Look at the smiles on those faces. Look at the preening. You’d have thought President Trump and the beaming Republican cohorts standing behind him – Stephen Colbert called it “the strategic white persons reserve” – had just cured cancer. Or accepted ISIS’s surrender. Or returned man to the moon. Or brokered Middle East peace. No.…
Details“The clownish veneer of Trumpism conceals its true danger,” writes David Remnick in The New Yorker. “Trump’s way of lying is not a joke; it is a strategy, a way of clouding our capacity to think, to live in a realm of truth.” What’s it this week? We are asked to “reform” our tax system,…
DetailsThe word is that Donald Trump isn’t much of a reader. Former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Taran Killam affirms this – that then-candidate Trump “struggled to read” when preparing for a dismal guest-hosting of SNL last year. That’s OK, Mr. President. Research finds a broad swath of our population, up to half of us,…
DetailsIt’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:…
DetailsWilbur 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…
DetailsIt’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…
DetailsAct 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…
DetailsThe 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…
Details“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…
DetailsIt 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…
Details