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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The post It’s Trump’s Derangement appeared first on DCReport.org.

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Ben Cohen over at The Banter wrote a piece about “The F-Word” aka “fascism,” and why it is 100% appropriate to call Trump and his wider movement fascists. The reason he dived into this “controversial” topic is that, for some reason, it’s actually still controversial to apply the proper label to a movement that is openly fascist and quite happy about it.

Here’s what Ben pointed out:

Robert O. Paxton is widely regarded as the pre-eminent historian of fascism in the English-speaking world. In his book The Anatomy of Fascism in 2004, he defined the ideology in the following terms:

Fascism is a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

This was written over twenty years ago, long before the Trump era in American politics. But Paxton is describing Trumpism to a tee.

You can quibble about whether or not these people are Nazis, but, as I’ve pointed out recently, that won’t be the case much longer. The Nazis are going to take over the party. Soon.

But for now, quibble away. What you cannot quibble about is whether or not they are, in fact, fascists. The Trump regime fits the definition so closely, it’s practically a textbook example.

So why ARE we fighting over this?

Well, to be clear, “we” aren’t. We on the left have been very clear for quite some time that the American right has been moving in this direction for over half a century. Now that they’re exactly where we said they were going, two things are happening:

1. The centuries-long project of protecting racist white men from consequences is working overtime.

2. The decades-long project of the legacy press shitting on the left is having a temper tantrum.

I’ve talked about the centuries-long project a number of times. This is America’s refusal to hold racist white men accountable for the evil they do.

We should have hanged the treasonous “government” of the Confederacy. Instead, we let them go home.

We should have hunted down and killed the entire KKK for the murderous terrorists they were. Instead, we left the South and allowed them to enact a reign of terror for generations.

We should have shot every American found to be working for the Nazi Party. We were willing to put over 100,000 innocent Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, but racist white men working to destroy America? Well…that’s a different story.

The steps of the Capitol should have been red with the blood of violent terrorists on January 6th. Instead, they were allowed to go home, too.

America does not like to hold racist white men accountable for what they do. It’s unseemly. It’s unfair. It’s “un-American.” Accountability is for Those People and the left.

Of course, and I’ve written about this a whole lot as well, those days are over. The right has gone too far to play the “We have to look forward, not back, for the good of the country” card this time. 2029 is going to be a very bad year for the fascists and their collaborators.

Now, the second thing we’re seeing here is the legacy press protecting itself from having to admit something: We on the left were right all along. The Professional Left Podcast talks about this allllll the time. The legacy press has spent decades telling us that we were fucking idiots. Alarmists. Absolutely hysterical. You stupid libs and your “sky is falling” nonsense!

I’ve only been writing about politics for 15 years, and I saw the White Christian Nationalism coming a mile away. Did I have some special insight? Am I smarter than the extremely well-paid Jake Tapper and Chuck fucking Todd and insufferable Chris Cillizza? No.1 I am, however, not deeply invested in saving face by denying what has been right in front of me for my entire career writing about politics like they are.

For the legacy press to admit that, well, yes, the left was right all along, they would have to admit that they, the legacy press, were wrong.

These are the smarmy shits that helped the Bush regime lie us into the Iraq War. Have they apologized for that yet? No.

These are the miserable assholes that savaged Hillary and pushed Trump into the White House. Have they even admitted they were “overzealous,” much less lying through their fucking teeth? No.

These are the same fucksticks who hated Biden because he was booooring and attacked him over the dumbest stuff imaginable while pretending his age was the Greatest Scandal In American History and then immediately forgot that the age and health of the president were important when Trump limped into office and instantly started to die in front of us. Have they apologized for ushering in the age of American Fascism? No.

Of course, they haven’t. The legacy press does not apologize. They rankle at the idea of being held accountable. They speak truth to power, you see. How the fuck DARE you speak truth to them! You’re nothing but a fucking peasant and they’re the mighty legacy press!

So, yeah, that’s why they’re fighting tooth and nail against naming and shaming the American right. Partly because they would rather eat glass than admit we were right all along. But also, once they do admit we were right, they would have to start discussing the source of America’s deep divide and severe dysfunction: The Modern Republican Party and its base of brain-rotted bigots.

More than anything else, this is verboten. We can savage women. We can savage the LGBTQ+ community. We can savage Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, the mentally ill, the handicapped, literally any and all groups are open for criticism. But not racist white men indulging their inner fascist, the way teen girls go through an emo phase. They are swaddled in the protective cloth of eternal innocence and victimhood.

But someday soon, that protection will disappear, and the enablers will disappear with it. That’s when real change will come to America, and we will all be the better for it. Even the racist white fascists who will finally be forced to grow the fuck up.

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Sit right down and let your Ol’ Uncle Ogre tell you a story. A story about hubris and shooting yourself in your own dick because you just couldn’t shut the fuck up long enough to get what you wanted.

Once upon a time, the most corrupt and arrogant president in all of American history saw that after just a few months into his second illegitimate term in office, his party was going to be crushed in the midterms. They were going to be crushed SO badly, they would lose control of the House and quite probably the Senate. The House was the bigger problem, though, because Democrats would impeach his flabby ass for a third time.1

That could not be allowed. The first two impeachments were a huge embarrassment. A third one would be intolerable. No one may hold the Emperor president accountable!!

So the corrupt president, who runs his party like a cheap mob boss, ordered the states controlled by his equally corrupt party to redraw their congressional maps to lock in his power and ensure he wouldn’t be impeached, errrrr…lose the midterms.

Several states rushed to obey their mob boss. Texas. North Carolina. Ohio. Missouri.

But then there was Indiana.

Indiana Republicans didn’t really like the idea of mid-cycle redistricting. They already held a gerrymandered majority. Why mess with what was already working?

The mob boss president demanded it anyway and started to threaten Indiana Republicans.

Now, six months ago, that might have worked. The mob boss president seemed unstoppable. His march to total dictatorial power all but assured.

Six months is a looooong time, though. That was then. This is now. The mob boss president doesn’t seem so all-powerful anymore and Indiana Republicans said, “Nah.”

So the mob boss president ratcheted up the threats, calling out Indiana Republicans by name. And then the death threats from the mob boss president’s death cult started to pour in.

Most Republicans buckle under that kind of pressure. See Joni Ernst’s craven decision to vote for drunken rapist Pete Hegseth. But for some reason, Indiana Republicans said, “Nah.”

So…more pressure, more threats. But the mob boss president couldn’t stop being an asshole and deeply offended a critical vote he needed:

This wasn’t going well. So more threats. It kind of worked? The Indiana House voted to appease the mob boss president. But what about the Senate? Lots of pressure was dumped on them.

The result of all the threats of violence and political retribution and primaries?

On Thursday, the Indiana Senate told the mob boss president to go fuck himself. Loudly.

21 out of 40 Republicans told the mob boss president to take a fucking walk.

Hilariously, the threats have been explicitly cited as the reason WHY Indiana Republicans told the mob boss president to fuck off.

Is Indiana uniquely resistant to mob boss tactics? Maybe. Maybe not. They were pushing back on Trump’s plan months ago, long before his precipitous tumble into lame duck territory.

Still, getting slapped down this hard by a completely Republican-dominated state is embarrassing. Remember, it is absolutely critical for a dictator to maintain the illusion of absolute power. Does this look like absolute power to you? Nah.

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The problem for Trump going forward is that this creates a permission structure for other Republicans to refuse the mob boss president’s demands. When he demands red states give the federal government full control over their elections, they are 100% going to refuse. They’ll have to. Ceding control of elections to the federal government is a one-way road. You can’t turn over all of your election infrastructure and then ask for it back because a Democrat is president.

Because that’s the risk they’ll be running. It’d be great if the regime could rig the elections as they do in Russia and Hungary. But what happens if a Democrat has control of that machinery? The risk isn’t that they’ll rig an election. It’s that they WON’T rig it. Free and fair elections are toxic to Republicans, after all.

But it won’t just be elections. There will be other things Trump orders Republicans to do that will benefit Trump and ONLY Trump. Why should state parties go along with that now? It’s clear the mob boss president is losing his power, and, hey, these Republicans will still have jobs to protect after Trump is long gone.

This is how a regime falls. Not always in big mighty strokes, but in little cracks that undermine the entire foundation until there’s nothing left but a sick and tired and dying old man screaming on the front lawn of the White House that all of this belongs to him and no one can take it away!

Maybe they’ll bury him under the wreckage of his stupid ballroom. But who would risk the rotten smell of his bloated corpse?

Anyway, don’t get too rah-rah for Indiana Republicans. They’re still awful people doing awful things, but for today, they stood up to Trump and hurt him in ways that really count. I’ll take it.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

There are 325 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.

The photo is one of a number from the “personal collection of Jeffrey Epstein” released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee today.

Other photographs show sex toys and bondage equipment — including something with a “choking hazard” warning on it — and a murderers’ row of men hanging out with their good buddy, Jeffrey. These men should be shunned, banished from what we used to call polite society and disinvited from any and all honors which might be bestowed upon them such as speaking at a college, attending a wedding, or even being invited to a dinner party.

That’s a photo of Bill Gates at the lower left on the wall of a room in one of Epstein’s homes. His association with Epstein is known to have been a factor in his divorce:

This is a photo of Bill Clinton being way too happy about being in the presence of his friend Jeffrey Epstein and his mistress-pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell. There are countless photos of Donald Trump in exactly this sort of situation, grinning ear to ear, having the time of his life with Epstein. Democrats cannot shrink from this. Anyone who was close enough to Epstein and his circle to have their picture taken with a big smile on his face should not be allowed anywhere near a Democrat running for any office in the land.

Epstein and Alan Dershowitz, who taught law at Harvard for many years. Epstein donated millions to Harvard and is reported to have visited the campus 40 times or more. Harvard donated the money Epstein gave to groups that support sex trafficking victims. They never should have taken his money in the first place.

Epstein and Woody Allen and a woman whose face is, thankfully for her, redacted. Every restaurant in New York should refuse to seat Allen. Every studio in Hollywood should refuse to distribute his films. Every person who sees him on the street should give him the finger and yell “Epstein” at him.

This is Richard Branson having way too much fun with Epstein and another unidentified man somewhere in the Caribbean. Branson is another person who should be denied honors and banished by right-thinking people.

There is no evidence that any of these men engaged in illegal behavior with Epstein, but that is not the question here, and it is certainly not the standard by which they should be judged. Any association with Epstein, privately or socially and especially in public, in front of the world, puts a stain on them that cannot be washed off.

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