I watched part of an interview Rick Beato recently did with the surviving members of The Doors—John Densmore and Robby Krieger. I found it to be a special thing—the three of them sitting in the studio where Light My Fire and other hits came together.

There they were, getting up in years but still fiery and sharp, reminiscing a bit, sharing details about who influenced them musically, about scouring LA for gigs, how certain songs took form and got recorded, and the brilliance of Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek.

It had the air of three guys just sitting, having a conversation, with all that water having gone under the bridge and plenty of stories to tell. It was cool, for some reason. And Beato doesn’t ask just your run-of-the-mill, starstruck questions, though there might have been a couple of those.

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“Red, White, and Blueland…”; Trump sitting at the Resolute Desk, looking useless and irrelevant, while Elon holds court beside him, spewing vagaries and other bullshit, wearing that stupid hat, his son on his shoulders, I guess signaling that he’s just a dad like everyone else; Pete Hegseth in over his head, making believe he has something important to say in Brussels, all the while scaring our allies, making idle threats, and causing everyone in the room to think “what a douchebag”; Trump signing a special proclamation on the way to the Super Bowl, announcing the name change for the Gulf of Mexico; Gabbard and Kennedy, Jr. confirmed; pining for the bygone days of a Washington bureaucracy that’s in the process of being dismantled.

Only the best people with the best ideas. We’re winning again. Nothing but winning bigly. Winning all the time. Never have we seen such winning. We’re gonna get tired of winning!

Mitch McConnell’s No vote on Tulsi Gabbard is no great shakes, just convenient and consequence-free. There’s no reelection to worry about, nothing at stake anymore.

He’s no pillar of conscience, though he’s always had a way with words.

How do we voice displeasure and have our voices heard? Or was this always going to be a fool’s errand?

The second Trump term is already feeling like some foreign incursion, like he and the rest are serving the interests of a narrow few, and not the country as a whole. Barring some miraculous change of heart, it appears there’s nothing anyone will be able to do to stop them, so it’s going to come down to violence, with law enforcement and the military having to choose sides.

We’ll know this for sure when Maddow, Colbert, and Kimmel, along with the press, decide to tone down their rhetoric and critique, become subservient and acquiescent, effectively marginalized.

How can these people have so much power? Partly because the Republicans in Congress are all walking around, somehow, without backbones. And consciences (that includes you, Mitch, even though you voted against Ms. Gabbard). And the Democrats have the convenient excuse of being in the minority. Helluva place to be, considering the moment.

People voted for this. We all should have seen it coming, and many did. No one should be surprised, except maybe by the level of cowardice and speed of capitulation. Who knew Executive Orders could carry so much weight?

Learn how not to be thrown off the scent!!

No one gets to “play” governance like children play house. No one gets to wield the levers of power without adequate understanding of duties and responsibilities, cause and effect, action and consequence. And yet…

What’s happening now is not only appalling and an affront to any true freedom-loving American. It’s not only an embarrassment and a catastrophe in process. It’s also the return of snark and misdirection and lying and incompetence alongside the flippant attitude of unserious people who are creating an atmosphere of folly and make-believe.

Trump 2.0 once again feels like throwing a passerby on the street into the control room of a nuclear reactor and expecting things to run without incident. What hurts the most is that this is the plan. This is intentional. And they don’t care if the core melts down.

It’s an old tactic, like an explosion down the street from where a bank robbery will unfold, all in the service of distraction and decoy.

When Trump doubles down on his assertion that Gaza will become a Middle East Riviera, or makes a ridiculously big deal about changing the name of the Gulf, or threatens Greenland with annexation or Canada with statehood, he’s trying to throw us off the scent of what’s happening to NIH or DOJ or USAID or the rest of the institutional tear-down in process in Washington.

“Flooding the zone” is already cliché, but the purpose for it is to confuse and overwhelm. Both throwing spaghetti at the wall and an exercise of power that’s supposed to shock and awe, which has also become a cliché.  

Anyway, the evisceration attempt is still ramping up. We best not lose sight of that—despite what DJT says about Panama or the Gulf of Mexico, or paper straws, or pennies, or whatever comes next in the “ooh, a squirrel!” roll out.