Well, there’s a lot of meat on the bones of this Friday morning, so let’s start gnashing.
We have to worry, first of all, about the health of Donald J. Trump. Anything impeding his work of making America great again—courts, reason, decency, health—is to be dreaded. Thus, the news that he has had to make TWO annual trips to the doctor in this year is worrisome.
The question, of course, is whether today is the day that Trump gets 25thed. Forgive me for making that verb up, but it came to me when I realized—oh, a year ago, maybe—the plan all along.
Trump 2.0 is not Trump 1.0. Even the body is not the same—more hunched, slower, less energy, falling asleep in court, shitting in his pants. (Figuratively and now literally). Mentally, of course, he’s gone, and we all know it. All of the signs of dementia are there, in brightly lit neon against a murderous black sky. He’s swearing in public now, he’s getting up on the roof of the White House to supervise little projects that should have stayed in his mind, and when asked yesterday about Ghislaine Maxwell, he said, apparently and oddly truthfully, “I haven’t heard that name for a long time.”
Even worse, there’s the Wall Street Journal saying that the Truth Social post that he published publicly was in fact meant to be a private message to Pam Bondi. (Just to walk my trivial mind, doesn’t it seem like having an Attorney General named “Pam” is a terrible idea? Couldn’t she be “Rebecca,” or “Esther?”)
Well, a good blogger would post a picture of the tweet, and that’s what I’m gonna do.
This is not the tweet that any competent lawyer (i.e., not Pam and not Lindsey) would suggest making. In fact, a text message is still admissible in court as a legal document, so even as a direct message to Pam, this is pretty bad. Fortunately for Trump, we were all so conditioned to illegality that it barely raised eye brows (or blood pressure) among even the most sensitive.
Your call—did he send it on purpose or by mistake?
My call—either way, it’s awful.
So Trump is off today to the doctor, and we’ll see if today is the day the grand plan gets revealed. Today might be the day, in fact, that the oligarchs show their hand, and how happy you’ll be, having heard all about it here.
Trump was never the candidate of Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or any of the other billionaires that needed the pesky Federal government to stop interfering with their careful though nefarious plans. No, Trump was an ignorant, arrogant boor who could play to the grievances of a spoiled American electorate.
Trump had to keep running because he had a grievance and because he’d have been in jail had he not.
Trump was losing his grip, and we all could see that.
Trump was, then, the perfect guy for the billionaires. He could get elected, he could ruin the country, he could destroy the economy, he could cause mayhem. It was impossible for him NOT to do all that.
The news that he was fucking nutso would come out when it came out. True—that little bit about the Haitians eating dogs and cats in Columbus (or wherever it was) was a bit revealing. But we all hated Kamala because she was right and a woman, so we gave it a pass. The rich guys sighed a sigh of relief, and Trump soared to victory.
So Thiel and Musk got right behind Trump, dug into their pockets, and got Trump elected. Now, of course, the trick is to get rid of him. So we’ll probably have to do the drip / drip until it’s too late, and Trump starts pulling his pants down and dropping his Pampers on the Resolute desk.
Here’s comes the 25th amendment to the constitution of the United States, which can occasionally be handy. We can 25th Trump and install JD Vance, who has done nothing since scrambling out of Appalachia and then out of Harvard but work for a guy called Peter Thiel. He’s rich, he’s gay—and that can be great, if you’re not a crazy conservative or rather a crazy reactionary.
But in the case of Thiel, gay and rich may not be our best option.
So is today the day that the doctors at last tell us the truth, which we will bear with a heavy heart.
A great man, Trump is no longer with us.
They’re not doing this because of me—I’m delusional, but not to that point. But they know perfectly that the majority of the American public, who are slowly coming around to little Marc’s point of view, will gladly buy in.
The problem isn’t that he is a fascist, and we all voted for him and made him rich.
Nah, he’s sick!
Well, we’re all off the hook, aren’t we?
Not if I’m writing about it.
So today is the day when all of that could be coming down, and I really wanted to write about John Roberts, who runs this thing called the Supreme Court, which at one point we assumed would safeguard our democracy. We expect people to do things for us, entitled as we are.
Anyway, Roberts is pettifogging away this Friday morning, saying that the Trump administration is going a bit far, really a bit far, in impeaching judges with legally sound but politically inconvenient rulings. If Roberts isn’t pettifogging (a word he famously used in the first Trump impeachment, since he blew off the second), that is. If Roberts isn’t pettifogging, he’s tsk-tsking. But he doesn’t really have much leg to stand on, at least if he had read the letter that I mailed to him a month or so after the inauguration.
That letter, which appears(drumroll) for the first time here in this blog (exclamation marks), read:
19 March 2025
Dear Justice Roberts,
I never thought I would write this letter, nor do I imagine that you will read it. For most of my adult life, I venerated the Supreme Court. I trusted you to be honest and fair. I accepted that you could be wrong (in my view), but never would have believed that you were anything less than intelligent, educated women and men working hard to preserve, if not improve, our democracy.
I no longer feel that.
The Supreme Court has done everything in its power to enable a wanna-be dictator. The decision to give Trump (limited) immunity, the endless delays in hearing the cases, the refusal to act when it was vital to do so—it couldn’t be clearer.
You administered an oath of office to a man whom you knew had no intention of honoring that office. You swore in a liar, and you knew it. You knew perfectly well that Trump had pledged to be a dictator “on the first day,” and you knew exactly what that meant.
I watched the inaugural because I wanted to see you administer that oath. That oath meant nothing to Trump, of course—it was only a formality to him, a stupid step before taking office (he didn’t, you remember, bother to put his hand on the Bible). But the oath meant something to me, and still does. I prepared immigrants for many years to apply for citizenship, and each time came away more impressed by the wisdom of our founders. No man is (or was) above the law.
The Supreme Court enabled Donald Trump. And your name, Judge, will forever be linked to Donald Trump. The first line of your obituary will include the name of Donald Trump.
We are now in a constitutional crisis. Trump knowingly violated an order by a federal judge, knowing perfectly well that he could get away with it. You gave away the power of the judiciary, and we are now dangerously close, if indeed not already into, a dictatorship.
The only question that remains is whether you wanted it or not.
Your name will live on in history, Judge. When the question is asked who sold the country out, your name will be the first on many lips. You did something worse than steal my country, Judge.
You robbed me of my trust and faith in my countrymen.
Marc Newhouse
Oh, how he must have winced when he got that letter! The constitutional crisis referred to in the letter, by the way, no longer lingers in the mind. There have been so many, of late, and so very unpleasant. I think it was when the government admitted that they knew the plane full of illegally detained immigrants would be illegally flown to El Salvador, a country which had no legal right to accept them or house them. It was the plane Abrego García was on, or one of them.
What I wanted to do, on this Friday morning, was not to worry about the billionaires 25thing the president, or the Chief Justice pettifogging about his judicial system. I wanted to tell you about Martin Luther and his quote, “Sin Boldly.” Actually, I wanted to write about it, since I don’t understand it, and what did the dude mean, anyway? I’ve done it, for sure, but what is it?
Writing about it helps to deepen my level of misunderstanding.
But it’s page six, and it’s late, and I gotta go.
See you all Monday.
