Tag: politics

Trump and the “Everything Must Go!” Campaign

Mike Rothschild

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I have a theory about Donald Trump and the 2024 election.

In his roughly 700 years of presidential campaigning, Trump has always done things a little differently. He shunned the retail politics and door knocking of past establishment campaigns in favor of a media strategy that revolved around building himself up as a cult of personality figure. That means countless rallies where he offered up his rambling thoughts to adoring crowds, fawning interviews from bootlickers about how great he is, and opening multiple revenue streams to keep his flock sending in the cash to help fund either the campaign or his own legal issues.

It worked in 2016 because nobody had ever seen anything like it, the media had no idea how to cover it, and because he was running against a candidate in Hillary Clinton that the far right hate machine had spent three decades claiming was the spawn of Satan. It didn’t work in 2020, and the Trump inner circle was so shocked that they took their disbelief and used it to fuel a coup attempt.

There are still six weeks until the election, but from most of the evidence we’re seeing, it’s not going to work this time either. Kamala Harris is polling well nationally, and has small but consistent leads in the states she needs to have leads in. She’s crushing Trump in fundraising, Trump’s get out the vote strategy is negligible, numerous high-profile Republicans have either failed to endorse Trump or outright endorsed Harris, he’s getting dragged down by horrible down ballot candidates in states he needs to win, he’s doing far fewer rallies and far more podcast interviews to a walled-off constituency of young men, his lackies are laying the groundwork to contest close elections and convince Nebraska to pull a last second rule change that would net him one electoral vote, and his fundraising efforts are much more centered around filling up his own coffers rather than anything to do with the Republican Party.

These are not the actions and attitudes of a campaign that believes it’s going to win. And my theory is that everyone in the Trump campaign, including Trump himself, have given up on believing they’re going to win. Instead, they’re running the “everything must go” campaign, hoping to wheeze over the finish line by making grandiose promises Trump can’t possibly keep, making as much money for themselves as possible, and sewing the seeds of doubt over Harris winning fairly. A Harris win might not result in another January 6th, but it could definitely be the foundation of a lucrative next stage for the MAGA movement – one not built around Trump as a politician, but as the elder statesman of a Republican Party built in his image, and one that features any number of acolytes fighting it out for his approval to take the mantle in 2028 and pretend that the last two elections were stolen.

Trump himself has more or less given up on campaigning with any kind of rigor or consistency. Whereas in 2016 he was having rallies once a day, sometimes twice, he’s barely having them twice a week now. His campaign has said that they aren’t necessary at this point, and his supporters will point to him nearly having been assassinated at one in July. But the decline started before then, and it’s easy to see why he’s no longer having many – he’s considerably older and less energetic, they aren’t as well attended, aren’t covered with the attention they used to draw, and Trump supporters who do attend tend to leave early. Why wouldn’t they, given that he’s been running for president for a decade and has nothing left to say.

More and more, Trump’s campaign rhetoric depends on making either ridiculous accusations (“Haitian immigrants are eating pets,” etc) or more recently on him promising truly ludicrous things that are never going to happen. Recent Trump rallies and interviews have promised 50% cuts to peoples’ energy bills and car insurance, food prices dropping from massive taxes on imported food, child care costs dropping through tariffs, IVF being free, removal of taxes on tips and overtime, credit card interest rates capped at 10%, restoring the uncapped state and local income tax deduction that Trump himself capped with his 2017 tax cuts, and most recently, a manned mission to Mars by 2028.

While a few of these are decent ideas – the no tax on tips thing has been kicked around Republican circles for a while – most of them are impossible because Trump has no power to enact them. Moreover, these are the sorts of “free goodies” giveaways that Mitt Romney built his 2012 campaign around fighting against, and which Republicans in Congress would fight to their last breath. Trump loses nothing by promising them, because they’re impossible promises to keep.

But they’re a way to get people who don’t understand how anything works interested in Trump, because hey, who doesn’t want their credit card interest rates capped? The credit card industry doesn’t want it, and that’s because it would essentially destroy anyone’s ability to get credit unless they already have sparkling credit scores. But if it’s never going to happen, who cares?

While the bossman is out promising every Trump voter a free TV and a subscription to Sports Illustrated, the rest of his core ticket is out there hitting the bricks and winning hearts and minds, right? No. JD Vance is still embroiled in the Haitian pet eating hoax fiasco while continuing to humiliate himself in TV hits. Melania Trump is focused solely on shilling her memoir, and has made just a few appearances for Trump, at several of which she was personally paid for. And Usha Vance? Never heard of her.

But if Melania is getting paid for the campaign, then it’s peanuts compared to what Donald is taking in personally. And that’s where the other part of the “everything must go” campaign really comes into play. Trump has spent an extraordinary amount of time shilling products with his name and face on them, with the money going not to the campaign, the RNC, or anyone else who might use it to help get Republicans elected. Instead the money just goes to him, presumably to spend on legal fees, or whatever else he feels like buying.

Just in the past few weeks, Trump launched a crypto currency that his two adult sons will run, announced $100 Trump-branded silver coins that are only worth $30, and published a glossy photo book of his time in the White House that includes a disturbingly high number of pictures of Trump with Kim Jong Un. All of this goes on the same groaning merch table that features Trump Bibles, Trump sneakers, and all of the other Trump branded products that the man has sold over the years. Not to mention Melania’s memoir, which is currently in the top 100 of books on Amazon ahead of its publication date in October.

None of the money from any of this shit is going to the campaign. Trump’s revocable trust owns the coins and sneakers, the photo book is being published by Don Jr.’s company, and the crypto is the product of a fly by night company called World Liberty Financial, about which nobody seems to know anything. While Trump has, in the past, claimed his campaign is self-funded, that’s never really been true, and he didn’t even make the same pledge for 2024. And there’s no indication that any of the money from any of these ventures is going to his cash-strapped and increasingly doomed bid for another term.

Beyond the low-effort campaigning and obvious last-second cash grabbing, there’s just the fact that none of these people seem confident at all. Trump allies are already screwing around with vote counting and election administration laws, while Trump has relentlessly whined that undocumented immigrants are going to vote in massive numbers to get Harris over the top and that mail in voting is going to be rigged. In a recent interview with a fawning antivaccine sycophant, he seemed positively morose as he declared that if he lost again in 2024 he wouldn’t run for a 4th time. Where is the fight from Mr. Fight Fight Fight? Where is the confidence from the world’s most insanely overconfident man? Nowhere.

Sure, maybe all of this doesn’t mean anything and Trump will pull the same inside straight he pulled in 2016 and win. The polls are still close in every swing state, and it’s not as if anyone in Trump’s core of cultists is going to walk away from him. Hell, they love the grift and the scamming and the ridiculous promises. Trump could win the most low-effort and scam-laden campaign in history simply because the Electoral College is stupid and overvalues some voters and undervalues others.

But that’s starting to look slightly less likely. And Trump and his people aren’t stupid. They have access to internal polling and proprietary data, and if they really are losing ground in key swing states, they’ll know it. And rather than fight for it, they seem to have resigned themselves to this being their last grab at the wingnut welfare spout. So you can promise people Mars and free stuff if you don’t ever intend to keep it. And you can sell coins and crypto if you have fans who don’t care where the money goes.

Ultimately, an “everything must go” campaign ends with everything having gone. And when it does, when there are no more coins to hawk or crypto to shill, you can always just light a match and burn it all down.

There is No Couch

Mike Rothschild

JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio and Republican nominee for vice president in 2024 did not have sex with a couch and write about it in his book.

Moving past the idea that this is a sentence one has to write in the year 2024, we can start to talk about why anyone thinks he did, why some conservatives and journalists are getting upset about it, and what it all means for the strangest election of all time, or at least the strangest since the election or 2020.

In mid-July (or maybe it was sometime in 1887, it feels like it’s been that long), a Twitter user who goes by @RickRudesCalves tweeted the following:

“can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”

Other than being named after the leg muscles of the late WWE Intercontinental Champion Rick Rude, there’s not much to go on about who this user is. They’ve chosen to stay anonymous, and there’s no reason to violate that. As for the tweet itself, Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy contains no such passage. People went through the book, quickly found that the reference to the latex glove wasn’t in it, and that should have been that.

But here we are nearly two weeks later, and the Vance/Couch story is pretty much everywhere. It’s been referenced on late night TV, It’s the fodder for more memes and jokes on social media than anyone could possibly count. It’s even jumped the firebreak of normie political speeches, something usually reserved for Trumpian insanity like QAnon, with Democratic vice presidential candidate, MN Governor Tim Walz dropping a “get off the couch” reference in his introductory speech at his first rally for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. When the crowd laughed, he exclaimed “see what I did there!”

We did.

Vance hasn’t responded to the couch allegation, except when he sort of did by making a remark about his wife making him sleep on the sofa if he asked her to come up and speak at a rally, which did nothing to defuse the joke because it was neither a denial nor him leaning into it and defanging it. Also, he used the word “sofa” not “couch,” thereby muddying up the wording of the joke, and proving again that MAGA people don’t know anything about comedy.

The Vance/couch meme has gone on for so long and gotten so far that even journalists and more respectable pundits have said it’s time to retire it, that it’s not funny, that passing it around is akin to spreading misinformation, and that it’s generally beneath the dignity of a presidential election to be discussing a candidate having sex with a couch.

The problem with approaching the Vance/couch story as an actual story is that the Vance/couch story isn’t a story. It’s a joke, intended by its creator to be a joke, and passed around as a joke. Imbuing it with serious solemnity as a piece of a disinformation to be batted down actually makes it funnier. Not only is there a viral joke about the potential vice president fucking a couch, people are actually taking it seriously as something that has to specifically be refuted. Other than maybe the first day when the joke was going viral and it wasn’t clear if the passage was in Hillbilly Elegy, nobody making jokes or sharing memes about it actually thinks he did it. It doesn’t even matter at this point, because the joke is out there, it’s still funny, and getting upset about it only makes in funnier.

But why did it go viral if the people spreading it knew it wasn’t true?

Again, I’ll go back it’s funny. The joke works, and the jokes about the joke work.

But more than that, it works because it fits in with what people believe about JD Vance. Because JD Vance is a weird, creepy, vaguely bizarre human being. He’s endorsed tracking women’s periods to determine if they’d have abortions. He completely flipped on his feelings toward Trump, going from calling him “America’s Hitler” in 2016 to serving as his #2 man on the campaign trail. He’s deeply linked to techno-libertarian weirdo Peter Thiel, who is hellbent on making the world less free and democratic. He’s said multiple times that women who don’t have children should have the power of their vote diluted. He wrote a memoir that was self-serving and full of omissions, about a life he doesn’t seem to have lived. He made a bizarre remark about his wife, who is Indian-American as being a good mother even though she “obviously isn’t a white person.” He’s good friends with a strange collection of racist weirdos and white nationalists, and has endorsed the explicitly racist and antisemitic Great Replacement theory.

And his newest thing seems to be following Vice President Harris around on the campaign trail, giving speeches in cities where she’s holding rallies, to the point of approaching Air Force Two and maybe trying to get on it in Wisconsin. The word you’re looking for there is “stalking.”

This is all very weird, creepy stuff that most normal people find repellent. It’s also the affect of a person who maybe, just maybe, would have sex with a couch and write about it proudly in his memoir.

Again, it’s not believable because it’s true. It’s believable because it seems like it could be true about this particular person, based on what you already believe about them. And the people getting upset about the joke, calling it dehumanizing or disinformation, or just grumping about “decorum” are not only missing the point, they are actively making the joke more alive and vital.

What’s worse than being the subject of a joke about fucking a couch? Being upset that someone else is the subject of a joke about fucking a couch.

Right wing social media has been full of such rumors and myths and conspiracy theories for years. They range from disgusting conspiracy theories like the Sandy Hook shooting being a hoax to transphobic nonsense like Michelle Obama secretly being a man. Many of the same people who extol Trump have spread these rumors as fact, maybe because they believe them, or maybe because enough other people believe them that it’s advantageous to spread them. They’ve been dining off this memetic warfare for years, and now that it’s being volleyed back to them, they can’t handle it.

With the shoe on the other foot, and the Trump campaign unable to shake the label “weird,” these same guys are melting down, flailing in every direction looking for their own version of the couch joke, and failing every time because none of them are funny.

They’re calling Walz “Tampon Tim” because as governor of Minnesota, he signed a law mandating free menstrual supplies in public school. That’s a knee-slapper, for sure. They’re spreading insane conspiracy theories about Harris’s rally crowds being CGI, or echoing Trump’s unhinged claims that President Biden wants to “take back” his candidacy. They’re making up nonsensical nicknames for Kamala Harris that literally nobody other than Donald Trump thinks are funny. And Donald Trump doesn’t think anything is funny.

The couch cope has gotten so bad that it’s led to a pathetic attempt by right wing influencers to create a “Vance/Couch” meme for Walz, with the former president’s equally weird son spreading a limp rumor that the governor was caught drinking horse semen. It didn’t catch on, and the entire attempt smacks of “I know you are but what am I.”

You can’t make something like the Vance/couch joke happen. It has to happen on its own, with a unique combination of humor, virality, and believability. The couch joke was funny, it was written with a fake citation that gave it depth, and most importantly, it was about a guy who you could totally see doing it. And Vance’s lame attempts to run with the joke or the label of “weird” are only making it worse.

Because there is no couch. There is only a very creepy vice presidential candidate who you can totally see bragging about going to pound town with a couch.

The jokes and memes should not let up. Democrats should do more of them, bigger, and bolder. People upset about the joke should stop whining about it, because it makes the joke funnier. And JD Vance, stay the hell away from my sectional.

Does Donald Trump Actually Think Hannibal Lecter is Real?

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

One of Donald Trump’s signature bits of weirdness in 2024 has been repeated references to the serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter and comparing him to the plight of undocumented migrants crossing the US/Mexico border.

In speeches going back at least to January, Trump has referred to the liver-eating menace – who is fictional – as “legendary,” “the late, great,” “a wonderful man,”

So why is the former (and maybe future?!?) President of the United States talking about a fictional character as if he were real, and about a truly monstrous character being a “wonderful” and “great” guy?

Psychoanalyzing Trump is like trying to get squirrels to sing an aria – impossible and not worth the time. But there are questions here that can be answered through research, and maybe by answering them, we can get at least closer to an answer to the question that can’t actually be answered – what the hell is going with this?

Does Donald Trump think Hannibal Lecter is real?

It’s fairly clear from the context of Trump’s most reported-on reference to the cannibalistic murderer that the former president knows Hannibal Lecter is a character in a movie. During a lengthy ramble at a campaign event in New Jersey in May, Trump went on extended riff about Lecter specifically being a character from The Silence of the Lambs.

“Silence of the Lambs. Has anyone ever seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? “Excuse me. I’m about to have a friend for dinner,” as this poor doctor walked by. “I’m about to have a friend for dinner.” But Hannibal Lecter. Congrats. The late, great Hannibal Lecter…”

Despite being unfollowable and bizarre, this makes it pretty clear that Trump knows Lecter was a character in a movie, and Trump is known for making copious references to movies and music in his speeches – though his pop culture knowledge pretty much has a hard out in the early 90s. He even references Lecter’s final line in the movie, though it should be noted that Lecter is not actually dead at the end of the movie. Hardly the worst of Trump’s factual abuses.

What does Hannibal Lecter have to do with undocumented immigrants at all?

Nothing really, which is why the reference is so baffling. At first, it seemed like the reference stemmed from Trump confusing asylum seekers – ie, people crossing the border because they are fleeing violence and persecution, and are hoping to be allowed into the country for their safety – with asylums for the insane. This is likely a reference to FBI agent Clarice Starling visiting Hannibal Lecter at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and engineering his release. But none of these things or places are real. And insane asylums in general no longer exist in the United States, nor in much of the rest of the world – though Trump has long called for reopening asylums and institutionalizing more people.

Later, Trump would clarify this bizarre story with his remarks at the Republican National Convention, claiming,

“They’re coming from prisons, they’re coming from jails, they’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. You know the press is always on me cause I say this. Has anyone seen ‘Silence of the Lambs’?” 

Trump is essentially creating a narrative that other countries are dumping their mentally incapacitated felons on us, which is essentially the same rap that Trump used all the way back in 2015 by kicking off his campaign with the false claim that Mexico was sending rapists and killers in the US. Trump has been making the specific insane asylum claim since at least 2023, and nobody has ever found any evidence this is true. Trump has claimed these are “real stories” but never offers proof to support them, because of course he doesn’t.

Is this the first fictional person Donald Trump has talked about as if they were real?

Not at all! Trump constantly talks about people who may or may not exist with the absolute certainty that they do exist, even if nobody can find them. Trump tells so many stories about burly, tough, great men that probably aren’t real coming up to him with tears in their eyes exclaiming “sir!” and regaling him with how great he is that they even have a name – “sir stories.”

Trump has even told stories about specific people who likely don’t exist. One actually has a name – Jim, a “very, very substantial guy” who used to “go to Paris every year with his wife” but no longer goes to Paris because “Paris is no longer Paris.” When Trump started talking about “Jim who no longer goes to Paris” in 2017, multiple journalists went on a fairly substantial hunt for who he was talking about, but nobody could figure it out. Later that year, Trump claimed he was no longer listening to Jim’s badmouthing of Paris, though, again, it’s not clear who exactly Jim was or whether Jim was real.

This type of easy conflation of real and fake doesn’t stop at people. Trump’s New Jersey golf course has a monument to a horrifying Civil War battle called the “River of Blood” that supposedly took place there, though no historical record or expert can confirm that such a battle ever took place. And Trump consistently brags of his winning the state of Michigan’s “Man of the Year” award some time before 2016, though, again, this award does not exist.

Why is he doing this?

We can’t really know why Trump has picked out Hannibal Lecter specifically, but we have established that Trump doesn’t actually think Lecter is real, that he’s linked Lecter to undocumented immigration through an “asylum” connection that’s not real, and that he’s done this kind of conflation before.

But none of those are reasons why he does it. The real reason might be that Trump doesn’t know what the word “asylum” means, and that would make sense.

But there’s another reason why, and it actually lies in Trump’s comments about his comments on Lecter: that the media “goes crazy” when he does it. A former president and current nominee talking about a fictional serial killer as if he were a real and great guy is newsworthy, and Trump knows it. He knows that it will be written about and get the “lying fake news media” all lathered up. And it’s not as if his supporters care, they love this kind of attention for Trump as much as Trump loves it.

So whether Trump thinks Hannibal Lecter is real, wonderful, and deserving of the Michigan Man of the Year award isn’t the point. We can’t really know if he thinks this is all real or not. The bigger point is that this is just another bizarre and awful and racist thing that Trump talks about, and that Trump knows the media will talk about him talking about. Like so much of Trumpworld, the details don’t matter – only the coverage.

Jim who doesn’t go to Paris anymore would agree. If he existed.

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We’re Talking About Joe Biden Completely Wrong

Mike Rothschild

One of the hardest things about being of a certain age is that the people you once depended on start to depend more and more on you. They need more from you – more time, more energy, more help doing things they used to do without help, sometimes even more money.

Sometimes, having an elderly person who depends on you means making decisions. It means painful conversations and losses of things that they never thought they’d lose. Have you ever needed to take driving privileges away from an older person? Have you ever told them they have to move into assisted living, or it’s impossible for them to live independently without help?

Was it easy? Did they just hand over the car keys? Did they just shrug and say “I’ll start packing?”

They probably didn’t. They probably fought you, told you you were wrong, you were crazy, that they’re fine, that maybe they’ve slowed down a little and have a little trouble doing things, but that’s just part of getting old. They’re fine. And they don’t want to hear it again.

But you have to bring it up again, because they’re not fine. And before they drive into a tree or burn the house down or hurt someone, you’re going to have to resolve this. And on and on it goes, you push them to give up something, they push back that they don’t need to, and you argue and put your head in your hands and want to give up. You want to say “fine, let them drive off a cliff.” I tried. I give up.

But you don’t give up, because if you love someone and you see something about themselves that they don’t, you have a duty to keep telling them it’s there until they believe you.

Now take all of that stubbornness and denial and refusal to accept what the people around you have long ago accepted – and make it about the most important job in the world, a job that a lot of other people think only you can do, and that you believe if you don’t do it, we descend into a fascist hellscape.

That’s the problem with Joe Biden running for president again. It’s not that we’re asking him to give up the car keys or the house he lived in for fifty years. We’re asking him to give up being the most powerful human on the planet. And he doesn’t want to.

We’re talking about Joe Biden the wrong way. We’re talking about him like a political candidate, and not like a person. A person who is aging in a very public and ugly way. He is 81 years old, and will be 86 at the end of a second term. And nobody knows what that means for him, for his presidency, and for the country. But it’s hard to see it as anything positive or comforting. Not anymore.

Aging isn’t linear. It’s a slow decline in your faculties and abilities and memory and judgement and temperament. For a while, Biden could walk that line. It appears now that, at a minimum, he’s having trouble walking it. And his halting, quiet, feeble, mush-mouthed, incoherent, extremely painful performance in the June presidential debate against Donald Trump (who, it should be noted, is also mush-mouthed and incoherent, just much louder) proved it.

Biden’s defenders believe that him stepping aside and handing the nomination over to someone else, be it Vice President Harris or another Democrat, will be a disaster. They might be right, of course. They might also not be. They believe that Biden just had a bad night, that he was jet-lagged and feeling sick, that he was over-prepared and restricted by said preparation and let lag and sickness from “letting it rip.”

And again, they might be right.

But if you’ve watched someone you love age, you know that the Biden we saw during the debate is probably closer to the real Biden than anyone wants to believe. Yes, older people can have better days than their worse days. But Biden is only going to get older. Whatever is going on with him might ebb and flow, but it won’t get better. Aging doesn’t go in reverse.

It might happen again. Maybe even worse. And it might happen again when it’s too late to make a change without it seeming like chaos and a total lack of planning.

The conversation about Joe Biden stepping aside is one we should have had years ago. It’s one that should have been had based on reality, on the cruelty of aging, on the idea that one man does not define a political party, and on the knowledge that once you reach a certain age, things start to go wrong in ways that can’t be fixed and so maybe we should act before those things go wrong. It’s not ableist or ageist to see an extremely old man who is clearly breaking down in the way that almost all extremely old people do and point it out. To take the car keys away before he hits someone.

We are being told by Biden loyalists, social media influencers, and die-hards that all of this is just bedwetting and a waste of resources and does nothing but help Trump by ignoring his many flaws and horrors in favor of a media frenzy being goosed by the right wing oligarchs and rat-fuckers that run everything. That Biden is fine, he had a bad night, his appearances since then have gone better, and that we need to suit up, shut up, and get in line.

I reject all of this.

I reject the idea that the movement to push Biden to step aside is just more of the “but her emails” nonsense that sunk the Clinton campaign in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s emails were a minor story that was relentlessly exploited by the right wind media machine who had spent decades trying to destroy her. And the idea that the far right was actually concerned about information security is laughable given their unblinking acceptance of Trump keeping untold classified documents in the bathroom of his golf resort.

I reject the idea that criticism of the Democratic Party and of Joe Biden’s stubbornness is tacit support for Trump. It’s the exact opposite, it’s wanting the Democrats to put forth the candidate who has the best chance to win, and being extremely concerned that this might not be Biden, and even if it is, we should probably talk about it while we can.

I reject that anyone who is having serious doubts about Biden’s ability to win again, his age, and his state of mind are “bedwetters” who are panicking over nothing. The debate we’re having now is the debate that should have been had last year. It’s the sign of a healthy party that puts the good of the country over the ego of one man. We have one party like that already – the Republicans. Just because they will support their man no matter what he does, says, or inflicts on anyone else doesn’t mean we should do the same.

I reject the idea that Democrats wouldn’t support another candidate if Biden were to step aside. Sure, there would be crabbing and bellyaching over Biden leaving the field, but it’s ludicrous to believe that Biden diehards would stay home rather than support another candidate who was already lock-step in beliefs with Biden. Democrats did support a potential Biden replacement already: Kamala Harris, who 81 million people voted to step in for Biden should something happen. Well, something happened.

And I reject the ludicrous conspiracy theories that Biden was sabotaged by a rogue soundman at CNN, the excuses that he was in Italy 12 days before and was too tired to debate, and the self-serving demands to “unite or die.” If Biden thinks that the scrutiny he’s getting from his own party is bad, wait until Trump – who has been uncharacteristically silent the last two weeks – starts on him.

At the moment, the far right has been content to let the two Biden factions battle each other. But that won’t last much longer, and Biden is going to have to defend not only his record and presidency from the right, but his sanity and health and basic ability to make decisions. And it won’t be for the good of the country, it will be for the good of Trump – a man who puts nothing above himself.

Joe Biden is not like that. He is a man who puts country over self. Not many people are like that. But everyone gets older. Everyone loses the ability to do things they used to be able to do.

And everyone has loved ones that at some point will have to step in and make the decisions they might not be able to make anymore.

Because Joe Biden the person has reached the point where while it might not get worse for a while, it won’t get better. It never does.

This is the first post in what will be a relaunched TheMikeRothschild.com. For quite a while I’ve put it to the side while I work on bigger projects, but I’m missing the immediacy of regular writing. I hope to post twice a week, with one post more expressly political and/or fringe, and one a little more of a mix of things I care about and want to share. I hope you’ll share, subscribe, and do all the other things we ask readers to do these days. One post will be Monday or Tuesday, the other Wednesday or Thursday. I’ll develop more of a regular schedule as I go.

As part of relaunching the website and making it a viable way to use my time and resources, I’ve joined Patreon and will be asking readers to kick in $8 a month. Basically, a dollar a piece every month.

I know, everything is expensive and everyone wants your money. I get it. And I’ll keep everything free for now. But I truly hope that if you’ve ever gotten anything of value from something I’ve written, tweeted, or talked about in an interview, that you’ll chip in. And if you can’t, don’t worry about it in the least. Like I said, everything will be free until further notice.

Thanks for reading this far, and for everything!

(photo credit: Elizabeth Frantz/REUTERS)

Here’s What’s (Probably) Going to Happen with North Korea

Mike Rothschild

August is hot. Humid, bedraggling, motivation-sapping hot. It’s so hot that Neil Diamond has a famous live album that’s literally called “Hot August Night.”

But what’s hotter than Neil Diamond busting out “I Am, I Said” for an amphitheater full of sweaty boomers?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A nuclear bomb going off over your head and turning you into atoms. That’s hot.

Obviously, the sabre-rattling between the U.S. and North Korea over Kim Jong Un’s nuclear ambitions has people nervous. Panicking, even. News broke last week that the Kim regime might be much closer to developing a nuclear warhead that can fit on a missile than anyone believed. He’s testing ICBM’s that could hit well into the U.S., and making grave threats about firing missiles at Guam and”mercilessly wiping out” his enemies.

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