#Steve Schmidt

[justinspoliticalcorner]

The Warning With Steve Schmidt:

Four years ago today, after losing a presidential election, Donald Trump incited an insurrection against the US Constitution. His mob stormed the Capitol, pissed on the walls and shat on the floors. They did $1.5 million in damage, caused injuries to at least 174 of Capitol police officers, and caused the deaths of five people. Trump will soon pardon the January 6 criminals, lionize them, and hang medals around their necks. Have no doubt about this. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has denounced Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Reform Party, saying that he is unfit to lead it. He has also stepped up his interference in the forthcoming German elections. He has also begun severely limiting criticism of himself and others on X with a social media scoring system that is straight out of China.

The Washington Post is in a state of collapse. The paper’s best political writers, journalists and commentators are like the first-class passengers on Titanic being lowered into half-filled life boats taking them to the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, but the truth is that there aren’t enough life boats for all. Everyone is going to want off a ship that is sinking into disgrace. Whatever private commitments were made between the Graham family and Bezos when he bought The Washington Post regarding its stewardship have been shattered. The most incredible part about the capitulations — which are not the least bit surprising — is how quickly they happened, and without so much as a soft whimper or scuffle.

By doing so, most editorial leaders of these institutions have demonstrated the only place they are truly fit to work is the Trump White House. There, they could combine the practice of moral appeasement, fecklessness, dishonesty, weakness and self-interest with being cheered, promoted and celebrated. Instead, these low men and women have to face the reality that the person staring back at them in the mirror is a different version of Lindsey Graham — only they call themselves journalists as opposed to senator. The farce is the same. The cowardice is the same. The record will show that when the starting gun sounded nobody came close to Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski with their Usain Bolt-like dash to Mar-a-Lago. Bezos must look at them through his capitulant lens as visionaries. Perhaps they will have the opportunity to summer aboard Koru, his yacht, with the Lady Sanchez in the south of France. Given that Bezos has green-lit a Melania documentary that explains her reemergence from witness protection, maybe she could be there as well, softly purring about her deep love of Donald and America.

[...] Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and all the rest of America’s oligarchs hold the American people in contempt. Because they do, they can’t see the character of the steelworker, trucker, nurse, teacher or cop. They only see one thing, and that in the end, is why this whole miserable MAGA project will crash and burn. They are locusts preparing to swarm to engorge themselves even though they feel no hunger and want for nothing. Donald Trump will keep pushing until someone, somewhere, some day, effectively pushes back again. I hope that day comes soon because until then they are going to be full speed ahead. By the time the inaugural address is over there will be perfect clarity around what must be fiercely opposed as indecent and un-American.

Steve Schmidt’s column is on the nose here. It’s insulting to see so many people and institutions obey in advance and capitulate to Trumpism, especially the Washington Post.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Davies

* * * *

President Carter, may you have fair winds and following seas

Steve Schmidt

President Carter was one of the six presidents who was born in the first 25 years of the 20th century.

Those six presidents led America between 1960 and 1992, before the first baby boomer was elected.

During this speech President Carter talked about the trauma faced by that generation specifically, and the country in general. He talked about the loss of faith, trust and belief in the future that was taking hold and was being driven by many factors. He painted a picture of the road that would lead to Donald Trump 37 years later.

Jimmy Carter reached out to the American people, and spoke a truth that hurt him politically, but this speech was among the most profound an American president has ever given about the American spirit.

He diagnosed a growing lassitude that was driven by consumerism and emptiness. His entire life was a living devotional towards resisting the temptations of a meaningless life for a principled one. He never cashed in, and never changed anything in which he believed. His convictions were backed by deeds. His wisdom should be better known.

There has never been an American president that lived as long as Jimmy Carter, and no American citizen lived longer as a former president than Jimmy Carter. His life has ended, and all of the politics and recriminations, judgements, actions and decisions of a life that has endured for almost 100 years are gone now.

What is left is the full record of an American icon, global statesman, Navy submariner, Sunday school teacher and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He was married to his wife Rosalynn for 77 years.

Every person who knows him says the same thing. They all say that the Jimmy Carter who became the most powerful man in the world came home as the same Jimmy Carter who left. He led a life of service and integrity.

He was a peacemaker who loved his country, and served it long and well. He was the last surviving member of the generation that fought and won the Second World War, and kept the peace in the dangerous hours of the Cold War.

Wherever there was suffering and injustice in the world the oppressed peoples knew of Jimmy Carter and what he stood for because he stood for them. He stood for the American idea and ideal all through his noble life.

The American people should take a moment and say a prayer of gratitude for Jimmy Carter. Whatever ails America, it still produces people like Jimmy Carter.

Godspeed, Mr. President, on your last journey.

May you have fair winds and following seas.

Thank you for all of your service to America and to all of humanity.

[Steve Schmidt]

+

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

William Shakespeare‬

[my-voice-my-resistance]

Oval Office Ambush: America's Response to Trump's Meeting with Zelenskyy

[isawthismeme]

[doylewesleywalls]

Steve Schmidt, “The Warning,” March 3, 2025

[porterdavis]

Quote of the Day

Romney’s recollections paint a dire picture of a broken institution in which the concepts of duty and service don’t exist. Some of his stories aren’t surprising, but still leave your jaw hanging open as you read what you knew to be true, confirmed by a witness you can trust

Steve Schmidt

[imkeepinit]

We need to face reality

[justinspoliticalcorner]

The Warning With Steve Schmidt:

Donald Trump’s assaults against Canada are a disgrace. They defile the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers on a hundred battlefields around the world where they fought and died for freedom. They kept the peace often side-by- side with their American brothers and sisters in arms.

Canada is a giant nation, not because of her immense geography, but rather the magnitude of her immense contributions towards peace, justice and human progress. Donald Trump’s aggression will fail because Trump is small, and Canada is great. Yet, this season of abject idiocy and insult will long linger. It will long stain our national honor. If that formulation of words seems strange or antiquated to you then please consider that might be a major cause of our current dilemma. A great nation cannot remain so for long when virtue becomes an endangered species, and nobility becomes an alien concept in a society that is built on a foundation of ideas about human liberty — not nihilistic philosophies about the rights of the strong to destroy as they please, and take what they want — whether it be from a person, a family, a community, or a smaller nation. The overwhelming majority of Americans find Trump’s bluster around Canada to be incomprehensibly asinine. They do not take his threats seriously, which is a mistake. It is well past the hour when the White House gangster should be taken both literally and seriously.

It should also be acknowledged that there are far too many Americans walking around with a frightening gleam in their eyes. These are the people who have become excited and enthralled around the idea of smashing and burning everything they see so it can be great. What I am describing is a human sickness. It is manifesting itself in a place — the United States — where generations thought it could not. Yet, it has. Donald Trump’s inaugural tirade was a declaration of repudiation against the Atlantic Charter signed in Placentia Bay, The Bretton Woods Agreement, the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and NATO. It is time to appreciate his intentions and understand that if he could make what he is saying so, he would in an instant. The failure to fiercely object to his insanity from the first instance only encourages more of his aggression. No sane person should think Donald Trump possesses the capacity for restraint. Each day’s actions are a probing attack at the boundaries of what might be possible or achievable. Would Donald Trump imprison journalists and kill his opposition if he could?

The answer is yes, and only a fool would debate the point. When Donald Trump puts his head down at night he does so dissatisfied. He dreams of becoming Putin, a man with no constraints. He dreams of being a czar. The biggest mistake of the last 10 years has been the singular inability by anyone to tell Donald Trump, “NO!” The time has come. He must feel the wall. He must be turned back, or he will move forward. [...] Why have no American leaders stood side-by-side with Ontario Premier Doug Ford and (almost former) Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, and denounced Trump’s sinister recklessness — and the real harm to real people, who are being made to feel great anxiety about their economic well-being, safety and futures. Canada is being squeezed by MAGA maliciousness on one side, and the pathetic weakness of the Schumer Democrats on the other. They are bound on one side by menace, and on the other with fecklessness.

[...] Donald Trump is directly, repeatedly and consistently threatening Canadian sovereignty and the liberty of 40,000,000 people. This aggression is both real and a staggering betrayal. Canadians and Americans have fought together, bled together, and died together. Their shared cause and faith was the liberation of the oppressed and enslaved. Neither country has waged wars of conquest for territories and empires. The sons of each can be found buried in French soil, where the graves all face home towards the free nations of the North American continent. This is not who we are. We must never become what Donald Trump’s dark dreams imagine we might become as he seeks to remake America in his image, while pulling Washington, Lincoln and King’s portraits off of the wall. One thing is for sure: the placement of Winston Churchill’s bust in the Trump Oval Office is like inviting a convent of nuns to a whorehouse happy hour. There are Canadian-American families on both sides of the border. Donald Trump is attacking each and every one as he seeks to take what is not his — and never will be. Canada is not for sale and the United States of America is not Putin’s Russia, regardless of whatever sick fantasy swirls in the head of Orange Nero, his ludicrous vice president, or his Ketamine-addicted unelected prime minister.

Steve Schmidt wrote a solid piece on why Americans must stand with our Canadian neighbours, even as Donald Trump is trying to bully Canada into giving up its independence and sovereignty.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Pensacola Prince Andrew, aka Matt Gaetz, has been defenestrated. 

Good riddance. 

The next weakest targets are the alleged rapist Pete Hegseth and the registered Qatari agent Pam Bondi. 

The Democratic position should be communicated in simple words: an alleged rapist cannot command the American Armed Forces, and a Qatari whore, who cashed the checks of the government that harbored Hamas while they plotted October 7th, cannot be the chief law enforcement officer. 

Hakeem Jeffries should make his members read the Monterey California police report into the congressional record.  He should apply maximum pressure on the weakest Republican members who know their place in the MAGA herd is on its periphery — on the outside. There, they run against the headwind, and feel the full force of the dangers that lurk everywhere. 

There are a few predictable ingredients when it comes to creating political good fortune. 

The first is luck. The second is your opponent’s incompetence and overreach. 

Trump is overextended, and the transition plan has collapsed into a rubble of insanity 60 days before the inauguration. 

He has taken his first step backwards, and will take many more. 

The zebras on the outside of the herd are the ones who are most vulnerable. In this analogy, their names are Hegseth and Bondi. 

The Monterey police report established beyond a reasonable doubt that Hegseth is an epic buffoon. Truly. 

He may also be a rapist. 

He seems to have a problem with women. Big time. 

Something broke somewhere, and this ought to be explored psychiatrically and forensically under public examination before the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

According to Reuters, Trump plans to decapitate the senior leadership of the US military in a Stalin-esque  purge. Guilt by association and kangaroo justice await the men and women who have spent their entire lives in preparation for immense responsibilities and leadership. 

The good news is that behind them is another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another. 

On Thursday, Karoline Leavitt, Trump-Vance transition spokeswoman issued the following statement:

This report corroborates what Mr. Hegseth's attorneys have said all along: the incident was fully investigated, and no charges were filed because police found the allegations to be false. Pete Hegseth is a highly-respected Combat Veteran who will honorably serve our country when he is confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense, just like he honorably served our country on the battlefield in uniform.

Pete Hegseth should be brutally questioned about the US Navy and USMC and naval warfare theory, history, strategy and tactics. 

The attitude of the Democratic opposition concerning his service in Iraq should be…wait for it…”We don’t give a f@#k.” 

It doesn’t qualify him to be Secretary of Anything — let alone Secretary of Defense.

He should be derailed, mocked, humiliated, defeated and sent into a splendid exile on the Mar-a-Lago patio.

The whole lion pride should swarm the slowest zebra first — Hegseth — trip him, and then eat him. 

When he’s gone and left behind as proverbial bones to be bleached by the hot sun on the Savanna, it will be time to give chase to Bondi. 

She has fresh legs. Let her stretch them. She will not get far because she is running in Qatari quick sand. 

I have said many times that Donald Trump Jr. is a moron and proof that nepotism is a very bad thing. It does demonstrate that Trump had some insight when he had some reluctance to bequeath his name, lest his progeny be “a loser.” 

Junior has always reminded me of Uday, while Eric throws off more of a Qusay vibe. They are easy to mix up. 

At any rate, they were a big problem for Saddam because, in the end, they were Saddam’s kids, and it was just going to be really hard for them to turn out okay — like Eric and Junior. 

This is the point that really matters, especially if you are going to let Uday and Qusay pick the cabinet after their father buried their mother on the first hole of his golf course — after allegedly raping her years earlier. 

You get the point, right?

This is all madness. 

Make Pete Hegseth defend his depravity, his ethics, his unfitness and keep him pinned down. He is the top target.

Expose his profound and epic lack of knowledge, grasp of strategy, history and culture regarding the US military. 

There is an old USMC saying: it is the 7 Ps.

It stands for “prior proper planning prevents piss poor performance.” This philosophy must be embraced by the Democratic Senate minority, led by the comically inept Schumer.

The US Navy and the US Army are two of the country’s oldest institutions. They are venerable. They are powerful. They will weather Trumpism if for no other reason than the NCO corps is as steeped in the traditions as is the general officers. In fact, from a lived experience perspective, more so. People who live without a North Star or a code do not comprehend those who do. 

Let me tell you a story about the US Navy. 

Think about this, as the alleged rapist and AAA-certified Fox News morning doofus gets ready to sink it:

This is the story of an elegant lady and her master. Her Master is a woman. She commands an American warship, a 44-gun United States Class heavy frigate, personally named by George Washington.

She was designed by an American genius from Philadelphia and built by New Englanders in a Boston shipyard.  Her bow has sliced through all the Earth’s oceans, across four centuries of time.

American merchant ships and their crews were being preyed upon by the British and French Navies and looted by barbary pirates. 

The young Republic was dependent on trade and commerce. The Third Congress appropriated money for the construction of six warships under the Naval Act of 1794 to protect American shipping.

The construction of the ships was spread between six states and cities. Local economies boomed around the building of the most technologically advanced machines ever constructed on the North American continent.

They were the spacecraft of their age, marvels of science, engineering and design.  Though bigger than French and British frigates, they were smaller than the Capital ships of the great European naval powers. They were fast and their speed made them lethal under the command and crews of the born sailors who shaped the young United States and her Navy.

United States Ship is abbreviated as USS and precedes the name of an American Warship. What would be the names of the six ships?

 It is an interesting question to ponder. Surely, the naming of these first American warships would have been imbued with meaning in 1794. We know it was not a trivial decision, and that it was made at the highest levels of government. The Secretary of the Navy submitted a list of ten names for consideration to President George Washington. 

His office was as new as the country.  Since there was no precedent, the founding generation was forced to make it up as they went along. John Adams had proposed a style of adornment and address for the office that would have embarrassed a European aristocrat. Washington rejected the flowery titles in favor of Mr. President.

The naming of the ships was a Presidential decision, and they offer a window into what was viewed as important, significant and meaningful in a young country not yet powerful or secure.

The first ship was named the USS United States. 

One was named the USS Chesapeake, after the great Bay near Washington’s beloved Mount Vernon on the banks of the Potomac River.

Another, the USS Constellation, signified the constellation of stars on the blue corner field of the new red and white striped flag of the United States. 

One was named USS President. There was only one President in the 1790s. He was the only elected Head of State in the world and his name was Washington. 

King George III was curious about what a “President” would become and what Washington would do. He was astounded when he was told that his rival would transfer power voluntarily and return to Mount Vernon. The King said that if that were true then Washington would be the greatest man of his or any age.

There have been 46 American Presidents. Grover Cleveland counts for two. There have been great ones and bad ones. Honest ones and crooked ones. There have been successful ones and incompetent ones. There has only ever been one that has sought to break his promise and hold power against the will of the people. There are many names for such a person. American President has never been one of them.

Another was named USS Congress. The Congress was a co-equal branch of government that stood equally with the Article 2 and Article 3 branches of government created by the Constitution of the United States that imperfectly imagined a new nation with a new system of government into existence. The Congress was comprised of the elected Representatives of the American people. 

It was unique in all the world.

There have been 117 Congresses. They have been filled with American people from our greatest thinkers, leaders, statemen and women to our most sublime fools, imbeciles, crooks, cons, racists, ne’er-do-wells, seditionists and criminals. 

In the end, the United States Congress and the great Capitol Dome under which it meets is an extraordinary living achievement, a symbol of democracy and a raging hot mess.

The sixth ship is the USS Constitution. The USS Constitution endures.  She survives.  She has been fired upon, hit, damaged and fallen into periodic disrepair. She was forgotten, but her contribution remembered by the American people when it was retold in verse by Oliver Wendell Holmes in the 1830s. 

Her hull was lined by Paul Revere, and her masts came from long leaf pine from South Carolina. She was set to be scrapped, but was saved by contributions from America’s school children in the 1920s.

Today, she sits in a quiet corner of Boston Harbor. She is the oldest floating ship in the world and the oldest warship in the US Navy. She remains in active service. 

Our divided nation is at edge, in an angry hour where extremism has seized power with a seething contempt for American freedom and the Constitution.

It seems significant and worth remembering that none of those first six ships designed to protect a fragile freedom were named USS Supreme Court. 

A radical court has acted in the name of the Constitution by stripping rights away from a specific category of Americans for the first time in history.  It represents a type of judicial tyranny and societal engineering that is as radical and foolish as it is destabilizing.

The Constitution of 1787 was not perfect. It was far from just. It was, however, an incomparable work of genius that gave each generation of Americans a chance to create a more just society – to perfect the Union.

The American Constitution endures. It makes the United States of America a young nation and the oldest constitutional republic in the world.

Her namesake will fire a 21-gun salute on July 4th, 2026, to the United States of America in celebration of the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the independence of the United States. 

She is undefeated. She is the USS Constitution.

[Steve Schmidt]

[my-voice-my-resistance]

Trump is giving Ukraine the old fashioned mob shakedown

Anyone who now doesn't believe Trump is working for Putin is damn fool.

[misfitwashere]

The Great Fire

ROBERT REICH

JAN 11

Friends,

The following is the best account I’ve read of the fire that’s consuming Los Angeles. It’s from Steve Schmidt’s substack, The Warning. (steveschmidt.substack.com.Getty Images

Like the Great Fire of London in 1666, the Great Fire of Los Angeles will be recalled for 500 years.

The scale of the conflagration is biblical. These epochal fires will join Chicago and San Francisco atop an infamous registry of American destruction.

The fires are still spreading, still growing. There is no precedent, and no similar event by scale, cost or damage that has ever occurred in America. None.

The “Big One” came, but it wasn’t an earthquake that triggered the inferno, it was January winds that brought with it a storm surge of fire.

The worst case scenario has arrived, and don’t let anyone tell you that it was unforeseeable.

The conflagration was entirely predictable, and ultimately, inevitable. In fact, it was destiny. I don’t say that lightly.

The winds have brought Armageddon, and a brutal judgement upon the genius and arrogance of mankind’s building on a Garden of Eden, tempting the wrath of creation.

This is why I have written about Titanic so often. The lessons are enduring — even if the learnings have been fleeting.

There is an old saw about what starts in California ultimately spreads to every corner of the United States.

There is a lot of truth to the saying.

Consider the immense technological, cultural, and legislative invention that has come from the Golden State. The state is home to 39 million Americans. Its economy ranks fifth internationally, behind the US, China, Germany, and Japan. On a per capita basis, California's GDP is greater than that of all of these countries.

I love California, and have from the second I first set foot there more than 30 years ago.

Among the great good fortunes of my life is that I have lived in California for many years, and have explored every part of it. My political career has brought me to nearly every town and ghost town in the state. I ran Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2006 re-election campaign for governor — the last time time a Republican was elected to that office. That was almost 20 years ago.

There is no other place like California in the world.

Her beauty is as magnificent as her dangers are deadly.

It has become fashionable in recent years to bash California. The state’s governance has become a punchline, a caricature and a MAGA war cry. Among the great grotesqueries and stupidities of our time is the sheer number of MAGA politicians who openly disdain the nation’s economic, technological, social, cultural, and innovation furnace. There is no scenario in which America succeeds with a failing California. Only an imbecile would root for California to fail or burn, and tragically, there is no shortage of fools in America rooting for both.

California is a mythological land. It is a place of sublime beauty and deep complication. It is the most complex state in the most complex nation in the history of the world. It is a place where one political party rules.

One party rule breeds corruption, incompetence, mediocrity, arrogance, entitlement and delusion. Of course, the California Republican Party has long been a collection of cranks, conspiracy nuts, ideological clowns and oddballs who prefaced the rise of their federal brethren.

California is a place where MAGA holds zero sway. There are 60 Democrats out of the 80-seat State Assembly, 30 out of the 40 State Senate seats. There are eight elected statewide officials, and every single one of them is a Democrat. These are epic supermajorities.

Sacramento isn’t Washington, DC, nor is it a proxy front in the MAGA drama produced by corporate media mandarins who ignore western state issues like fire, water, and drought with as much determination as they ignored the opioid crisis and fanned Trump’s rise.

The recriminations are just beginning in California. They will get much worse because what will become clear is that the failures were epic, systemic, plain as day, completely ignored, wished away, and left to build until the instant of catastrophe.

Everything will change in California after the fires, and everything will stay the same. This tension will upend the state’s political establishment, and destroy the line of succession that has taken root during the term limits era.

A succession of mediocrities — each a political careerist — has bounced from office to office for an entire generation doing nothing but ignore growing problems, while seeking elevation to the next office.

The initiative and referendum process will be abused by political profiteers, while corrupt recovery deals proliferate like the deadly conflagration exploded.

Recovery profiteers will seek fortunes, while politicians plot for attention and advancement.

The charred wasteland will become a battlefield on which competence and incompetence will meet in daily battle. Insurance companies will deny claims saying that it was a wind event, not fire, that burned down 10,000 structures. The ordinary family devastated in a biblical fire is about to become a lonely pawn in a vicious game of musical chairs where paying out is the sucker’s move.

There are devastating, brutal days ahead for so many people.

Yet, this time there is a difference.

Southern California television news has long abhorred substance and seriousness. Politics and government were treated like genital sores by TV news executives for 40 years, as they covered freeway chases and all manner of stupidity, while the clock ticked down, while the fuse burned down. The story of the Great Inferno is the story of “The Looming Tower.”

This did not have to happen, but it also could not be stopped. It could not be stopped because nothing could stop people from building in the most beautiful places anyone had ever seen once the first thing structure was built there.

There has always been a precariousness about California, an impermanence.

When the ships came through the Golden Gate during the Gold Rush, there were so many of them they were abandoned. They became the ground fill on which the Marina district in San Francisco rose. It has crumbled, burned, and been rebuilt more than once.

There were 160,000 in California before the discovery of gold. Five years after the US Civil War there were 560,000 Americans, and by the beginning of the roaring 1920s there were 3.4 million. The count was 10.6 million in 1950, and 34 million in 2000.

The people kept coming. They kept coming and coming and coming until there were more than 39 million by 2025 when it all burned down.

The scale of the environmental disaster will dwarf the damage caused by the 9/11 clean-up. The pollution is toxic, cancerous and deadly. The magnitude of the environmental crisis is almost impossible to comprehend.

It is hard watching people who have lost everything appear on television demonstrating unbelievable perseverance and grit, and declare that they will rebuild. Some will, but the truth is that many will not, and should not.

This is going to be the most expensive disaster in the history of the United States. The costs will beggar imagination and become multiples of the initial estimates of $160 billion in damage, but it is beyond that.

The scale of the disaster and the nature of fire as a destructive force has reduced vast swaths of the second largest metro area in the United States to ashes.

The age of hyperbole has finally yielded to a reality for which there are truly no words.

What can be said?

The California political class seems to be mostly going with, “Who me?” which is always the awful predicate to, “Why me?”

For the uninitiated, let me introduce you to the LA City Council. Though the story is old, the machine remains.

America’s cities were spared the type of destruction that reigned down on European and Japanese cities like Tokyo 80 years ago. There is no modern frame of reference for an event like this occurring in a modern city anywhere in the world.

Vast parts of Los Angeles have been reduced by different means to what Tokyo was by firebombing.

Tokyo after the 1945 firebombing (USAF)

When the smoke lifts and the full sweep of the destruction can be understood it will boggle the American mind.

Then things will change.

Dramatically.

Donald Trump has talked at length about his revenge.

It has begun. It is underway. It is happening. Right now. It’s not in my head, and not in my imagination.

During the greatest crisis in the history of California en route to becoming the costliest natural disaster in American history, Donald Trump has offered snarling insults, veiled threats, misinformation and unrestrained malice.

He has used the disaster to attack the California governor, and has said nothing that matters of any consequence to the multitudes who are terrified and have lost everything.

Instead, like always, he has debased, inflamed and manipulated when he should have done the exact opposite. He seeks to gain from suffering, and incredibly, he doesn’t even bother to hide it anymore. More than anything else, it is this revelation from his chaotic transition that is most bone-chilling.

Our president is Arthur Fleck deep down.

Somehow he has concluded that a firestorm that has devoured a geography larger than Manhattan, and is only six per cent contained, is good for him. Donald has decided it proves him right about something — if only any of us could know what that might be. It certainly has nothing to do with his idiocies around the Delta smelt, a small fish that is the subject of controversy hundreds of miles away, as it has been for more than 30 years.

The capitulant Wall Street media should cover the dishonesty and incoherence of Trump’s inanity and insanity like the evil it is. Have no doubt, malice masks predation, and it is premeditated and purposeful. Trump looks at this disaster, and he sees one thing, and one thing only.

Opportunity.

He sees an opportunity to attack and weaken the enemy, which in his sick mind, is California.

The enemy is us.

Trump is happy today. Do you doubt it?

Over and over again, he has made clear what he wants to happen.

Trump despises California. He has made that clear enough.

Ten days from now, he will take command. What better way to pay back “Shifty Schiff” than by making his constituents suffer?

Why would anyone think anything else would happen?

In fact, just when California needs a mass deportation least, it’s going to get one.

It’s going to get it because common sense is in short supply around Donald Trump. Up in the thin air, where the stupid never takes a break, there will be no let up.

Delivering on this promise — long discounted by the media, which constantly asserts that he doesn’t really mean it and can’t possibly do it — he has been playing like Lucy does Charlie Brown for the last 10 years.

Nothing ever goes back.

Nothing burned to nothingness can be restored. Nothing.

The highrises built in Miami on the edge of the ocean are sinking into the sand. The waters are rising. The temperatures are becoming more extreme.

The hour long predicted has arrived.

It doesn’t make it any easier to watch.

2025 is off to a brutal beginning in these United States, and it is going to get worse.

Defiance will be required, and more than anything, the faith to maintain it.

Pray for California and her people.

[filosofablogger]

Then vs Now -- A Tale Of Two Speakers

Steve Schmidt is one of my favourite political analysts and I subscribe to his posts through Substack.  I don’t always have time to read all of his work, for he is prolific, but I was glad I did find time yesterday to read the one I am about to share. Schmidt takes us back on a trip through history and compares past to present … Before there were tiny Speakers of the House, there was a giant By…

[porterdavis]

Quote of the Day

Anyone who thinks it is impossible for Trump to return to power hasn’t been paying attention. I’m betting that he is very pleased with the landscape right now. He is the worst president in American history, twice impeached, utterly disgraced, the father of an insurrection — and he is still winning.

Steve Schmidt @SteveSchmidtSES

[ausetkmt]

Trump's New Campaign Slogan is Dangerous

At Donald Trump's rally in Long Island, he broke out his newest reason to vote for him - "What do you have to lose?" Steve Schmidt reacts to Trump's newest campaign slogan and breaks down everything we will lose if Trump wins in November.