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Kelli Klymenko's avatar

Donald Trump is increasingly incoherent, detached from reality, and exercising enormous power without meaningful restraint.

Our allies see it. Our enemies see it. The entire world sees it.

The only people pretending not to see it are the people with the power and responsibility to do something about it.

Their silence is no longer cowardice. It is complicity.

Eileen's avatar

The Republicans are accomplices in crimes.

Bluchek Mark's avatar

They are like the courtiers in The Emperor’s New Clothes who are praise him for his wardrobe because they are afraid to say what everyone can see.

Marc Panaye's avatar

The massive problem is indeed that this fellow walks around with the nuclear "football" and has a sycophant fake crusader in control of the military.

What could possibly go wrong right?

Russell John Netto's avatar

Allies increasingly attach no weight to his declarations; courtiers do nothing but shamelessly repeat them; and congressional Republicans do nothing at all.

Bryan Sean McKown's avatar

The Pain at 1600 Pennsylvania is entirely in trump's disintegrating brai .. n ....

horhai's avatar
23mEdited

Yes, Trump escalating the war and launching military strikes against Iran while at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkiye is not the best timing or sane, given the location.

And to make it even more bizarre, Donold goes on a tirade about how Iran is "led by sick people, and they’re, they’re vicious, violent people...Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars.… There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo." If that's not the pot calling the kettle a gold plated faux king orange maniac...

EcstaticRationalist's avatar

My only comment is that Dr. Richardson, whose intent with her letters, among other things, is to create a record that future historians can use when studying this era, provides reliable sources for everything she writes in the comments to her FB post and on her Substack. All of this is documented.

To use a popular phrase, she brings the receipts.

It's Come To This's avatar

I'm always impressed that she's one of the few who quote President Bibble-Babble verbatim and at great length to drive home the point that others fear to. Most mainstream sources bypass the actual slop-verbiage, thus contributing to the illusion that there's really a there there, rather than just a pile of rancid Velveeta on a stale cracker.

J L Graham's avatar

Today Chase Bank kindly sent me a "heads up" presenting clues that may indicate snares laid for you by a scammers:

.

"We're sharing what you may hear from a scammer

Scams are built to feel so real and urgent that even security experts have been scammed. Know what to listen for.

(...)

Scams work because scammers try to cloud your judgment

Urgency-

They rush you into acting fast, before you can think or check with someone you trust.

Pressure-

They invent emergencies or threaten legal action against you.

Emotion-

They spin emotional stories to cloud judgment so you ignore your instincts."

>

And some scammers scam bigly. One can't be too careful.

JDinTX's avatar

You are being too nice. Schitt on a shingle is also too nice

David Herrick's avatar

Thanks ITCC, I just got out of bed to read HCR and now I'm about to upchuck. To think Velveeta was a regular part of my diet growing up...

TJB's avatar

Perhaps she can bring something else to the nation & the great state of Maine. I know you’re all thinking about it ….

It's Come To This's avatar

She already nipped that idea in the bud yesterday. But whoever the Maine Democratic Party now chooses, she'll enthusiastically back him/her.

TJB's avatar

The disadvantage of being 6 hours behind the east coast. I miss some of the news & announcements. Too bad. When (showing my optimism) there’s a Dem administration in 2029, she can lead the reconstitution of the DOE.

It's Come To This's avatar

She often gathers the day's thoughts and posts them on YouTube a few hours before her regular Letters. Yesterday, she spoke not just about Maine, but about the larger re-alignment taking place in both parties. She was surprisingly optimistic about Maine. No doubt she'll have more to say about that soon enough....

J L Graham's avatar

The whole friggin' public sector.

Bill Katz's avatar

We need to begin organizing voter rides for the midterms. Essentially, we need a nationally organized campaign to send drivers to any states where absentee ballots will be curtailed or those who would normally send one in but now this method is in grave jeopardy. Trump is ordering the Post Office to not accept ballots from states that have not surrendered their voting lists. This is serious and must be addressed now. If this is not developed now it may be too late. For example, I’m willing to caste an absentee ballot in Connecticut with no problem and then drive to my assigned state to work on Election Day. I proposed this to Miles Taylor to take the leadership of this new plan. Trump is planning any and all kinds of disenfranchisement’s heading toward the midterms. WE MUST ORGANIZE NOW.

JDinTX's avatar

Who would put themselves in the crosshairs. Obama survived doing that but the the odds are even worse now.

lwbrown's avatar

I was pretty sure I (we) had seen it all. That was such FOOLISH, WISHFUL THINKING! The fact that our electeds have done NOTHING to get Trump and his crazy, dirty, lying mouth where he/it belongs stuns me more each day. We’re never going to save face. His family and friends continue to pocket huge sums of money in plain view, and the Donald blathers on, insanely insulting Iran and the rest of the world, and the people we’ve elected are doing NOTHING!! Our economy is in shambles, Trump is foaming at the mouth, and our country has gone to hell in a hand basket. The 2025 plan (or whatever it’s called) is “winning” (said like Charlie Sheen a few years back.) I have never felt this saddened and disgusted in my (almost) 73 years. 💀

JDinTX's avatar

Older and more morose, but can still kick arse

Bill Katz's avatar

You got that dog right.

Bennett Gaev's avatar

This is a very salient point. If more media outlets actually quoted à la HCR the semi digested word salad that hurls from Trump’s mouth which lucidly displays the amyloid tangles in his brain would, perhaps more than anything else, instruct the literate populace of our country just how impaired his thinking is. On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t matter since most people who’d possibly vote for him wouldn’t read those news sources anyway.

I personally find it shocking that the purported leader of the free world is so lacking in the higher cortical activities so necessary to function as a competent adult in our present day society, and instead predictably defaults to primitive, impulse driven, hate laden rhetoric. At the very least someone could attempt to expand his adolescent vocabulary.

EcstaticRationalist's avatar

His vocabulary isn't adolescent, it's senescent. Find a clip of him talking from the early 1980s. He was a hateful shitbag already, but he was at least coherent.

Mark Lane's avatar

Like JD Vance now. A hateful shitbag but at least coherent.

Bill Katz's avatar

A friend once met this shitbag in Hartford in the late 1980s and told me she thought he was a very smart man to which I responded, “You gotta be kidding.”

JDinTX's avatar

Rupert will never change his spots. Hell would freeze over first

Russell John Netto's avatar

The evidence itself is voluminous but it takes a historian of some calibre to record it succinctly and accurately for the benefit of posterity.

J L Graham's avatar

Like an archeologist finding shards of an ancient urn and finding how they fit.

It's Come To This's avatar

Do they speak Javanese in the Islamic Republic of Japan, or Arabesque? I can't remember now. It's all so confusing. I thought they were Habañero-speakers, but maybe that's what you hear in Cuba.

Asking for a friend.

JDinTX's avatar

It’s a combo of AI and auto correct. Tower of Babel coming soon…

Mark Slattery's avatar

Ther is not one insult that Trump directed at Iran that is not a self-own.

Protect the Vote's avatar

Registered Voters Are Already Being Disenfranchised

Beau Bayh grandson of Birch Bayh of Senatorial fame is running for Indiana’s Secretary of State on the Democratic side of the ticket.

He reports that a registered Indiana voter prepared to vote in the Indiana primary and found that she was not eligible to vote(bit.ly/4p3UOLz). Charrie Stambaugh had been a U.S. citizen for nearly three decades and had cast a ballot in every election since she became eligible to vote. But this spring, after seeing a Facebook post encouraging people to check their voter registration status, she found her registration had been canceled. She was one of 1,625 registered voters targeted by Indiana Nazi Republican laws.

“I was not notified at any point that my registration had been revoked … I would not have known that had I not checked myself,” said Stambaugh, who thought it was unlikely other recent voters would randomly think to check their registrations without an election coming up

So a word to involved citizens. Check your voter registration and vote early so you can cure if there is a problem. Also notify and alert friends, neighbors, family, and relatives about the possible disenfranchisement of their ability to vote.

Go to https://www.vote411.org/check-registration to locate your voting registration in your state.

PS An Ariz lady in the comment section said that she had the same thing happen to her.

J L Graham's avatar

I believe that careless or malicious vote suppression is an even greater crime than one-off unauthorized voting. There is a harm in it to society and an individual as well. Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are only some of the human rights that are justly considered "Unalienable", and the right to vote is surely among them.

J L Graham's avatar

“It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.”

– John Adams

Bill Katz's avatar

Please read my idea above about organizing nationally to send drivers to red states to transport those who normally vote absentee but now will be unable and bring them to the polls. Folks who may be seniors, handicapped, etc.

JDinTX's avatar

The dirty tricks are in full swing

jmtp's avatar

Our President is like a toddler, but with dementia.

I keep waiting to hear Jim Jordan and his ilk rant about Trump's mental decline, like they ranted about Hillary's private server, etc. But I hear nothing.

Garrett Mengel's avatar

And you never will - not from them.

J L Graham's avatar

And with a mean streak that won't quit.

J L Graham's avatar

Ans somehow the press way plenty worried about Biden's alleged mental decline.

JDinTX's avatar

Old and tired, not a lunatic. I relate

It's Come To This's avatar

Amid the dementia and the Red Queen moments of barking orders at nothing and nobody in particular in Ankara, President Slopmouth apparently did something Zelenskyy had expressly asked for -- Ukraine received licensing rights to build Patriot antimissile systems itself, something only granted to Germany before this moment. Patriots are the only defense system fast enough to intercept incoming Russian ballistic missiles, which have rained down on Kyiv in recent days.

The bad news is that building, testing and rolling out a Patriot system requires at least 8 months to a year. In the meantime, the only source of Patriots is Germany (since we've been busy depleting our own reserves through a stupid war with Iran).

Other than missiles, however, Russia now finds itself on the back foot. Within the last 3 days, Ukrainian drones have either ka-boomed or incapacitated 23 Russian oil tankers in or near the Sea of Azov. Gas lines now routinely stretch for 3-4 miles in places like Chita, about 150 miles from Mongolia (2,500 - 3,000 miles from Ukraine). The Ukrainians have actually figured out how to use Russia's own immensity against itself. In response, unverified reports that some kind of attack against Poland by Russia is being planned. The country's borders between Finland and other NATO members, as well as Kazakhstan and Armenia, are being closed.

We are nearing the most dangerous moment in world affairs since the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it's not Harvard-educated John F. Kennedy who's figuring out the next move, but a 2-year-old psychotic toddler obsessed with ballrooms who gets Iran confused with Japan instead.

It's not just our allies paying attention to the 'throne vacant' neon signs flashing on and off over the United States right now....

Teresa D. Hawkes, Ph.D.'s avatar

This is WWIII. No one wants to admit that yet.

JDinTX's avatar

The throne is not vacant but occupied by evil. No other word will do.

Annabel Ascher's avatar

How much longer will the architects of this authoritarian plurocratic coup allow this dementia patient to be the mouthpiece?

I would bet what i have in my pocket right now that they are waiting for the midterms, and will usher him out close to that date, either on his shaky legs or toes first.

Carol S.'s avatar

Unfortunately a lot of damage can be done in the next four months while waiting for the midterms.

Rex Page (Left Coast)'s avatar

Republicans in the legislature, and Republican politicians everywhere for that matter, will leave Trump in office as long as a significant fraction their constituents want them to. Roughly 77 million Americans voted, with malice aforethought, to put a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and lifelong con man in the White House. If they could vote again today, nearly all of them would vote for Trump again. That’s why nearly all Republican politicians, and ALL of those who want to be reelected, contnue to tote Trump’s water. The only hope is to outvote the louts in November by a huge margin. That isn’t a likely outcome, but it’s the one all Americans who are decent human beings (that is, roughly 40% of the white population and most of the rest of it) must work for.

Loren Bliss's avatar

I am now convinced that what we are seeing -- the conduct of the ChristoNazi Regime, the cunningly perfected, always plausibly deniable collaboration of the Democrats and the embrace of tyranny implicit in the refusal of the people to (effectively) resist -- is the true face of the (real) "America."

Thus the Unified Reich -- like the Third Reich that fathered it -- will not be overthrown save by invasion, and that only if the liberators first achieve the scientifically impossible miracle of doing what it is alleged some flights of UFOs have done, paralyzing the USian CBR arsenal so that the Regime cannot destroy the world to avoid defeat, surrender, the replay of V-E Day celebration and retributive justice by partisans and judicial authorities.

My oldest half-brother, my father's first-born son and one of the founding directors of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said before he died that he believed Trump's 2016 victory was literally the beginning of the end of the world. I believe he spoke prophetic truth.

JDinTX's avatar

Although the future is not written, we are the authors. Can we sell sanity rather than sleaze.

Bill Katz's avatar

Better toes first.

93clementine's avatar

'Trump told reporters that Iranian leaders are “scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re, they’re vicious, violent people,” Trump said in his comments earlier Wednesday. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars.… There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo.’

Sounds like he is projecting the same descriptors he has heard his whole life about himself. He is sick, violent, vicious, a liar, cuckoo, and an abusive bully. Something is wrong with him but he is what he is.

What is really unforgivable are the greed and venality of the enablers and sycophants around him. They know all of this and they choose corruption.

Radio Free Fredbox's avatar

Once again with this regime, every accusation is a confession.

93clementine's avatar

Yep. It’s amazing that they can’t see how pathetic they are.

Michael Abeshouse's avatar

All energies should be focused on sweeping all the Trump enablers out in the midterms, and then removing Trump from office as soon as possible. He’s now resumed war and called it off for the 65th time or so, always saying the Iranians accepted all terms or other such nonsense. Just another insider moneymaking opportunity for him and his pals. This reign of error must end.

Mike Savage's avatar

Thank you, Professor. I’m very sad. It is so horrible. What he has done to the heart and soul for what America stands for. We have always been a beacon of light for the world I believe. And I wish no ill to anyone. But he needs to be set a drift. And fade away. And let the sun shine again on America and our connection with the world, our friends.. ☮️❤️🌻

pilgrimRVW's avatar

But this is not just Trump. In fact, I’m not sure how much is Trump and how much Miller, Hegseth, and all the other sui generis nasty

Stephen Bothel's avatar

It really makes me cringe when I hear him making comments about Spain as I am visiting there now.

We are make it a point to tell people we meet that we know he is a nut job and want all of his administration brought up on charges and imprisoned.

JDinTX's avatar
8mEdited

See Greg Olear’s recent post from Madrid, a keeper and so relevant

Garrett Mengel's avatar

Once again, Thank You Dr. Heather. It takes more fortitude than I've got to sift through that foulness every day looking for sense without needing to take a week off just the re-establish your sanity. You're a national treasure. And a pretty tough nut too!

Marlene Lerner-Bigley (CA)'s avatar

Today, I put my flag out in my front yard. It is not huge but the lettering is… 86 47

Deepak Puri's avatar

Follow the Saudi billions Kushner and Witkoff got before Trump attacked Iran driving up gas prices

https://thedemlabs.org/2026/03/12/kushner-witkoff-saudi-money-map-iran-attack/

Follow the Middle Eastern money behind the Trump and Witkoff sons $500M UAE Crypto Deal

https://thedemlabs.org/2026/02/03/trump-uae-crypto-deal-ai-chips/

Lee Houten's avatar

Looks like Netanyahu is putting a lot of pressure on threatening to release files that certain people would prefer to keep hidden