Opinion

Donald Trump’s deliberate vandalization of DC, along with our democracy, has reached a tipping point where even his most loyal cultists are questioning his motives.

Just not enough of them…yet.

The headlines out of the Supreme Court came at us in waves Thursday morning, like a barrage of punches to the gut:

• Supreme Court Allows Trump to Block Asylum Seekers at Border
• Supreme Court Allows Trump to End Deportation Protections for Haitians and Syrians
• Supreme Court Strikes Down Hawaii Gun Restriction Limiting When, Where People Can Carry Firearms
• Supreme Court Overturns Jury Award to Missouri Man Who Contracted Cancer Through Use of Weedkiller Roundup

I wondered when the next headline might be, “Supreme Court Approves Name Change of United States to Trump States of America, because the country is entirely his now. The court majority has kowtowed entirely to a madman, transforming us into a nation not of immigrants but white Christian fascists determined to obliterate everything this country once stood for.

After musician after musician pulled out from Trump’s “Freedom 250” concert, he was left with Lee Greenwood, an opera tenor, a couple of military bands, and Kash Patel’s girlfriend. The anthem that made Greenwood a star, “God Bless the USA,” was written in 1985 during the height of the Cold War. It begins with the specter of loss— “If tomorrow—all the things were gone, I’d worked for all my life/ And I had to start all over with my children and my wife.” Then the wounds disappear before they’re felt: “I’d thank my lucky stars to be living here today/ Because the flag still stands for freedom and they can’t take that away.”

Ronald Reagan made the song his campaign theme while launching a new age of American inequality by systematically busting unions and cutting taxes for the wealthiest.

Disgusting, vile, repugnant, supremacists.

I can think of more attributes along these lines to describe the six conservative justices, who handed down three rulings today that, taken together, reveal the naked, ugly face of what this court has become - disgusting, vile, repugnant supremacists.

Mitch McConnell isn't voting this week. His office isn't saying much about why, just that he's been hospitalized. Curt answers, no timeline, no details.

I worked in PR for more than 30 years, and one thing you learn is that when the news is scant, the situation usually isn't good. The less said, the worse it often is.

Hey, wanna see a cult that’s been fully triggered by a public display of basic human goodness and decency?

Head on over to Twitter or Threads, where all of MAGA is short-circuiting over their guy’s last few days of global embarrassments, which began with his UFC slapfest birthday party tanking in the ratings, then continued with his weak and shambolic performance at the G7 conference.

If the chaos of this last year and a half week has shown us anything, it’s that every distraction Donald Trump has manufactured to stop people from talking about the Epstein Files has failed spectacularly.

The UFC fiasco kicked off a week that ended with a full surrender to Iran at Versailles, which was glaring enough. But the Reflecting Pool scandal has also been an excellent visual metaphor representing all of Trump’s failures to distract from his entire administration’s involvement in the biggest political cover-up in American history.

This weekend, the right-wing Italian daily Libero, a major conservative newspaper that shares a fair amount of Donald Trump’s politics, ran a one-word verdict on the President of the United States across its front page. The Italian word is coglione. The polite translation is “idiot.” The translation that George Conway and half of social media reached for, and the one the paper plainly intended, is a good deal blunter than that and more dictionary accurate: “a--hole.”

What set the newspaper off wasn’t the war, or the self-dealing, or the cruelty toward immigrants: it was Trump’s lie about a photograph. He pathetically told an Italian network that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had “begged” him repeatedly for a picture at the G7 in Évian, that she’d wanted it so badly he “felt sorry for her” and went along.

The thing that’s always stood out to me about Donald Trump, besides his cruelty and utter incompetence, is that he’s just so sad and hostile. He comes across as a man who has never experienced a legitimately cheerful moment, aside from the schadenfreude he appears to derive from the misery he inflicts on others.

Take his behavior at the G7 summit this week. He secreted the vibe of a man hellbent on taking revenge against those around him, and all of the other world leaders took note. At this event, and similar to previous ones, he was treated as if he had the plague while, at the same time, seeming disconnected from the moment.