Trump's Words May Have a Role to Play in Las Vegas Shooting

This morning the nation awoke to the news that a sniper fired hundreds of rounds into a crowd of concertgoers at a music festival at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. Fifty people are confirmed dead as of this writing and more than four hundred are injured. The death toll will almost certainly rise and once again, America is shaken by the news that its core has been attacked by a madman and by the insanity of our times.
     But who is to blame for this? I have a suspicion that many people will put, at least part of the blame on the occupant of the Oval Office. Donald J. Trump has conducted the first year of his presidency as if he is playing a narcissistic board game in which everyone loses because he must always win. He seems to look at America as an amusing puzzle with lots of moving parts that can be manipulated and stretched and bent. Mostly for his own pathological amusement. What do you give a man who has everything? The Presidency of the United States. What does he do with that gift? He uses it to see how far he can force the country to bend before it breaks.
     Trump has been playing with fire, and he continues to play with fire. There are no shortage of crackpots, lunatics and very, very angry people in this country and they are all open to suggestion from "leaders" who forget that words matter.
     The nasty rhetoric that has been trafficked by this president eventually finds its way into the sick minds of people who don't seem to get the joke--the joke of a president who thinks attacking nearly everyone whose name is not Donald Trump can have a good end.
     No one knows what was really in the mind of this insane murderer who took the lives of scores and scores of innocent human beings this Sunday evening at a music festival in Las Vegas. But you can't help wondering how much the president's dark and ill-conceived words may have contributed to the atmosphere of lunacy that seems to be floating around the air these days.

Trumpeter Swan in the Bird House: The First 100 Days

Shaking your head about the presidency of Donald J. Trump?

Trumpeter Swan in the Bird House: The First 100 Days is a hilarious political satire where all the politicians are birds, and the locations are elaborate “nests” built above famous buildings such as the White House (“the Bird House”), CIA, FBI, the Kremlin, and Trump Tower.  

    

Trumpeter Swan is a mega-wealthy New York real estate developer who rises to the pinnacle of American bird politics, becoming the unlikely occupant of “the Oval Nest.”

●    Follow Trumpeter Swan from his controversial campaign for the presidency, into the “Oval Nest,” and through his wildly erratic, unprecedented, and desperate first 100 days in office.

●    All of the familiar scandals are here: the Inaugural Crowd disputes, the Russian meddling in the presidential election, the presidential tweeting scandals, the “WallBird Street and GoldBird Sachs Cabinet” scandal, the nepotism scandal, the peddling of Igota Swan's clothing line, the CIA speech fiasco, the Press Secretary controversies, and so on.

●    All leading up to investigations by the Central Bird Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Bird Investigations.  

Where the Streets Have No Name

It is Monday morning on a heat-baked southern California day and the task ahead is to make sense of the continued ramblings and backwards rantings of an administration that has so far confounded, confused and cast a thousand doubts on the continued relevance of the United States on the world stage.

In just five months, President Donald John Trump has managed to execute his plan for America: Make America Scratch its Collective Head with a program of alternative news and manufactured facts that have just about everyone, including the most rabid of supporters, wondering what strange, crazed, slapdash "policy" will drop next.

Everyone appears to be walking around in a very special political fog, the kind of semi-high that closely approximates the severe let-down of a monumental hangover.  Where is this all headed? No one seems to have the courage or clarity to guess. Or is it just that the obvious seems a bit too much to contemplate? Trump's Pied Piper, Steve Bannon, has indicated a desire to unsettle expectations and this has become the keyword for an administration that moves left when everyone expects it to move right, and right when everyone expects it to...govern. America's allies are shaking with fear, while America's enemies are laughing and pinching themselves.

Another day, another dollar. Another sunrise over the Capital of a very confused nation. And we're less than half a year into a presidency that will almost certainly prove to be the most upside down in the long history of Imperial presidencies.

Even the fabled  looking glass is beginning to have a lot more clarity than this administration and its struggling, often floundering leader.

What is really going on with the Trump fans?

Look, a lot has happened in the past four months. I'm not going to rehash all the scandals, semi-scandals, possible scandals, reputed scandals and scandals-to-be-seen. This has been a presidency that is, as the Trump fans like to keep pointing out, "unprecedented." Trump and his minions routinely twist the truth to the point where truth seems to have become nothing more than an embarrassing roadblock to an end that no one can really quantify. Trump has insulted nearly all of our allies and remained steadfastly loyal to his "pal" Putin. He has signed Executive Order after Executive Order, despite condemning Obama for signing Executive Orders. He has changed his mind about major issues within moments of issuing strong words of support for those same issues. This is not a man who needs to justify his waffling. He has thrown together a budget proposal that would decimate the very people who voted him into office. He has appointed weird people to head government agencies and his cabinet (the head of Exxon Mobil for Secretary of State? Is that a stab at humor from some alternate universe?)

And on and on and on...

What seems like four years really is just four months, folks, and unless all those investigating entities come up with some fire, it's going to be a very long four years ahead.

Yet, through it all, Donald Trump has remained the most unpopular president in the history of the United States of America. Everyone keeps saying that we are a deeply divided nation, but is that really true? Nearly seventy per cent of Americans are not divided at all--they deeply distrust and dislike and disapprove of this president. Nearly seventy per cent! When was the last time seventy per cent of Americans agreed on anything?

So what's with that other thirty-five per cent, who continue to support Trump and his wacky administration, despite the daily barrage of negative news and revelations? Here's a theory.

When You Watch Trump Being Interviewed You Know Something Is Wrong

Donald Trump did two astonishing things this week—he fired the Director of the FBI, the man who was leading the investigation into the Trump administration's possible collusion with the Russians, and he appeared for a televised interview on NBC with correspondent Lester Holt. It's hard to tell which of these two events was more distressing.

That Trump would brazenly fire his greatest agonist is, by now in keeping with his strangely accepted behavior. What can Donald Trump do to shock us? Well, yes, there is always something bigger, more fact-defying to grab our attention and his follow-up meeting with Hold accomplished just enough to send even the most jaded Trumpers dashing for their phones.

Trump was asked why he had done what he'd done, why he'd said what he'd said, and why he had thought the things he'd thought that caused him to say the things he'd said and do the things he'd done. His answers were thrilling in their bald faced boldness and edge-of-a-cliff recklessness. If you want to know how we got to this strange place we now find ourselves, you don't have to look much farther than the transcripts of that interview. I won't bother to recap it because to try to describe in simple terms the sheer breathlessness of Trump's reasoning would do little justice to the words. You need to experience them for yourself.

Look up the interview and watch it. Or read the transcripts. Then try to figure out what planet we're living on.

Is Donald Trump Crazy?

Is Donald Trump Crazy?

A lot has been written by pundits and psychiatrists lately about the mental state of our new president. Some estimable shrinks have gone on TV to claim that Donald Trump's over-the-edge behavior has exemplified the characteristics of many serious psychological conditions.

Let's assume that Trump has at least one fairly obvious mental condition: megalomania. Let's assume that his expansive ego, which served him so well for so many years was intact when he ran for president. After all, he was able to obliterate the competition and he seemed to be having a good time doing it. He never seemed to break a sweat. He was a television guy, after all. He knew how to feed an image to the camera lens. This was a man who had a clear picture of himself and that picture was served well by a lapping media that hungrily devoured every outlandish word and borderline deed he committed.

As long as his out sized ego was served by the campaign and the media, things went along just fine. But trouble may have started to rear its head on election night.

What if Trump really never expected to become president at all? What if he was just running because it served to publicize his brand and to get him out in front of the cameras? What if it was all just a good workout for his ego?

What if, on election night, he was more surprised than anyone to discover that America had thrust him onto the highest perch in the world? What if he had more trouble handling the shock of that information than anyone imagined?

Ask yourself how you felt when you first heard that Donald Trump been elected Leader of the Free World? Maybe the condition known as Trump Derangement Syndrome has affected even that condition's namesake.

Try This In The Era Of Trump

It isn’t always easy waking up in the morning, especially these days. You turn on the TV and the first thing you hear about is how many people have died in this and that conflict. How the president of the United States is at war with the Congress. How nothing is being done to make the lives of individuals easier or more fulfilling. How your money is going nowhere fast. How your kids are going to have college debts they’ll never manage. How, how, how…

Here’s a tip to make you feel better instantly. And I’m not kidding about this. When you wake up tomorrow morning do these few easy steps and don’t skip any of the details. I guarantee you will feel a lot better; this kind of thing can become addictive.

First of all, call your office and tell them you’re finally taking that personal day. Don’t make excuses, just say you have things to take care of (things called YOURSELF). Then (and this is the big one) turn off your cell phone, your landline phone, your television, your radio.

Lay down in bed and close your eyes. Rest, relax, you have nothing to do today, no one to see, no issues to take care of. You’re free today.

For the first few hours, this will all feel really strange. But as the day goes on, you’ll become accustomed to the rhythm of your own relaxation and soon you will crave it. Take the rest of the day to revel in your own serenity.

Go to sleep and don’t think about the things that stress you all the time. Today is the day for…nothing.

Tomorrow, you will wake refreshed and ready to start the usual routines. But you’ll feel as if you’ve been on a desert island for a month. Call it as daycation-not a robo-call or loud politician to break the silence.