Clown With a Flamethrower: An Update
In today’s newsletter:
Mood music for the shutdown: “Trump posts vulgar deepfake slam of Democratic leaders after White House meeting” CNN’s headline: “Trump posts racist, AI-generated video of Schumer and Jeffries ahead of looming government shutdown”
Mood music for Pete Hegseth’s gathering of the generals: “Military leaders voice concern over Hegseth’s new Pentagon strategy” - The Washington Post
Bonus soundtrack: “Pete Hegseth is ‘crawling out his skin’: Pentagon insiders tell of explosive tantrums and erratic behavior”
Corporate grovel update: “YouTube settles with Trump for $24.5 million”
Today’s “To the Contrary” Podcast (which should come with lots of trigger warnings for the snowflakes out there.)
A note to readers:
I know there are a lot of claims on your time and your wallet. And I understand that reading the news these days can feel like daily shock therapy. But that’s why we do this: to remind you that you are not the crazy ones.
If that has some value for you, please consider joining our band of brothers and sisters in sanity.
Today would be a good day to start.
A shutdown flashback
As you prepare to be inundated with charges/countercharges, spin, and rank demagoguery over today’s government shutdown, it’s worth remembering this Trumpian moment from the distant mists of time…. by which I mean two years ago.
On September 20, 2023, Citizen Trump demanded that Republicans shut the government down to “defund” his criminal prosecutions.
“Republicans in Congress can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social media site late on Wednesday, calling it “the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”
“Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!” Trump wrote.
**
Clown with flamethrower update:
After meeting with Democratic leaders in the White House, the president of the United States reminded us (as if we needed it) that he is a scabrous and bigoted troll.
As the US government barrels toward a shutdown, President Donald Trump shared a racist video on social media, which appears to be AI-generated, depicting House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wearing a sombrero and a mustache and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speaking in a fake voice.
Jeffries and Schumer met with Trump just hours before at the White House to discuss the looming shutdown.
The video depicts Schumer and Jeffries as if speaking to reporters following the meeting, but the fabricated audio has Schumer saying Democrats “have no voters anymore, because of our woke, trans bullshit” and that “if we give all these illegal aliens health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.”
Further comment seems unnecessary. But the Dems fired back: Jeffries wrote on X, “Bigotry will get you nowhere. Cancel the Cuts. Lower the Cost. Save Healthcare. We are NOT backing down.” Schumer followed: “If you think your shutdown is a joke, it just proves what we all know: You can’t negotiate. You can only throw tantrums.”
Google bends the Knee
It is a tale as old as Trump 2.0: extortion, bogus lawsuits, craven surrender, and the usual tasteless grift. Via the NYT: “YouTube Settles Trump Lawsuit Over Account Suspension for $24.5 Million”.
YouTube agreed to pay a $24.5 million settlement to President Trump and others who were suspended by the video streaming platform in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to a legal document filed on Monday….
The vast majority of YouTube’s settlement payment — $22 million — will go to Mr. Trump, according to the filing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. He has directed that the money be contributed to the Trust for the National Mall and to the construction of a ballroom at the White House.
Here’s Oliver Darcy on the YouTube payoff:
Sundar Surrenders: Sundar Pichai and Neal Mohan are going to need to get some pillows for the floor if they’re going to kneel this much before Donald Trump. Per a legal document filed Monday, YouTube agreed to pay a $24.5 million settlement to Trump and others who were banned after the January 6 insurrection. The vast majority of the settlement—$22 million—will go into Trump’s coffers. Of course, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X had already settled similar cases with Trump, meaning Google was the last hold out.
What Should I Be Reading?
Glad you asked.
Definitely check out Tara Palmeri’s latest on the media’s mood in Trump 2.0: “Death of the Trump Scoop” -The Red Letter:
This time it feels different. Reporters are burnt out and so is the audience. Maybe because we’re drowning in news. POLITICO’s Zack Stanton summed up just last week:
“Trump told women not to take Tylenol during pregnancy… His budget office floated using a shutdown as a pretext for mass firings… He spoke at the U.N… met Arab leaders about peace… announced a major shift on Ukraine… his FCC tried to jawbone Disney into dropping Jimmy Kimmel… his DOJ criminally charged James Comey… ordered U.S. attorney’s offices to draft plans to investigate a Soros group… signed an executive order to keep TikTok alive… plus a dozen other gigantic stories.”
Do you even remember it?
As former Trump administration official Matthew Bartlett put it: “The first administration was a soap opera, this is shock therapy.”
Ed Luce in the Financial Times: “Why Trump is going for Soros”.
Among Soros’s chief detractors are Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. Because rightwing populism is nationalist, it comes in many varieties. Soros is as close as the world’s strongmen get to a cross-border demon. Hundreds of human rights groups, investigative journalists, democracy advocates and other disobedient types have received Soros grants.
No global philanthropist comes close to Soros’s $32bn funding of such causes. Indeed, the very name of his foundation — Open Society — offers a strong hint. Those who prefer closed societies dislike Soros. Yes, he is a big personal donor to Democratic campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 and Biden’s in 2020 and 2024. But there is nothing unusual in that. Should Trump wish to harass billionaires who bankroll US elections, he would have a wide choice.
Trump’s game is to bring down one of America’s largest non-profit groups the better to silence the rest.
Today’s Podcast
Paul Rieckhoff: The Kids Are Not All Right
For today’s “To the Contrary” podcast, I sit down with Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Independent Veterans of America, for a wide-ranging conversation about America’s mass shooting crisis, the culture of grievance fueling extremism, and the dangerous consolidation of presidential power. Rieckhoff highlights the role of isolation and disconnection among youn…
(NOTE: I apologize that we had some technical difficulties that cause my video to freeze up occasionally. Our usual platform had an outrage. But the audio is all there.)
Subscribers can listen to an ad-free version right here… or you can watch on YouTube / Listen (and subscribe) on Apple/ Spotify / iHeart / RSS Feed.
Finally
Well, this is awkward.
A photo by The Associated Press at the United Nations General Assembly last week shows Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reading a text from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who expresses concern that China just pwned Trump on the tariffs.
Tuesday dogs
Auggie and Eli checking out the turkey action in the woods last night.
I tried to watch the Hegseth and Trump speeches to our senior military leadership this morning. Although the past 10 years has taught me something about our country (not in a good way), I still have trouble believing that 80% if not higher of the officers in attendance would have been thinking....these guys are jokes.
I spent 30 years in the military and there's no way you get to that level of leadership without having a real appreciation for our country's history...especially military history. Both Hegseth and Trump spoke about our military history like teenagers who just got done watching a WW2 movie.
Honestly, it was AWFUL and the fact that it has come to this is shameful. Our MAGA citizenry has done the complete opposite of Making America Great Again by electing and supporting these clowns with flamethrowers.
It's gone beyond flamethrower. Trump has told the generals they must fight the war domestically and we have cities full of terrorists. They need to use these cities as proving grounds for the military. He even called Pritzker by name. He's beyond mad. He needs immediate removal.