Things seem to be going up and down like crazy. The Don put up his Claw stadium for his 80th birthday shindig and has floated the idea of not taking this monstrosity down.
The Don has always been a fan of the showmanship and histrionics of wrestling. Remember Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt to shreds at the 2024 Republican National Convention to reveal a TRUMP VANCE T-shirt underneath? His embrace of the UFC is a natural progression: more unhinged and more hurt.
At one point, after combatant Josh Hokit won his cage match, he was so fired up, that he yelled “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?” I’m not sure The Don paid him to say that (given his endless obsession with the Obamas), but there is no doubt he relished it.
The event was an astonishing sight for so many reasons: The use of the trappings of the White House for violent cage fighting. The corporate sponsorships. The eruptions of casual cruelty. Barnum and Bailey move over. Don King (famous boxing promoter) has nothing on The Don. He has found his true calling. Promoting cage matches is much more inspiring and fun than running the government. There are no negotiations in the ring: just mano-a-mano, may the most unhinged man win. Perhaps The Don will decide that it will be mandatory for all visiting heads of state to be treated to some good old American violence. After all, he wants to make them squirm; he wants to communicate his essential narrative: dominance and submission
In another kind of wrestling match, The Don’s name came down from the Kennedy Center for the Arts. It was another WTF moment in the absurdity of his presidency: The man who has worked hard to erase things he disapproved was now being erased. Now that’s Karma for you. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall to witness his rageful outburst. How humiliating! To The Don, the Kennedy Center is like one of The Don’s real estate properties. After all, branding is the name of the game. As The Don sees it, he is the president of the company called the U.S. and he has the prerogative to put his name on everything he wants.
Moving on, in what I call the “putting up after taking down” escapade, a federal judge temporarily blocked the National Park Service from removing or revising signs, films, and other materials at national parks across the country to comply with a directive from President Trump.
The ruling pauses enforcement of an executive order that called for removing or covering up materials at national parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans” or cast the United States “in a negative light.”
The judge, Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, also ordered the Park Service to restore within three weeks any exhibits that it had dismantled or altered.
To comply with the president’s directive, the Park Service has taken down plaques about slavery at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, a sign about climate change at Fort Sumter in South Carolina and a sign about Indigenous people at Acadia National Park in Maine.
Judge Kelley wrote: “Not only does this undermine the integrity of the national parks; it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization…“From the echoes of abolition in John Brown’s Fort in Harper’s Ferry, to the genesis of the modern L.G.B.T.Q.+ civil rights movement at the Stonewall National Monument, to the retreating ice of Glacier National Park in Alaska, the national parks preserve the multifaceted and multilayered history of our nation, including the good, the bad and the ugly.” And as I have said many times, our need to insist on American exceptionalism prevents us from coming to terms with our “ugly” actions” and stifles our capacity to grow into the multi-racial democracy we aspire to. To the White Supremacists, who believe they are the only true Americans, that’s the point.
Of course we can’t leave out the great takedown of Iran by the U.S. With a ceasefire memorandum about to be signed. The Don is ready to give the big thumbs up when everyone around him, from the left and the right, sees it as a thumbs down. According to the ceasefire agreement (which no one has seen!), The Iranians will open up the Strait of Hormuz and…that’s it. How much money will the Iranians get in the great American shakedown? Nuclear material, let’s kick that can down the road. The irony of this disaster is that the deal the Obama administration achieved succeeded in significantly reducing Iran’s nuclear enrichment program; and when The Don tore it up, Iran returned to increasing its capacities. This travesty of an “excursion” has brought down the world economy and brought down the U.S. another rung on the respectability ladder.
Each day The Don and his fellow Republicans degrade, attack, and tear down the pillars of our democracy. The recent revelation that Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance pushed to suspend the constitutional right of Habeas Corpus is terrifying. There will be more outrageous actions coming our way during the midterm elections. Already, The Republicans are planting the seeds for claiming the elections will be rigged and try to convince Americans that the military is necessary to ensure fair elections. What is our recourse in this dangerous moment, this attempt at an autocratic takeover? We must stand up to this menace by showing up at the polls and doing what the Hungarians did: Hand the Republicans such a landslide defeat that any attempt to question the results will not stand with the people. We need to bring them down!
The Grand Offal Party 