Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, December 20, 2025, the fifth full day of Hanukkah, five days before the beginning of Koynezaa, and National Sangria Day, which is good if you use a decent light red wine and fresh fruit. It’s a lovely refresher on a summer evening. Below is a photo of a glass from Wikipedia “made with blueberries, lemon, lime, grapes and other fruits”. Wikipedia adds this:
Sangria is very popular among foreign tourists in Spain even if locals do not consume the beverage too often. It is commonly served in bars, restaurants, and chiringuitos and at festivities throughout Portugal and Spain.
I did have it in Madrid in 1972 and now I feel like I was a damn tourist (which I was)!
Sacagawea. . . . also spelled Sakakawea or Sacajawea; May c. 1788 – December 20, 1812) was a Lemhi Shoshone or Hidatsa woman who, in her teens, helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition in achieving their chartered mission objectives by exploring the Louisiana Territory. Sacagawea traveled with the expedition thousands of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean, helping to establish cultural contacts with Native American people and contributing to the expedition’s knowledge of natural history in different regions.
She made it to the Pacific and back, and then died at 24 of an unknown illness in what is now South Dakota (the date of her death is contested by scholars). I visited the reputed site of her death, which is marked by this monument (not my photo):
Phil Konstantin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
And she was on a brass U.S. dollar coin (the “Sacagawea dollar“), which looked like this (who uses dollar coins any more?):
There will be no Readers’ Wildlife feature today as I have but one batch left. If you want to help out, please send in your good wildlife photos.
Da Nooz:
*Trump now wants to change the name of the Kennedy Center (formally, the “John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts”) in Washington D.C. Guess what he wants it changed to?!
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington donned a new name — the Trump-Kennedy Center — on the exterior of the building Friday, just a day after President Donald Trump’s hand-picked board voted to change the arts institution’s name.
The move came despite concerns about the legality of the shift and objections from members of the Kennedy family and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle after the center announced that its board on Thursday voted unanimously to approve the name change.
President Donald Trump on Thursday said he was “surprised” and “honored” that the board, of which he is chair and which is composed of members he appointed earlier this year, approved the name change.
“Surprised,” my tuches! Ten to one he suggested the change. But I digress. . .more:
“This was brought up by one of the very distinguished board members [I believe Trump is a board member], and they voted on it, and there’s a lot of board members, and they voted unanimously. So I was very honored by it,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
The president, who has revamped programming and events at the Kennedy Center since the start of this term, had previously teased to the prospect of changing the institution’s name, writing in a post on Truth Social in August, “GREAT Nominees for the TRUMP/KENNEDY CENTER, whoops, I mean, KENNEDY CENTER.”
. . . . Legal experts told NBC News earlier this year that the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administration-era statutes governing the creation of the Kennedy Center had enshrined the original name in legislation. They added that a new law passed by both chambers of Congress and signed by the president would be needed to change the name.
It does not appear that officials in the Trump administration heeded those legal concerns, which were shared by lawmakers in both parties on Thursday, before installing his name on the building Friday.
You can see the name change in progress in a photo here, and below is a video report on the reactions of the Kennedy family:
As the report says, the Kennedy family is “confused and horrified” by this change. Confused? This is predictable: Trump got rid of nearly every Democrat on the board and replaced them with Trump supporters. The vote was unanimous, but one sensible person left on the board objected, but they muted her and wouldn’t unmute her. I am horrified but not surprised. Is there anything that Trump wouldn’t slap his name on? Is this going to go to the Supreme Court because changing the name appears to be illegal, needing Congress’s approval?
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: An alcoholic’s personality.”
→ Bondi Beach pogrom: Two suspected Islamist terrorists shot up a Hanukkah event on the iconic Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. They killed 15 people, including a 10-year-old girl named Matilda. And Sky News was on it, covering what mattered most.
I’m fascinated by the idea of this act being “immature.” Like, the childish, boyish urge to slaughter Jewish families on Hanukkah. Silly goofballs! Once they grow up, they’ll find more mature and productive ways to channel their Jew hate. A mother can only hope. Meanwhile, a pro-Palestine protester showed up at a small beach memorial soon after the shooting to scream at the people who gathered to remember their dead. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, attempted to block a memorial gathering, according to an MP and event organizers. And in Amsterdam, groups of Islamist protesters tried to surround a Hanukkah celebration while chanting “Kill the Jews.” At least they’re getting pretty straightforward; less time must be spent interpreting what exactly globalizing the intifada means when they just go straight for kill them.
Back in Sydney, there were some odd things going on that day. One odd thing is that there was a police station about 650 yards from the shooting. And the shooting reportedly went on for about 10 minutes. One video shows a female cop appearing scared of intervening; other images show one seeming to hide behind a car while the massacre took place. A mother was separated from her 3-year-old daughter and actually found some of these cops. She recounted what happened: “These police officers were hiding behind a car. . . I tried to grab one of their guns. Then one of them grabbed me, he says ‘no.’ ”
Avner’s, a well-known Jewish bakery in the area, is shutting down after the shooting, posting a note on the door: “After two years of almost ceaseless antisemitic harassment, vandalism, and intimidation directed at our little bakery, we have to be realistic about the threats that exist going forwards.”
→ On the topic of scams: One more quick scam to study. This is the number of K–12 school employees versus the number of K–12 school students. It’s almost as though taxpayers are just funding a group of people to hang out, totally unrelated to students. The students are just there so that the party “feels full.”
→ I love Susie Wiles: Members of President Trump’s close team met withVanity Fair at the White House. I don’t know why they did this, but that’s not my job. Among the interviewees was one Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, my instant favorite of the lunch bunch. She said Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” and that Elon Musk is an “avowed ketamine [user]” and an “odd, odd duck.” J.D. Vance? That old queen? He’s been a “conspiracy theorist for a decade,” says Suz. Talking to Susie Wiles sounds exactly like talking to about half a dozen older women in my life, like I swear to you if you called my mother-in-law today this what she would say about me. It’s as though all women, at a certain age, converge on an omnipolitics in which there is no left and right, there are only odd ducks, kooks, out-to-lunchers, and real sick puppies. Susie Wiles, please come over for dinner, you remind me of my Yaiya; your wisdom is deep, your judgment is final. The Trump team, after being absolutely roasted by Susie Wiles, all came out in support of her, saying she’s great and no one should overreact. Which is exactly what I would do to defend the grandmothers in my life, too. We stand with and for Susie Wiles. Please come roast TheFree Press anytime.
In a cave thousands of years ago, giant owls scarfed down the spoils from their hunts. With eyes that were apparently bigger than their stomachs, the owls regurgitated bone-rich pellets onto the cave floor.
In the process, the birds were unwittingly helping the bees. Scientists analyzing fossils from the cave, in what is now the Dominican Republic, recently discovered odd sediments lodged in the tooth sockets of rodent skulls. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the scientists posit that the oval-shaped traces represent the petrified nests of prehistoric bees.
According to Lazaro Viñola López, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago and lead author of the paper, the cave’s layers of bones were ideal for the bees there. “It was this perfect situation with lots of decomposing fossils that lacked teeth,” he said. “These chambers provided protection for the bees’ nests.”
Dr. Viñola López first encountered the site during his doctoral studies at the Florida Museum of Natural History. A colleague suggested they excavate Cueva de Mono, a cave in the Dominican Republic that a local landowner had unsuccessfully tried to turn into a septic tank. Dr. Viñola López and a fellow doctoral student, Mitchell Riegler, ventured into the cave and discovered thousands of bones, deposited over the past 20,000 years.
So far the team has identified remains of some 50 species of vertebrates, including sloths, lizards, tortoises and even crocodiles. Cueva de Mono is particularly rich in fossils from extinct relatives of hutias, a group of stocky Caribbean rodents. Evidence suggested these partially digested fossils were brought into the cave by the prehistoric relatives of barn owls.
As soil washed into the cave, it buried the jumble of fossils and filled bone cavities with sediment. As the team cleaned the dirt off the bones in the lab, Dr. Viñola López noticed that some tooth sockets contained oddly smooth structures that reminded him of fossilized wasp cocoons.
To describe the structures, the researchers micro-CT scanned the rodent skulls and created three-dimensional digital copies of the sediment structures, which were smaller than the eraser on a pencil.
A closer inspection revealed that these multilayered structures exhibited the caring craftsmanship of a bee.
Here are two figures from that paper, which is free at the link above. The purple structures are interpreted as mud nests of these solitary bees, constructed by mixing their saliva with the dirt. The jaw is from a ratlike rodent:
(From the paper): CT scan and photograph images of MNHNSD FOS 25.6385. Plagiodontia araeum skull and the ichnofossil Osnidum almontei. (a–c) Skull in occlusal view. (a) Photograph. (b) Non-transparent from CT view, highlighting ichnofossil in purple. (c) 95% transparent view from CT view, highlighting ichnofossil in purple. (d) Isolated ichnofossil from CT scan.
. . . and a reconstruction of how the bees nested:
(From paper) Life reconstruction of the tracemaking bee nesting inside a cave and using bone cavities as containing chambers for some of the brooding cells. Copyright: Jorge Mario Macho.
*Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan is hoping that Trumpism is on its way out. His piece, “The trials of an unpopular populist.” I hope you watched Trump’s rant the other day; if you didn’t, it’s here:. Calling it “bombastic” and “arrogant” are big understatements.
You very rarely see President Trump address the nation the way presidents used to. You know the drill: seated at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, talking candidly and intimately to the American people. Trump tried it with Covid in 2020 and it didn’t quite work. Stiff, awkward, rote, interspersed with sniffs, it’s a bit sad in retrospect. He just can’t do intimacy. He can’t do reassurance. His fireside manner has always been gasoline.
This is a real weakness for a president, who may, from time to time, be required to comfort — as Clinton did after the Oklahoma bombing, Bush after 9/11, and Obama after the church mass shooting in Charleston. It’s also a serious flaw if you need to rally people in tough or challenging times. But Trump just can’t do that. He can do other things. But not that.
Then there’s another Trump weakness in a situation like this, i.e. normal economic anxiety. Because he cannot acknowledge any fault on his own part, if the economy drags or disappoints or worsens, he’s got nothing. Except to insist it’s not dragging. In his first term, this never came up because there was only a huge boom (fueled by his tax giveaway) and then a pandemic for which he could not be blamed — both (just) within Trump’s skillset. But now, when discontent is due increasingly to his own policies? That’s a whole different story.
On Wednesday night, we saw someone drowning, not waving. Underwater by 18 percent on the economy and 28 percent on inflation, he barked at us for 18 rushed minutes behind a podium, telling Americans that any economic anxiety is entirely because of Joe Biden, and that a new Golden Age is at hand. He then did a breathless Greatest Hits weave. I imagine the core base loved it, but browsing the web afterward, the reaction of this MAGA-friendly reader of Erick Erickson captured a more common response, even among the faithful:
I can’t believe I rushed home from dinner (7:00 here in AZ) only to hear Trump yelling at me in a speech accurately characterized … as “full of accomplishments: some real, some perceived”; after about 3 minutes I had enough and started to do housework.
It was a whiff when he really needed to avoid a whiff.
And Sully’s guess about what may be the nail in Trump’s coffin:
With Trump term-limited, the factions are going to get even more restless and the incoherence of the coalition increasingly exposed. And then we have Trump’s chief-of-staff, Susie Wiles, blabbing damning takes on this year’s chaos on the record — as if to signal that she, at least, is not bonkers. Trump himself gets loopier: renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the DoD, and now the Kennedy Center; appending embossed deranged rants against previous presidents in the White House; making his own birthday the equivalent of a federal holiday in the National Parks, all while enriching himself and his family in a Putin-style orgy of oligarchic corruption.
But it’s the latter that could bite him in the ass. When Plato dissected the appeal of a successful strongman in late-stage democracy, he homed in on the kind of figure who might emerge: a member of the upper class who becomes a traitor to it. And that was indeed part of Trump’s appeal. But all year, the visuals and the substance have broadcast the direct opposite. He’s gone native with the billionaire class.
Out goes the McDonalds campaign schtick. In comes jetting around the world to receive luxurious gifts, including a 747, from kleptocrats and tyrants; turning the White House into a classless White Lotus where he can dine with crypto-kings and AI machers; throwing a Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago; appointing the world’s richest man to consign thousands of the very poorest children to agonizing deaths; brazenly ratcheting up healthcare costs by ending the Obamacare subsidies, even as he implausibly tries to pivot on “affordability”: this is Gilded Age shit. It’s more John D Rockefeller than William Jennings Bryan; more Louis XVI than Henry VIII. At some point, more in the persuadable faction of American public opinion will notice.
And this seems to me a very real fear:
My main fear right now is how Trump could react to this drift downward if it continues, as it well might, absent an economic miracle. He may go completely nuts. His greater and greater grandiosity requires ever greater claims, and when those claims fall flat with the crowd, Trump’s psyche melts down. Recall him after the election in 2020. Since defeat was intolerable for his self-image, he nearly brought down the entire system to preserve it. God knows what he might do if he sees the economy sliding or the Congress moving decisively against him next November.
When Trump changed the name of the Kennedy Center (see above) and pretended that was an objective decision of the board, that was a sign to me that the man is losing it. The good news is that the Democrats may take control of both houses of Congress at the midterms. The bad news is that Trump is still President for three more years. How much worse can it get? Don’t answer that. . . .
A blunt critique of Mexican bread by a British baker sparked a cascade of social media outrage, ultimately leading to a public apology.
In an interview for a food-themed podcast that resurfaced online, Richard Hart, the co-founder of Green Rhino bakery in Mexico City and a well-known figure in international baking circles, said Mexicans “don’t really have much of a bread culture,” adding that “They make sandwiches on these white, ugly rolls that are pretty cheap and industrially made.”
His comments quickly rippled across Instagram, TikTok and X, with many Mexicans accusing him of being dismissive and insulting of Mexico’s traditional breads.
What began as a dispute over bread soon ignited a national debate over food identity — not only over who defines Mexican culinary traditions, but also over the growing influence of foreigners in a capital already tense from a surge of U.S. expatriates and tourists.
“He offended the community of bakers in Mexico and all the people in Mexico who like bread, which is almost everyone,” said Daniela Delgado, a university student in Mexico City.
Social media was soon flooded with memes, reaction videos, and passionate defenses of Mexican bread. Users took to social media to praise everyday staples — from the crusty bolillos used for tortas to the iconic conchas found in neighborhood bakeries. In many cases, these simple street foods act as a uniting factor across social groups and classes, and often cut to the core of the country’s cultural identity.
The incident prompted many to question why a foreign entrepreneur would publicly disparage a staple so deeply embedded in Mexican life. For many, Hart’s remarks echoed long-standing frustrations over foreign chefs and restaurateurs receiving disproportionate prestige, as well as concerns over gentrification in the capital.
“Don’t mess with the bolillo,” warned one viral post on X.
This critic is just wrong. (Bollilos are savory Mexican rolls.) I go to Mexican bakeries in Chicago quite often, grab a metal tray and a pair of tongs, and load up with a variety of inexpensive but tasty pastries and breads. Mexicans certainly do have a bread culture, and I can prove it with this famous movie clip starring Tin Tan singing “el Panadero (con el pan)”. Even I can understand much of the Spanish. And once you hear this song, you won’t forget it. It’s from the movie “¡Ay Amor… Cómo Me Has Puesto!”, which you can watch free in its entirety here.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili mentions the Egyptian cat-god; The Princess clearly wants an altar.
Hili: What came first – god or the altar?
Andrzej: Bastet managed without an altar.
Hili: I doubt it.
In Polish:
Hili: Co było pierwsze bóg czy ołtarz?
Ja: Bastet obywała się bez ołtarza.
Hili: Wątpię
From The Language Nerds: the darker letters form the baby kangaroo word:
From Masih. Two very brave women whose children were killed by the Iranian regime—and their response to the death threats they received.
Listen to these mothers!
Khamenei’s agents killed their teenage and young sons, and now they are threatening to kill the mothers as well.
The courageous words of Leili Mahdavi, mother of Siavash Mahmoudi, and Kamelia Sajadian, mother of Mohammad Hassan Torkaman, are a powerful… pic.twitter.com/SeR1pYC5Al
From Luana, a cringeworthy specimen of Whataboutery:
The news from Bondi beach is grim.
For many it will have terrible echoes of the massacres on October 7th.
For Jews living here it will feel painfully close to the murders at a synagogue in Manchester.
It is a reminder – if one was needed – that Jews all over the world now live…
From reader Malcolm, who thinks this viewing room for cats is “not fair on the fish”. I agree! I wouldn’t construct such a thing. Think of how scared the fish are!
One from my feed. This otter has acquired an awesome rock to crack open shell fish (such rocks can’t be common), but he trades it away for a fish. Awesome!
20 December 1938 | French Jewish girl Eveline Stabryd was born in Paris.
She arrived at #Auschwitz on 21 August 1942 in a transport of 1,000 Jews deported from Drancy. She was among 817 of them murdered in a gas chamber after the selection.
—
Jeff Bezos’ sub-orbital Blue Origin flight NS-37 that was scrubbed at T-58 seconds Thursday morning is currently rescheduled for this morning in a launch window that opens at 0915EST. I bring the flight to the attention of WEIT readers because it includes a handicapped young woman (Michi Benthaus) as a passenger. As I mentioned Thursday, while one might think that weightlessness would be a perfect environment for a parapalegic, there are important operational issues forspace travel including access and egress in 1-g on Earth. Thursday’s scrub provided a good real-time test of nonstandard egress. I usually watch via link at space.com and there is a short piece on Michi at https://www.ohb.de/en/magazine/ohb-sponsors-parabolic-flights-for-paraplegic-student
Thanks to ESA for their sponsorship and to Michi for her spirit!
(And I still remind people that this is dangerous business and thank Michi for her willingness to participate)
“My main fear right now is how Trump could react to this drift downward […] He may go completely nuts.”
Highly likely. He’s a classic megalomaniac and the only thing that would possibly stop him would be apoplexy from enough people rejecting him and saying ‘no’.
Nick Robinson is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the BBC. He is arrogant, insensitive and lied to the British public on the evening news about an interview he had done that was broadcast live that afternoon. He thought the public was too stupid to notice his lie.
I see he is trying defend himself against the pushback he’s had for that tweet.
It started in kindergarten, at least, when we were going through the alphabet and the letter ‘S,’ and only the letter ‘S,’ was represented by a picture that incorporated the letter within the picture. The picture of a swan incorporated the ‘S’ as its neck.
I asked the teacher, “Why didn’t they do that for the other words?”
Others I remember from my younger days:
Strengths. A nine-letter, one syllable word with only one vowel.
Bookkeeper. Three double letters in a row.
Thanks for something I haven’t thought about in a long time.
You should be studying Japanese Robb! 🙂
Officially Japanese characters are “pictograms” but it is much deeper than that. They have a whole game show on TV about it!
Right up your (and my) alley.
I’ll up you one for bookkeeper (albeit in Dutch)
voorraaddoos. (a box for stock)
Someone added lev (pre-euro bulgarian currency) at the front and systeemkast (a closet) at the end to get (a nonexisting word):
levvoorraaddoossysteemkast
And if we did not have the Electoral College, Hillary would have been President in 2017. She most likely would have been a mediocre president, would have been blamed for Covid, and a normal Republican would have been elected in 2020.
Good question, Jim. We may all be hiding behind the hope that 2028 brings a sane and orderly transition to a new President, knowing that such a transition is unlikely. Hope springs eternal.
Yes. I watched parts of two speeches by President Trump this week. One was in North Carolina and the other was from the White House. He seems like a raging lunatic, with his “Sleepy Joe Bidens” and his “Best economies ever!” and with his “Billions and billions are coming in from tariffs.” He’s a walking series of crazy memes.
Is he losing it? It depends on what one means by “it.” He’s obviously losing his mind and is getting worse and worse—probably because his sycophants and advisors are mindlessly praising every word, goading him further and further into the crazy-sphere. But is he losing his grip on power? Not yet. His constituents need a little more time to come to realize that his policies are not helping them, and that the Sultan of Hoax is a hoax himself.
His support IS slipping among the MAGA crowd, though. That is his most important power base and I do believe some are catching on to the fraud. That only makes him more dangerous because he is so clearly mad and without a shred of human decency, but there’s a glimmer of hope. If we can get through the next three years we can get to work repairing the damage, if possible.
He can’t. The 22nd directly prohibits and the 12th precludes the vice-president ruse. He may be planning on trying, but he’ll fail. The fight will be ugly.
He does illegal things all the time. Why do you think a silly thing like the Constitution would stop him? Not when he has control of the nuclear football and the US military.
Yep. It was either Cheney or Rumsfeld who blew off and simply dismissed the Geneva Conventions as “quaint”. And this guy is waaaay beyond either of them in chutzpah. He is a fully and totally amoral being.
Jeff Bezos’ sub-orbital Blue Origin flight NS-37 that was scrubbed at T-58 seconds Thursday morning is currently rescheduled for this morning in a launch window that opens at 0915EST. I bring the flight to the attention of WEIT readers because it includes a handicapped young woman (Michi Benthaus) as a passenger. As I mentioned Thursday, while one might think that weightlessness would be a perfect environment for a parapalegic, there are important operational issues forspace travel including access and egress in 1-g on Earth. Thursday’s scrub provided a good real-time test of nonstandard egress. I usually watch via link at space.com and there is a short piece on Michi at
https://www.ohb.de/en/magazine/ohb-sponsors-parabolic-flights-for-paraplegic-student
Thanks to ESA for their sponsorship and to Michi for her spirit!
(And I still remind people that this is dangerous business and thank Michi for her willingness to participate)
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions. -Susanne Langer, philosopher (20 Dec 1895-1985)
Trump will put his name on anything from Bibles to buildings to condoms to phones to sneakers but he won’t put his name on the current economy.
“My main fear right now is how Trump could react to this drift downward […] He may go completely nuts.”
Highly likely. He’s a classic megalomaniac and the only thing that would possibly stop him would be apoplexy from enough people rejecting him and saying ‘no’.
Nick Robinson is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the BBC. He is arrogant, insensitive and lied to the British public on the evening news about an interview he had done that was broadcast live that afternoon. He thought the public was too stupid to notice his lie.
I see he is trying defend himself against the pushback he’s had for that tweet.
Kangaroo words: Chicken has ‘chick’ AND ‘hen.’
From an early age I loved the ‘look’ of words.
It started in kindergarten, at least, when we were going through the alphabet and the letter ‘S,’ and only the letter ‘S,’ was represented by a picture that incorporated the letter within the picture. The picture of a swan incorporated the ‘S’ as its neck.
I asked the teacher, “Why didn’t they do that for the other words?”
Others I remember from my younger days:
Strengths. A nine-letter, one syllable word with only one vowel.
Bookkeeper. Three double letters in a row.
Thanks for something I haven’t thought about in a long time.
You should be studying Japanese Robb! 🙂
Officially Japanese characters are “pictograms” but it is much deeper than that. They have a whole game show on TV about it!
Right up your (and my) alley.
D.A.
NYC
I’ll up you one for bookkeeper (albeit in Dutch)
voorraaddoos. (a box for stock)
Someone added lev (pre-euro bulgarian currency) at the front and systeemkast (a closet) at the end to get (a nonexisting word):
levvoorraaddoossysteemkast
All I can say is that if the Left had held Obama and Biden to the same standards as Trump, Trump would probably not now be President.
And if we did not have the Electoral College, Hillary would have been President in 2017. She most likely would have been a mediocre president, would have been blamed for Covid, and a normal Republican would have been elected in 2020.
Why do people still think he is term limited?
Good question, Jim. We may all be hiding behind the hope that 2028 brings a sane and orderly transition to a new President, knowing that such a transition is unlikely. Hope springs eternal.
Yes Norman, but as my favorite NASA boss would always remind us: “hope is not a strategy”
Yes. I watched parts of two speeches by President Trump this week. One was in North Carolina and the other was from the White House. He seems like a raging lunatic, with his “Sleepy Joe Bidens” and his “Best economies ever!” and with his “Billions and billions are coming in from tariffs.” He’s a walking series of crazy memes.
Is he losing it? It depends on what one means by “it.” He’s obviously losing his mind and is getting worse and worse—probably because his sycophants and advisors are mindlessly praising every word, goading him further and further into the crazy-sphere. But is he losing his grip on power? Not yet. His constituents need a little more time to come to realize that his policies are not helping them, and that the Sultan of Hoax is a hoax himself.
Good one, Norman: “the Sultan of Hoax is a hoax himself”.
His support IS slipping among the MAGA crowd, though. That is his most important power base and I do believe some are catching on to the fraud. That only makes him more dangerous because he is so clearly mad and without a shred of human decency, but there’s a glimmer of hope. If we can get through the next three years we can get to work repairing the damage, if possible.
Love the “Sultan of Hoax”
Per news sources, Trump has been meeting with various parties to find out how he can run for a third term.
There you go…my comment #8 above, Adrienne.
He can’t. The 22nd directly prohibits and the 12th precludes the vice-president ruse. He may be planning on trying, but he’ll fail. The fight will be ugly.
He does illegal things all the time. Why do you think a silly thing like the Constitution would stop him? Not when he has control of the nuclear football and the US military.
I do think he may try to avoid the constitution but i do not think he will be successful.
I also think that if he tries to stay in office it really will be time for insurrection. I’m old, but I’d fight.
Yep. It was either Cheney or Rumsfeld who blew off and simply dismissed the Geneva Conventions as “quaint”. And this guy is waaaay beyond either of them in chutzpah. He is a fully and totally amoral being.
I honestly don’t think he’ll live that long. I also think powerful drugs are propping him up…I can’t prove it, I just know it’s true.