Trump Derangement

Friday Morning Ethics Morsels

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I burned this week’s open forum on Tuesday night as my remedy for enforced absence from EA (dead laptop, ethics road trip), so I’m waking up this morning with a different low energy feature. This was an awful week from a scheduling standpoint; on the other hand, at least my ethics wisdom was in demand. I had back-to-back seminars to teach for the first time since Ethics Villain Dr. Fauci and the totalitarian Left wrecked my training business (and the economy, children’s socialization, education, culture…) with their lockdown. Oh, and it killed my wife, too, I mustn’t let them off the hook for that. But I’m not bitter…

1. TCM has cancelled Porky Pig. It is hypocritical for a station that purports to preserve American film history and present the screen entertainment of the nation’s past for enlightenment and perspective to engage in any censorship at all reagrding the content its mission dictates, but I guess Porky doesn’t count. TCM often shows Warner Bros. cartoons between its main features, and as any culturally-literate person knows, these always ended with Porky Pig poking through the screen and stuttering, “That’s all folks!” the traditional Loony Tunes coda. It took me a long time to figure it out (“Huh! That’s funny…this one doesn’t have Porky…”) but Ted Turner’s legacy project has erased Porky from the endings of all its Warner Bos. animated features. What petty, silly, cowardly, pandering morons. Porky stutters, see, so he’s being mean to the disabled, or “differently-abled,” or funny speech-enabled, or whatever the hell we’ve been ordered to call it by our moral betters. If “Make America Great Again” meant nothing more than “End Crap Like Banning Porky Pig,” it would still be worth cheering for. I am officially ECLBPP.

2. Speaking of mind-rot in the U.S., one of my most esteemed and once-rational Trump Deranged Facebook Friends demonstrated how the cult corrupts. He posted with favor an essay by a progressive journalist that purported to give “both sides” of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and recommended that everyone read it. The essay was weakly camouflaged anti-Semitism and anti-Israel propaganda, and obviously so.

Once my friend would have seen that, but Trump Derangement has eaten a substantial part of what had been an impressive brain. The party he is now pimping for has become, incredibly, pro-Islam, pro-Iran, pro-Hamas and pro-terrorism, so the Cognitive Dissonance Scale is forcing him to excuse these indefensible positions by embracing spin, rationalizations, and lies. The author my friend was promoting referred to Israel as an “occupation” and cited the position of the World International Court as evidence of Israel’s wrongdoing. There is a reason why the U.S. doesn’t recognize the anti-American, anti-Isreal WIC.

Those are flaming tells, and that my friend, a retired lawyer, couldn’t or wouldn’t see that is itself a tell. Tragic. And yes, this time I did comment critically on his post. No response, because he’s still smart enough to know I was right.

3. Back to TCM: the station is saluting director Stanley Kubrick this month, which is appropriate since almost every one of his movies is brilliant and he excelled in every film genre he tried. I stumbled upon a disturbing note, however. Sue Lyon, who played Nabokov’s teenage sex nymph in “Lolita,” was evidently raped and sexually abused repeatedly by the film’s producer during the shoot, which the actress reasonably believed derailed her emotional stability, career and life. Where was Kubrick while this was going on? It was his film and his project, and I hold him responsible if his child star was being abused during the production. This month HarperCollins UK announced it would stop selling the children’s books authored by David Walliams following allegations that he harassed female and junior employees. The UK has lost all common sense in its woke-mania: if we start banning artists based on their personal conduct, we’ll have decimated our cultural resources. Kubrick’s film achievements aren’t degraded by his human failings, but it is interesting to me that Porky Pig was banned because he stuttered yet the TCM progressives don’t think Sue Lyon’s abuse under the director’s metaphorical nose is worth mentioning. TCM’s hosts habitually mention all sorts of production details in their introductions and final comments to the movies they show. (“Gone With The Wind” is racist, you know!) But they admire Kubrick too much to tell “the rest of the story.”

4. Here is something artificial intelligence is good for: baseball statistics and history. Last night the Boston Red Sox lost to the Cleveland Ind..sorry, Guardians 1-0 on a home run around Fenway Park’s famous “Pesky Pole,” which marks the shortest outfield fence point of any baseball park still in use. I wondered if the Red Sox had ever lost a 1-0 game on one of those cheap homers, so I asked Google’s bot. The answer came in seconds: No, last night was the first time that has happened in all the games the Sox have played at home since 1912. Then I decided to check the information, as one must with AI until its annoying habit of making stuff up abates. It took me almost an hour, but the bot was right.

A Popeye For A Trump Deranged Facebook Friend…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Slowly but surely, they are forcing me to tell them how full of shit they are.

Posting this from the Kennedy Center’s marble slobber over our most over-rated President,

…a friend of many decades proclaimed on Facebook, “Can you imagine ANYTHING approaching this coming out of the current administration?”

As Popeye memorably said (many times) before swallowing his un-canned spinach and going bonkers, “That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more!!!” I responded, as nicely as I could,

“There just has to be some way to make your point without advancing shameless Kennedy hagiography, Jon. JFK always talked a good game…there is also substantial evidence that he organized a gang rape, compromised US security by having an affair with a foreign spy (as well as with a Mafia don’s moll), and was saved from being the man who triggered WW3 only because a Russian Premier decided it was worth backing down and getting purged to save millions from death. No, JFK wasn’t afraid of Jackie’s grace and beauty so he humiliated her by being a serial adulterer and sexual predator. Marilyn writhing at his birthday party in a dress that made her look naked, basically broadcasting their sexual relationship, may be the most disgusting public moment in US political history. And of course, Kennedy didn’t write most of his fine words, not even the ones that got him a Pulitzer Prize for “Profiles in Courage,” which was mostly authored by Ted Sorenson. It’s amazing what being assassinated or dying young will do for one’s reputation. As SNL writer Michael O’Donahue said when Elvis died, “Good career move!” Kennedy was a bad man and weak President. I really don’t care what he “said” and neither should anyone else.”

I can’t wait to see how the blithering idiots who “loved ” “sad-faced” and “angry-faced” his post try to spin that. I’m betting my friend, who knows I know what I’m talking about when it comes to Presidential history, will default to “But Trump…!” because that’s all he’s got.

Little by little, drip by drip, these people are forcing me to point out their ignorance, bias and stupidity.

[Oh…and someone tell Jack’s ghostwriter that it’s properly “that,” not “which.”]

Trump Derangement Case Study #50,674,328…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

My next door neighbor just posted an innocent photo of a wild turkey that turned up in his back yard.

The first comment on his post: “Does he work for Trump?”

Sickness. I am permanently harming my fingers by wrestling them away from the keyboard so many times each day.

I momentarily gave in yesterday when a good friend referred to Trump “defiling a memorial” by putting his name on the Kennedy Center. I couldn’t stop myself. I had to respond that while Trump’s fooling around with the Kennedy Center is dumb, neither JFK nor the Kennedy family warranted such a monstrous mausoleum that was already defiled with the names of a sociopath whom only moral luck saved from being the POTUS who caused World War III, and who should have been impeached for having sexual affairs with a foreign spy and a mob moll, and the family that covered up a murder so the Jack’s black sheep youngest brother could stay in the Senate and out of prison.

I did manage not to add that JFK achieved so much less in his three years in office than Trump has in just two years of his second term it isn’t even close, which would have caused mass un-friending and several fatal head explosions.

What Does AI Have To Do With President Trump? Oh, Just Nothing, But Don’t Ask The Trump Deranged…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I must credit Ann Althouse for pointing me to an August opinion piece by the New York Times’s NeverTrump fake conservative Bret Stephens (who wants to repeal the Second Amendment!). I guess I should check out the Times more often; it’s just that it is an enemy of the people, one of the worst, and I resent what the paper has done to American journalism and, as a consequence, our nation.

But I digress. The subject of Stephens’ August column, “I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.,” is that learning to write clearly and well is an essential human skill, and one that has important feedback. In addition to making communication between human beings better (more effective, more persuasive, more rational) writing also clarifies the writer’s thoughts, requires close examination of arguments, biases and assumptions, and, essentially, the more one writes, the more adept one becomes at life competence.

I agree with the theory, with a blazing caveat. Stephens is speaking from the biased perspective of one whose associates are all in the upper echelons of educated society, are well above average intelligence, and who work, play and live among the minority of Americans who read, have articulate conversations, and place a high priority on verbal interaction. My late wife and I would sometimes change our table at a restaurant because the conversation at a table next to us was so banal and inarticulate that we wanted to scream.

Military analysts have noted that one of the reason Ulysses S. Grant was such a successful general during the civil war was that his written orders were masterpieces of clarity, telling subordinate exactly what they had to do in straightforward prose. You can see that same skill in his autobiography, which Grant wrote in his final days while dying of throat cancer so his family could pay off his debts with the income from its sale. (Which it did. Mark Twain published Grant’s story.) Today, most students graduate from high school unable to write well, or even coherently. You learn to write by reading and writing; I had to compose five-page essays in the 5th grade, ten-page essays in the sixth grade, and up to 20-page compositions, (with footnotes!) in high school. I wrote a 116 page honors thesis as a senior in college. Later, when I was an administrator at Georgetown University Law Center, I was stunned to learn that GULC was admitting students who had never written a substantive paper at all.

I’m digressing again, but my point is that for, tragically, the majority of Americans, being able to let a chatbot turn their jumbled thoughts, flawed logic and infantile vocabularies into clear prose is a major boon for them and the people they are trying to communicate with. Is it likely to be great writing or even good writing? Not right now, it isn’t. I am working on a project that requires a clear web page to describe it, and the content I have seen was heavily dependent on AI. Nobody had to tell me that; it was obvious, and bot-writing usually is. And it’s bad.

However. the theme of this post is that Stephens felt that he had to somehow virtue-signal to the Trump Deranged. Here is how he ended the column:

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On Trump’s “Gifts” To His Staff

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The latest hyperventilating outrage for the Trump Deranged to get furious over is this:

“President Donald Trump gave $45,000 cash gifts to his executive assistant Natalie Harp and two of his other young, loyal White House employees, according to financial disclosures released by the administration. On their disclosure forms, which were released publicly late last week, the three women described the payments as “Cash Gift for Holidays.” The gifts amount to about one-third of the $150,000 salaries they each earn from their White House positions, according to an annual report to Congress.”

The Washington Post predictably runs to NeverTrump Bush White House legal ethicist Richard Painter, who wanted to impeach Trump in 2016 before he took office. “Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush and a critic of Trump,” the Post tells us, “said the payments appear to violate a federal statute that prohibits the supplementation of federal employees’ salaries from outside sources.” “He’s clearly trying to make it easier for them financially to work in government service at the White House,” Painter said. “You can’t do that.”

Wouldn’t you think a responsible and objective news source would begin by highlighting the opinion of a lawyer and ethicist who hadn’t already made it clear that one of his main goals in life is to “Get Trump”? If the gifts were the slam-dunk offense Painter says it is, shouldn’t it be easy to find other “experts” to weigh in on the matter? Eventually, the Post does bring another “expert” into the mix, but only after quoting Painter extensively. [Full Disclosure: the best legal ethics website that I have ever had the pleasure to visit was John Steele’s Legal Ethics Forum. It managed to stay non-partisan and therefore useful until Painter ruined it with his routine anti-Trump rants. Steele eventually gave up and let the website slide into misuse. The partisan ethics rot that killed that site has also seeped into the listserv of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers. I can’t blame Painter for the whole phenomenon, but he was one of its architects, and yes, I resent it.]

That second voice does not echo Painter’s predictable condemnation. Don Fox, the former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) in the Obama administration, tells the Post:

“…it was not clear from the available facts that the payments violate the prohibition on supplementation. He said that would be the case if Trump made the gifts after one of the employees said they were leaving for the private sector because they couldn’t live on what they were making, and he gave them a supplement to level the disparity in salaries. There are rules that restrict employees from giving gifts to their superiors over concerns they could be abused to curry favor. But a large payment to a subordinate is “not a circumstance that OGE ever really envisioned,” Fox said. “This just doesn’t happen.”…Even in the absence of any violation, however, Fox said he still found the payments “troublesome” because they could leave the aides indebted to Trump. “I would feel somewhere between really uncomfortable and then beholden to the person who gave me such a large gift,” he said.

Oh-oh! There’s another one of those “democratic norms” that Trump keeps breaching!

The Post reveals,

Harp, Martin, Harris and Nauta all have ties to Trump dating from his first term, and they were all among a small inner circle of aides who worked for Trump in Florida in between his presidencies. Harp, Martin and Harris have limited work experience that isn’t tied to Trump…Harp gained national attention in 2019 for a LinkedIn post in which she credited a law Trump signed in 2018 expanding access to experimental treatments with saving her life following a Stage 2 bone cancer diagnosis. Medical experts have cast doubt on those claims. Harp spoke about the experience at the 2020 Republican National Convention. As an anchor with One America News, she frequently promoted Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election. She began working for Trump in 2022 after leaving the network.

Martin began working for the Trump White House as a press assistant in 2019 and continued to work as a press secretary for Trump after the inauguration of President Joe Biden. Harris began her career at the White House and was known as the “receptionist of the United States” during Trump’s first term.

Nauta is a Guam native who enlisted in the Navy in 2001. By 2021, he was promoted to the rank of senior chief culinary specialist, according to military records. Nauta was working in the White House at that time, and Trump promoted him to be his valet, according to court records. Valets are often known as “body men,” following politicians closely so that they can provide them with everything from snacks to schedules.

Here is the Federal law that Painter references, 18 U.S. Code § 209 – Salary of Government officials and employees payable only by United States, which states in relevant part,

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Case Study Of An Ethics Train Wreck: The Crooked Cap Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Baseball has been doing a bang-up job lately validating my baseball ethics posts. My conviction is that the game is and has always been a cultural ethics microcosm, revealing and clarifying ethical dilemmas and conflicts with applications far removed from the game itself. Yesterday there was another example.

Behold…

During the sixth inning of the St. Louis Cardinals’ 7-6 victory over the Colorado Rockies last night, Cardinals rookie reliever Hancel Rincon, making his first appearance in a big league came, wore his cap rakishly askew. Rincon was pitching to Rockies batter Cole Carrigg when home-plate umpire Doug Eddings decided to react to the query of the previous Rockies batter, who had asked Eddings, “Hey, can he wear his hat like that?”

Batters since the dawn of baseball time have tried to find ways to wage psychological warfare against pitchers; EA had an earlier example this season, here. This one worked: the comment inspired Eddings to join the fashion police. Eddings halted the game, motioned to Cardinals catcher Leo Bernal, and told Rincon to fix his cap, punctuating the request with “Grow the fuck up!” Rincon complied. Three pitchers later, Carrigg hit an inside-the-park home run and Rincon exited the game shortly thereafter.

Later in the inning, Cardinals manager Oli Marmol was ejected from the game by Eddings. Marmol explained: “We have a kid making his debut, and in between an at-bat, he tells him that he needs to fix his hat and, ‘The kid’s not going to wear his hat like that on my field.’ Last I checked, this is Coors Field, so I took issue with it.” Not only did Eddings eject Marmol, but he also called a pitch-clock violation that gave Rockies designated hitter Troy Johnston a 1-0 count to start his at-bat against the new Cardinal pitcher. That was not a valid use of the rule, but umpires think they are God sometimes. It’s tradition!

“And then the pitch violation while I’m out there having a discussion, that’s also stupid, in my opinion,” Marmol said later. “So there’s a lot of moving parts to that one. At the end of the day, I thought they handled it poorly, and I’d like an explanation at some point.”

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OH NO! Trump Is Toppling A Work Of Art Outside The Kennedy Center! Democrats Would NEVER Take Down…Oh. Right.

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Well, I’ll say this for my Trump Deranged Facebook Friends: they are useful for keeping up on that group’s rapidly progressing mental illness, which exhibits symptoms manifesting constant fury over trivia, obsessive behavior, presumptions of certitude, and loss of all perspective. Oh, and hypocrisy! Mustn’t forget hypocrisy.

My friend the Trump Deranged professor posted this today with favor:

“Today, a permanent artistic gift—Joel Shapiro’s “Blue”—was taken from the nation because Donald Trump didn’t like it.

“September 18, join Hands Off the Arts to raise your voice and make sure Trump pays the political price for his vandalism of John F. Kennedy’s memorial and our nation’s cultural center.”

I’m marking my calendar right now!

The alleged vandalism was Trump’s ordered removal of the ugly thing above, which, since I started personally boycotting the monument to one of our most unethical Presidents and his corrupt family dynasty that included a U.S. Senator who left a young woman to die in a submerged car, I had never seen before. Huh. Is the outrage over Trump getting rid of that piece of blue crap more contrived than the fury over the 250th Commemorative coin, or less?

In a risible report, the New York Times informs us that “Blue” is a “towering artwork.” And it fit so well with the neo-Classical style of the Edward Durrell Stone white marble box-shaped Center, too!

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts removed a major outdoor sculpture from the center’s grounds on Wednesday. The work, installed in 2019, was targeted for elimination after President Trump’s takeover of the center, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

The Kennedy Center made no advance announcement of its plans to remove the towering, vivid blue metal sculpture of a stick-like human figure, called “Blue.”

On Wednesday morning, the limbs and torso of the figure were wrapped in protective material; an arm was the first to be removed.

The Kennedy Center confirmed in a statement on Tuesday that the sculpture was being deinstalled and that a foundation dedicated to the artist would determine its next location. It did not say the reason for the removal but noted that the deinstallation of artworks that had been donated or lent was common practice for conservation or preservation purposes.

A news release from around the debut of “Blue” describes it as a permanent sculpture for the grounds.

“We are deeply grateful to Joel Shapiro for the years ‘Blue’ has spent animating our campus and connecting visitors to his vision,” the statement said. “We are honored to have been stewards of his vibrant work and a part of his enduring legacy.”

Mr. Shapiro died in 2025. His daughter, Ivy Shapiro, who is president of his foundation, said in an interview that she thought her father would have been “alarmed” that the sculpture was being taken down from its intended location.

“In Joel’s mind, it was one of his greatest site-specific commissions, which celebrated joy, freedom and creativity,” she said.

Hear! Hear! I know I’ve always seen giant metal stick figures as celebrations of joy, freedom and creativity. Not as much as those inflated wiggly-men, of course, but still.

If there is one thing I do not care to hear knee-jerk progressives bleat about in their ravings, it is President Trump removing a single ugly artwork from the grounds of a public building because “he didn’t like it.” In this case the President showed exquisite taste (for a change) but even if the thing weren’t a big blue metal stick figure, the reason “It stinks!” is still a brilliantly-reasoned critique compared to the Axis and Friends removing over 160 statues from public grounds …

…because a black lifetime petty thug died after an accidental use of excessive force by a Minnesota police officer while he was resisting arrest and over-dosing on drugs.

The hypocrisy—and willful blindness to it—exhibited in this latest episode of “Everything Trump Does Is Terrible And Justifies Impeachment If Not Death!” is…I need a new adjective for “beyond belief.” Let’s see…it looks like I use all of them, and the Thesaurus list doesn’t even include “gobsmacking,” “head-exploding” or the phase that keeps jumping into my mind right now, “so fucking stupid it makes my pancreas whimper.” I guess I’ll go with the Cambridge Dictionary’s more dignified and restrained “impossible to comprehend.”

A Note On The Latest Axis Freak-Out Over Trump Trivia

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The graphic above was based on data from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), White House executive orders, and U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary’s Orders to chart notable geographic renamings in the U.S. from 1963 to 2026.

While renaming two large bodies of water is certainly an unusually flamboyant example of changing names of geographical locales for political or other reasons, Trump’s contributions to the map certainly have plenty of company. The hysteria attached to the most recent “horror,” the renaming of Lake Ontario (Who. Cares.) is, in this context, wildly excessive.

It is also, as an astute conservative contrarian on my Facebook feed pointed out, hypocritical. The same people foaming at the mouth over the loss of “Ontario” to name a lake shared by the U.S. and Canada were all-in as schools, streets, plazas, parks, buildings and more had their names changed by wokesters when The Great Stupid spread its dark wings over the land. They applauded attempts to erase from cultural memory such crucial figures as Founders Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, William McKinley and John Tyler, and important historical figures like Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun….and I’m not even talking about all the toppled statues.

As an aside, I saw for the first time, the brilliantly gold-refinished hyper-muscular horses and riders that grace D.C.’s Memorial Bridge as I crossed crossed from from the Old Dominion to the Lincoln Memorial. They look great, in stark contrast to their tarnished, ruined appearance for, oh, as long as I’ve lived in the area. But I bet the Trump deranged still hate the upgrade, because he did it. For example, a Trump-hater posted on X a representation of how Trump’s arch would block the view of the Lee Mansion in Arlington National Cemetery. Huh. So you wanted to pull down every statue of the General across the country, but his plantation’s mansion is sacred!

Fascinating.

Asshole.

From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Today’s Trump Derangement Outburst

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

A Facebook “influencer” whom I had never heard of before somehow invaded my Facebook feed with this:

“All the news channels yesterday were full of tributes to Dolly Parton. Of course, it’s sad that she died and I was aware of many of the wonderful things other than the music and performances she gave us. What surprised me was how refreshing it was to see this in review against the against the constant chronicle of the cruel, corrupt, inane, buffoonish, disgusting lying narcissist who is usually dominating the news.”

I responded that he needs to get help, because being compelled to express hatred for the President of the United States in discussing completely unrelated topics is the definitive symptom of crippling Trump Derangement. I expect his post to attract dozens of “likes” and “loves.”

This is monomania, a mental disorder.

Comment of the Day: “Another Trump Derangement Update!”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post “Another Trump Derangement Update!” is clear, perceptive, and helpful. It needs no more introduction from me, so here it is…

***

I remember during Trump’s first term, I made a Facebook post that tried to explain to lefties the concept of “resistance burnout”…. Basically, if you approach everything Trump does with the exact same amount of action and outrage, then you lose the ability to signal what is actually important, and everything just ends up sounding like an adult from Charlie Brown. I used how Trump muzzled the EPA’s Twitter account and how he appointed a man actively being sued by the EPA as head of the EPA as examples of something very low stakes and something legitimately bad.

Because there is some there there, and a sane resistance has a place. I’ll put it out there: I was absolutely more than willing to talk about how awful Biden was, and how the 25th was probably more appropriate for him than any other President in living memory. See: “Weekend at Biden’s” and “President Autopen”… That wasn’t normal either.

Because Trump isn’t normal, but just saying that is insufficient. “Normal” isn’t a moral state of being. What he does is important, and while I could be annoyed at all the capital projects, particularly during a cost of living crisis (I am), or his instinct to rhetorically pee on everything he can in an attempt to get his name on things (ditto), or his desire to add acreage to the American empire by floating ideas that are just… Never going to happen, as some kind of legacy project (also yes), these things are relatively unimportant. We need to be able to walk and chew gum, and separate the annoying things Trump does from the things that are actually problems.

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