George Washington University has issued a statement on William Barr:

The George Washington University Law School released a statement on June 23, 2020 calling for Attorney General William Barr to resign, for Congress to censure him, and for the Justice Department’s Inspector General to investigate him.

Barr received a juris doctorate from the Law School in 1977, served on its board of advisors, and has previously been honored by the school.

Most of the faculty signed.

The Law School’s statement cites the following as instances of Barr’s failure to uphold his constitutional oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The signers assert that Barr

• Deliberately misled Americans about the contents of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report,
• Intervened in Roger Stone’s sentencing,
• Interfered with the prosecution of Michael Flynn,
• And violated civilians’ First Amendment right to assemble and protest at Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020.

So why won’t Moses and Jesus validate him?

Jesus and Mo on Patreon

The new book

Trump did another gig yesterday, for a conservative group in Arizona. He said some words:

I want to thank also Kimberly, and I want to thank my son — boy, I watched my son.  I got here — wow.  I said, “What’s this all about?”  He’s good.  And people like him.  People like him a lot.

To everyone here today, and watching live all across our country, thank you for bravely defending our nation, our values, and our great American heroes.  (Applause.)

You know what’s going on because you’re on the frontlines of a tremendous intellectual struggle for the future of our country.  It’s really what you’re talking about — the future of our country.  You see what’s happening.  It’s a disgrace.  It’s a disgrace.  If we weren’t here, you could forget it.  Okay?  But we’re going to be here, and then you’re going to be here, and we’re going to keep it going for a long time.  (Applause.)

Eh?

He could be talking about anything, or nothing.

But he does get to some substance eventually.

Our people are stronger, and our people are smarter, and we are the elite.  We are the elite.  (Applause.)  You know, do you ever notice?  They said it two weeks ago.  I was talking to somebody who says, “Well, you know the elite…”  I said, “What are you talking about, the elite?  Who’s the elite?  They’re the elite?”  They’re not the elite.  You’re the elite.  You are.  (Applause.)  You’re smarter, better looking.  You have a better future.  You know your way around better, believe it or not.

There’s only one thing they have: They’re more vicious.  They are vicious.  They are vicious people.

We don’t repeat ourselves as much though.

We believe that the beloved heroes of American history should not be torn down by militant mobs, but held up as an example to the world.  (Applause.)  Now they’re after George Washington.  I said, “What did he do wrong?”  George Washington.  (Laughter.)  Thomas Jefferson.  We stopped them.  They were heading toward the Jefferson Memorial.  They have — they couldn’t care less.  I think half of them don’t even know who Thomas Jefferson is.  (Laughter.)

I wonder how much Trump knows about Jefferson. Sally Hemings maybe? Does he know about her? I don’t think so. (Laughter.)

So our heroes are not a source of shame.  They are an example and something that you can all look up to — a true example of greatness, a point of pride.  And we will honor them and cherish them forever.  We will cherish them.

And we have to cherish our past.  We have to cherish good or bad.  We have to understand our past.  We have to understand our history.  Because if we don’t know our history, it could all happen again.  We have to know our history.  (Applause.)

Then Trump should learn some.

He sings an ode to The Wall.

So, we built 220 miles.  We’re going to have — and it’s every single element.  I met with Border Patrol, who are fantastic, by the way.  Every single element they wanted.  You have to see through, which makes sense.  You have to do all of the different — we have cameras on it.  We have sensors on it.  It is just great.  Thirty feet high.  It’s very hard.  Very hard.  (Applause.)  We have anti-climb provision on the top.  We have the whole deal, and it’s very powerful.  And, by the way, where that wall is, nobody is getting through.  Nobody gets through.  (Applause.)

We put a chunk — California — off the record, California was saying, “Please, can we have the wall?”  This is California.  You know, they didn’t want the wall.  They didn’t want the wall.  But they wanted the wall, right?  Because right next to San Diego is a wonderful town in Mexico.  You know the town; I won’t mention the name.  (Laughter.)  But they’re heavily infected with COVID.

Do you ever notice?  I said, the other night — did anybody see my speech the other night, on Saturday night?  (Applause.)  But I said the other night, “There’s never been anything where they have so many names.”  I could give you 19 or 20 names for that, right?  It’s got all different names.  “Wuhan.”  “Wuhan” was catching on.  “Coronavirus,” right?

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Kung flu!

THE PRESIDENT:  “Kung flu,” yeah.  (Applause.)  Kung flu.  “COVID.”  “COVID-19.”  “COVID.”  I said, “What’s the ‘19’?”  “COVID-19.”  Some people can’t explain what the 19 — give me the — “COVID-19.”  I said, “That’s an odd name.”  I could give you many, many names.

That doesn’t quite do it justice. When Mean Donnie said “Kung flu, yeah,” there wasn’t (Applause) but (Uproar, cheers, applause). There was a loud fervent surge of approval for the president’s use of a sneering racist nickname.

Here it is again so that you can confirm.

Amnesty International explains its view on women’s rights.

“We live in a society that is more likely to discriminate and commit violence against transgender people, so we are proud to stand with them here in the UK and around the world,” they say.

“More likely” than what?

They don’t say. What does that mean then?

It’s similar to that “the most vulnerable in society” of Jolyon Maugham’s on Monday. Maugham’s is more precise in a way, but it’s still just an assertion, and it’s not true. It’s not difficult to think of people who are more vulnerable than trans people (trans people as such, trans people who are vulnerable because of being trans). Uighurs come to mind. Women and girls in Pakistan. Children separated from their parents and imprisoned on the southern border of the United States. Women and girls in India. Atheists and humanists in Nigeria. Homeless people in the US. Women and girls in Saudi Arabia. Rohyinga. Racial minorities pretty much everywhere. Religious minorities pretty much everywhere. Poor people pretty much everywhere.

Why is it that people who think they’re cutting-edge progressive are so convinced that trans people are more vulnerable than the poor, the minority, the persecuted, the subject to enslavement? Why does Amnesty International, of all organizations, claim (however vaguely) that they are the most subject to violence? Why have all these people forgotten everything they know?

Amnesty then goes on to type the flat lie that “there is absolutely no evidence” that men would use self identification to get access to spaces where women are vulnerable: there is in fact a lot of evidence that men have done exactly that, which counts as evidence that they “would” do it. Having done it and doing it now=evidence that they will go on doing it.

I don’t know. It’s as if they’ve all been slipped a “forget what you used to know” pill. It’s not possible to make any sense of it otherwise.

The ACLU is right in line with the current craze for reviving misogyny.

Yeah. Those selfish greedy mean women trying to keep pregnability just for themselves. EVERYONE can get pregnant. EVERYONE can be forced to drop out of high school because he gets pregnant. EVERYONE can lose his chance to go to university because he gets pregnant. EVERYONE can be forced to give up a job because his employers don’t provide maternity parental leave. EVERYONE can spend nine months getting increasingly uncomfortable and tired. EVERYONE can push a baby out of a narrow channel with considerable sweat and pain. EVERYONE can provide milk for an infant. EVERYONE can face the practical difficulties of providing milk for a baby while going to university or working at a job. EVERYONE can do all of this, and none of this is an interruption or disruption of plans that affects only women, women only. Not at all. Women are just women; the hell with them.

I hope he drops dead before finishing the speech.

I saw it via Mayor Watermelon this morning.

What man tracking what woman down? This man tracking this woman down.

It’s horrible to watch. He’s a bully. He would be a bully even if she had “flipped him off” but his claims about her are not even convincing. And hello, he’s a man, he followed her home in his car, and then stood there shouting at her and filming her while she screamed and cried.

It reminded me of the Central Park clash between Christian Cooper and Amy Cooper, except that Amy Cooper called the police on Christian Cooper for no apparent reason, and Christian Cooper did not follow her home (or shout at her or keep escalating while she cried and shook).

Christian Cooper didn’t call Amy Cooper a Karen, either.

Ben Sixsmith in the Spectator US:

If you are on the internet you have no doubt heard of ‘Karens’. ‘Karens’ are middle-aged white women who have a fondness for reporting people, especially black people, to the authorities. ‘The archetypal “Karen”,’ says Vox in one of its invaluable explainers, ‘Is blonde, has multiple young kids, and is usually an anti-vaxxer.’ She ‘has a “can I speak to the manager” haircut and a controlling, superior attitude to go along with it.’

It sounds pretty fucking sexist right from the outset, doesn’t it, even before “Karen” has done much of anything. Oh no, she’s blonde. Oh no, she has kids. Oh no, I don’t like her haircut. Oh no, she talks in a way I would take for granted if a man were doing it. Sixsmith remarks:

In practice, calling someone a ‘Karen’ is generally an excuse to abuse a middle-aged white woman and make it seem woke.

Precisely.

Enter Karlos Dillard. Dillard is a young black man who was cut off while driving by a middle-aged white lady who then, according to him, showed him her middle finger. Mr Dillard followed her home and began to film her. Clearly, this woman had encountered the ‘Karen’ trend. She knew the rage of the internet could be turned on her, her family and her livelihood. She had what one can only describe as a breakdown, shaking, screaming and desperately trying to hide her face and her license plate.

Passers-by attempted to intervene to dissuade the young man from filming a woman in such obvious distress. Suddenly, Dillard insisted that she had called him the n-word. Really? Why he had not accused the woman herself of that is curious, given that no one would suggest that a raised middle finger is more hostile than the slur? Meanwhile, the woman continued to shake and cry.

Mr Dillard uploaded this video to Twitter, where he sports the unusual handle ‘wypipo_h8’. It took off, and has currently accrued 46,000 retweets and 97,000 likes. Commenters are laughing at the woman’s distress. ‘That’s extreme Karening,’ says one. ‘I wonder how they end up like this,’ says another, ‘Is it a defective gene or do they go for training?’

Yes, how dare women find it frightening if men follow them home. Nasty bitches with their haircuts and their attitude.

Edward Champion looks into the incident in more detail and doubts that Dillard is telling the truth about any of it.

Dillard claimed — in a series of Instagram stories — that he had the right of way to merge onto a street from Melrose Avenue in “Capitol Hill. Fucking Capitol Hill.” Dillard says that he was in the right lane. As the two lanes of the unspecified street were about to merge, Dillard says that the woman “freaked out and swung around me and got in front of me and slammed on her brakes and did a brake check.” He further claims that he nearly collided into the back of her car.

Well, you know, merges can be tricky. It’s not always clear what the other driver is planning and whether you should speed up or slow down or keep going at the same speed. It works fine when both parties are driving like adults, but there are assholes out there. Maybe it wasn’t “the Karen” who was being the asshole.

Dillard, a Trump supporter whose online record shows a clear angling for attention and online fame, saw an opportunity to go viral. So he chased the Geo Woman down in his car and confronted her, releasing the below video excerpt onto Twitter, which, as I write this, has been seen more than four million times.

He wants to be the next Christian Cooper, but here’s the problem: men following women home is not a social justice kind of look…at least it hasn’t been, and it shouldn’t be, but right now who knows, when the left has been so thoroughly steeped in angry misogyny by its trans wing that maybe now it is.

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Fox and Owl and Drew.

I despise people who worry about being “seen as.”

People who were worried about being “seen as”, let gangs of rapists sexually enslave little girls in the North of England, because when the rapist is Muslim one has to worry about being called racist.

And this isn’t a knock on the Muslim community, the Catholic Church covered up child rapers for decades if not centuries, because it was worried that if word got out that they were basically a giant pedophile and money laundering ring their moral credibility would be undermined.

During all this time, they didn’t stop raping kids or embezzling money the Irish state gave them to run orphanages, they just covered it up because they were more worried about being “seen as” than actually doing anything about the abuse. The abuse you see, made them money.

Fuck the optics, reality matters, and reality requires that people are free to disagree. That’s what this all boils down to.

JK Rowling doesn’t agree with all of trans ideology, there are bits she disagrees with, there are bits she questions and because of that there is this tremendous pressure to shut her down.

Oh, but she’s rich and powerful, who cares? Well, its like this, if Rowling can be shut down, anybody can be shut down. If a publisher can be pressured to give up an author who nets them billions of dollars, what about all the critical authors who don’t?

A while back, I read a few Wild Cards stories, its a series of short stories curated by George RR Martin. One of the stories was about “Golden Boy” – a superhero during the setting’s version of the McCarthy trials.

The whole point of the story was how HUAC broke the titular character, and why did they break him? Because if they could break him, they could break anybody. Because he broke, nobody was safe from the witch hunts.

That is the case with Rowling. I personally don’t actually like the Harry Potter books, but I have to stand by her for the sake of all the good authors who might come along who don’t buy into what is a modern orthodoxy.

This isn’t even really about trans issues. This is the same issue that hit Amelie Wen Zhao, a native of Beijing who had the temerity to write a novel involving slavery in a non-western, non-racial context. You see to the “seen as” crowd, popularly known as the woke, not being racist pile of trash is less important than not being “seen as” a racist pile of trash.

So forcing their cultural lens onto writers who do not share that lens isn’t being colonialist bastards its tooting their virtue horn. She’s “anti black” because she was more influenced by the history of China, where she’s from, than Alabama.

And if they can toot that horn so loud Rowling falls, they’ll toot that horn at anybody over any perceived slight to their holy wokeness (provided the person has a vagina, you’ll be amazed at the shit you can get way with if you’ve got a penis) just to demonstrate that they can.

One doesn’t give bullies a pass because you think they’re “punching up” – there are a lot of much smaller people who get flattened if Rowling falls.

In which the doctor backs himself into a corner, to the amusement of onlookers.

How the contagion happens:

Six months into the coronavirus crisis, there’s a growing consensus about a central question: How do people become infected?

It’s not common to contract Covid-19 from a contaminated surface, scientists say. And fleeting encounters with people outdoors are unlikely to spread the coronavirus.

(All the same I do wish people would move away when they can. It does annoy me when they stick to the middle of the sidewalk when it would be so easy to just veer to the side.)

Instead, the major culprit is close-up, person-to-person interactions for extended periods. Crowded events, poorly ventilated areas and places where people are talking loudly—or singing, in one famous case—maximize the risk.

These emerging findings are helping businesses and governments devise reopening strategies to protect public health while getting economies going again. That includes tactics like installing plexiglass barriers, requiring people to wear masks in stores and other venues, using good ventilation systems and keeping windows open when possible.

Keep those windows open.

“We should not be thinking of a lockdown, but of ways to increase physical distance,” said Tom Frieden, chief executive of Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit public-health initiative. “This can include allowing outside activities, allowing walking or cycling to an office with people all physically distant, curbside pickup from stores, and other innovative methods that can facilitate resumption of economic activity without a rekindling of the outbreak.”

All of which of course underlines how appalling it is that Trump insists on doing rallies. Crowds, enclosed spaces, people talking loudly…

Something I always wonder about this guy.

He’s not a random young woke “activist” on Twitter, he’s an adult QC, yet he echoes the childish woke rhetoric as if there were nothing childish about it. It sounds bizarre coming from establishment figures like QCs.

Specifically, what makes him think that men who say they are women are “the most vulnerable in society”? That claim entails thinking that men are vulnerable to women; how did he get there? What sense does that make? Why does he believe that, or pretend to believe it?

I don’t suppose I’ll ever find out. Life is frustrating that way.

Trump’s people think it’s time to change the plan, but Trump doesn’t wanna.

In what amounts to a relaunch of a relaunch, Trump now travels to Arizona, a battleground state, to embrace his most comfortable signature issue with an event marking the 200th mile of his wall on the US-Mexico border (most of the construction has in fact replaced existing barriers).

The president will then speak at a “Students for Trump” event in Phoenix. Despite soaring cases of coronavirus in Arizona, his campaign team will be hoping for an enthusiastic turnout to get back on track.

In other words despite the fact that cases are swiftly rising in Arizona, Trump is eager to put more people at risk of illness and death because he enjoys shouting at crowds. What a mensch.

Observers argue that Tulsa was a warning that he needs to reset, not least because of the health risks of big indoor rallies – but there appears to be little chance of him heeding advice.

“From what I’ve been told, Trump just insists on these rallies and he wants more and not fewer compared to 2016 because he’s got all of the trappings of office and he can fly Air Force One low so people can be awed and all the rest of it,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

He doesn’t care that he’s killing people so that he can fly Air Force One low so people can be awed. His fun in being in Air Force One when it flies low is more important to him than any number of deaths.

“Obviously, he didn’t calculate properly for the pandemic and other factors. He thinks they can correct it and go on. He wants one every couple of weeks or more frequently. He didn’t learn a thing. His campaign staff would gladly give them up, along with the tweets, if they could. But they can’t.”

Well, that’s Trump, isn’t it. He doesn’t learn things because he’s incapable of learning, and his staff can’t persuade him to do less-stupid because he prefers more-stupid.

Trump wants to see cruel and unusual punishment for people who make political gestures he dislikes.

Trump referred to the protesters who tried to tear down the Andrew Jackson statue near the White House as “vandals” and “hoodlums” who don’t love America.

“We are looking at long term jail sentences for these vandals and these hoodlums and these anarchists and agitators,” the president told reporters shortly before leaving for Arizona.

He wants people in prison for years for a minor property crime.

“Call them whatever you want. Some people don’t like that language, but that’s what they are. They’re bad people. They don’t love our country. And they’re not taking down our monuments. I just want to make that clear.”

Not his call. He’s not a god-emperor, he can’t stop us taking down monuments. They’re ours, not his, and we can collectively decide we don’t want monuments to genocide or slavery or Jim Crow.

Andrew Jackson was a genocider, so yes, there damn well is something very dubious about having a statue of him in Lafayette Park.

Granted, I don’t expect The Authorities to stand around and watch people destroy it, but that doesn’t make long prison sentences the appropriate response.

More rally!

Even as more of his campaign staffers test positive for coronavirus, Trump is still scheduled to hold a campaign event in Phoenix, Arizona, tomorrow.

The president will speak at a “Students for Trump” event at the Dream City Church in Phoenix, despite Arizona seeing a rise in its number of coronavirus cases.

In a video, two of the church’s leaders said they have installed cutting-edge technology that “kills 99.9% of Covid within 10 minutes.”

Oh yes? What “technology” is that exactly? Why isn’t it being installed everywhere?

These two fellas explain it. It’s ionization. Or ionizidation. The one guy isn’t quite sure. Anyway it cleans out all the particulates and the virus can’t live in that. They said so. Thank god for technology, they also said. (So why didn’t god give us the technology back in October?)

They’re very upbeat about the whole thing.

That crude old technology of wearing masks won’t be mandatory though. Whew! Freedom freedom freedom freedom.

Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said on Sunday that the city’s policy requiring face masks to be worn in public will not be enforced during President Donald Trump’s upcoming event at a Valley megachurch…

She added that she is hopeful Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey — who will attend the event — will take the opportunity to set an example regarding mask usage.

Well that’s good enough. Just hope. Just hope the governor will set an example, and hope people will wear them even though they don’t have to, and hope no one catches the virus, and hope the event won’t cause a huge spike in cases. Just hope. Maybe say a little prayer.

“We would hope that our governor … can send a strong message,” she said. “He believes in masks and he could be a great spokesman for telling the young people who are there to wear masks. But the best spokesman would be the president — if he told everyone at that rally it was important to wear masks, I believe they would do it.”

But it has to be voluntary. The city won’t be enforcing the policy, it will just be hoping people set a good example. That’s responsible and wise and adult.

White House press secretary has no problem with Trump’s racism.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was asked if Trump regrets using the racist phrase “kung flu” to describe coronavirus during his Saturday rally. McEnany replied that the president “never regrets putting the onus back on China” for the coronavirus pandemic.

But that wasn’t the question. The question was whether he regrets using the racist phrase “kung flu” to describe the coronavirus. Lying Fox News sleaze changed the subject.

Another reporter noted that, earlier this year, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway described the phrase “kung flu” as offensive and wrong.

Asked repeatedly whether the White House disagrees with Conway’s characterization, McEnany ignored the question and then called on someone from the far-right website One America News Network.

Of course she did.

People in Lebanon can no longer pay their Ethiopian “maids” who are really their slaves…so they take them to the Ethiopian embassy and leave them there.

Lebanon’s economy is collapsing with the country’s currency losing 70% of its value in the past six months.

Now many of the country’s middle class claim they can no longer afford to pay their domestic maids.

More than 100 Ethiopian migrant workers have been dumped outside their embassy in the capital in recent days.

There’s a video at the link. It’s worth watching.

A rather sad account of transgender life:

Am I a woman? I used to believe I was. I used to have stars in my eyes. My role model was the Bond girl (and self-described “Transsexual Supermodel”) Caroline Cossey. She was gorgeous and glamorous. If she could do it, couldn’t I? Me, a socially awkward boy who struggled to find brotherhood in the company of boys, who more easily made friends with girls. Why not?

I have a lot of sympathy for that struggling to find brotherhood in the company of boys. I had friends who were boys who struggled that way. It wasn’t that they “felt like girls,” as far as I remember, so much as it was that they were nerdy aka bookish aka intellectually inclined aka not particularly keen on sports. The company of boys can be tiring.

In the very early days of the modern Internet, there was a non-commercial predecessor to Facebook and Twitter called IRC, or Internet Relay Channel [Chat]. Using login credentials borrowed from a teacher, I used this chat network to seek out help. And I found it. For a misfit like me, finding a group of people who were accepting and validating was amazing. Maybe even intoxicating. These people understood me—or, even if they didn’t quite understand me, they would at least listen to me. Crossdressers, transvestites, and transsexuals—people who were gender non-conforming—a community where I belonged. Finally.

A community with a belief system.

“Born in a man’s body” became the accepted device for explaining our existence as transsexuals. To “cure” this condition, we were expected to take feminizing hormones and whatever other treatments were necessary to achieve femininity, commonly including hair removal (through the process of electrolysis, predating laser depilation), facial feminizing surgery, tracheal shaving to reduce the prominence of the Adam’s apple, surgery to change vocal pitch, rib reduction surgery, a list of implants including breast, hip, buttock, and cheek, and then finally sex-reassignment surgery.

…

You might be wondering about the women who wanted to transition to become men. They were hardly around. And truth be told, they weren’t particularly welcome in a space populated by gender-bending men. Antipathy toward the female sex is the norm in these trans spaces. It’s hard to make believe in the presence of the real deal.

I’ve noticed that. Boy howdy have I noticed that. I wish more people would.

While I wasn’t paying attention, a new thing called the “Transgender Community” arose to take the place of the thing I’d previously known as simply community. Whereas the community I’d transitioned with was mostly middle-aged white men of all different political views, this new community was mostly middle-aged white men of radically leftist ideology. Before, we had been a group of individuals brought together by an unusual commonality. Now, it’s a whole identity movement. What’s more, the previous antipathy toward women has become more intense. 

So very intense.

My ignorance of the transgender cuckoo’s egg was corrected when I started that blog, which I used to explore the intersection of transgenderism and feminism. While there was heat on both sides of the divide, it was immediately obvious that only one side used threats of violence, violent (often sexual) imagery, and harassment as part of its strategy to confront its counterpart. I was shocked by the misogyny coming from “my side,” and spoke out against it.

If only more people would.

As I came to accept myself, and accept my choices, the depression lifted. I wrote more, trying to work out and understand my life through a different lens. Events and encounters that had previously left me confused and anxious started to make more sense when I realized I’d experienced them as a transsexual and not as a woman. In fact, my spiral of misery was practically an assured outcome given my effort to assert a womanhood that never existed and never can or will.

Since then, I’ve learned I’m not the only transsexual to have this revelation. The transgender community (such as it is) talks about authenticity, about true selves, about becoming ourselves. Why did I need to become a lifelong medical patient and have a dangerous surgery to reveal my “authentic” self?

Is there even any such thing as an “authentic self”? Hume said the self is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

Now I’m 45. Almost certainly more than half-way to wherever I stop. If I keep taking estrogen, I risk a stroke and deep vein blood clots. If I stop, I risk skeletal deterioration. Teenage me had no way of appreciating the choices middle-age me would have to make. Do I regret my choices? As a child growing up during the AIDS crisis, and watching some of my friends damaged by drug addiction, there’s a chance that my choices left me better off than I might otherwise have been. If I regret anything, it’s that so few people helped me to understand the weight of my decisions, and that I was discouraged from believing in my own agency.

Of course there’s also a chance that those choices didn’t leave Corinna Cohn better off.

This one however is brilliant.

Trump’s niece really doesn’t like him.

“I think he’s freaking out,” said Michael D’Antonio, author of Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success. “He will treat her savagely.”

On Sunday, Axios reported that Trump insists Mary Trump is “not allowed” to write her book, because doing so would violate a non-disclosure agreement she signed.

Trump told Axios: “She’s not allowed to write a book. When we settled with her and her brother, who I do have a good relationship with – she’s got a brother, Fred, who I do have a good relationship with, but when we settled, she has a total … signed a nondisclosure.”

It’s interesting how he extorts NDAs from people. I guess he must have something to hide?

Mary, 55, is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr, the president’s older brother, who died in 1981 at the age of 42 from a heart attack linked to alcoholism. She has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature, as well as a PhD in clinical psychology from Adelphi University in New York, according to Forbes.

Meaning she’s a whole lot smarter than Trump. Trump at this point would flunk second grade.

D’Antonio commented: “It makes her someone that Donald would fear on a very elemental level. She thinks for herself, she’s analytical when it comes to humans and she can express herself, so this is a nightmare for him.”

We can hope so.

The president is now reportedly considering suing Mary over the memoir, due to be published on 28 July by Simon & Schuster. It is expected to disclose Mary was a key source of confidential documents for a Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times investigation into Trump’s personal finances.

Squirm, Donnie. Squirm and sweat and lose sleep.

So now Don is furious at Brad and so are Jared and Princess, but Brad is furious at the news media and the news media are…reporting the news.

The Tulsa fire department said 6,200 people attended. The Trump campaign claimed 12,000. The arena holds 19,000.

Who ya gonna believe, the fire department or the Trump campaign? Hahaha just kidding.

Trump’s demeanour on returning to Washington was widely scrutinised. He was initially quiet on Twitter on Sunday but the president was reported to be “furious” at the “underwhelming” event, which followed a week of controversy about whether it should even be held. According to NBC, Trump was “particularly angry that before he even left DC, aides made public that six members of team in Tulsa tested positive for Covid-19”.

Right. Everything about Covid-19 should be kept completely secret, because it’s better for Trump that way. Stop testing, stop mentioning, stop reporting, stop saying “wear a mask.” Stop all of it. Pretend there is no Covid-19.

In a statement, Parscale blamed the low attendance on “a week’s worth of the fake news media warning people away from the rally because of Covid and protesters”, which he said “coupled with recent images of American cities on fire, had a real impact on people bringing their families and children to the rally”.

Look at that. Just look at it. This filthy hack is shouting at the news media for reporting that a huge indoor rally would be unsafe during a lethal pandemic. This filthy hack wants them to have shut up about that so that more people would “bring their families and children to the rally” – and get infected.

As Covid-19 cases in Oklahoma rise, public health officials had warned against holding a large indoor gathering. The Trump campaign did not require attendees to wear masks. Some observers speculated fear of Covid-19 may have stopped some supporters from attending the rally.

Oddly enough, not everyone wants to risk death for the sake of watching Trump scream into a microphone.