It’s a tradition in many militarized cultures, like turkey and cranberry sauce. First comes the military show of force. Then come the goose-stepping troops. You may think this to be a reference to the goons of North Korea, or the vipers of Syria. It is. It’s also a reference to “Fox and Friends.” First, Syria:…
Wilbur Ross was misinformed, and he was sitting right next to the guy. To watch the missiles fly, Donald Trump had assembled his inner circle to a cramped room that looked like a banquet nook at Benihana. Please pass the saké. It was Mar-a-Lago, actually. Being at the new nerve center of western civilization, you’d have…
It’s about the public record now. It’s about Coretta Scott King speaking from the grave to remind us how one-time judge and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions winked in approval from the bench at racist schemes to keep black people from the polls. It’s about our new Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos showing how little…
Act 1 of Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” features a put-down of a hollow braggart who “speaks an infinite deal of nothing.” Sort of reminds of the merchant of Mar-a-Lago and his first act as a legislative mastermind. “On my very first day in office,” said Donald Trump in October, in full bray about the Affordable Care…
The Fujita scale is the “F” by which weather people rate tornadoes. F-1: a carport down. F-5: whole city blocks reduced to grout. We now lean on such comparisons in assessing the shades of disaster that would emanate from Trumpcare, especially compared with what Donald Trump claimed would happen. Trump the campaigner said his plan…
“My, how presidential.” For all those, including the reputedly lucid, who said Donald Trump “turned a new page” with a “presidential” State of the Union, the next page he turned was a bucket of brine right in the kisser. You know now that as he left the House chamber his face turned south from what…
It looks like a simple fountain pen, but then: A flash of hyper-light in the eyes renders a person blissfully ignorant of what he did moments before — remembering nothing. In the movie “Men in Black,” it was called a neuralyzer. Is that the kind of technology the Russians deployed to drain members of Team…
Steve Bannon, the white supremacist-turned-squatter-on-a-president’s-shoulder, says the Trump administration’s war with the news media has only just begun, and it’s “going to get worse.” Right you are, Steve. You just don’t understand which side of the conflict will get the worst of it. Donald Trump doesn’t understand. Otherwise, he would cease using pimply-faced laments to…
Questions to ask after one month of Trump: — Is Stephen Colbert our new Edward R. Murrow? — Is Stephen Miller a human or a hologram? — The same for Kellyanne Conway: real or Memorex? — If the media are, as Donald Trump says, enemies “of the American people,” why are members of the press genuflecting at his…
Revised for johnyoungcolumn nation to reflect events. . . In July, Donald Trump said he’d never spoken to Vladimir Putin. Sure, he hadn’t. Except that in 2014 he said he had — spoken with Putin “indirectly and directly” when in Russia on Miss Universe business. Well, who you gonna believe? Donald Trump or Donald Trump?…