CSotD: From the Mouths (and noses) of Babes
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Remember that brief moment during the campaign, when progressives began describing Trump and his coterie as “weird”? It had tangible impact, but it seemed unpleasant and unconstructive so they quit saying it and focused, instead, on arguments that were more pleasant and constructive.
And that had no tangible impact.
Jones points out the number of people who, like Elon’s kid, would like Donald Trump to shush his mouth.
My guess is that Donald Trump does not like four-year-olds to wipe boogers on his desk and tell him to shush his mouth, nor does he like having a little kid publicly point out that his daddy bought Dear Leader and owns his ass.
Repeating the quote, then, seems like a pretty good way to at least drive a wedge between Musk and Trump, if not cause Dear Leader to go completely bonkers. But don’t hold your breath.
Progressives are already questioning what exactly the little tyke said and I’m sure will soon conclude that they probably misunderstood him and that, anyway, it wouldn’t be polite and constructive to keep hurling it in Trump’s face when instead they could discuss deep, meaningful, complex issues that nobody would understand or respond to.
However, not everyone is rolling over. Jones writes about the moment with his usual passion, and Charlie Sykes offers a more staid but strongly motivated analysis.
And the cartoonists are having fun, as seen in this
Juxtaposition of the Day
There have been several cartoons of Musk with Baby Trump on his shoulders, with Crowe winning the chance to represent them mostly on graphic detail. The point of them all is that Musk is in charge and Trump is just along for the ride.
My analysis is that neither one of these knuckleheads knows what he’s doing, but Musk is better at convincing powerful people that he does, while Trump is the carnival barker who ropes in the crowds. It’s a pretty powerful one-two combination.
But it does potentially rouse some jealousy, which brings us to Blitt’s take, in which Trump tries valiantly to keep up with his smoother partner.
It’s not easy: Barron’s mother has made it clear that she doesn’t want the kid exploited, Don Jr and Eric are obvious goofballs, Ivanka wants no further part in the farce and I doubt Trump could pick little what’s-her-name out of a lineup. She’s like the invisible daughter who refused to even appear in The Osbournes.
Speaking of young women who decline degrading opportunities, Brodner profiles Danielle Sassoon, a conservative prosecutor — a Federalist Society member and former Alito (Scalia) clerk — who was told to dismiss the case against NY Mayor Eric Adams despite the strong evidence against him and who wrote a blistering letter of resignation instead. A half dozen more prosecutors followed her lead before a quisling was found to do the deed.
The details are chilling, the letter is heroic, but my point is that among 53 GOP Senators, only Mitch McConnell voted against putting a Russian agent in charge of our intelligence services and a snake-oil screwball in charge of public health.
The rest must surely include a few with common sense, but apparently none who prize their honor and their country above their jobs. Terrified of being primaried, they go along with whatever they’re told to do.
Thank god not everyone is so craven and so obsessed with the trappings of position.
The Musk/Trump attempt to welcome white supremacist immigrants from South Africa has gotten horse laughs from that country, with Zapiro putting his fellow white South African in an appropriate uniform to go along with his obvious regret that apartheid ended.
One doesn’t expect Trump to know what’s going on down there, given that he probably couldn’t find South Africa on a map, but if Musk is unaware of how the land claims issue is being pursued, it may be that he gets his South African information from sources similar to those from which he gets information about Germany.
Madam & Eve has run several cartoons mocking Trump both for his weak grasp of the situation there and for his hypocrisy in objecting to land grabs when he has several on his own agenda.
Cartoonists are hard-pressed to keep up with the outrages: If firings of government employees aren’t being treated as photo-ops, arrests of immigrants are. NPR reports that some family members of people swept off to Guantanamo didn’t know they’d been arrested until they saw them in the media.
Nor is South Africa the only place the US is losing friends and support. As Adams notes, the Trump administration has managed to pick fights with the European Union on a variety of fronts, including insults to Denmark and offensive speeches by Pete Hegseth and JD Vance, while abandoning Ukraine to be trampled by a bloody-footed Vladimir Putin.
The gravest fault, Jennings and others say, is Trump’s willingness to bargain with Putin without including Ukraine in the talks. There are reports that the US asked Zelenskyy to sign over 50% of Ukraine’s mineral rights in exchange for some level of post-war security, which he declined to do.
While in this country, Davies wonders what the point would be of including Ukraine in the talks anyway, since Trump is so firmly in Putin’s thrall that, like the animals in the final chapter of Animal Farm, Zelenskyy looks from one to the other and realizes he can no longer tell them apart.
The withdrawal of USAID from the world — blocked for the moment but still on the docket — opens a world of opportunity for China and Russia, Kal suggests. He may overestimate Russia a bit, given the current state of their economy, but there are already reports of China stepping in to fill the gaps USAID has left in other countries.
An exiled Cambodian diplomat once told me that there’s no such thing as a “non-aligned nation,” that every small nation chooses one of the three major powers, by who can do the most for them and who can hurt them the least. For Lon Nol, it was the Americans. For the Khmer Rouge, it was China.
Our current administration seems determined to make everybody’s choices easier.
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