Time to pile on and add my thoughts on Donald Trump’s behavior at the World Cup final, as Spain was ready to hoist the trophy and celebrate a true team effort.

Donald wouldn’t get off the stage.

Of course he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He may have been confused, but it’s more likely that he felt that this grand occasion needed his presence, though not quite as much as he needed to stand there and share the spotlight.

What a sad, pathetic man.

Thanks, DJT. You never stop providing fodder.

Tornadoes outside NYC yesterday. What a crazy scene! That’s a rare occurrence, but maybe less rare as time goes on?

We were Zooming yesterday with relatives in the upper Midwest and got talking about the AQI (air quality index) last week, as smoke poured out of the fires in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and Ontario. There was one day, in Duluth, MN, when the AQI was 1000. By comparison, it was 200-something here in northeastern PA, and we were being advised to wear a mask or just stay inside.

According to Trump, it’s Canada’s fault, so it’s higher tariffs for them.

What an idiot.

I read recently that the number of possible arrangements of starting cards in the basic format for Solitaire is 8×10 to the 67^th, which exceeds the number of atoms that make up the known universe.

The number of words spoken in opposition to Donald Trump and a certain brand of Republicanism has to be more than that by now. But to what avail?

It’s getting increasingly difficult to watch any late-night program that has a live studio audience. They must be coached or encouraged to whoop and holler and scream high-pitched “woos!” at the drop of a hat, and it’s getting ridiculous.

It feels contrived, it’s grating and over-the-top. The exuberance often doesn’t match what was just announced, or what someone said in the course of an interview. It often seems like a shouting contest, and it cheapens the product. But I guess this is the new acceptable standard for audience participation?

Same goes for America’s Got Talent or any of those shows. I have to believe that, to one extent or another, the audience is coached to react with unrealistic fervor. In any event, it seems an exaggerated response, and just plain too much.

Very few of them have a healthy sense of humor. This should be our first hint that something is off. They speak as if they’re often offended, unsure of what they’re saying. They often seem like they’re on the defensive.

They appear to have short fuses. They respond to questions as if just about every question is out-of-bounds, or an insult, or beneath them.  

They must be getting tired of wearing shoes that don’t fit, growing weary of serving a megalomaniacal, narcissistic moron. I’d like to think they wake up every morning and immediately put their heads in their hands and pray for the strength to make it through another day of fighting fires of their own making, perhaps even questioning the propriety of their “cause.”

The whole lot of them have drunk the Kool-Aid. They are masters of deception, they’ve lied to themselves and us, compromised themselves and chosen to support a person who has no interest in governing. They are an unnerving bunch of sycophantic impostors.

Obedient, and dead in the eyes.

It is stunning—the lengths he will go to cover his own ass. Stunning! Donald Trump knows what’s in the Epstein files, as do other members of his entourage.

Is it as we suspect? Is most everything that unfolds in this interminable slog in service of distracting the public from the files? Would an actual shooting war, where lives are lost and billions are spent, not be a bridge too far if it serves to avert our gaze from the files?

Let’s add all the talk of a ballroom, an arch, a helipad, a reflecting pool “fix,” wanting your bust added to Mt. Rushmore, and your ugly mug and signature on coins and paper money; renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and straying off-topic and talking about water flow and magnets, and carting out the old chestnut about election fraud in 2020, and the spelling of “dumb,” and more tariffs for Canada because of the wildfire smoke, and threatening to revoke the licenses of networks who decided not to cover his most recent screed this past Thursday.

Well, that last one might be more indicative of the ongoing vindictiveness and power trip that have marked Trump’s time in office from the beginning, not to mention being part of the blueprint of Project 2025. But it all gets lumped together at some point. It’s all bad and ugly and tiring and sad.

The excruciatingly infuriating reality is that he is President of the United States, and all he’s done for the 11 years he’s been front and center–even while out of office– is embarrass us, string us out, lie to us, waste our time, abuse his privileges and the people he was elected to serve, while willingly serving as figurehead for those who would love nothing more than to reduce America to just the next failed state.  

How on earth could we let a perpetually angry, greedy, misogynistic, lying narcissist and possible pedophile get this far?

To borrow a line from Sully, can we get serious now? Can we possibly see a connection between escalating hostilities in Iran and the Trumpian/Heritage Foundation vision of having a reason to postpone or cancel the elections?

Maybe there’s no Iran connection, and Republicans at Trump’s goading will try to invoke the Insurrection Act because they aim to please their fearless leader and maybe are convinced that our election system is porous and riddled with fraud—even though it’s long been established that there is relatively negligible fraud.

The alarm bells should be sounding, as our own federal government appears to be testing and hinting at an increased presence of ICE agents and who-knows-who-else at polling places ahead of and on November 3.

These are desperate people now, and we need to see them for who they are and have always been—impostors and weaklings intent on sabotaging and destroying the institutions that have sustained us for a quarter of a millennium.

They’ve been loitering and taking up space long enough. It’s soon time to kick them out.