I started hearing mentions of uber right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer being in the company of Donald Von Shitzenpantz maybe two weeks ago. At that time, the rumor was that Loomer was helping to prep TFG for the Great Debate along with Tulsi Gabbert and Matt Gaetz. Now, it seems that was wrong: Loomer had nothing to do with the debate prep. It was all Gabbert and Gaetz.

Could have fooled me.

But as time went on, Loomer and The Former have been seen together on several occasions, prompting former RNC Chair Michael Steel to say, “Melania, check your man!” all the while wondering why “…we are so susceptible to this kind of BS. ”

Even Bill Maher has chimed in saying on his weekly HBO show “She’s 31, looks like his type… Who’s Trump f—ing? Because I said, it’s not nobody. He’s been a dog for too long. And it’s not Melania. I think we may have our answer this week.”

Rather than let this go on and on, Loomer sprinted to the finish by disavowing any and all hanky panky between her and The Orange One on “X”: “I should sue Bill Maher for Defamation. This is beyond the pale and it’s a complete and blatant lie.”

TFG’s h̶a̶n̶d̶l̶e̶r̶s̶  campaign staff have been working overtime to deny what normal and mean-spirited people can all agree to: they’re a good match. His staff says that she’s not MAGA material, while the whole world knows that is not true at all: they are MFEO (Boomers, that means Made For Each Other). Indeed, it’s the staff that are not MAGA enough if that’s what they’re all saying.

I don’t know, and I don’t care. His base doesn’t care about anything TFG says or does, so why should I?

One reason: it’s funny. No, it’s hilarious. It may be pure fabrication, but that won’t keep me from posting an analogy problem like you used to find on the SATs:

TRUMP : LOOMER as
a. TOAD : ORNITHOLOGY
b. TURTLE : MICROBIOLOGY
c. VANCE : COUCH
d. GYMNOSPERMS : BOTANY

If you drive south on Palos Verdes Drive in southern California, you get some spectacular views as the rocky PV Peninsula juts out into the Pacific Ocean. On the right, you pass the Point Vicente Lighthouse and the Terranea Resort, a luxury vacation spot for the well-heeled elite. It sits on the site of the former Marineland of the Pacific, a fun destination for families to bring their kids to see whales and dolphins perform in giant seawater tanks. It was sold to the company that owns Sea World in San Diego (who absconded with Corky the Orca, a killer whale that was renamed Shamu).

As you proceed further south, you pass the Trump National Los Angeles Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes. It was there, yesterday, that TFG had a news conference of sorts, with Santa Catalina Island in the background.

And just a little further south, still in Rancho Palos Verdes, over 100 homes are slowly making their way down multiple slumps that will inevitably conveyor belt them down to the crashing waves below.

The plight of these homes was addressed by the former president, who commiserated with RPV’s mayor: “I want to express my support for all of the families affected by the landslides in Rancho Palos Verdes. This area is very solid, but you go a couple of miles down, you’ll see something that’s pretty amazing. The mountain is moving. And it could be stopped but they need some help from the government. So I hope they get the help.”

Tragically, the former president was lying again. There is no fix for this. The Wayfarers Chapel, a local landmark also known as The Glass Church, across PV Drive and just west of the golf course, has given up and closed its doors forever. The RPV homes TFG mentioned are just east of the golf club.

The golf club sits downhill between them. But that’s a story for another decade.

That wasn’t all that TFG had preying on his mind in regard to “government help.” Recent fires in the SoCal area were also uppermost in His Orangeness’s thoughts.

“And Gavin Newscum [sic] is gonna sign those papers, and if he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put [out] all his fires.”

He was speaking, naturally, of the California governor’s stance on protecting Sacramento Delta smelt, an endangered fish species that would be wiped out along with the fragile delta ecosystem if more fresh water from the delta is diverted for agriculture.

TFG hates that, and California will only get federal wildfire aid from a new TFG administration if Newsom lets the fish die.

It’s a trick he tried to use on Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019 when he wanted the Ukraine president to deal the dirt on Joe Biden and his son in exchange for military aid.

That didn’t go very well last time, but you know, if at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again.

Welcome to “What Trump Means For,” a multi-part series I’ll be publishing over the next several weeks as the 2024 election creeps closer. I’ll break down what Donald Trump and his current and probable future teams have said about how they will govern and exactly what they will do while in office. If Trump wins, he may not accomplish everything he pledges to do. But he will no doubt do a lot — and it’s worth taking seriously what he says and plans.

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Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has tried to rebrand himself as an abortion moderate. He succeeded in getting the Republican Party to slash its abortion stance down to the absolute minimum necessary to keep the anti-abortion base from mutinying. During his 90-minute RNC speech, he didn’t mention or even allude to abortion. He has said he doesn’t support a national abortion ban. He has said he wants to leave the issue to the states, and that he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the pregnant woman.

Donald Trump says a lot of things.

Trump has, in other contexts, signaled support for a national abortion ban. When he was running the first time around, he said he supported not only criminalizing abortion, but criminally punishing women who have abortions. He promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade and end the era of legal abortion in the US, and that’s exactly what he did. He has called himself the nation’s most pro-life president ever. He has kept anti-abortion groups and their leaders close, and there is no question that, if he wins, they will be shaping his agenda in 2025 and beyond.

The thing to understand about Trump and reproductive rights is that he truly, deeply does not care. There are issues he cares about, and they’re the greatest hits you hear at his rallies: Immigration, crime, the economy. He knows abortion is a biggie for the GOP base, and so he’s anti-abortion.

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But he also understands, better than most Republicans, that the game has changed since 2016 and 2020. With the end of abortion rights no longer theoretical but actually here in more than a dozen Republican-run states, the American people are getting schooled in what it’s actually like to live under pro-life rule. And it turns out it’s pretty brutal and pretty bad. Only about 1 in 10 Americans agree that abortion should be outlawed in all circumstances, and yet that’s historically the position of every large anti-abortion organization as well as the GOP. Before the Dobbs decision, a lot of Americans assumed they could avoid the abortion issue, or even told pollsters they were pro-life because, well, they didn’t really like the idea of abortion and it made them uncomfortable. After Dobbs, though, abortion became about something other than the personal ick factor. It became about personal freedoms; about women not bleeding out in hospital parking lots; about healthcare; about the government staying out of our most intimate decisions. Voters, including many conservatives and Republicans, really do not like the Republican position on abortion.

The Republican response to that reality has largely been “too bad.” They’ve pushed through wildly unpopular abortion bans, and taken wildly unpopular anti-abortion cases to court — cases that are so fringe and toxic that even the abortion-hostile conservative justices of the Supreme Court have punted on them. Trump’s response has been different, and frankly smarter. His view? Shut up.

Trump isn’t urging the GOP to actually moderate on abortion. He is urging them to shut their pie-holes for the next few months to allow him to get back into office. Once he’s there, he’ll be a one-term president who does not need to get reelected, and because he is a deep narcissist who has turned the GOP into a cult of personality revolving around one man, doesn’t care about any Republican successor getting reelected. He wants to consolidate his power. He wants to be revered.

And the people who are going to help him do that also want to see abortion rights vastly curtailed. Trump will reward them — and why not? Once he’s in office, he has nothing to lose. And given that he doesn’t actually give a damn about abortion, he’s happy to let the people who are enabling him get their way when it comes to reproductive rights. Here’s what that could look like:

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Democrats Face Growing Gender Divide as Men Shift Toward Trump and GOP

Democrats have a man problem.

Poll after poll keeps reaching the same conclusion: Women are moving left; men, right into Donald Trump’s arms.

“This is the most gendered election America has seen — and the split has only deepened with Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket instead of Joe Biden,” Axios recently reported.

While Vice President Harris had the support of 56% of women in a head-to-head race against Trump in a mid-August CBS News poll of registered voters, only 45% of men said they’d support her. Trump led by nine points among men in that poll.

In battleground states, the partisan gender divide was wide four years ago. Now, it’s wider.

On election day 2020, Trump had a 6-point advantage against Biden among men in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada, per New York Times/Sienna College data. By mid-August 2024, Trump had a 15-point advantage over Harris among men in those same states, according to a Times/Sienna survey of likely voters.

What’s happening?

Clearly, American men, increasingly young ones, think Trump and his cocktail of conservative policies will better address what ails them — economic anxiety, depression, addiction, overdoses and some vague, ballyhooed crisis over the meaning of Millennial masculinity.

But men need to rethink their budding bromance with the Republican Party.

The problems men face aren’t spread evenly across American political geography. Men who live in states where Republicans reign suffer more. And the dismal differences between red and blue states are measurable, significant and not coincidental.

Cancer will kill 611,720 Americans this year, per federal projections; and men will disproportionately die from it. But cancer won’t kill them at equal rates. Men who live in red states — which spurn environmental protections and public health spending — have the highest rates of death from cancer (and Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cirrhosis, kidney failure, heart disease and influenza).

GOP polls repeatedly reject and weaken workplace safety rules, and men die on the job at the greatest rates in their states. But higher risk doesn’t mean more reward there: Men earn lower wages in red states than in blue states.

Conservatives constantly accuse liberals of denigrating the “traditional family,” so you’d think marriages would last longer in their states, where, after all, more people attend church every Sunday and pray. But no. Marriages fail more often in Republican states.

Men care about law and order, we hear — and nobody outdoes Republican tough talk on crime and punishment. However, men who live in Republican states are more likely to be murdered. The average man in Senator Lindsey Graham’s South Carolina is 86% more likely to be killed than in Governor Gavin Newsom’s California.

Over the last two decades, suicides have risen, hitting men hardest but not proportionately. Men in Republican states kill themselves more often than in Democratic ones.

Despite GOP pro-life talk, men in red America live shorter lives. So do the mothers of their children, who die more often from pregnancies. So do their newborn sons and daughters.

“Infant mortality rates … are consistently higher under Republican-controlled state legislatures than under non-Republican-controlled ones,” a 2022 peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found, concluding these differences were not accidental but, in part, the result of Republican legislation.

Policies matter.

If men peer behind the curtain of Republican machismo, they’ll see a party with little to offer them besides bluster, AR-15s, coal plants and, maybe, menthol cigarettes.

But when it comes to their pocketbooks, their sanity, their safety, their health and even their marriages, men should realize: Republican states are hotbeds of the misery they’re trying to escape.

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