We interrupt the previously scheduled post in this space on a splendid new television series to present an astonishing torrent—even by the President Trumpian standards we have gotten “used to” at our peril—of 55 Truth Social posts the president shared from late night Monday into the early morning hours Tuesday. The posts have since been verified and summarized by the fact-checking site Snopes, the first five of which all happened within a minute of each other. Trump did indeed go on a posting spree from around 10:14 p.m. May 11 until 1:12 a.m. May 12, so we’ve rated the claim…
-
-
If there’s one thing we know about the American electorate, it’s that we simply abhor “boots on the ground.” Trade embargoes, naval blockades, sudden kidnappings, targeted assassinations, torpedoed boats, bellicose warnings of worse yet to come—a good portion of us are jittery and suspicious for all that, but the larger voting public, much of it minimally informed as it tends to the demands of daily life, tends not to get apoplectic. But to contemplate American boots on anyone’s ground but our own, our sons and daughters sent into harm’s way on foreign soil—nope! We’re against it, to the tune of 62%…
-
“When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen.” —From George Washington’s address to the New York Legislature (26 June 1775) *** “When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous to the state, and calls for an exercise of the power of dissolution.” —From Thomas Jefferson’s “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” (1774) *** “There never was…
-
So it turns out that the figure of the “strongman” is ascendant once again in contemporary history. Putin in Russia, Xi Ping in China, Kim (Jong Un) in North Korea, Erdogan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Mohammed (bin Salman) in Saudi Arabia, Bukele in El Salvador. And of course Trump here in the United States as a kind of wannabe dictator who openly admires others on that list and often muses on dreams of becoming one of them. What unites all these men is a fierce desire to govern by the exertion of their own will, along with disdain for…
-
Like multi-millions of other Americans, I spent much of the weekend thinking about Alex Pretti. Combing through countless media reports, checking for up-to-the-minute alerts, trying, flailing, really, to write something coherent yesterday that would bring a modicum of ease and a shred of understanding to the awful scene of his murder. Abhorrent as it is, I kept cueing up the raw video footage and still photos, as if at some point I could finally come to some halfway sensible conclusion about how it all came to this. How it is that eight masked, heavily armed and armored agents of our…