Mamdani gets it that the comfort of the wealthy does not rise to the level of societal problem when the middle class and lower suffer.

Can it happen? I don’t know. But what if we fucking tried?

As Mamdani eloquently (always) put it yesterday:

UNTIL IT’S DONE, Ep. 5: Vito MarcantonioThere are many who dismiss our vision for New York as impossible. To them, I say we need look only to our past for proof of how we can shape the future.Tomorrow is Election Day. And this is the final Until It's Done of our campaign.

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@zohrankmamdani.bsky.social) 2025-11-04T04:14:19.749Z

“Are we brave enough to believe in a city that benefits us all?”

Damn, but he is good. And I don’t mean to pretend that Mamdani has never had media training, and, if he has, that he has not benefited from it. But so many candidates (and elected officials) communicate in such a contrived manner as to appear in a constant state of disingenuity–weird polish that never traverses the Uncanny Valley. Mamdani appears to believe what he says when he is saying it.

There is also the effect that Mamdani has had so far, as a straw man. The forces aligned to stop Zohran Mamdani at any cost include not just usual suspects like Mayor Adams, the NYPD, Trump and Trump toadies like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller and pathetic nobody Bill Ackman, but also Andrew Cuomo and the entire centrist wing of the Democratic Party. At first glance, a very big tent. However, at second glance, the secret revealed is that these unlikely bedfellows are not unlikely at all, but united in what they fear. Putting a name on what they fear will be an interesting task.

But for now, we wait and see what happens. (One thing that’s happened: Results are not even in, and Establishment Dems are already publicly wringing their hands.)

Hopefully, the chance that you are tired of hearing the name of Zohran Mamdani will continue.

I have a lot of books.

They are literally all over the house, on shelves, stacks, tables. Our apartment is basically a little less than fifty percent comprised by my books. They may well be load-bearing.

This is something that has brought me great joy. The look of them, the smell of them. They have accompanied me on this long journey, always a few (“few”) more with each passing year.

We even have a storage unit, which was not primarily for the books, but once the storage unit was a possibility, some books found their way over. To make room for more books, of course. And no trip to store more stuff in the storage unit is complete without popping open a box of two of books and grabbing a handful to bring back, to be stacked, in the bedroom, or the bathroom, or in the entry way.

Mutely these books have stood witness through a whole lot of eating dinner and watching TV and sleeping and reading the other books. Beneath their silent gaze, I have grown from a young man, to a man who is not really young at all, no matter how he dresses. Through years and years of good decisions and bad decisions and all the decisions in between.

These books are my friends, of course, but now that I have attained the age in which one scans the obituaries with a keener interest than before, I am realizing that as I am childless, someday–hopefully someday so far in the distance that the urine on the president’s tombstone will itself be old enough to have little urine children of its own–all these books will be somebody else’s problem.

This concerns me, but only a little, as when such time as the books are somebody else’s problem, they will be beyond my (earthly) control.

But what does concern me, what stopped me in my tracks when the realization came crashing down on my bad haircut, is this: No matter how young or old I am, there will never be enough time to read all the books I want to read. If I were to retire tomorrow, and devote my waking moments solely to reading, when all is said and done the books in the “To Read” pile will be no smaller than when I started. This was true 25 years ago, and it will be true 25 years from now.

This assertion is based purely on the books written and published to date, and not books to be written/to be published. Woe betide anyone who dares thumb through this week’s issue of the New York Times Book Review, or opens a Tuesday email from Bookshop. How long would it take to read all the books you want to read published in a single year? In a single week?

Sometimes it seems, as literacy withers and dies, that the whole bunch of us who read books are outnumbered by the other whole bunch of us who write books. Surely this can’t be true, or at least is only true in incremental part.

It doesn’t make me feel lost, or bereft, only a little sad.

Which, in this national environment of spiraling shittiness, wondering which of our neighbors secretly voted for someone who is (feebly) deadset on killing all who dare not kneel before him, is a cute little distraction from all the other bad things.

And naturally no reason not to get more books.

I would hate for tomorrow to pass and the Rapture to happen, before I got to put into writing my Rapture story.

So I was raised a Christian, a dishwater Baptist. My folks were not churchgoing types but my grandparents were, so as a three- and four-year-old, I spent my Sunday mornings with my Gran Gran, at services. I was a hit, and for a while there, a Ring-Bearer for hire. However, even with all that, and the vacation bible school, the Word didn’t find a place in me to set a hook. (That came later, briefly. Different story.)

So I had a cursory knowledge of the Christian landscape when later, as a voraciously-reading pre-teen, I happened across a pamphlet. The pamphlet was about how in 1982, which was still a couple years away, the planets would align, like in a straight line from Sun to Pluto. This was an exaggeration of an astrological phenomenon that did happen–the planets weren’t in a straight line at all, more like an infield shift.

But the other exaggeration in this particular pamphlet was that the Rapture was going to happen on that day in 1982, and not just the “what clothes should I wear for the Rapture” Rapture, but sincerely apocalyptic shit: the moon would turn to blood and airplanes would fall out of the sky as cartoony angels–your neighbors! your airplane pilot!–sweetly wafted to the heavens, all of which was luridly illustrated, as was the fashion for these sorts of pamphlets. And as if that were not enough, there were bonus pages at the end, featuring a thousand years of war for those unlucky enough not to have asked Jesus Christ into their heart as their own personal savior–a specific and Baroque requirement that also oddly presaged the second Trump presidency. A seriously bummer millennium.

I do not remember how this DIY mimeographed bit of scruffy paranoia found its way into my grubby little hands, or even how if found its way out, but the message of doom hit me hell hard.

As a consequence, I did not sleep very well from 1979 until 1981 or so, when my concerns for my eternal soul (or worse, for being left behind) were subsumed by adolescence.

And then, of course, in 1982 nothing happened. Zilch.

Looking back, I mostly feel embarrassed and dumb for falling for such risible horseshit, but boy did I. And it wasn’t for another decade that I cast those concerns out of the temple of my mind like a bunch of money changers, but I still carry the trauma with me.

Note that the really true believers, the end-of-the-world cultists, never experience the same sort of trauma, because tomorrow’s just another day, a day in which the Lamb of God could possibly call the faithful to his side and the lamentations of the wicked shall bla bla bla whatever.

I wanted to get this Rapture story out before EOD not just in case I’m wrong, but rather so that all the smug fundie weirdos will have something to read on Wednesday morning, before the shock wears off and they go back to being racist and filling the coffers of Campus Crusade or whatever the Charlie Kirk grift is called, and dream nightly of being proven maliciously righteous, of having learned the lesson that there is no lesson to learn.

There have been very many bad things and a handful of good things written about the demise of Charlie Kirk. Read the good ones, and maybe read this one bad one so that you never feel like you have to read Ezra Klein ever again.

I don’t have a lot to add to that particular soup, even though I am blessed with an employer that would not punish me for saying that Charlie was a gutter racist and bigot who made an awful lot of money by pretending to be polite. Others have said similar, at an actual risk.

In the meantime, failure to properly observe Kirk’s death are being met with varying calls for punishment. For example, if you are an NFL team that did not have a moment of Charlie silence, if you criticize the half-masting of the flag for Charlie (which also earns you a tsk-tsking from a retired Jet), or if you refuse to print non-decorated cake flyers for Charlie vigils.

Even social media platforms are not immune to this proscribed decorum, as Rep. Clay Higgins shoots off a sternly worded letter demanding censorship from the platforms, and The Federalist suggests that Bluesky be punished for… existing?

Let it be noted that many of these punishments are being levied not for celebrating Charlie leaving us, but rather for repeating (racist, bigoted) words he actually said or wrote. This is what inspired the Washington Post to fire its only black female columnist.

And even if you have complied with the requisite display of grief, the Attorney General has promised that any anti-Charlie speech in the future will be met with legal threats from the Trump Department of Justice.

This is the first time in my lifetime that Americans have been told that failure to mourn a specific individual is a crime. Further, I can think of no example of this in the American history I was taught in school. I’m not really read up on the Soviet Union or Mao’s People’s Republic of China, but I would not be surprised to read that compulsory demonstrations of this sort of adoration were par for the course.

Here’s another one, from Billionaire-whisperer Bari Weiss.

Not only is the alleged not an act but an omission, but the gravity of the things that didn’t happen give Bari the power to read actors’ minds (and a convenient misremembering of history).

There are a lot of people who do not care about this, as it is a very Fox News concern, and Fox News, while monolithic, averages 2.5 million viewers during prime time, which is not even one percent of the citizenry. Normal people have no idea who Charlie was and why they should care. Not to blame them, as the current information environment, being even ill-informed is a luxury investment in one’s time. In fact, I’m frequently jealous of them.

But that the entirety of the MAGA Cinematic Universe decided that this was the moment to go all in on groupthink, over some minor political activist whose true skill was not convincing anyone but acquiring money and power for himself, speaks of the crushing insecurity and paranoia that the fascists are bathing in.

Normal people would generally agree that there is some sort of sin, perhaps minor, in speaking ill of the dead. However, they would generally agree that failing to speak well of the dead does not even rise to a sin of omission.

And obvious to everyone is the clownish flop sweat of those who demand compliance with proscribed performative mourning protocol, who demand not only to be feared but to be loved.

Here in New York City we are currently undergoing a mayoral election. You’d think, what with the economy and the communal PTSD from the pandemic and the looming autocracy, we would deserve a nice calm election, peopled with candidates, each of whose name and distinguishing characteristics are fuzzy in the memory, each beigely promising to upend the status quo in the service of preserving it. Maybe one has funny hair, or is short.

But no.

Our current electoral landscape is dominated by Zohran Mamdani, who has, by dint of his likeability and social media skills, has become enormously popular amongst the populace in the course of three or four months.

However, the billionaires just hate him. Haaate him. One can conject that the source of this hatred is Mamdani’s self-proclaimed Democratic Socialism, or his various policy proposals (which are very gentle, on the spectrum of socialist policy proposals). I propose that the billionaires hate Mamdani because he does not adhere to the belief that the billionaires are the one constituency of New York City, honest and true. He cannot be bought, and he won’t even tell the billionaires how smart and virtuous they are purely by being billionaires. Accordingly, those who are captured by the billionaires–establishment Democrats and newsrooms, mostly–manifest this hate with ham-fisted foot-dragging and I’m-just-saying dis-endorsements.

There are other candidates in this race. One was a governor, and the other is currently the mayor. One has enormous baggage, as does the other. Both are polling terribly, and yet both are the preferred candidates of the billionaires, although the billionaires have yet to coalesce around one or the other.

That is, but for one billionaire, President Trump, whose shadow has loomed over the election like a much bigger version of his actual shadow. Trump has grumbled at the fact that Mamdani is a communist, and has signaled that he wants to clear the field so that anti-Mamdani candidates don’t split the vote. And while Trump already has a proscribed, groveling relationship with Mayor Adams (running as an independent), Trump’s preferred candidate: Andrew Cuomo (also running as an independent. And to clear the field: an offer to pay off Adams with a Trump Administration gig. Adams has so far refused, but bribery is one of those things Adams has a hard time saying no to.

There is also a candidate running on the Republican line. He likes hats and cats.

Trump doesn’t want Mamdani to be mayor. Trump is using presidential power to try to clear the field of candidates so that the anti-Mamdani vote isn’t split. Trump, purely by habit and by choice, is big-footing all the non-Mamdani candidates. Trump, again purely by habit and by choice, has made the election one between Mamdani and Trump, who is not running but apparently has a lot of time on his hands.

This raises the question: if Trump is so exercised over this matter, why isn’t Trump using his (according to him) unequaled popularity directly? He has claimed a “massive mandate”–if he’s so popular, then why doesn’t he come to New York City and take Cuomo by the arm and go kiss some babies?

Obviously, the idea of Cuomo and Trump on even a brief tour of baby-kissing is the kind of optics that lose elections forever. You and I know this. But does Trump?

All of this is to say: Trump-whisperers wonder if Trump realizes the abysmal depths of his unpopularity, even as he posts on his little social media site about his historically good numbers and universal international respect and being a scratch golfer. Imagining Trump to contemplating his own public-facing odiousness–in a spare moment in between the ritual humiliation of his Dear Leader meetings–just doesn’t pass the smell test.

So what is stopping him? Why will he not come on down and debate Mamdami, and use his unmeasureable charisma to effect his singular will upon the outcome of this particular election?

Maybe the answer is that Trump is not as consumed with blustery omnipotence as he strains to appear in moments of comfort, that Trump is deliberately avoiding the risk of being humiliated without possibility of a plausible denial.

In order to be a coward, you have to know what to be scared of.