Tag Archives: Donald Trump

media news

So … what about WH communications chief?

I am going to call attention briefly to an individual who hasn’t received a whisper of chatter in the boiling controversy over Jeffrey Epstein’s files and whether they should be released for public review.

I refer to the White House communications director. That’s right. Donald Trump hired a guy to serve as communications director for his second term as president. His name is Steven Cheung, a native of Sacramento, Calif. He played football at Cal State-Sacramento,  but didn’t earn a degree there. Hmm. More on that in a moment.

The communications director role is to control the information flow from the White House, to ensure it is consistent with whatever message the president wants to convey. The communications chief must work with the press secretary and all Cabinet staffers and White House staff to deliver a cogent, reliable message from the White House to the public.

The Jeffrey Epstein communications flow has been a cluster fu** of the first order. What in the hell has Steven Cheung been doing? The White House changes its tune about whether to release the information contained in the files pertaining to Epstein, the late child molester/sex trafficker and his relationship with Donald Trump. It vows to be “transparent,” then reneges on its pledge to reveal all the information it has on Epstein.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has told the media she informed Trump in May that his name is in the files. Trump then said he didn’t hear about it until June. Or maybe it was July. Shouldn’t the communications director be able to tell the president keep the story straight?

Cheung is not a seasoned communications professional steeped in political tradition. His earlier stint as commo director for the 2024 Trump campaign was riddled with blowups with the campaign media. He quit the White House during the first Trump term over a snit he had with White House chief of staff John Kelly.

It all seems connected to the revelation that Cheung didn’t complete his college degree at Cal State-Sacramento. He looks for all the world to me to be a throwaway appointment, a sycophant whose fealty to Trump made him preferable to others who well might have more actual experience keeping the lines of communication untangled.

So, as the White House stumbles, fumbles and bumbles its way through this Epstein matter, Americans are entitled to ask: What is the White House communications director doing during the daylight hours … because he has lost control of the narrative?

crime news

Epstein isn’t going away

I can say this with crystal clarity … Jeffrey Epstein is not going away anytime soon.

He’s dead. He won’t come back. His name, however, won’t die along with his miserable body. With that in mind, the Congress is taking a monthlong break. I am sure they’re going to get a snootful from their constituents at home. Listen up, GOP U.S. Rep. Keith Self, I am putting you on notice, too.

Trump once pledged to release all the info on Epstein, the convicted child sex trafficker. Then he backed away. Now the Wall Street Journal says Trump sent Epstein a birthday greeting card with lots of lewd pics of underage girls. Trump denies it. He has sued the Journal for a billon bucks. He’s going to lose.

I am reminded of the trouble that caught up with President Nixon as he tried to cover up his involvement in the Watergate scandal. That matter never died, either. Nixon ended up quitting the presidency when the Supreme Court ruled he had to release the tapes that contained his instructions to cover the matter up.

Something tells me the walls might be closing in on Trump.

crime news, national news, political news

No apology for being right about this clown

A critic of this blog just cannot seem to grasp the notion that my mind was settled long before Donald and Melania Trump glided down the escalator in the summer of 2015 to begin Donald’s career in politics.

I concede the obvious. Yep. My mind was made up a long time ago. And the 45th and 47th POTUS has done nothing at all to change it. I believe then what I believe now, which is that Trump is categorically unfit for public office.

But you know that already. Correct?

What none of us knows at this moment is what can be done to improve matters in D.C.

I’ll start with a couple of possibilities. One is to turn the House of Reps into an organization led by Democrats. Voters need to wrest control of that chamber from Republicans. If that occurs in the 2026 midterm election, then the fun can begin anew. There might be a third impeachment of this fundamentally corrupt individual. This impeachment could center on his involvement with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein hanged himself in a federal prison cell. Trump is now believed to have had something more than a passing acquaintance with this sexual predator. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump sent Epstein a birthday greeting card years ago. Trump denies it. He has sued the Journal, which stands by its reporting. I’m inclined to stand with the WSJ.

We have seen some fracturing among the MAGA fanatics who have supported Trump since he rode the escalator with Melania. Many of them want Trump to release the documents that could reveal a whole lot about Trump and whether he and Epstein were besties.

The other option is to elect someone to the presidency in 2028 who is clean, scandal-free and who knows how in the hell to govern. It won’t be Trump … no matter what some of his ardent supporters would like to see happen. The Constitution has labeled Trump a lame duck until Jan. 20, 2029.

Then it will be good bye and good riddance to the singularly most stupid individual ever elected to the presidency. Then we’ll have to ensure we cannot make that mistake ever again.

national news, political news

Voters are a confusing bunch

The run-of-the-mill American voter appears to suffer from some form of political schizophrenia.

Think about this for a moment, because that might be all the time you care to ponder what I am about to put forth.

Americans twice elected a young man who blazed trails everywhere he went, as the first Black editor of the Harvard Journalism Review, the first Black president of the United States, who was faithful to his wife and who avoided any semblance of scandal during his two terms in the White House.

Then voters in 2016 and in 2024 elected arguably the dumbest man ever to hold the office, who has acknowledged cheating on all three of his wives, who paid a porn actress to keep quiet about a sexual encounter he said never happened, who has never acknowledged a single failure in his professional life, who denigrates war heroes and Gold Star families, who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War, who selects certifiable morons to serve in the Cabinet, who lies at a breathtaking pace, who provoked an armed attack on the federal government to stop the certification of a free, fair and legal presidential election in 2020, the one that the president has never admitted he lost.

This is the kind of strange behavior that defies description. It challenges anyone to explain how an electorate can transform itself from a body of Americans dedicated to real-life change for the better to one that falls victim to a cretin’s call to follow him backward into the era of Jim Crow.

My hope is a simple one. That we can reverse what we have done to our nation in 2026 and again in 2028. We are far better than what we have delivered to ourselves in the form of a national government.

legal news

Loathing is alive and well in DC

Oh, boy … I just hate watching spectacles like the one I watched unfold today in a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

However, given the loathsome attitude that permeates the nation’s capital, it’s not surprising and it isn’t likely to be nearly the last such demonstration.

Committee Democrats stormed out of the hearing today because the Republican leadership on the panel wouldn’t allow further debate on a truly horrible appointment to the 3rd U.S. District Court of Appeals. Donald Trump has selected his former personal counsel, Emil Bove, to a lifetime post on the federal bench. Committee Democrats wanted to debate Bove’s appointment further. GOP Chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa said “no.” He ordered that the appointment proceed to a committee vote.

Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey pleaded with Grassley, who he praised as a man of decency and character, to grant the extra time for debate. Grassley was having none of it. Booker wanted to know what kind of control Trump had used to coerce Grassley into denying the debate.

Bove is a patently preposterous choice to become a federal judge. This is the guy who once said it was OK to tell a court to “fu** you” while disobeying a court order. He represented Trump in his case against the woman who won a court judgment that held Trump liable for sexual abuse. He also has said it might be possible for Trump to seek a third term as president, even though the Constitution limits presidents to two elected terms. Roll that around a while … eh?

Never in my entire life have I seen relationships between the legislative and executive branches of government degenerate to the level where it sits today. I have implored all the parties concerned to seek common ground. They need to return to an era where political rivals can disagree on policy but retain a certain level of personal decorum.

It’s all shattered. I fear it is gone forever.

Donald Trump

How does he do this?

I am headed for the great beyond eventually, although I am not wishing for any sort of exit sooner … as I would rather it occur much later.

Before I check out of this world, I am going to seek to understand how people I consider to be reasonable, intelligent, well-read and blessed with the ability to discern right from wrong can continue to stand behind the charlatan who is masquerading as president of the United States of America.

They support this Republican In Name Only even as he:

  • Embraces dictators, tyrants and killers around the world.
  • Grants full pardons to individuals who attacked our government on 1/6 and inflicted harm to police officers.
  • Cuts off international aid aimed at preventing terminal illnesses.
  • Stands behind the lying Russian goon and then denigrates our own intelligence network that determines that Russia sought to influence the 2016 presidential election.
  • Selects unqualified and unfit members of a Cabinet he runs.
  • Violates at every turn the oath of office he took to protect and defend the Constitution.

There’s probably more to list. You get the idea.

What perhaps is equally baffling is how Donald Trump has managed to buffalo these aforementioned folks into believing a single thing that flies out of his overfed pie hole.

That brings me to what might be the million-dollar question. Which is more frustrating, that millions of Americans continue to slather up this guy’s lies or that Donald Trump, the man with no commitment to anyone other than himself, is able to persuade his followers that he is “one of them”?

He isn’t. Donald Trump is unique. There can be no one else on Earth who can manage this kind of political stunt work.

national news

Donald Trump: RINO in chief

Donald John Trump’s game of charade as he pretends to be a “conservative Republican” has been called out many times by many people and in many forums. So what I am going to provide isn’t an exclusive.

He is a Republican In Name Only. Trump is the nation’s RINO in chief.

There once was a time when Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility. They railed against budget deficits, no matter their size. The 1980 GOP landslide win for the presidency rested in part on Ronald Reagan’s intense criticism of President Carter’s $43 billion budget deficit that fiscal year. Forty-three billion bucks wouldn’t even get a mention these days!

Trump’s big ugly bill runs up deficits in the trillions of dollars. It piles on another $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. About the only GOP-friendly policy in the big ugly bill are the tax cuts that benefit the mega-rich. Those cuts come at a cost … the aforementioned deficits and debt.

Republicans hate Marxist dictators. Trump calls them “smart cookies,” says he admires their leadership strength, wishing he had the kind of popular support that they enjoy.

GOP pols normally would rally to the side of a sovereign nation attacked by Russia. Not this RINO in chief, who scolded the Ukrainian president for daring to suggest he could defeat the Russians on the battlefield.

Donald Trump has turned Republican orthodoxy on its ear. Yet he continues to bully GOP members of both congressional chambers into backing his idiotic tariffs, which real Republicans such as George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford all have said are taxes that result only in inflation.

Donald Trump once admitted that he ran for president as a Republican only because the GOP offered him the easier path to the pinnacle of power. There you have it right there. He cannot articulate a party policy issue because he is too stupid to understand one.

All hail the RINO in chief!

environmental news

What if we had voted ‘blue’?

Grateful as I am for Donald Trump/s pledge to rush aid to struggling Texas families damaged by the raging floodwaters of the Guadalupe River, I feel compelled to ask what I believe is a fair question.

What would his response be if Texas had voted against him in three presidential elections?

Trump has this sickening habit of politicizing everything, of attaching partisan preferences to issues that demand that he act as president of the entire United States of America. Disaster relief of the scale that has befallen Central Texas is one of those issues.

We have seen his reaction to California wildfires when he lectured state officials on what he said was inadequate forest management policies. Or his silence on the assassination not long ago of a Minnesota state senator and her husband by a known MAGA supporter.

I dislike bringing all this up, but I know it’s on the minds of many Americans who are worried and grieving the loss of all those Texans from the carnage brought to the Hill Country by the Guadalupe River.

Texas has stood firmly in Trump’s corner through three presidential elections, in 2016, 2020 and 2024. I guess our state’s fealty to Trumpism has earned the quick federal response. It sure isn’t supposed to be that way.

local news, national news, political news

Now we get to test our system

Donald Trump’s big ugly bill is now law, which means that the next big test of the strength of our democracy awaits in the form of congressional elections, which are approaching rapidly.

Can you believe it?

Americans who are concerned about the slashing of social programs, the effect it all will have on our national debt, the tax cuts for the mega-richest of us, the pardoning of criminals who attacked our Capitol on 1/6 will get a chance to elect a new Congress in November 2026.

It’s up to us, kids. You and me. All of us.

Talking about it, attending rallies, spending money to political causes won’t do the job. To finish the task, Americans who say they oppose the big ugly bill need to get out and vote. President Obama was fond of telling us to avoid the boos and jeers. “Vote!” he would say. Just vote your conscience. If your conscience moves you to cast your ballot for someone other than those who support the big ugly bill, you are afforded the right to do so in secret.

No one needs to know. Just vote!

I won’t keep my preferences a secret. I will continue to speak out on this blog about the direction I hope the country takes in a little more than a year from now. We have a congressman in North Texas, a gentleman I happen to like personally, who is on the wrong side of this big ugly bill issue. I intend to let Keith Self know my feelings frequently. I just hope he gets a worthy opponent who can speak intelligently and pledges to act accordingly to fix what I believe is wrong with the direction we’re taking.

No hard feelings, OK congressman?

economic news

Make ’em pay their share

I feel this overwhelming desire to put this blogger’s current word of the day into perspective.

The word is “greed,” and it clearly has wrapped itself around the hearts and minds of mega-rich Americans over the issue of paying their fair share of taxes.

Donald Trump’s spending and taxation bill is now law and it contains those infamous tax breaks for the richest among us. Please consider the following …

If we demand that billionaires pay their fair share of taxes, they would still be richer than God. The going rate is about 38%. If someone were to pay that amount in taxes on $1 billion in gross income during a given calendar year, that still leaves the billionaire with more than $600 million in gross income for that year.

What could the government do with the money it collects from the billionaire? It could parcel it out to replenish food and housing assistance for Americans who are about to be deprived of such assistance. How about spending more money to arm Ukrainians with hardware to fight the invading Russian army?

We could do all of that … and the richest of the rich can still float around in their yachts and enjoy the decadent lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.