Ray Richmond

It isn’t catastrophizing to assume that Donald Trump is going to do everything we fear he may do to threaten the midterms, if for no other reason than every one of his actions lately demonstrates his belief that no rule or law applies to him — and losing in Congress obviously threatens his base of absolute power.

What Trump has gotten really good at lately is whining, as his Time magazine cover interview last week makes abundantly clear. Wah! You only write bad stories about me! Wah! Your numbers about my polling are fake and the pollsters are corrupt! Wah! You haven’t asked me one positive question! Wah! The Supreme Court votes against me unfairly! I give those guys the position of a lifetime and look what they do to me! Wah! They blame me for the deficit when it’s all Biden’s fault!

Yes, we know. Poor, poor, abused Donnie. It’s all so very unfair....

Let’s just come right out and say it: the Republicans couldn’t do a better job of tanking the midterms if they were doing it on purpose.

Is it possible they are? Or have they just inherited their president’s gift for doing the worst imaginable thing at the worst imaginable time?

I’m talking about the decision of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley – a literal fossil at age 93 – to put Jack Smith on the stand Tuesday to testify under oath, along with the move last week to cancel roughly 760,000 Affordable Care Act enrollees off their health insurance coverage....

Is it just me, or has anyone else also noticed that our president has been melting down even more than usual lately?

That whole “no guardrails” thing, combined with being surrounded by sycophants who are only too eager to do all of his bidding without questioning it and Congressional Republicans who almost without exception remain scared to death of him – plus immunity – has produced a monster who believes no court order applies to him and no law can stop him from doing whatever the hell he wants.

Given the above, I don’t think it qualifies as catastrophizing to conclude that all bets are off when it comes to this guy’s wholly unpredictable behavior and what he’s prone to do when faced with what’s looking like an increasingly likely blue wave washing over the midterms to deliver a Democratic majority in both the House and Senate....

I was reading a story about how Donald Trump had so thoroughly destroyed the Kennedy Center, a once-great arts institution reduced to a pathetic shell by one man’s seemingly deep-seated enmity at John F. Kennedy’s ongoing, and entirely justified, veneration. It was clear that Trump’s goal all along has been to raze the venue and rebuild it as the Trump Center, so egomaniacal is he.

The thing is, this sort of pitiful move is entirely on brand for this president. He is at war with America’s history, the goal being to erase it and install himself as at once the demolisher and self-appointed savior of everything that has been and will be. He is all about marking his territory with toxic urine. If it doesn’t bear his name and/or likeness, he believes it carries no value and must be wiped from the face of the earth.

Indeed, to catalog the institutions, ideals, norms and shared assumptions of American life that Trump has sought to destroy during both his first and (especially) second administrations is to perceive an impossibly voluminous obliteration of things and standards that once seemed permanent and invulnerable....

I’ve heard enough this past week about AI – or as Linda McMahon calls it, A1 — taking over the world and annihilating all human beings that it’s frankly left me kind of worried. I mean, how pathetic would it be if we were able to conquer fear, hate and disease, but we fell prey to software programs?

Pretty disappointing. And Trump's promise that the only guardrail AI needs is a "strong and smart (high IQ!) president" doesn't do much to allay fears.

But in the spirit of, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” I thought I’d go straight to the source of all worldly knowledge to find some answers to the questions that many of us have been asking lately. Because when the going gets tough, the tough go to ChatGPT. And it’s time to stop wondering and start knowing, as the following actual conversation (related here verbatim) demonstrates....