He’s deprived. Glittering gold in the Oval Office, gaudy frills everywhere. And now his puppy dog, eager-to-please press secretary announces that he’s done enough to deserve one more piece of bling: the Nobel Peace Prize. There would be no more dissonant an occurrence than Trump receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, but you can bet he and his lackies are “reaching out” to the people with connections.

The people around him are so subservient, they’ve got their heads buried so far up his ass that no stone will be left unturned. It may just happen. And it would be among the biggest, most farcical misappropriations in the history of the awards. Maybe at the top of that list.

No matter to Donald, though, because all he’s ever wanted is to rub it in Barack’s face.

He did the right thing. Various media were playing it up like Keegan Bradley deserved to play, that he had an agonizing decision to make because he had the right to pick himself to play as well as captain the Ryder Cup team. I’m glad he decided not to do that. It would have been a bit selfish, to say the least, and of course it would have left someone off who could have had the experience of making the team if not for another large ego.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, he showed restraint, and took the high road. It turned out to be not nearly as agonizing as various pundits were making it seem. I hope things go well for him and the team. And I hope the event is unmarred by stupid fans.

Every day, the news gets worse. Gavin Newsom, according to some, is already jockeying for position in 2028. Others feel he’s reacting to the moment, getting under Trump’s skin, which can be both a great thing and also potential trouble for the agitator—because you know accusations in some form are coming, or there will be more troops arriving in Californians’ back yards.

It’s great, isn’t it, to watch day after day as our elected leaders sink to the lowest common denominator and make fools of themselves, investing time and energy in frivolous pursuits while funding streams dry up and genuine challenges get ignored?

It’s unforgiveable, Donald. Your day of reckoning has to be coming.

This decision to send in the National Guard and taking over local law enforcement is really troubling. But the issue for me—beyond the visual of troops in the streets of only Democratically-led cities—is the seeming inevitability of the troops themselves just following orders. Isn’t it possible for them to decide not to follow orders?

Are they that programmed and that blind to the moment that they can’t make a decision for themselves and just say No?

This is a moral issue, these are no ordinary times. There is no unrest, there are no hurricanes to clean up after. It’s just a megalomaniacal poor sport paving the way for total control and wreaking havoc in the 2026 midterms and beyond, giving orders and doing atrocious things simply because he can.

He’s drunk with power, and he’s putty in the hands of the Heritage Foundation crowd.

I got up to use the bathroom around 4:30 this morning, which meant I could return to bed for another half hour before the alarm went off. So I did that, and was asleep and dreaming in what must have been less than a minute.

It was a short but vivid dream—I was being confronted by a Trump supporter who was reprimanding me for muttering something under my breath after she launched into the tired line about how we have to listen to each other if there’s any hope of moving beyond the current entrenchment. I started to respond to her abrupt tone, which I guess I deserved, but then woke up.

I didn’t get back to sleep, because I lay there trying to formulate my response. I’ve just rushed through my journal entry and bypassed the Daily Writing Prompt—for now—to get to this before it leaves my head. So here goes…

There was a time, back in 2015 maybe, when such an effort might have been warranted— i.e., making the effort to talk to each other. Donald Trump, in certain ways, was an unknown quantity, and people were open to giving him a listen, even giving him a chance, since he spoke plainly and with what many took as refreshing honesty about issues that mattered to folks—cost of living, border security, etc.

From my perspective, I already knew enough about him to be highly suspicious and unconvinced that he had any business being considered for the job of President of the United States. He emanated a disconcerting vibe, reminded me of an entitled rich kid who always got his way. He appealed to peoples’ worse angels. He annoyed the hell out of me, and I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.

Even back then, he was laying out his “plan,” offering hints of things to come when it came to a crackdown on illegal aliens, and his hatred for Barack Obama. We were well aware of the slight he felt from things Obama said– and the fact that Obama had won a Nobel Peace Prize. Then there was the embarrassment Trump apparently took to heart after Seth Meyers laid into him at an earlier Washington Correspondents Dinner in 2011.

So, we all knew he filed things away, remembered the slights, always contemplated payback.

What we’ve come to learn since is that a monster was created, and let loose on us all, because payback is one of his main motivators. He’s a damaged child. He never grew up.

Cutting to the chase, the time for dialogue between sides is long over. There is nothing to parse, nothing on which to meet halfway, nothing that would soften my stance when it comes to Donald Trump. In some ways, he’s just the poster child for a more insidious problem, which is personified in the likes of Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Kevin Roberts, and Steve Bannon. Trump is just the sad point man, but since he’s POTUS—again!—he’s the one out front who gets the blame. As it is, he does and says enough stuff on his own to warrant numerous spit takes.

Anyway, if this morning’s dream had continued, I hope I would have been able to tell this person that some sort of truce is unseemly. The time for finding something of value in any opinion of someone who still supports Donald Trump is over. Has been for a long time.

Get it through your heads, MAGA loyalists: you’ve long backed the wrong horse, and the only reason you’re still with him is either because the stock market is doing OK, or he stimulates your misplaced religious fervor and your belief that White is Right.

Just remember—no one will escape his wrath. Even his most ardent supporters are just a means to some end. He doesn’t give a shit about about any of us, including those who can still say they love him.

I’m growing tired of all the panels of pundits. They raise their voices, they pontificate, analyze, warn, cajole, and get indignant over and flustered by the daily dose of bullshit and stunning news generated by the cabal controlling pretty much everything in Washington, D.C. They just add to the noise and raise everybody’s blood pressure, keep telling us we need to get involved before it’s too late. Meanwhile, Trump and the rest just keep filing lawsuits and signing EOs, dissing blue cities and black mayors, feeding off any kind of press, and generally giving everyone a giant case of the jitters with their mindless, scorched earth policy decisions.

There’s never been anyone close to this awful in the Oval Office. And the cancer is spreading throughout the rest of the federal government. Trump offers assurances that he’s not a dictator, but he is– he likes the sound of that. The plan is to tilt the playing field so everything works in his favor, to the almost total exclusion of the rest of us. There is a concerted effort to neuter and destroy checks and balances, ignore court orders, and in general act with impunity until someone stops this movement.

No one’s been able to stop them. We’re mostly spectators, watching our own demise, while Trump lines his pockets and consolidates the power. How can his supporters look at what he’s party to, and not have second thoughts about him?

I guess it makes twisted sense if one considers that Trump is just the idiot out front. The real brain trust and idea people are the devious crew who have been operating in the shadows for years—Vought, Miller, Roberts, Bannon, etc., aided and abetted by Fox News and the rest. Trump is just the front man, the loud, low-brow, ugly talking head. The puppet. Is there anyone out there who actually believes Donald is capable of thinking up all this stuff on his own? I’m fully convinced that he doesn’t know what he believes, other than whatever will sound good to voters and keep him in office.

This assault has been in the works since early in our history. A civil war in the 1860s, concerted efforts in the 1930s and 1950s, and now they’ve seemingly worked out the kinks and have been able to lay the groundwork—under our noses, behind the scenes and in broad daylight, and in the name of telling everyone that they alone have the best idea for what America should be: a gaggle of white men who wield the Bible as a weapon and claim a convenient, oppressive Christianity.

It’s a hijacking, though. Donald Trump is an answer to the Heritage Foundation’s prayers. Congress is impotent, and the judicial branch is heading toward extreme partisanship. And, short of large-scale disobedience or another civil war, there’s nothing we can do, except watch it all unfold. Or hope that the whole scheme somehow implodes under the weight of its own stupid cruelty and self-serving intent.

It could happen, though probably not tomorrow, and not before some serious damage is done.

Stop with the woke-bashing already. You’ve beaten it to death, relegated it to cliché status. And most of all, you’ve confirmed yourselves to be the closed-off, anachronistic, conveniently Christian lemmings you’ve always been.

If “woke” means being tuned in to injustice and caring about others, then that’s really all one needs to know about the word. Sure, it seems in some ways some have taken it too far, and that’s a fair critique. But you’ve lumped everything into this one word, and that’s wildly unfair and inaccurate, and lazy.

Woke culture is mostly people who recognize that change and discovery are givens and we don’t live in a static, cookie cutter world—as much as such a place would please people like Donald Trump and the whole crew at The Heritage Foundation. Woke culture views the Bible differently, less like a cudgel, which might be the biggest wrinkle of all, the most heinous affront to the average MAGA loyalist.

Wokeness gets associated with someone who believes Social Security actually is an entitlement, that mRNA vaccines and their predecessors actually do save lives. It gets associated with people who believe scientific research always deserves a seat at the table and is critical to our continued well-being as a species. Wokeness gets associated with people who, without the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, thought Covid restrictions were sensible– in light of the fact we were dealing with something we’d never seen before that spread through people who gathered in close proximity to one another. Wokeness is a label slapped on those who reasonably think 8 billion of us are having an effect on planetary systems, that we are most definitely affecting CO2 levels while trying to live like that’s not the case.

“Wokeness”, somehow, is sadly perceived as weakness masquerading as genuine concern, when in reality it has become a catch-all, a buzzword, corrupted and used by conservatives to rile up the base, like “Niagara Falls” used to rile up Moe and Larry.