I don’t know exactly where it is, but somewhere in the Bible, there has got to be a verse that says, First God created work; then he created make-work. It took exactly two weeks for the 2,200 National Guard soldiers deployed in Washington D.C.
Every day it gets worse and worse. But there will come a point where some brave governor will tell Trump enough is enough and he will cave. And people will realize what a waste of time this all is. In the meantime, Democrats need to be talking about the economy, how expensive things are and that they can fix it since Trump hasn’t done squat in 8 months. The Iowa State Senate victory is a sign that people are fed up with all this BS
People already realize it. Look what just happened to Susan Collins just yesterday. But Trump AND THE REPUBLICANS are now trying to outright rig the 2026 elections to make it impossible for anybody BUT a Republican to win in order to keep their majority. They know as it stands they won't win, so they have to cheat to do it. They are no longer a legitimate Party. They are full blown cult, doing Trump's bidding like automatons, disregarding every law, every statute, the Constitution itself to keep the tuchus of their master lip smacking clean.
Um...what does Kristin Gillibrand have to do with Susie "Concerned" getting (rightfully) booed at Searsport?
And Maine Dems actually do have two very worthy opponents to run against Susie "She Who Sits on the Fence" Collins.
We have Shenna Bellows an experienced campaigner who is currently Maine Secretary of State and has already told Justice Nazi Pam Bondi and her request for voter registration info to "Go jump in the Gulf of Maine...".
We also have Graham Platner of Sullivan Maine. He is a born and bred Mainer, a progressive who is willing to talk about kitchen table issues. (hopefully our own "Maine Mamdani"!!) He is a veteran who came back to Maine to run an oyster farm. I think he would be a GREAT replacement for the Faker Susie who pretends to be a moderate but who NEVER votes against the GOP unless her vote won't count either way.
Your top candidate has ZERO experience in politics & Susie is is the Chair of the Appropriations Committee!
Democrats are raising $$$ for her in California. Big, big $$$ are backing her…ever heard of Tim Cook?
Gillibrand is the Senator in charge of recruiting Democratic candidates for state office. YOU should be spending ALL your time to get your candidates elected. BIG $$$ are in little Maine. I hope your guy wins.
How much experience at being president did Obama—or any other candidate—have in his first run? In politics, inexperience is a silly accusation. trump had plenty of executive experience. Do you think it qualified him to be U.S. president?
Bernie Sanders? Democrats look like the party of the AARP.Why not tell all of us how many young male Democrats voted for Trump & how many Democrats stayed away in 2024? Democrats list ALL 7 swing states.
How did that happen?
PS: Pelosi & Schumer & Sanders ++++ need to get out of the way…they are killing the Party. Their good days are long over.
I think Platner is an awesome candidate. I just hope that, as a private business man, he is not a Trojan horse. I don't know how to guard against that.
Platner's looking so far like a Mamdani. The Trojan horse threat doesn't bother me, but I watched a charismatic WV insurgent, retired army major Richard Ojeda, turn into a nothingburger under stress, so I don't speak with certainty. (Now a WV whatever-became-of, Ojeda's running for a hopeless NC congressional seat.)
I hope that Trump doesn’t see a red headed Marine while he’s being driven around DC in the Beast! (Explanation note: There’s a story about the commanding general of a Marine Corps base who was standing on the main drag with his staff when he saw not one but two red headed Marines walk by. The CG wondered out loud “I wonder how many red headed Marines we have on this base?” Of course his chief of staff put everyone on weekend duty so that they could report the number of red headed Marines stationed on the base first thing Monday morning!)
Meanwhile can anyone trust the US regime? A friend shared this NYT article about Russian drones spying on German weapons manufacturing and routes to Ukraine.
If the US destroys its relationships with democracies in service to Putin and all the other authoritarian leaders Trump wants to join, will it be that much harder for the US to regain its democracy once it is rid of Trump?
Democrats who are social democrats like me may need to talk about their solutions about the economy, but really to save our country, the healthier parts may need to cut the other parts lose like a cancer. I am hearing about a Blue State "Soft Secession." I have been advocating a financial secession of no more federal taxes and states fully tax their people and provide all services as well. That is health care, education, pensions, infrastructure, disaster relief, security, environmental protections, etc... like a small country with smaller GDPs than most US states does.
Lucian, you are so brilliant, insightful and have a such great sense of humor. It’s 10:48 and I’ve had some wine and just opened up to your column tonight. It’s so funny I can’t stop laughing. We all needed this tonight after another unbearable day in Trump world. Thank you!
I spent most of my adult life at big law firms, where we called that kind of thing “rocket polishing” and where there were clear distinctions among shit-shows, clusterfucks and goat rodeos. I can’t tell what this one is, at least not yet.
that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone"
Slogan and song for the democracy we used to have and are now fighting to win back.
Or should it be the anthem for the farmers in the mid-west and the south who all voted for MAGA and now are about to lose their farms because of the tariffs drying up their supply chain?
It’s too bad these guys can’t say “NO”. Terry Moran had a great news show from the ground in DC with interviews. Lucian’s correct. Where the crime really is will not be addressed. One of the interviewees across the river said we’d love to have ATF get these illegal guns out of here. Nope. That ain’t a show for Dear Leader…
Well, there's no glamour in that part of D.C. so there'd be no press glory for Mangolini. He desperately needs to feed on adulation and applause as much or more than he must eat Big Macs.
I walk down the street, and if I see my favorite weeds (easy to pull) I pull up to three on every block. It used to drive the kids I babysat for crazy. I also pick up litter if I see a garbage can I can put it into.
Same here. I've also found all sorts of unusual items like a small three-dimensional dog in white beads with blue harness - just like my own white miniature poodle with a blue harness! - and a multi-colored beaded frog. Then there's the Hoover measuring tape, advertising a Hoover clothes dryer I'd never heard of.
Trump's deployment of thousands of heavily armed National Guard troops to the nation's capital has terrorized the inhabitants of the city for the sole purpose of allowing the convicted felon to play-act as a "law and order president." In reality, the city's violent crime rates recently hit a 30 year low.
The domestic invasion also has the added benefit for Trump of distracting from his worsening Jeffrey Epstein scandal and his failed economic policies. He remains a reality television personality at heart, so his first instinct is always to distract and generate headlines rather than to actually solve problems.
Not surprisingly, the deployment is proving deeply unpopular with the American people. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll discovered that just 38% of Americans support the use of troops for law enforcement in D.C. with 46% voicing opposition. The remaining percentage were unsure or declined to answer.
Trump's laughable claim about violent crime also points towards a cornerstone of his worldview. He thinks that his supporters are so stupid, so helplessly gullible, that they'll take anything he says as Gospel truth. He can say that the streets are a war zone awash in blood and rather than look out the window and see the lie, MAGA voters will simply nod along in agreement.
Unfortunately for them, the rest of us live in the real world. We're not falling for it and we're going to vote Republicans out of office en masse the first chance that we get.
In the real world grocery prices have not gone down, poor folks have been kicked off Medicare and food stamps, and prices for other goods have gone way up because of the Trump tariffs. How’s that workin’ out for you, maggots?
"So far" re Medicare which is going to take a major hit due to the Pay-as-you-go Act. Medicare is "mandatory spending" and a program which Republicans in Congress would love to reduce.
"PAYGO, which stands for “pay as you go,” is a budget rule requiring that tax cuts and mandatory spending increases must be offset (i.e., “paid for”) by tax increases or cuts in mandatory spending. PAYGO has never applied to discretionary spending (spending that is controlled through the appropriations process), but this spending has at times between subject to its own ceilings.
Various versions of PAYGO have been enacted in law, most recently in 2010. In addition, both the House and Senate have sometimes adopted their own PAYGO rules for considering new legislation." https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-paygo
I’m still pissed off the government drafted me into the Army in 1968 but at least I never felt useless and humiliated like the National Guard troops in D.C. must feel.
This is all that our war-fighting Secy of War, Piss-ant Pete could come up with for his war fighters to do? It reminds me of my days in the Boy Scouts when the Scoutmaster ran out of adventures for us, then the order was always to "police the area." It's much like the Big Birthday weekend for Dear Leader, troops needlessly taken from their homes and jobs just to entertain the Big Orange Turd-in-Chief.
It would be very difficult to describe how happy 2,000 guard personnel are to put their careers, families and lives on hold for a month to collect trash in DC!! Perhaps, they will recall these happy days when they go to the polls in Nov. 2026, and in 2028. Ignorant arrogance is so hard to comprehend.
Rumor has it that taco's right hand bruise came from swatting J D in the head, once too often.
The term always used during my Army Lite Reserve training was "policing the area," but, of course, using that phrase now would only confuse things. I never had the dubious pleasure of tending to any location where officers with scrambled eggs on their visors spent their time, but the last Saturday morning ending our advanced MOS (military occupation specialty) training cycle at Fort Sill, it was truly make-work time, I chose the detail (lingo for work assignment) riding a deuce-and-a-half to the farthest west boundary to police the area. We filled most of the truck with the usual crap --- rusted cans, bottles --- when the cadre sergeant suddenly looked at his watch and swore, mightily. The base trash repository was at its eastern edge. Driving all the way there to get rid of the stuff, he said, meant we might not make it to the mess hall in time for lunch. Just over there, the barbed wire fence marking the edge of the base. He backed the truck to the fence and told us to throw all the crap onto the other side --- where there was a sign saying it was a wildlife refuge. Not one of us E-2s said a word as we did what sarge told us to do. We made it to lunch. I wish I could write that it was the perfect Army menu for what we'd just done, creamed chipped beef on toast, a/k/a SOS, "shit on a shingle," but, 62 years later, all I remember is, probably just more of the same old stuff. I was ashamed at what I'd done. I bet the troops pickiing up trash in D.C. feel the same, plus anger. Every single one of them has more actual love of this country (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) in his or her smallest fingernail than DT47 has in his entire, bloated body.
The description of the National Guard troops picking up garbage is reminiscent of prisoners cleaning up litter in the area near the Illinois Statesville prison. The only real difference is that they are armed with weapons of mass destruction unlike the fellows with the striped uniforms. It gives me a good laugh but for the fact that it’s a monstrous waste.
Every day it gets worse and worse. But there will come a point where some brave governor will tell Trump enough is enough and he will cave. And people will realize what a waste of time this all is. In the meantime, Democrats need to be talking about the economy, how expensive things are and that they can fix it since Trump hasn’t done squat in 8 months. The Iowa State Senate victory is a sign that people are fed up with all this BS
People already realize it. Look what just happened to Susan Collins just yesterday. But Trump AND THE REPUBLICANS are now trying to outright rig the 2026 elections to make it impossible for anybody BUT a Republican to win in order to keep their majority. They know as it stands they won't win, so they have to cheat to do it. They are no longer a legitimate Party. They are full blown cult, doing Trump's bidding like automatons, disregarding every law, every statute, the Constitution itself to keep the tuchus of their master lip smacking clean.
Susan got booed but, Maine Democrats have no good candidate to beat her & no help from Kristin Gillibrand.
Um...what does Kristin Gillibrand have to do with Susie "Concerned" getting (rightfully) booed at Searsport?
And Maine Dems actually do have two very worthy opponents to run against Susie "She Who Sits on the Fence" Collins.
We have Shenna Bellows an experienced campaigner who is currently Maine Secretary of State and has already told Justice Nazi Pam Bondi and her request for voter registration info to "Go jump in the Gulf of Maine...".
We also have Graham Platner of Sullivan Maine. He is a born and bred Mainer, a progressive who is willing to talk about kitchen table issues. (hopefully our own "Maine Mamdani"!!) He is a veteran who came back to Maine to run an oyster farm. I think he would be a GREAT replacement for the Faker Susie who pretends to be a moderate but who NEVER votes against the GOP unless her vote won't count either way.
Susan Collins is a coward and a fraud. She stands for nothing but licking the felon child rapist's ass.
Your top candidate has ZERO experience in politics & Susie is is the Chair of the Appropriations Committee!
Democrats are raising $$$ for her in California. Big, big $$$ are backing her…ever heard of Tim Cook?
Gillibrand is the Senator in charge of recruiting Democratic candidates for state office. YOU should be spending ALL your time to get your candidates elected. BIG $$$ are in little Maine. I hope your guy wins.
How much experience at being president did Obama—or any other candidate—have in his first run? In politics, inexperience is a silly accusation. trump had plenty of executive experience. Do you think it qualified him to be U.S. president?
Where is Sullivan Maine? LOL
Graham Platner has been getting great national press. Who needs Gillibrand when Bernie Sanders is active in your campaign?
Bernie Sanders? Democrats look like the party of the AARP.Why not tell all of us how many young male Democrats voted for Trump & how many Democrats stayed away in 2024? Democrats list ALL 7 swing states.
How did that happen?
PS: Pelosi & Schumer & Sanders ++++ need to get out of the way…they are killing the Party. Their good days are long over.
"...Faker Susie who pretends to be a moderate but who NEVER votes against the GOP unless her vote won't count either way." Nailed it
I think Platner is an awesome candidate. I just hope that, as a private business man, he is not a Trojan horse. I don't know how to guard against that.
Platner's looking so far like a Mamdani. The Trojan horse threat doesn't bother me, but I watched a charismatic WV insurgent, retired army major Richard Ojeda, turn into a nothingburger under stress, so I don't speak with certainty. (Now a WV whatever-became-of, Ojeda's running for a hopeless NC congressional seat.)
Gulf of Maine? Now you've done it! The Bondi has put lawyers on researching if there can be more than one "Gulf of America."
I hope that Trump doesn’t see a red headed Marine while he’s being driven around DC in the Beast! (Explanation note: There’s a story about the commanding general of a Marine Corps base who was standing on the main drag with his staff when he saw not one but two red headed Marines walk by. The CG wondered out loud “I wonder how many red headed Marines we have on this base?” Of course his chief of staff put everyone on weekend duty so that they could report the number of red headed Marines stationed on the base first thing Monday morning!)
You've not heard of Graham Platner? https://www.grahamforsenate.com/
Meanwhile can anyone trust the US regime? A friend shared this NYT article about Russian drones spying on German weapons manufacturing and routes to Ukraine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/us/politics/russian-drones-weapons-routes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hk8.ubr3.BZceTndcmmz0&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
If the US destroys its relationships with democracies in service to Putin and all the other authoritarian leaders Trump wants to join, will it be that much harder for the US to regain its democracy once it is rid of Trump?
Democrats who are social democrats like me may need to talk about their solutions about the economy, but really to save our country, the healthier parts may need to cut the other parts lose like a cancer. I am hearing about a Blue State "Soft Secession." I have been advocating a financial secession of no more federal taxes and states fully tax their people and provide all services as well. That is health care, education, pensions, infrastructure, disaster relief, security, environmental protections, etc... like a small country with smaller GDPs than most US states does.
Here are 2 people writing about Soft Secession.
Dean Blundell
https://open.substack.com/pub/deanblundell/p/the-quiet-breakaway-how-us-governors?r=f0qfn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Chris Armitage, author of the Substack blog The Existential Republic.
https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/its-time-for-americans-to-start-talking
So solutions are happening and we need to note them and support them. Yay for Iowa. It is starting to cut out its cancer and hopefully heal itself.
Do you have any idea of how difficult "fully taxing" state residents in order to provide services would be?
If there are no federal taxes, you add the federal tax rate onto the current state tax rate and there you go.
Lucian, you are so brilliant, insightful and have a such great sense of humor. It’s 10:48 and I’ve had some wine and just opened up to your column tonight. It’s so funny I can’t stop laughing. We all needed this tonight after another unbearable day in Trump world. Thank you!
Agree with all of it!!
I spent most of my adult life at big law firms, where we called that kind of thing “rocket polishing” and where there were clear distinctions among shit-shows, clusterfucks and goat rodeos. I can’t tell what this one is, at least not yet.
All of the above
It is a circle jerk.
Goat rodeos 🤣
"Don't it always seem to go
that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone"
Slogan and song for the democracy we used to have and are now fighting to win back.
Or should it be the anthem for the farmers in the mid-west and the south who all voted for MAGA and now are about to lose their farms because of the tariffs drying up their supply chain?
And they’re losing their migrant workers that they depend on.
And food is rotting in the fields and on and on we go…
It’s too bad these guys can’t say “NO”. Terry Moran had a great news show from the ground in DC with interviews. Lucian’s correct. Where the crime really is will not be addressed. One of the interviewees across the river said we’d love to have ATF get these illegal guns out of here. Nope. That ain’t a show for Dear Leader…
Well, there's no glamour in that part of D.C. so there'd be no press glory for Mangolini. He desperately needs to feed on adulation and applause as much or more than he must eat Big Macs.
Be all you can be! Trump's disrespect for the military is obvious. Bet retention and recruitment numbers drop.
Like a bloody stone. Everyone wants to pick up someone else's garbage and weed someone else's lawn, yes?
Next they’ll be scrubbing toilets.
It's high time that men learned how to scrub toilets. ha, ha, ha.
I walk down the street, and if I see my favorite weeds (easy to pull) I pull up to three on every block. It used to drive the kids I babysat for crazy. I also pick up litter if I see a garbage can I can put it into.
Same here. I've also found all sorts of unusual items like a small three-dimensional dog in white beads with blue harness - just like my own white miniature poodle with a blue harness! - and a multi-colored beaded frog. Then there's the Hoover measuring tape, advertising a Hoover clothes dryer I'd never heard of.
Trump's deployment of thousands of heavily armed National Guard troops to the nation's capital has terrorized the inhabitants of the city for the sole purpose of allowing the convicted felon to play-act as a "law and order president." In reality, the city's violent crime rates recently hit a 30 year low.
The domestic invasion also has the added benefit for Trump of distracting from his worsening Jeffrey Epstein scandal and his failed economic policies. He remains a reality television personality at heart, so his first instinct is always to distract and generate headlines rather than to actually solve problems.
Not surprisingly, the deployment is proving deeply unpopular with the American people. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll discovered that just 38% of Americans support the use of troops for law enforcement in D.C. with 46% voicing opposition. The remaining percentage were unsure or declined to answer.
Trump's laughable claim about violent crime also points towards a cornerstone of his worldview. He thinks that his supporters are so stupid, so helplessly gullible, that they'll take anything he says as Gospel truth. He can say that the streets are a war zone awash in blood and rather than look out the window and see the lie, MAGA voters will simply nod along in agreement.
Unfortunately for them, the rest of us live in the real world. We're not falling for it and we're going to vote Republicans out of office en masse the first chance that we get.
In the real world grocery prices have not gone down, poor folks have been kicked off Medicare and food stamps, and prices for other goods have gone way up because of the Trump tariffs. How’s that workin’ out for you, maggots?
It’s only going to get worse
So far, none kicked off Medicare but millions kicked off Medicaid.
Yes, my typo.
"So far" re Medicare which is going to take a major hit due to the Pay-as-you-go Act. Medicare is "mandatory spending" and a program which Republicans in Congress would love to reduce.
"PAYGO, which stands for “pay as you go,” is a budget rule requiring that tax cuts and mandatory spending increases must be offset (i.e., “paid for”) by tax increases or cuts in mandatory spending. PAYGO has never applied to discretionary spending (spending that is controlled through the appropriations process), but this spending has at times between subject to its own ceilings.
Various versions of PAYGO have been enacted in law, most recently in 2010. In addition, both the House and Senate have sometimes adopted their own PAYGO rules for considering new legislation." https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-paygo
I like MAGATS
I’m still pissed off the government drafted me into the Army in 1968 but at least I never felt useless and humiliated like the National Guard troops in D.C. must feel.
I alwaysappreciateyour military-informed take on matters.
This is all that our war-fighting Secy of War, Piss-ant Pete could come up with for his war fighters to do? It reminds me of my days in the Boy Scouts when the Scoutmaster ran out of adventures for us, then the order was always to "police the area." It's much like the Big Birthday weekend for Dear Leader, troops needlessly taken from their homes and jobs just to entertain the Big Orange Turd-in-Chief.
Well, at least that was a complete embarrassment. Pretty funny.
I am sure this cluster fuck wasting the guard and stressing their civilian lives will do wonders for retention and recruiting.
“John Barron” lol. Calling Page 6 to talk HIMSELF up! Truly pathetic.
His favorite subject.
Indeed lol.
It would be very difficult to describe how happy 2,000 guard personnel are to put their careers, families and lives on hold for a month to collect trash in DC!! Perhaps, they will recall these happy days when they go to the polls in Nov. 2026, and in 2028. Ignorant arrogance is so hard to comprehend.
Rumor has it that taco's right hand bruise came from swatting J D in the head, once too often.
Your last sentence made me laugh, but I think he would delegate someone to swat at JD.
Did you ever see the old Tammany Hall cartoon, with all the fat cats standing in a circle, each pointing his finger at the one standing next to him?
This sent me to the internet to read about Thomas Nast and view his cartoons. Thank you!
The term always used during my Army Lite Reserve training was "policing the area," but, of course, using that phrase now would only confuse things. I never had the dubious pleasure of tending to any location where officers with scrambled eggs on their visors spent their time, but the last Saturday morning ending our advanced MOS (military occupation specialty) training cycle at Fort Sill, it was truly make-work time, I chose the detail (lingo for work assignment) riding a deuce-and-a-half to the farthest west boundary to police the area. We filled most of the truck with the usual crap --- rusted cans, bottles --- when the cadre sergeant suddenly looked at his watch and swore, mightily. The base trash repository was at its eastern edge. Driving all the way there to get rid of the stuff, he said, meant we might not make it to the mess hall in time for lunch. Just over there, the barbed wire fence marking the edge of the base. He backed the truck to the fence and told us to throw all the crap onto the other side --- where there was a sign saying it was a wildlife refuge. Not one of us E-2s said a word as we did what sarge told us to do. We made it to lunch. I wish I could write that it was the perfect Army menu for what we'd just done, creamed chipped beef on toast, a/k/a SOS, "shit on a shingle," but, 62 years later, all I remember is, probably just more of the same old stuff. I was ashamed at what I'd done. I bet the troops pickiing up trash in D.C. feel the same, plus anger. Every single one of them has more actual love of this country (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) in his or her smallest fingernail than DT47 has in his entire, bloated body.
But of course. There was never any crime fighting going on. Simply a grandstand move. I love the photo!
The description of the National Guard troops picking up garbage is reminiscent of prisoners cleaning up litter in the area near the Illinois Statesville prison. The only real difference is that they are armed with weapons of mass destruction unlike the fellows with the striped uniforms. It gives me a good laugh but for the fact that it’s a monstrous waste.