Again, such a post is signature significance for Trump Derangement. No one who isn’t clinically ill with this cerebral malady would ever post such crypto-libel. It might as well have read “I am not a cannibal” or “I am Marie of Romania.” There is no evidence, none, that Donald Trump is a pedophile, yet the Trump Deranged believe it anyway. What did Donald Trump ever do to justify this delusion? How does beating Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College translate into likely pedophilia?
Now, the long-time friend who posted this today is an actor, and a communist (he’s one of those who says, “Real Communism has never been tried”) but he’s not an idiot. He’s serious and informed. Yet I would no more post a statement on Facebook that is that batty than I would announce that I am the reincarnation of Mae West. My friend only did it, presumably, because he is certain that none of his friends will think less of him for doing so, and that most of them will agree with him.
Ethics question: Should friends let friends make fools of themselves even if most of the people in their bubble don’t realize it? Isn’t this like noticing that a friend has a big piece of spinach on a front tooth? The problem is that someone who posts something this stupid isn’t likely to listen to reason, logic, or rational analysis. Are friends obligated to try to alert friends when they are behaving foolishly in public even though the likely result is losing that friend?
In fact, it’s brilliant, well-deserved, and spot-on. The purpose of trolling Trump-style is to make your opponents, detractors and adversaries start screaming and kicking things. Normally I would say that 1) causing people pain, psychic or otherwise, for no other reason than to do it, is unethical and that 2) for a President of the United States to engage in such conduct is petty, an abuse of position and and beneath him. But the fools, knaves, assholes and clods that make up the Trump Deranged just nearly got the President killed again. This particular trolling post, mocking the “No Kings” idiocy that has polluted the very concept of public demonstrations and protest as free speech, is a wonderful way to respond to those responsible.
To wit..
1 The President comparing himself to the UK’s King Charles brightly illustrates how silly the protest was to begin with. None of the kings extant in the world today, with Charles being the most prominent example, have any real power except for prestige and cultural respect.
2. If Americans and the mews media allowed Trump the formal respect and deference that the English royals receive, our politics, culture and society would be far healthier.
3. The Founders’ concept of our Executive was, in fact, that he have the status of a king but with his powers limited and controlled by two equally powerful government institutions. This is why both John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were shocked when our first President eschewed any of the trappings of royalty.
4. The difference between the conduct of the UK’s King and our President, especially this one, is striking. King Charles, like his mother, rarely allows reporters to shout questions at him, or addresses hostile audiences like Trump was about to do before the shooting started, or will take part in a contentious interview with a journalist as Trump has done many times, most recently with Norah O’Donnell. Framing them both as “kings” neatly points out the distinction. Our king is more accessible, a commoner (one might wish a bit less common) and self-effacing.
5. Real kings, and many of Charles’ predecessors, would execute or imprison critics, especially those as hateful and vicious as those who have taken part in the “No Kings” rallies. President Trump just teases them. That’s the epitome of a beneficent monarch.
6. Ann Althouse this morning chides the White House for, she says, sacrificing integrity (“consistency”) for trolling. Baloney. Trump trolling his undemocratic foes, who do not believe in allowing an elected President to govern, is one constant in his two terms. The post says, in effect, “Nyah, Nyah, Nyah. Nyah! I’m POTUS and you’re not. Bite me!”
Yes, childish, but Trump’s targets are children—worse, really, because children have an excuse for acting immaturely and adults do not. In the context of what he has put up with, it is a restrained, clever, and well-deserved rebuke.
The chart above reflects the results Harvard got from its alums when it asked last month in its alumni magazine what the school should do about its absurd grade inflation, which Ethics Alarms examined here , here, and here.
The red bar shows the percentage of readers who felt that Harvard should “Implement recommendations from a Faculty of Arts and Sciences subcommittee, such as imposing a 20-percent cap on A’s in every class and awarding internal honors based on “average percentile rank” instead of GPA.” In other words, fix the problem. In other words, establish a grading system with some integrity. In other words, ensure that a Harvard College diploma means something other than that a student somehow got admitted to the iconic and supposedly challenging institution.
What should be troubling to Harvard—and us— is that the other options got as much support as they did:
14.1% think that the school should “Grade all classes pass-fail; take A’s out of the equation.” This doesn’t address the problem at all. Harvard doesn’t fail anyone already: it is harder to flunk out of Harvard than almost any U.S. college. The pass-fail option just substitutes one false standard for another.
11.17% chose the “solution” “Nothing; students work hard and it’s unfair to change the rules.” Morons. Who says they “work hard”? Effort doesn’t mean success, achievement or mastery: one can work hard and accomplish nothing. It’s unfair to change what obviously doesn’t work? How does an intelligent, educated person reach that bizarre conclusion? Revelation: over 10% of all Harvard grads are incompetent and irresponsible.
6. 12% voted to “Implement changes, but only if other schools do it too.” Wow. There’s leadership for you. 6.12% of all Harvard grads are apparently weenies.
In related news, the embarrassing Harvard student petition opposing grading reform at Harvard University as “racially harmful” has been removed from Change.org. The petition urged Harvard to abandon the plan limiting top grades because doing so would “mirror and reinforce existing racial and socioeconomic hierarchies.” I had expressed my dismay at the petition here.
Yes, the Trump DOJ really indicted the Deep State’s scumball ex-FBI Director for his obnoxious Instagram post featuring an anti-Trump seashell message he happened upon on the beach (Yeah, I wouldn’t put it past this guy to arrange the seashells himself and then pretend it was made by someone else, but that is unprovable.)
Trump’s DOJ has unsuccessfully indicted Comey once already. That indictment at least had some law and logic to support it: this one does not. I didn’t think the DOJ and FBI could be so wasteful as to have an ongoing investigation of a seashell formation that has taken eleven months, but to be fair, tracking down all those mollusk witnesses and interviewing them must have been quite a chore.
Last year I wrote, after Comey issued his Instagram post,
“James Comey, the partisan, dishonest, unethical former FBI Director whom Trump was right to fire (but he should have fired him earlier) posted on Instagram, with approval, a message that consisted of the numbers 8647, meaning “rub out the 47th President,” Donald Trump, delineated with sea shells. …
“Nice! It didn’t take long for Comey to realize that this was, to say the least, a tactical error, and he took down the post. In doing so, Comey proved what a mendacious creep he is again by claiming that it never occurred to him that 8647 might be interpreted as a call to have the President of the United States eradicated, offed, murdered, killed…you know assassinated. Never mind that there have been two near misses by the “Kill Trump” club already, that some Democrats and “the resistance” have openly advocated violence, and that for a former head of the FBI to join their ranks is, to put it mildly, unseemly. Comey said he was sorry.
“Not good enough. Not nearly good enough. A former high law enforcement official calling for the assassination of the sitting President is a big deal, attention should be paid, and Comey should suffer more than the indignity of having to channel Emily Litella (“Never mind!”)
“…There is no valid justification for taking criminal action against Comey (who wrote coyly under his shells photo, “Cool shell formation”), but there also is no good reason not to thoroughly humiliate this Ethics Villain either.”
Instead, the crack MAGA lawyers in Trump’s Justice Department decided to thoroughly humiliate themselves instead by using this old, obnoxious, since-deleted Instagram post as the basis for two criminal counts alleging that Comey “ma[d]e a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the States”:
DOJ has to prove under the law that “a reasonable recipient“ of the image of “8647” posted by Comey “who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret” the post “as a serious expression of an intent to do harm” to Trump. It can’t. Among other things, the editing term “86” is ambiguous. Because I have been an editor, I know it means “Kill this section” or “throw away this story.” But even in the editing game, 86 doesn’t literally mean “kill” because you can’t kill something that isn’t alive in the first place. Furthermore, most Americans don’t have a clue that “86” means “eliminate/cut/get rid of/trash, etc.” In fact, the DOJ can’t assume or prove that Comey did, so the “knowingly and willfully” requirement is dead in the water, like the previous inhabitants of those shells.
It’s overkill because the indictment is obviously absurd and you shouldn’t have to be a lawyer, a legal scholar or a beach-comber to figure it out, but Alan Rozenshtein and Ben Wittes at Lawfare—a reliably anti-Trump, Axis-allied site, but that doesn’t mean it is always wrong— examined the legal issues regarding Comey’s post and concluded, “James Comey could have gone a lot stronger than ‘8647’ and still not risked jail.”
Absolutely correct. Taking a picture of an ambiguous message on a beach and calling it “cool” can’t conceivably constitute a “true threat.”
In Brandenburg v. Ohio, the U.S. Supreme Court held “the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit [a law] to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” A seashell message on a beach complimented by a fired FBI director is likely to incite violence? Come on.
In my continuing quest to identify useful symptoms of Trump Derangement (to shake in the faces of those who deny that there is such a malady, or that it isn’t frighteningly widespread, I found the just-released survey of self-identified Democrats and progressives invaluable. Read it all, but heed particularly one item in the chart above, showing what percentage of this group believes that the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump was a false flag hoax orchestrated by MAGA to create sympathy for Trump ahead of the election.
Almost a fifth, 19% believe this crack-brained theory is definitely true. Another 27% believe this nonsense is “probably true” (despite any evidence whatsoever). That’s almost half, or 46%. I would add to this the 15%, dimwits all, who say they “aren’t sure.” That’s a damning 61% of Democrats and progressives who are so marinated in hate and and bubble-bath that they can’t accept reality.
A man sitting behind Trump was killed by a bullet, and Trump’s ear was grazed. Reviewing what happened at that campaign speech and not concluding that it was an honest-to-Pete assassination attempt and a close call at that constitutes a Bias Makes You Stupid lollapalooza, right up there with thinking the world is flat and dinosaurs didn’t exist. This is signature significance for brain failure, and the name for this variety is “Trump Derangement.” 61% seems a bit small to me, but it’s still damning.
Now it appears that the same 61% (or more) are claiming that last weekend’s attempt to kill the President was also a hoax. From The Hill:
The Philadelphia Phillies (that’s a baseball team, for those of you tragically unschooled in the Great American Pastime) have fired manager Rob Thomson and named former Yankee star and past major league manager Don Mattingly as interim manager.
The Phils are off to a terrible start, especially for a team that has been a World Series contender for four years and was supposed to be one this season. Firing a manager in April, especially a skipper as successful as Thomson has been, is rare indeed, but the Boston Red Sox just did it. Baseball teams are like that: they tend to get caught up in fads. With this firing, many think the New York Mets will follow suit and fire that team’s manager. The Mets, another expected contender with a huge payroll, have been worse than either Boston or Philly. It may also be germane that all three cities are infamous for having impatient and unforgiving fans.
But I digress. Here is the issue: Don Mattingly is an experienced manager and was Thompson’s bench coach, essentially the in-game strategy consultant. He would make perfect sense as Thomson’s replacement, except for one fact…
Mattingly’s son Preston is the Philadelphia Phillies general manager.
That’s Don on the left and Preston on the right above.
The latest unfair conservative assault on Jimmy Kimmel led me to do a quick survey of all the Ethics Alarms “Stop Making Me Defend X” posts. With this one, Jimmy indeed becomes the leading non-political figure in number of SMEDX entries, with three. I bet you can guess the leader in the political figure category: yes, it’s Donald Trump. (In second place is Joe Biden.)
President Trump was the subject of the very first such post, way back in 2015 when I was writing a “Letting Donald Trump be President is like letting a chimp pilot a passenger jet” post almost weekly. The list of figures (and sometimes other things) that have prompted rueful defenses here is a rogues gallery: Kathy Griffin, Robert De Nero, Bill Maher, Bill and Hillary, Eric Swalwell, Eric Adams, Chris Cuomo…the most recent was Jeff Bezos, just a week ago. The previous SMEDX effort in defense of ABC’s disgusting late night host was last September. I began it like this, quoting my first defense of this asshole in 2017, and I wouldn’t change a single word today:
“I detest Jimmy Kimmel. I loathe him. He is the most revolting of all the Left-Licking late night and cable progressive comics, worse than Colbert, Maher, Samantha Bee, all of them. All of them combined. He is an ongoing blight on the ethics of American society, and yet he is self-righteous in the process.’ My opinion of Kimmel has, if anything, deteriorated since I wrote that.”
However, the current conservative pundit, website and MAGA attacks on Kimmel as the symbol of Axis hate-rhetoric that irresponsibly encourages Trump Deranged assassins is completely unfair. (So are the attacks on House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for his “total war” statement.)
On his show last week, Kimmel was riffing on what he might say if he were the MC at the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,” Kimmel said. Of course Kimmel didn’t know that there would be an assassination attempt that night. But more importantly, there was nothing violent about the joke at all. In fact, it was well-constructed; the line can be interpreted in several ways, but taking it to be referring to Trump’s assassination is not among them.
Melania is considerably younger than her husband: in an earlier era, she would be called a “trophy wife.” I think I may have heard a wag make nearly that same joke decades ago when I attended a trial lawyers association convention. The number of decrepit antediluvian millionaire lawyers with gorgeous 20- or 30- something women on their arms was fairly revolting. Kimmel’s joke could have easily been made about the late professional bimbo Anna Nicole Smith when she married, at 26, an 89-year-old billionaire. Remember?
I can see why the First Lady was insulted by the innuendo (a bit “too close to the bone”), and, taking a cue from her husband, exploited Kimmel’s bad luck to pounce on Jimmy the way Jimmy pounces on the President literally every night his show airs. Nonetheless, it was unethical. “Tit for tat,” revenge and deliberate mischaracterizations are still unethical no matter how much the target “has it coming.”
I was hoping that Ethics Alarms history buff and house deep-diver would weigh in on the latest Presidential assassination attempt, and he didn’t disappoint.
What makes me wonder is that the Secret Service didn’t appear to have run everyone staying in the hotel at the time of the event through whatever databases they had. The would-be assassin didn’t have a criminal record, but recent firearms purchases might have popped, which might have made them look again, see that he hadn’t gone through airport-level security, and made them at least check him out. Be that as it may, there is pretty clear evidence of intent here, between the manifesto, the carefully managed trip, and the hotel stay.
This actually makes four tries for Trump, if you count the one before he was elected the first time where the guy tried to grab a security guard’s gun but got grabbed before he could do much. We still know probably the least about Crooks, the guy who came the closest in Butler, PA, because he was shot and killed at the scene and he didn’t leave a clear paper trail.
I’m aware that few of the presidents were universally popular, and that a lot were divisive and had strong opposition. Andrew Jackson was disliked enough (especially in the Carolinas) that three people tried to kill him, although only one while he was president. Lincoln of course was killed by a Confederate bitter-ender (there were supposedly four other attempts to kill him, including one to kill him as he took the train to his inauguration). Garfield was killed by someone clearly crackers. McKinley was shot dead by an anarchist. Taft, Hoover, FDR, and Truman were all targeted for one reason or another. The two PR independence activists who tried for Truman killed a White House policeman. The anarchist who tried for FDR failed but did get the mayor of Chicago. Then of course there is the murder of JFK, the shooting of Reagan, and failed attempts on the next four presidents. As far as I know, Biden was never targeted.
Most of the presidential assassins and would-be assassins were either insane (Guiteau, Hinckley) or extremists of a lost cause or a cause that never was (Booth, Czolgocz, others). There’s nothing insane about this guy. Either that or most of the Democratic Party has gone over the edge. I don’t think that’s the case, though. A lot of it is just cold hate and arrogance. It’s easy to hate someone in the heat of anger. If you still hate someone when the heat of anger has cooled down, or if you were never all that angry when you decided to hate that person, that’s really a problem.
It’s completely normal to dislike Trump. It’s completely normal to believe that his policies are the wrong ones. It’s completely normal to think he is leading the country in the wrong direction. All of that is at least reasonably debatable and there is room for disagreement. It’s not normal to believe Trump is a pedophile, there is no evidence of that, and in fact there’s more evidence that Biden is (getting too close to young girls, showering with his daughter). It’s not normal to believe Trump is a rapist, there are no findings of any court convicting him of that. It’s not normal to believe Trump is a traitor, because if he could have been charged with treason they had four years to do it in.
As you may have heard, the new biopic “Michael” is on the way to becoming a huge box office hit, which Hollywood needs desperately these days. It is also a film that critics have nearly unanimously panned as pure hagiography. Sure, movies about real people routinely gild the human lily, but “Michael” has taken the whitewashing (Is it tasteless to use that term in reference to Jackson? I think it’s rather appropriate…) to absurd levels. The film stops before the 1993 allegations of child sexual abuse against the pop icon, in part because the terms of Jackson’s financial settlement ($20 million while refusing to admit wrongdoing) with an accuser prohibited the estate from publicly questioning the allegations against him. Thus “Michael” is a big wet kiss to the King of Pop and his fans, omitting the dark and creepy stuff, which in Jackson’s case is considerable. I would argue that it is also defining.
Jackson is played by Jaafar Jackson, one of the singer’s nephews, who looks like Michael might have looked if he were, you know, normal. Telling the life story of Michael Jackson while ignoring his disturbing pederastic tendencies is like making a movie about Errol Flynn or John Barrymore that never shows them taking a drink. Or a movie about John Wilkes Booth that leaves out that little Ford’s Theater incident. How about a Bill Clinton biopic that leaves out Monica? Fatty Arbuckle was a silent film genius: why ruin a movie about him by including that downer of a party he gave where a woman was killed and he was tried for murder?
Most of these notes, as you may well expect, involve the latest Trump assassination attempt.
1. Barack Obama is trying to surpass Donald Trump as the most obnoxious former President ever. At least Trump had the excuse that he was trying to get elected to another term. Obama has no excuses. He wrote on “X”: “Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy. It’s also a sobering reminder of the courage and sacrifice that U.S. Secret Service Agents show every day. I’m grateful to them – and thankful that the agent who was shot is going to be okay.”
Nobody has any doubts about what the motives of the shooter were, and the message he sent out shortly before his attempt to kill the President and as many of his aides and Cabinet as he could made those motives clear. So this is going to be his party’s tactic for ducking responsibility, is it? Gaslighting? (See the shameless Rep. Raskin pretend he has no idea what kind of rhetoric his party has used against President Trump.) Obama’s message is also notable in expressing concern for the Secret Service agent but none for the would-be assassin’s main target. Apparently it was too difficult for Obama to say he was also thankful that Trump, his wife and others were “going to be okay.” That sentiment, after all, would upset the Democratic base that wants Trump dead.
The longer I get to observe Barack Obama, the more indefensible his character seems to be. If Jimmy Carter, as he boasted, was among our most accomplished ex-Presidents ever (well-behind Herbert Hoover, however), Obama has to rank as among the most destructive, right down there with John Tyler, who joined Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy Cabinet.
2. How can this happen? NYPD Officer James Giovansanti’s pickup truck has been caught on camera 547 times in Staten Island since 2022, with 187 camera-issued tickets in 2025 alone. The cop has accumulated $36,650.02 in fines. Apparently Giovansanti is a piker compared to NYC’s reckless driving champion, someone in Brooklyn whose tickets total up to over $60,000, but the Staten Island scofflaw is a law enforcement officer. He should have been terminated years ago. [Pointer: JutGory]
3. The hot topic for the Trump Deranged isn’t that the President was nearly murdered, but that he was mean to Norah O’Donnell on “Sixty Minutes” less than 24 hours later. During a Sunday interview, O’Donnell read to Trump’s face the most direct part of the failed assassin’s so-called “manifesto,” the section I called “the key quote in the message” yesterday: “I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me.I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
Ethics Alarms 