Superficiality, braggadocio, and image. Pete Hegseth’s rah-rah speech before the military brass was an embarrassing display of everything wrong with the current administration. Hegseth standing before the crowd in that room was like any Kardashian lecturing Robert Oppenheimer on how to build the bomb. Then Donald arrived, meandered and pontificated nonsensically, and drove home that point.

Was there ever a time when people didn’t get hurt by the hardball politics involved in moving legislation through Congress? When the layfolk weren’t caught in the middle, slipping through the cracks, going without a voice because their representatives in one chamber or the other were farting around, too busy going low or trying to outsmart the opposition, always calculating, always playing chess and maybe even trying to ensure they could pin the blame on those across the aisle and emerge from the brouhaha smelling like roses?

Anymore, there’s too much at stake to engage in this sick, highly consequential brinkmanship. We’re all tired of the weakness and cowardice and the appalling lack of principles. There has to be a baseline of commonality. How about we set the bar really low and all get on the same page with regard to Donald Trump?

Can Republicans actually not see that he is… let’s put it mildly… unfit? Are they so afraid, in so deep, that they can’t summon the courage to admit they’ve compromised themselves by backing the wrong horse? I hope we haven’t reached the point where even Republicans with a head on their shoulders are prepared to go down with the ship.

This giant ruse can only be sustained for so long. In the meantime, unconscionable harm is being done.

Jimmy and Stephen, on each other’s shows. Quite a spectacle. And rarified air—each sharing the circumstances and how they felt about getting the news that their shows were canceled or suspended.

I appreciate them both, but somehow Tuesday’s shows were a bit rich for my blood. It’s difficult to explain—two well-to-do late-night hosts commiserating over an experience a negligible percentage of us will ever experience.

The bigger picture, of course, involves us all—their shows were affected because they said things that got under Donald Trump’s skin. And we all know by now that whatever Baby Man deems offensive and hurtful is not likely to escape his attention and eventual wrath, free speech be damned. He and his henchmen and women will see to it that the liberal talking heads will somehow pay bigly.

Except Jimmy’s back, and who knows what yet may happen with Colbert?

Is there, will there be anything left untouched by this amalgam of awfulness, this collection of disillusioned derelicts and pretenders? Godspeed, Stephen and Jimmy and the rest. In some ways, you are our voice in these nightmare times.

Quite a picture yesterday—a roomful of military brass, elbow to elbow, having to suffer through the tired tirades of two pretenders who think they have the authority and street cred to dictate policy.

I guess the generals and field commanders sat there and listened with poker faces, unemotional. But what were they thinking? I really hope it was along the lines of, “What are we doing here? Is this for real? Who are these people and who do they think they are? Not in a million years…”

But that’s not what will happen. Project 2025 will seep into our military and that cursed “wokeness” will suffer what will appear to be a death blow, the latest domino to fall in this administration’s sham march to some sea. Knees will be bent to these clowns dressed up as serious politicians.

Highly disturbing, and pathetic.

Either command loyalty or fire them. This is one opinion of what’s going to happen in the meeting of Hegseth and top military brass from around the world. Not only does this gathering feel like a massive security risk, but it smacks of more dominoes falling. It’s all moving too fast.

I’m starting to have creepy dreams about what the future is gonna look like. It’s wearing on my psyche. Father David, a current YouTube regular, echoed the words we’ve heard in reference to Nazi Germany—the ones about silence being complicity—and it was a gut-wrenching awakening.

Trump is looking for fealty from the entire US military? We can’t be there already, can we? And something else: can Trump really be the one in charge? Isn’t it past time that Republicans in Congress wake up and grow a backbone? Isn’t it past time we start looking a lot closer at Vought and Miller and Roberts and the rest? Trump is an incompetent, perpetually angry and vengeful, 79-year-old marionette, doing these other guys’ dirty work.

Calculating, spineless, sniveling goons all. With issues. Taking pages from the Nazi playbook! And right now, getting away with it.