I was standing at the sink after dinner last night scraping a plate when I started thinking about the new iteration of the word, “scrape.” You see it used all the time to describe how Artificial Intelligence (AI) trains itself by “scraping” information that it collects everywhere it can. Those AI super-data-farms sitting outside cities in the Midwest and South? That’s what they’re doing – scraping data found in news reports, websites and social media posts, magazines, medical and technical journals, even books that are in print and copyrighted by authors. The word “data” in the above sentence means “words.”

I have written tens of millions of words in the nearly 60 years I have been a writer. I use words to form sentences, and I use sentences to form paragraphs, and I use paragraphs to convey information and ideas and descriptions, and in the novels I have written, stories about people’s lives I have made up. It’s what writers do. They live their lives and in doing so, have experiences, see things, meet people, read books and magazines and newspapers, watch the news, go to movies, go places they’ve never been before, return to places they have visited and see and experience those places anew – that’s a woefully incomplete list, but you get my drift – and they sit down and write about all of it.

When AI “scrapes,” it is collecting the words of writers who have written about their experiences and the facts they have found, and in some cases, their feelings and opinions about those facts. AI does not experience the world and write about it. AI collects writing about the world. To the extent that AI rearranges those words, it is writing about writing. If you ask questions of an AI platform, the answers it gives you are the words of writers who have had experiences or gathered facts and written them down. Almost every answer you receive from an AI platform has been stolen from someone who went out and lived a life and wrote down words to describe how they lived it and what they learned.

AI treats numbers differently. Numbers express quantifiable information. AI is able to analyze numbers by “reading” the numbers over and over and looking at the results of manipulating them differently until it is able to come up with an answer presented that amounts to analysis. AI can do this very, very rapidly with unknowably huge quantities of numbers. AI is able to look at photographic information and express it as numbers and “see” the numbers in ways that are difficult for humans to do because of the hugeness of the amounts of data involved. Facial recognition is an example of this. Humans can of course recognize faces, but they cannot compare thousands of images of faces as quickly as AI platforms can.

AI is being used as a tool to invest money. AI systems use programmatic algorithms and other numerical analytic devices to see and identify patterns in trading stocks and use all of it to see which way markets will move and predict profits and losses. AI can do this much faster than human beings.

Elon Musk was part of OpenAI when it was dedicated to research and the development of ways AI could be used to benefit humanity. He parted ways with OpenAI when it dropped its “open” nature and became a “closed” machine with the goal of growth and making profits. Musk told a story that the reason for his break with OpenAI was about ideological bias, but it was really all about money.

Musk established xAI in 2023. Just two years later, xAI bought Musk’s X platform and integrated the two platforms into one system. This year, Musk became the first person in history to be awarded by his primary company, Tesla, what amounts to a one-trillion-dollar salary for a year’s work. Musk must meet certain financial goals in order to “earn” this incredible amount of money, but his ambition was realized when the company, of which he is the largest shareholder, agreed to pay him such a salary.

The current AI platforms – this is not an exhaustive list, but they include OpenAI ChatGTP, xAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Microsoft Azure AI, Meta-backed TensorFlow and PyTorch – are growing as fast as they can build their massive data centers. It is hard to know where AI systems are going, what the future holds for the technology, and for you and me, the humans who live on this planet. Cars were once built by humans; then by fewer humans and more machines, then by even fewer humans and robots. I’m sure they are working on systems that will one day give us cars that have never been touched by a human hand.

We know where those technological changes went. We can see the cars on our streets and in our driveways. What can we see of the changes wrought by AI? We read a story occasionally about AI being used by doctors to analyze tumors, to review and analyze medical tests, even to make diagnoses. We can see AI on our phones and computer screens, popping up with Google searches and in automatic “help” bullshit in Microsoft Word, in photo manipulation and what we might call fake-manufacturing.

Where we really see AI at work is in photos taken in the White House with tech moguls attending thank-you dinners for “contributing” to the hideous ballroom Trump is in the process of building, whether we like it or not. We see AI in their wealth. This is what AI does best: making more money for fewer and fewer people. This is nothing new. It happened when automation caused fewer human beings to work on auto assembly lines. The auto companies, and the people who invested in them, got richer every time a worker lost a job and a profit margin went up.

It has been called “progress,” and we know we can deal with it, because we have dealt with its after effects for at least a century and a half or more.

We have seen greed before, too, and we have felt its effects. The great Depression looms darkly over the history of this country.

I do not think, however, we have seen greed on the scale we are seeing it today. We went nearly two centuries without a single billionaire. Now we have thousands of them, and we have centi-billionaires. We have billionaires who own yachts the size of World War II battleships. We have billionaires who own enough land to amount to a small state. Now that Musk is a trillionaire, we will have billionaires who want what he has just because he has it.

But what has greed gotten Elon Musk, to use just one example of an extremely wealthy man? His ambition is so enormous that he wants to reproduce himself with what amounts to a race of Elons. He has impregnated an unknown number of women, some of whom are house in a compound in Austin, Texas, that resembles something out of The Handmaiden’s Tale. What has he done with that? He has sought more women to produce more Elons. He is obsessed with genetics. Do you recall who else is obsessed with genetics? Donald Trump. He has staffed an entire government dedicated to cleansing this country of people they consider have “bad” genes. It’s not necessary to “go there” with a mention of who that reminds you of.

Do you remember earlier this year, only a month into Trump’s second term, when Musk brought his son into the Oval Office and stood there next to Trump at the Resolute Desk and talked to the press for more than a half hour? Musk had one of his children with him, a son he calls “Lil X.” As the president of the United States sat there pretending to listen, Musk expounded on many of his theories of the benefits of cutting the government, how we shouldn’t be sending money to people overseas – he went on and on. Meanwhile, Lil X scampered around at his feet, trying to get his attention, creating mischief, going over to Trump’s desk and playing around, in short, acting like a four-year-old boy. I remember watching the whole thing in abject amazement, because despite the fact that Musk picked up the boy and put him on his shoulders and held him with his right arm, he paid absolutely no real fatherly attention to him. His eyes were on the reporters in the room – not even on Trump – as he continued to ramble on answering questions. A few times, as the boy pulled at his pant leg and reached for him, Musk smiled slightly, but not at the boy. He was smiling at the reporters. Trump said almost nothing until the boy became obstreperous enough that he got Trump’s attention, at which point Trump pronounced him “a high IQ individual.” Because…good genes.

As a father of three children, one of whom was a very active four-year-old boy, I do not know how you can be in a room with your son and essentially never look at him, even when you reach down to put him on your shoulders. Musk put Lil X there not affectionately, because it feels good to have a child on your shoulders, or because you’re giving him a ride, but to shut him up. Trump had no reaction. It was obvious that Trump had very infrequently, or even never, put one of his children on his shoulders.

This is not human behavior. It is inhuman. To act in such a way depresses you and depresses the child. Musk’s smile to the press was fake, a performance. The whole thing was a performance. Trump did not smile even once, not at anything Musk said, not at the child. The attention in the room was not on him. He was unhappy, managing to remain impassive, rather than showing anger, which was probably his real reaction.

There is another billionaire on the planet with ambitions to be a trillionaire. His name is Vladimir Putin. The trillion dollars he wanted to be paid four years ago was Ukraine. He has killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians trying to achieve his goal of paying himself an entire country as a salary. He has bankrupted both his own country and Ukraine. It will take years, if not decades, for both countries to recover from his egomaniacal ambitions.

How does this have anything to do with AI? Because AI, and the men who are running the companies with AI platforms, are not satisfied with being human. They are not satisfied with what you might call a human quantity of stuff, whether it is money or power or things. They want more and more and more so badly, they are attempting to build an inhuman future that will give it to them, because the human history of the past did not give enough to the men who came before them and were so much like them.

Elon Musk is a perfect example of this kind of inhumanity. His ambition, his greed, is so enormous that he is not even satisfied with living on this planet. He wants to create a place for himself to live on the inhuman planet of Mars. That barren world is a perfect place for Musk and men like him. On Mars, there will be no laws, no courts, no regulations, no taxes, nothing to get in Musk’s way.

Musk’s greed, and the greed of Trump and men like him has no limit. It is inhuman. We need human beings. We don’t need Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Their dreams of a master race comprised of high IQ individuals with perfect genes will die of its own airless idiocy or fail because it is inhuman. Perfection is a series of mistakes that collects incremental bits of wisdom in a process that never ends. Progress is never quite getting where you want to go. You end up where life takes you. That’s how you know you’re human.

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All you really need to know about Pete Hegseth is that his rank when he left his service in the Army National Guard was Major. The rank of Major is the worst rank in the officer corps. It’s between two ranks eligible for commands – Captains can serve as company commanders, and Lieutenant Colonels can command battalions. Not every officer who achieves the ranks of Captain and Lieutenant Colonel is awarded a command, but the possibility, and thus the ambition, is there.

Majors serve on the staff of a brigade or a division. They don’t get to give orders. Nobody serves under their command. They are in between in every bad sense of that status. Nearly every Major I encountered – including my own father, who was a Major for a very uncomfortable number of years – exuded stifled ambition from every pore. They want to be Lieutenant Colonels so badly, they can taste it, and yet, it is considered untoward to let one’s ambition show too much. A Major depends on the ratings given to him by his commander, so the urge to suck up is almost irresistible. But Majors are hated for being suck-ups, so they can’t even really get away with the one thing they think can get them ahead.

It’s the classic “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” rank, and Majors hate it almost as much as other soldiers, in ranks both above and below, hate them.

Hegseth’s order to the generals and flag officers in all the services to come to Quantico to listen to his lecture on fitness and haircuts and the evils of DEI was the resentment of a Major come fully to fruition. It explains the grim, studiedly unresponsive looks on the faces of the generals. To them, the man giving the lecture wasn’t Secretary of Defense -- or God help us, War – it was Major Hegseth.

So, here is how he’s getting his revenge. The Washington Post reported today that Hegseth is ready to execute “some of the most significant changes at the military’s highest ranks in decades.” The Post reports that Hegseth’s plans will “slash the number of four-star generals in the military,” which when he took office he had announced would be one of his goals.

This is not the way you run the Department of Defense. As the top civilian running the military establishment of the country, you want the generals on your side. We’ve already seen the photographs from Quantico. They’re not on his side. So, Hegseth has apparently said, well, fuck you. I’ll show you who’s boss.

There are so many things wrong with that attitude, it’s hard to know where to begin. You don’t have to be the generals’ friend – in fact, you don’t want to be – but you need their respect and loyalty. At the same time Hegseth is trying to force the Navy to order Senator Mark Kelly back to active duty to court martial him, he’s telling the people who run the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard that he’s going to cut their ranks and reduce their influence over how their services are run.

That is precisely the way Majors behave, and every general and flag officer in uniform knows it.

Hegseth’s plan to reorganize the military involves changing the command structure, cutting the number of service headquarters commands, known in mil-speak as “combatant commands” from 11 to 8. The new structure would deemphasize U.S. support of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and concentrate the Pentagon’s focus on the Western Hemisphere, in accordance with the insanely racist and ignorant national security strategy document that was released last week.

Hegseth has already fired or forced into retirement more than 20 senior general officers. At his strutting, egomaniacal speech to the generals at Quantico, Hegseth went all “my way or the highway,” telling them that if they don’t like the way he and Trump do things, they should “do the honorable thing and resign.” These men and women get up every morning and think about their service to the country. They’re not paid very much, but the amount of responsibility on their shoulders dwarfs what the oligarchs and techno-bros carry. They can’t use money and raises to motivate those who serve under them. They must depend on the sense of honor and service of those under their commands to carry out orders that can, and do, involve life and death.

Hegseth is treating the military as if it’s a business. His plans to reorganize the Department of Defense resemble the way companies acquire and merge with each other. Every time there is a corporate consolidation, people lose jobs, especially those at the top of the corporation that is being taken over. Hegseth plans to combine the current U.S. Southern Command, the European Command, and the Africa Command into one central “International Command.” The commands of the Western Hemisphere – Northern and Southern Commands – will be consolidated into a single “Americas Command.”

It all sounds like a move to make things more efficient, but it’s really Hegseth consolidating and centralizing his control by cutting down the number of generals who report to him, so he can more closely control what they do. By reducing the number of top jobs, he will also make the contest to see who gets a senior command more cutthroat among the generals. Unhappy generals who are fewer in number are more easy to frighten and control than happy generals.

What Hegseth is ignoring is the strength derived in military units by familiarity of top commanders with those under them. It’s harder to know the strengths and weaknesses of 50 commanders under you than it is to know how well 25 are running their commands. Hegseth doesn’t care about how well things are being run. He just cares if he’s the one who is in overall charge. He has ordered senior officers in the Pentagon to undergo lie detector tests as a way of catching leakers and scaring military officers into pledging loyalty to him.

This is, naturally, insane. Officers and enlisted soldiers in the military take seriously their oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution. Their loyalty isn’t to an individual. It is to the supreme law of the land and to the nation they serve.

Soldiers have a way of dealing with people like Hegseth who think they can invade their world and change the way they do business. They cut them out. Hegseth thinks he can better control the generals if there are fewer of them. He’s going to find that fewer generals means there will be fewer people who are choosing not to report what is really going on down in the ranks they command.

What Hegseth doesn’t know will hurt him. He’s not going to like it when his phone rings one day, and it’s Trump complaining that someone told him something that Hegseth doesn’t know anything about. What’s going on? Why did that happen? Why didn’t you tell me this was coming?

Major Hegseth won’t have the answers because one or more of his generals didn’t bother to inform him. It won’t be death by a thousand cuts. A few deadly stabs in the back will do. The generals didn’t smile when he delivered right-wing applause lines at Quantico. They won’t be smiling when they slip the knife in, either.

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These are dark times but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!).

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The greatest high Donald Trump has ever experienced was not “winning” the 2024 election.1 It wasn’t the birth of his children or sexually assaulting grown women or the time he spent with Jeffrey Epstein, raping little girls (allegedly).

No. The greatest moment of Donald Trump’s life was January 6th. That was the day he commanded a mob of violent terrorists to attack the Capitol and attempt to murder hundreds of his enemies. Trump watched the events unfold on TV and laughed and laughed and laughed. It was the most intoxicating drug imaginable for a malignant narcissist. People were willing to kill and die for him.

The sick, twisted, dying addict has been chasing that high ever since. He wants people out in the streets, murdering in his name. So. Fucking. Badly.

Look at Trump’s unhinged, even by his standards, post about Rob Reiner’s tragic death. He blamed it on “the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” Trump went on and on about how the murders were actually all about him and how Reiner’s obsession with Trump is what caused him to be killed.

Trump’s post was oozing with barely concealed joy over the murder of Rob Reiner, a beloved figure whose legacy will long outlive the last vacuum-sealed Trump steak buried in a landfill, and Michelle, his wife. Trump was clearly hoping it was one of his followers ridding him of this meddlesome priest.

The most disturbing part of this is that there is a distinct pattern forming to Trump’s behavior if you know what to look for. I was already going to write about it and the Reiner post fits the pattern perfectly. Which is not really a good thing.

In addition to Trump increasingly calling for his enemies to be executed, last month, Trump pardoned all of the people involved with trying to steal the 2020 election through the fake elector scheme. The DoJ dropped the charges after Trump “won” the 2024 election, and yet, Trump pardoned them. Why? Because dozens of Republicans still face state charges.

The Constitution is very clear that presidents can only pardon federal crimes, aka “Offences against the United States.” Article 2, Section 2. The language is very specific. Those crimes committed against the entire country, not an individual state, can be pardoned. JUST those crimes.

Last week, Trump issued a pardon to Tina Peters, a Colorado county clerk convicted of multiple counts of election interference. All of them state charges. Colorado has rejected the pardon, but there’s a very real possibility the regime is going to push forward on this. The hope will be to get the Supreme Court to fabricate new law (like they did with “presidential immunity”) that gives Trump the ability to pardon state crimes.

What happens then, and how does all this tie together?

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Part of this has to do with Trump sending a message: If you help me rig elections, by tampering with polling machines or burning ballots or altering data, I will protect you. That is how most of the press is viewing these pardons. But it’s more than that, and this is the part they would prefer not to discuss.

It’s important to understand that since 2020, Trump has repeatedly called on his mob to come to his defense. He demanded massive protests for each of his indictments, hoping for a show of force to intimidate law enforcement. Nothing happened.

Trump has also been demanding the military and federal law enforcement shoot protesters with real bullets. He’s been doing this for years. Trump really REALLY wants people killed in his name. As I said, there’s no greater high for a malignant narcissist.

But what has been holding his faithful back from obeying the commands of the Great and Mighty Leader? Why have there been no Trumpian Brownshirts cracking skulls and killing activist leaders and prominent Democrats? Federalism.2 That separation of federal and state power that Republicans used to worship and now despise.

Trump has corrupted the federal government, and it is understood that anyone in his regime can commit any and all federal crimes with impunity. They will never be investigated by Trump’s breathtakingly crooked DoJ, and their crimes, when exposed, will be pardoned.

But fear of consequences at the state level has been keeping the right’s mob violence in check. The Proud Boys desperately want to rampage through Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Colorado and every state where they can beat and maim and murder liberals. They want to drive them away from the polls and chase them out of office. They want to enforce their fascist worldview on blue strongholds everywhere.

But they can’t because they will not be protected.

Even in red states, the militias and Nazis and assorted wannabe-Brownshirts do not dare take to the streets to attack protesters in large, coordinated ways. It will all be captured on cell phones for the country to see. Even the most entrenched, gerrymandered, voter-suppressed state government would not be safe if it allowed unchecked mob violence. And if Republicans gave it their blessing with pardons or a refusal to investigate what everyone can see happening on video? It’s hard to call yourself the “law and order” party when gangs of Nazis are beating up senior citizens with anti-Trump signs.

It’s one thing for red states to look the other way when federal agents violate the civil rights of American citizens. It’s quite another when it’s a bunch of incels screaming about how much they hate Jews.

This is why the Trump regime does not have Brownshirts spreading out across the country, attacking "No Kings” protests and assaulting college campuses and punching reporters in the face. He has no way to protect them. Yet. As long as his thugs face real consequences at the state level, they will not dare obey their godking’s orders.

But keep a close eye on Trump’s “pardons” of state-level crimes and how hard they push to make that law. If the most corrupt Supreme Court in history signs off on yet another novel legal theory fabricated from whole cloth, there will be an immediate explosion of street-level violence as Trump orders his foot soldiers to spill blood in his name. The dying junkie will never stop chasing his high.

We can only hope that even this Supreme Court will find Trump’s demands a bridge too far.

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There are 321 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

By now you have no doubt heard of Donald Trump’s post on Truth Social this morning about the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner. I would quote the post here, but that would only further amplify its disgusting content. It’s hard to even paraphrase it. Essentially, Trump blamed Reiner and his wife for being murdered because they angered “others” by being Trump haters.

This was at 9:51 this morning. The Reiner’s son, Nick, had been arrested on Sunday night at around 9 p.m. By the time Trump posted on Truth Social, he had been booked and held on $4 million bail.

But look at me. I’m trying to establish a timeline about the deaths and arrest of the son as a suspect, but it makes no difference what Trump knew or when he knew it. His instinct was to lash out at someone he considered an enemy. That Reiner and his wife had died tragically from stab wounds did not matter to Donald Trump. He didn’t even mention that they had been murdered. He said they had “passed away.”

There, I did it. I quoted two words from Trump’s post. I’ve ended up doing my job the way that I have always done it – find the facts, use relevant quotes from interviews or, in this case, writings from the subject being covered. And all for what? I guess what I do with this column, what we all do every day, is try to make sense of this man as a form of self-protection. Somehow, if we can understand him and his movement, it will make us safer. But it’s like trying to hide a rock by wrapping it in a piece of paper. It can be done, but what you end up with is a rock wrapped in paper.

That is what is happening to this country, day by bloody day. We watch the news, we read the stories, we pay attention, but it’s as if we’re standing along a road somewhere watching a funeral procession go by. What we are witnessing is the burial of our country. After Trump’s outrageous desecration of Rob and Michele Reiner, even his supporters are left standing along the road with us, watching yet another procession of horrors. Here is a comment directly below Trump’s post on Truth Social from a supporter calling herself 45 Liberty Lady: “Terrible response to this tragedy. Unbecoming of the Office of the President. I voted for you three times but this is beyond the pale.”

CNN tried without success to get Republicans on Capitol Hill to comment on Trump’s post, reporting that Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson “are not addressing” Trump’s post about the killing of Rob Reiner, but instead are “offering prayers for his family.” You would be right to write off the reaction of these two as cowardice in the face of what they know will be Trump’s wrath if they speak out like 45 Liberty Lady, but looked at in another way, even though they are powerful leaders in our government who were elected by thousands of voters in their states, they are left watching their, and our, country take yet another blast from the death star that is Donald Trump.

The incredibly insensitive comment by Trump about the murder of Rob and Michele Reiner isn’t the only nail he pounded into the coffin holding the husk of our democracy. Trump held a Christmas celebration at the White House on Sunday where he addressed a gathering of distinguished guests who had been invited to see the way his wife, Melania, had decorated the White House for Christmas. After recognizing a couple of professional golfers in the audience and telling several golfing stories, Trump pointed to a woman in the audience and praised the way she looked because he believed she resembled his daughter, Ivanka.

Then he launched into a lengthy story about another person in the audience who had served as a physician’s assistant in the White House under President Obama and during Trump’s first term in office. According to Trump, this man, James Jones, had gone on an expedition to the jungles of Peru with Obama’s two daughters, and during the trip, he had been bitten by a viper of a type that kills 28,000 people each year in Peru. Let’s leave aside the fact that 28,000 Peruvians don’t die from viper bites every year. We have to push this little lie aside to get to the bigger lie that Trump was leading up to. When the doctor was bit, a Secret Service agent called back to the White House, where Trump’s favorite doctor, Ronnie Johnson, knew exactly what kind of viper had bit him and told them which anti-venom to administer, because of course, the Secret Service had anti-venom on hand in the middle of the Peruvian jungle, and the doctor with the Obama daughters survived. But he was “unconscious for months” and was given last rights three times, according to Trump.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Donald Trump story without an attack on environmentalists, “the animal rights people would say, ‘Oh, leave it alone. It’s such a wonderful viper.’” Big laugh at this line, then Trump continues, “Okay. Usually they say, ‘Leave it alone. such a wonderful, leave the sharks alone. Don’t touch the sharks. They’re wonderful. I love the sharks.’ Right? Uh, I don’t feel that way, but that’s okay.”

And then he launched into his regular paeons to his tariffs, which are not causing “affordability,” and the trillions of dollars foreign nations are investing in the U.S.A. because of him, and his record low inflation after all the problems caused by Biden, because, according to Trump, “They’re the ones that caused the problem. That’s all they’re do, they’re good at cheating in elections, very good at cheating. They’re professionals at cheating, because we won in 2016, by a lot. The election was rigged in 2020. We have all the ammunition, all the stuff, and you’ll see it come out. It’s coming out in, in truckloads.”

I will remind you that these were his remarks at the White House Christmas celebration party.

Over the weekend, two students at Brown University were shot dead and nine others were wounded. In the skies of the Caribbean Sea, a Jet Blue aircraft nearly collided with an Air Force tanker close to the airspace of Venezuela. Around the country in Illinois and North Carolina and Louisiana and California and in other states we haven’t even seen reporting from, masked federal agents who are not wearing personal identification, and in some cases, do not wear agency identification, are without warrants or probable cause arresting people on the street, shoving them into unmarked SUV’s, and driving them away to hastily arranged detention camps and holding them without charges, often denying them contact by phone with family members or lawyers. Some are immigrants without documents, some are immigrants who carry papers allowing them to live and work in this country, and some are American citizens who were unable to immediately prove their citizenship.

Donald Trump has ordered the deaths of 90 people in boats, calling them “narco-terrorists” without providing a shred of evidence that they were shipping drugs or committing terrorism.

Today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump continued to attack Rob Reiner, calling him “very bad for our country.” He told reporters that Reiner “was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned.”

This man, who refers to himself in the third person as “Trump,” is our president. Making sense of him isn’t working now, if it ever did. We are in a race between his unraveling and the unraveling of our country.

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Trump’s Cruelty After Mass Shootings Shows How Far We’ve Fallen

The awful feelings from this week’s mass shootings and the twin murders of Rob and Michele Reiner come in waves.

The feelings mix despair and frustration for a society that accepts that violence — even loss of life— as an acceptable trade-off for ideological alignment and personal anger.

It happens that our family is from Providence and we both attended Brown, so the television images were unusually familiar. Bondi Beach may be a half world away, but attacks on Jews are not new for us. And like many, we’ve held Reiner in a certain shared respect for his work in film and politics.

Unfortunately, these shootings not so different from violence a year ago on the campus of Florida State University, where our younger daughter teaches in the dance faculty. The Australian anti-semitism matches attacks on a Pittsburgh synagogue and calls of hate in the streets and on the internet.

The frustration is that unending mass killings don’t prompt successful gun limitations, that despite’s thoughts and prayers, we refuse to shun hate and its carriers. Indeed, I had not planned to write about these incidents which we are following closely because the shared revulsion is widespread.

What changed that were postings and remarks by Donald Trump, who posted that the blame for the Reiner killings is the Reiners’ Trump Derangement Syndrome.

No Empathy for Non-Loyalists

Somehow this egocentric autocrat whom we have chosen to be the most powerful man in the country is showing us that for him, only those who agree with his politics, who accept his leadership as flawless, are worthy of his otherwise empty  powers of empathy.

Even as Republicans have started speaking out to say Trump’s remarks were both inhumane and cruel, Trump doubled down to add that he did not like Reiner’s politics. For that matter. Trump isn’t exactly in love universities, including Brown. Nor, despite his protestations about antisemitism, Trump’s support for White, Christian nationalism has been a source of serious discomfort for Jews.

There is plenty of derangement syndrome to go around. It turns out that it is Trump who is deranged.

Who besides Trump can’t find empathy for a couple apparently stabbed to death by their own son, as Los Angeles officials have alleged? How devoid of recognizably human feelings is Trump? How is this Trump, Scion of cruelty, a “leader” worth our respect, even apart from any of his policies?

How have we so walked away from “character” and “morality” in leadership to normalize Trump’s public behaviors?

If this is how Trump acts in a situation that just requires a moment of basic human solemnity, why should anyone be surprised about ordering the killing of shipwrecked smuggling survivors, or wrenching children from deportable migrant parents, or insisting that it’s perfectly fine to double and triple health insurance costs?

Students ought to be able to expect to attend classes without fear of mass killers. People should expect to celebrate religious and ethnic rites with worry about snipers. Parents ought not expect to be stabbed to death by their children.

Unless you’re Donald Trump it has nothing to do with one’s political outlook.

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