Temperature today:  50C ?  Who the hell knows?

Since the election I have felt a nearly constant yingyang between “evil people imposing martial law” and “bumbling incompetents who can produce a shitshow and not much else”.  The great “scum” tweet of a few days ago raised the specter of the former, but that is countered now by two other prominent threads in the news:  dementia and tariffs.

In the meantime, we’re attending a wedding, and I just wrapped up a year in our church choir in which we sang challenging and meaningful pieces that stretched all of our abilities and helped us grow together. This is the kind of experience that seems completely foreign to the MAGA-verse.

Getting back on track: discussions of Trump’s mental infirmities are no longer in the fringes of the news; they are out in the open.  In part this may be due to the White House removing posted transcripts of Trump’s various “speeches”, thereby drawing attention to the issue. The speeches tell you everything you don’t want to know:  rambling, often incoherent, no ability to either stick to a subject of importance (or any subject, for that matter) or to transition in a meaningful way from one subject to another.  Aside from social media posts he does not seem to be doing anything that might be called “governing”, and he seems to not remember or understand what his administration is doing.  He is not fit for office (he never was, but now it is worse) and others are really in charge of the “agenda”, or the various splintered pieces of the agenda.  Apparently they give him a new executive order, he asks “What am I signing?” without reading it, and so it goes.

On tariffs, we now have the TACO meme (Trump Always Chickens Out), so the whole world is laughing at him.  I am trying to avoid Schadenfreude in these posts, but there’s something bracing in listening to Lawrence O’Donnell detailing at length how stupid, ignorant, predictable and stupid Trump is.  This week he first chickened out, and then the US Court of International Trade found his tariffs to be illegal.  A Federal appeals court put a stay on the ruling halting the tariffs, BUT as O’Donnell pointed out, to get this stay the Trump lawyers had to guarantee that plaintiffs would suffer no harm as a result of the stay, meaning Trump has now promised in writing to give full refunds on the tariffs if the International Trade ruling is upheld.

And last for today, something very hopeful:  an article alleges that Trump left West Point before shaking hands with the new cadet graduates because those cadets, and their instructors, had decided that shaking hands with a convicted felon would be a violation of their Honor Code

(https://www.facebook.com/robhawks61/posts/10228806491372034/).  If this is true, it may be difficult for Trump to use the military against civilians.