I wake and exclaim, it’s Thursday and I don’t have anything! It’s been a relatively busy week so far so this makes me happy.

My immediate next thought: we’re on the fascism train.

And it’s left the station.

Feel free to skip the rest. Go outside. Take a walk. Read Mary Oliver or Robin Kimmerer. Have a nice bowl of yogurt and strawberries. But I need to place a marker this morning. As long as this is, it is in no way comprehensive.

On Monday Maddow highlighted another purge, this time of upper level intelligence and military personnel. Yesterday, Trump fired the CIA expert on Russia, who was at the Alaska Summit. The government, briefly took over the Amtrak station in DC. The occupation there, ongoing. Tyranny experts talk about the importance of controlling the Capitol, meaning it’s not just a distraction. It’s not just a scare tactic.

(And I’m with Tim Miller here: can we stop talking about “distractions” already? It’s a journalistic waste of breath and also misses the point that things can be both ugly, scary power grabs AND distractions and by distractions, lately, of course we’re talking about the ongoing cover up of trump’s crimes with cohort and bestie, Epstein).

Trump is targeting Lisa Cook, who sits on the board of governors of the Federal Reserve. In the history of that agency, not one single president has ever ousted one single serving economic expert. Not one. No surprise she’s a Black woman. It’s also abundantly clear he’s attacking her because he cannot yet risk trying to get rid of Jerome Powell.

Trump lacks the authority to fire Cook without cause and according to the NYTimes, the voluminous material produced by the Trump appointee at the Federal Housing agency fails to outline a crime (mortgage fraud. See also Adam Schiff and Letitia James).

The head of the CDC has been fired. The recent cancellation of vaccine research, the revamping of vaccine guidelines along non-scientific, conspiratorial lines is recent history. Threats to sue the American Pediatric Association for issuing their own (sane) vaccine recommendations came not long after. (Covid is not included in the vaccine liability law so the government cannot do this). It’s not a stretch to imagine that free Covid vaccines might be a thing of the past — maybe available for people 65 and over maybe not.

Meanwhile, the press continues its flaccid coverage. Sanewashing trump’s delusional and incoherent statements, for instance. People around the president know he’s declining. People who track down recordings and listen to Trump (MeidasTouch) know he’s more off the rails than ever. He looks like shit. Online debates about how far progressed his congestive heart failure is can be a great time waster but obviously everyone invested in America’s future wants to know: when is this fucker gonna drop dead?

On the subject of succession, it’s clear to many that the scary anti-democratic billionaires and others are busy behind the scenes getting ready for a JD presidency. Vance is often away when some of the worst things are going on, for instance, distancing himself from the administration.

Every single thread about Trump dropping dead has someone piping up, but JD Vance will be worse!

The most recent take on that, a view supported by what I know about Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, suggests that it really won’t matter who’s president next given the unitary executive approach to governing which the Supreme Court has had no small hand in ushering along.

In other words, the absence of a cult following may not matter as much as we hope. Same with Vance’s across-the-board unlikeability.

I can’t follow what’s happening to the Palestinians right now. It throws me over a ledge. But even scanning headlines delivers outrageous news: targeting journalists and lying about it seems about par for the course for the raging war criminal at the helm.

And by “targeting” I mean slaughtering. By “war criminal at the helm” I mean Netanyahu.

We’ve got vocal brave fighters now. Newsome, Pritzker, Wes Moore. Others. That’s not nothing. There was an amazing special election result in Iowa this week, bolstering Robert Hubbell’s opinion that results matter more than polling or registration numbers (this candidate won by double digits in a state that Trump won by double digits).

So for now, I will continue to pin my hopes on the 2026 midterm elections.

For now my online porn will continue to be watching Republicans being yelled at and booed in town halls attended by very fed up constituents.

Reminder: it would only take a handful of Republicans to make a lot of this stop.

What happened to the Republican Party remains one of the most unanswerable and confounding issues of our day.

The sun has moved off the armoire and there’s coffee waiting for me downstairs. Time to rise and shine, in other words.

Check out this iteration of the turtle theme on the scrap-holding side of the pin board. Its chaotic clutter speaks to this moment better than any of the studied compositions.