Category Archives: Surviving trump

Realistic. Pragmatic.

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OK, I have to say this. I am not a pessimist.

I can awfulize with a regularity that’s demoralizing and I might feel defeated too early in cycles of effort, but I carry around a proper reserve of hope, even now. Even now, I believe this country is gonna get through this.

There’s been a great deal of suggestion online lately that being skeptical about the Epstein Bill producing any accountability is some kind of bad Democratic habit of defeat. We don’t know how to take a win, etc. As if skepticism is a function of pessimism instead of the result of being alive for the last ten years. Really?

It’s pissing me off.

I’m sorry if I remember the Mueller hearings. I’m sorry if I read the laid-out obstruction charges and believed the next AG would bring them up. I’m sorry if I was fully invested in the impeachments. I’m sorry if I watched the January 6 hearings with a sense of the inevitability of a Trump takedown. I’m sorry if I listened to endless podcasts, covering every fucking bit of minutiae about all the cases against Trump and cheered on every minor step of progress. I’m sorry if I thought Fani Willis was gonna be the winner.

So forgive me if I’m a little skeptical about the Epstein revelations producing a regime change.

For one thing, it should be clear to everyone that sexual depravity is not gonna bring Trump down. Otherwise he’d have been ousted long ago and certainly not re-elected. The Katie Johnson pleadings have been public facing for years (and yes, I read them and most of the Mueller report). More than two dozen accusers have been on the record for years. And years. Epstein survivors have come forward. There are pictures of trump partying with Epstein for Christ’s sake. There’s his gross and documented incestuous longing for Ivanka. I could go on.

No, it will have to be revelations about Russia. And Israel. And maybe the Saudis. Money. It’s always the money.

That’s why Senator Wyden’s pursuit of bank records interests me more than whatever the DOJ is gonna produce.

I could be wrong about this. I’d happily be wrong.

Will the lame and co-opted Fourth Estate cover it with even a fraction of the energy they devoted to Hillary’s emails? I’m not holding my breath.

The marches, the rallies, the whistleblowing ICE resisters, Mike Johnson’s clear sense of defeat, the overpass brigades, Schumer and Thune pulling off a unanimous consent vote on the Epstein bill, trump’s consistent defeat at the district and appellate court levels, the possibility that SCOTUS will find the tariffs unlawful, these produce sparks of not just hope but joy. There’s momentum! Momentum that will generate results!

See? That’s not defeatism.

But do I think Trump will resign? Do I think he will be impeached, convicted, and removed?

Do I think his cabinet, even after listening to trump’s comments at a McDonald’s function (complete gibberish) trigger a 25th Amendment removal? Will his inability to stay awake even during press conferences and cabinet meetings make any kind of difference? And all these mysterious health runs to Walter Reed?

No. No. And no.

He may die soon and that’d be a good thing (I choose to think about a JD presidency later), but I don’t think he’ll see the inside of a jail cell or ever be held accountable.

That’s not pessimistic. That’s realistic. Pragmatic.

What’s that? Hope, you say

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What a night! What a beautiful night! Woke up this morning and did some Joy Scrolling (as opposed to Doom Scrolling). Everywhere you looked — and I mean everywhere — there were great results, often with sizable margins.

Georgia, Detroit, Mississippi, California, New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York City, Mass., New Jersey, and so many more. From gubernatorial seats to school boards, the message is clear: the American people don’t like Trump or his authoritarian agenda.

In other news, Ken and I celebrated our 35th anniversary last night at a small restaurant in Newton Center. I never comment much about these occasions, but I will say this: there is something very sane and relaxing about being past fanfare. I got him some special chocolates and he fixed the closet light I’ve been missing (and bitching about missing) for more than ten years. Dinner was tasty!

PS based on research, it’s clear my blog is being scraped by AI bots for data. I will install some sort of filter if I can figure out how to do it, but in the meantime since it’s not mucking up the works, I’ve decided not to worry about it.

PPS I now see calls for apps to offer AI blocking functions. Pinterest just added such an option, to much approval.

Also, I’ve recently learned that adding the word “fuck” to a google search blocks an AI response (except when it doesn’t and then ooh boy watch out). It may seem silly but typing a four letter word is easier than inserting a minus sign followed by “AI.”

From our dog walk this morning.

Shadow speaks

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I sometimes find it useful to write the unspeakable. Grain of salt time, folks.

Yesterday’s workshop writing prompt was a quote taken from the recent HBO series, Task: “Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing, there is a river.” I posted the screen shot from the series as well (above). Central to the story is the idea that we sometimes do terrible things for good reasons. Villain as hero stuff.

Also of note: the workshop took place two days after 8MM Americans showed up in the streets to protest autocracy.

🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋

He was shabby and short and wanted to burn it all down. Sound familiar? John the Painter. Red hair, fiery temperament, a Scotland-born American enthusiast in England at a divisive time. “No Kings” the ultimate distillation of revolutionary thought then as now. Early in December – what year, don’t ask, I don’t know yet — he set fire to buildings near the wharves in Portsmouth.

I can’t focus. He didn’t burn ships as intended. It was ruled an accident. Does that mean James Aitken a.k.a. John the Painter failed? He was dubbed both a saboteur and a “frightened little man” and ultimately was executed.

I have a massive cloud in my forehead or I might be able to supply more details. If the “frightened little man” escaped, how was he put on trial? Ah — now I see he lacked coolness and guile and confessed.

Shabby little saboteur with red freckles and a fondness for arson, holder of big revolutionary ideals, lacking guile and coolness.

I keep going back to Luigi being captured in Pennsylvania while having breakfast at a Burger King. I think that’s what was but it could have been lunch at McDonald’s. Luigi also showed a lack of guile and you couldn’t help but wonder if he wanted to get caught.

Then there’s Jason Fairbanks, infamous murderer of Dedham, Massachusetts, who in 1801 after breaking out of prison stopped for a bite to eat at the ferry depot near Lake Champlain (or wherever) – long enough to be captured. He was executed. John the Painter was executed. Someone somewhere is calling for Mangione’s execution. Anybody and everybody who resists the post-capitalist order or the GOP is a domestic terrorist now, apparently.

Did it bother the little revolutionary, John the Painter, that the fires he set were deemed “accidental?” Meaning the only way to claim credit for his pro-American stance (was that even a stance then?) (make that: his “anti-Kings stance”) was to confess.

A man being little and being referred to ever and on as little, does things to a man’s psyche, none of them good. Refer here to Stormy Daniels’s comment about a certain pro-King’s appendage.

I’ve said two things so often that I’m sick of myself and they’re not incontrovertible, but here they are. One, if Trump had a big dick, we wouldn’t be in this mess, and two, if Hitler had been a talented painter, met with acclaim and reward, Poland’s genetic pool would be vastly more interesting today.

Say what you will, but we are at a “Sons of Liberty” kind of moment and I wonder just how long the peace will hold. Images in my mind – Liberty Poles (Fairbanks’ kin got in trouble for erecting one), the Liberty Tree near Boston Common where the Sons of Liberty would meet, now a mere plaque because the British understood its significance and axed it down. It was a time of ragtag collections of men, barely armed, of treatises proclaiming this freedom and that freedom, taxation without representation being called BS.

Does it always come down to money? Well, penis size and money and by the way to look at Jeff Bezos’s clobbering walk with his new bride is to perhaps see an overlap.

If only we wonder, we tired-at-times-hopeless-modern-day-liberty-lovers — if only we had atoned for the great sin of slavery. If spiritual and financial reparations had been made — where would we be now? Certainly not in the maw of backlash to an elegant, moral Black president who loves his wife and brought a dog into the White House, which is being shredded, even as I write.

The Liar-in-Chief promised he wouldn’t touch the structure, but promises be damned and by “promises be damned” I mean we the American people be damned. The aptest, most stomach-churning metaphor around — a power-crazed, mentally unwell man with a little penis is tearing down walls of the White House and in true autocratic fashion demanding that the press not show pictures of the demolition. They’re upsetting, those pictures.

But back to coin and cock. The issuance of tariffs has long had swinging dick energy to it. Why is this not commented on more? (You can’t swing a mushroom, but the point holds). 40%!! 60%!! You’re an ally and there’s no trade imbalance? 120%!! He’s hoarding the cash, circumventing Congress’s power of the purse in yet another outrageous fashion. Lest I sound too New York Timesey here, let me be clear: he is violating the Constitution, he is breaking the law, he is committing impeachable offenses. Daily, mind. Every god-damned day.

Back in the day, patriots were busy, doing things like founding Plattsburgh and casting a massive Liberty Bell in bronze and stitching up the first flag. Did they have less to lose, I wonder, or was it easier to take up arms against an occupying force when you’ve been slaughtering Native Americans for 15 years or more? Bloodshed normalized, and anyway if a stray bullet didn’t get you, the pox or yellow fever likely would.

General strike? Cancel Christmas? It’s hard for us Americans to imagine an uprising being effective without money at its center and it’s also hard for us to be inconvenienced.

Who is suspect? Whose lies get the biggest megaphone? Whose disgusting and sacrilegious AI tomfoolery gets put out to millions without consequence?

Armed revolt, I say. Armed revolt. Or poison, poison would be good. I’d start with Johnson, Trump, and Miller. Arsenic — a little at a time.

“Relax!” you say. “Relax.” You go relax. Go relax somewhere else, anywhere else, but not near me and now I’m out of time and maybe we are too.

[I was scanning pages from this book while writing]

Oct 18, 2025

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Here are a few pix from yesterday, Newton Center, where there was a lively and vibrant scene.

A lot of dogs attended, so I can forgive Ken this photo, below (his other hand holds the leash — tightly).

Those are all neighbors from my street, so we were well-represented.

We’d come right from Williamstown where we’d spent the night in a super shabby motel.

I didn’t select it with my usual rigor. At least the room didn’t smell bad?

Tomorrow — some beautiful shots from the Clark Institute (below).

In spite of the eleventh hour critiques of the No Kings Day Rallies, I’m super proud of us — all 7 million of us. If the main point was to demonstrate how incredibly unpopular Trump is, we succeeded. “Who cares?” was his response. Obviously, he does.

The AI video of him flying a jet and releasing streams of shit on protestors ought to be the basis for the 25th Amendment, but we know it won’t be.

Onward.

Could a general strike work in this country? It is the next logical step. I’m at least prepared to SKIP SHOPPING for Christmas if that’s what gets organized.

Who’s gonna feel what when*

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To rise in the dark, is to wonder where the dog is. Illuminated curtains suggest a moon that she’s forgotten about. The mending of sleep these days lies only in its amnesia, its removal from news – like images of troops in American cities or arrests of Congress people (extra points if they’re Black apparently). Reprieve is not the same as rest, nor is it the same as regeneration, but she takes her pauses from horror where she finds them. This time she doesn’t trip over the dog.

She asks the cards over and over — is my mother gone (yes), is my sister gone (no)? Seven o’clock rolls around and the day begins with all its notable absences. There are three cats buried in the backyard. That pin cherry came down years back, but the massive copper beech was only recently chopped up, sections as big as trees hoisted up and over her neighbor’s house to a waiting chipper. Now she can see Michael on his deck. Also, late afternoon sun fills the new room, a benediction to loss.

The black walnuts begin their percussive rain. Watch out! They set off car alarms. They’d really hurt if they pelted arms or head. The squirrels use a big rock near the side gate to open them up, no easy task, she knows. She’s tried. She broke the nutcracker.

Time was, at walnut–artillery–time, she’d be looking forward to snow — not to hastily run through the season of scarlet maples and rusty, rattling oak leaves, but as a knowable return of a certain kind of silence, a sheltering silence.

But now? Seasons seem lost. And when the seasons lose all semblance of regularity, a whole region starts to lose its collective mind.

Meanwhile the ugliest people are in charge. She finds herself listening to an expert** on resistance, who analyzes the use of violence in times like these.

“I’m Irish,” she said last night in a poof of sitting down. “I don’t have a problem with violence.” She felt compelled to clarify though her husband already knew. “For the right ends, of course.”

The expert said, “Don’t shoot the architect of the Final Solution. Shoot the clerks issuing the deportation orders.” He also pointed out that the Third Reich had to break institutions whereas American institutions are collapsing in advance. “What took the Reich four months,” he said, “is happening here in hours.”

Good grief! No wonder she needs pot gummies to sleep!

“Who’s gonna feel what when?” could’ve been the title of the conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates — Klein feeling exempt from all costs of regaining power, Ta-Nehisi Coates not. She admits to her husband that she will not listen. I loathed Ezra Klein before it was cool, she says as if there was a point system. But seriously, if only the morality and intellect of a Ta-Nehisi Coates, if not the man himself, was in charge of the press. You better believe we’d be hearing about the huge multinational flotilla nearing the coast of Gaza.

Half the time? No, now and then, she wonders about an alternate reality – all those newly unearthed Carlos Castaneda books perhaps needing a reread? It isn’t useful to imagine otherwise, but she does.

Most recently: What if we’d arrested Netanyahu yesterday while he was in DC? Or when he touched down in New York? What if this year’s Nobel peace prize was awarded to Harris or Biden or even, god love her, Jasmine Crockett? Why not? A clear and scathing snub is in order.

He’s stopped seven — or is it ten or is it eight — wars, you know, between countries he can neither pronounce nor locate on a map.

Make that: Greta Thunberg for the Nobel Peace prize.

Meanwhile, she posted a picture of the sour cream coffee cake baked over the weekend — because someone asked. You know those posts – show me something good? And it was good, above average delicious, but where is her moral authority?

The calendar got clobbered. Whoops! A run to Schenectady planned, followed by a day at the Clark Museum. But that Saturday is October 18 – the next No Kings Day rally — so they may be protesting at the Pittsfield Common instead and maybe that’s appropriate since both she and her husband were born there — six months apart. She’s older, if you must know.

Going to the Clark is like going home — not a pilgrimage, but a return to something known and familiar. Hers was a family with coffee table art books. Boxes of pastels. A family with a shared love of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. To see The Woman in White is to notice her own feet connecting to the floor. Hello again! To see that bearded man on a hillside in the Homer exhibit is to feel her chest open. But now?

You can’t go home, she thinks. Remember — your mother is gone! So are decency and honesty as core values. Gone is an interest in governance. Gone is a willingness to follow the god-damned Constitution.

Maybe the Constitution is damned. She thinks no amount of swooning at Sargent’s renderings of cloth will get them out of this mess.

Not one of those 800 generals saw fit to get up and walk out? They sat there silently – some say itself a kind of rebuke – with their stern visages. Don’t they all have stern visages? Making Hegeseth’s cringey advice on how to be more manly all the more laughable.

It would all be funny if the fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t one of their closest historical parallels.

We’ve had a good run, is one way to look at it. Two hundred and fifty year runs are typical, after all, some are saying — but not Louise. Louise sews and thinks about threading needles. A narrow chance, but not impossible. Though if she had to predict, there will be blood and it may come sooner than any of them are ready for.

* uttered by CC in writing workshop on Tuesday

** Tad Stoermer here. It’s an Instagram link.