Who had THIS on their Bingo card?

President Donald Trump phoned Rudy Giuliani from his hospital bed Saturday afternoon to declare he feels so healthy, “I could get out of here right now.”

  NY Post

Hmmm. So, what's holding you up?

“If you can judge by the way he speaks, he sounded like vintage Donald Trump,” Giuliani said.

The president dictated a statement to Giuliani:

“You go tell people I’m watching this coverage [reporting he’s taken a turn for the worse].

“I feel I could get out of here right now. But they’re telling me there can always be a backstep with this disease. But I feel I could go out and do a rally.

“I am the president of the United States. I can’t lock myself in a room. … I had to confront [the virus] so the American people stopped being afraid of it so we could deal with it responsibly.

“We have made tremendous progress on treating this disease. Fatality rates are very low compared to [the beginning].

“I’m going to beat this.

“Then I will be able to show people we can deal with this disease responsibly, but we shouldn’t be afraid of it.

“If I had handled it any other way, I would have created more panic, more fear in the American people.

“We are making great progress on dealing with this disease and making better progress with the economy than anyone had the right to expect.”

He'll be a god.  He is, after all, "the chosen one."

When he comes out of the hospital, MAGAland will literally worship him.

L'etat c'est moi

The Department of Agriculture is mandating that letters from President Trump be included in millions of food assistance boxes, according to Politico.

The $4 billion Families to Farmers Food Box Program has distributed 100 million boxes already, the USDA announced Wednesday. The program delivers surplus goods that would normally go to restaurants to families experiencing financial hardship due to the coronavirus pandemic.

  The Hill

Why is it called Families to Farmers Food Box Program? That sounds like families are sending food to farmers. Is that a misprint?

Organizations tasked with distributing the food have complained that the messaging and campaign-like letters included in the boxes appear to have the goal of boosting the president’s image ahead of the election.

"Appear" to have?

“In my 30 years of doing this work, I've never seen something this egregious,” said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Food Banks, told Politico. "These are federally purchased boxes.”

[...]

The letter, which comes in English and Spanish, says: “As President, safeguarding the health and well-being of our citizens is one of my highest priorities. As part of our response to coronavirus, I prioritized sending nutritious food from our farmers to families in need throughout America.”

Some lawmakers have argued that the letters could potentially violate the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal officials besides the president and vice president from engaging in politics in their official capacity.

And Trump should be scared of that, why? Practically the whole damned administration has violated the Hatch Act repeatedly and suffered no consequences.

“A public health crisis is not an opportunity for the administration to promote its own political interests. Likewise, a federal food assistance program should not be used as a tool for the President to exploit taxpayer dollars for his re-election campaign.”

EVERYTHING is an opportunity for this administration to promote its own political interests.

In a statement to The Hill, the Agriculture Department said “politics has played zero role in the Farmers to Families food box program — it is purely about helping farmers and distributors get food to Americans in need during this unprecedented time.”

Farmers to Families. That's more like it. But, bullshit. Politics played a leading role.

Just waiting for...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

He always thinks he has magical charm

No matter how many times he gets played.

He offered lengthy meetings in the Oval Office and made phone calls at night from the White House — delivering Bob Woodward an unprecedented nine hours of access across 18 interviews.

Aides spent months fretting about President Donald Trump opening up to the famous Watergate journalist, fearing the consequences all the way through Wednesday’s bombshell revelations.

Trump bulldozed through them all, believing he could charm the man who helped take down a president and chronicled half a dozen administrations over the past half-century.

[...]

The revelations in “Rage” have sent the Trump White House scrambling, with aides blaming one another for the predictable fallout from injecting even more chaos into an already challenging reelection race.

  Poltico

Of course there's still the idea that he likes flaunting his ability to say exactly what he wants and not pay a price for it.

As the White House and Trump campaign sought to tell a different story this fall about their handling of coronavirus, the book’s release is renewing attention on the president’s early missteps in a crisis that continues to disrupt hundreds of millions of American lives. The book’s rollout will continue this weekend as Woodward sits for a “60 Minutes” interview ahead of its wide release on Sept. 15.

[...]

In 2018, White House aides shielded Trump from an interview for [Woodward's] book “Fear” because they didn’t want to give the author more ammunition than he already had. The book was withering — portraying the Trump administration suffering a “nervous breakdown” with anecdotes from current and former aides inside and outside the administration.

[...]

[Trump] made clear to aides that he would participate in the next book, convinced that he could charm and cajole a veteran Washington journalist into seeing his point of view.

[...]

Trump also urged his senior staff members to grant Woodward access and time, allowing him to interview several top aides, including senior adviser Jared Kushner, national security adviser Robert O’Brien, deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger and former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, among others. Often Trump would urge aides to call Woodward directly during the reporting process and kept asking West Wing aides when the book would come out.

[...]

On Wednesday, Trump called the book “another political hit job” — despite the recordings of the president’s own words. And he defended the way he downplayed the virus early on by saying that “you cannot show a sense of panic or you're going to have bigger problems that you ever had before. Please.”

And a sarcastic "please" right back.

The access does not seem to have brightened Woodward’s view of the president. The author bluntly concludes his book with the assessment that “Trump is the wrong man for the job."

[...]

When asked why the president would sit down with Woodward for 18 interviews when his first book was so critical, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said it was because Trump was the “the most transparent president in history.”

Oh, he is that, alright.

In response to the book’s revelations, White House aides quickly started [to] blame one another. Newer White House staffers tried to pin the decision to help Woodward on previous offices or particular aides, even though the president himself made the call to work with the author.

So...mission accomplished. He got everybody fighting each other.

As distressing as several White House aides found the excerpts, they spent part of the day just trying to track down a copy of the book. The White House struggled to respond to audio of the president’s interviews, as well as on-the-record quotes from Kushner — evidence that forced them to argue that, at best, some of the remarks deserved more context.

[...]

“Trump loves brands, and Woodward has been the gold standard for 50 years of investigative journalism around the presidency, so it's the same reason why he likes the Gray Lady, he likes The New York Times. It's the paper of record traditionally in his hometown, so even though both excoriate him, he's attracted to them the way a low-IQ small moth would be to a flame,” said Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as White House communications director under Trump. “Trump is always convinced that if he talks to the person, he is going to elucidate and enlighten that person and get them to like him.”

[...]

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham also helped to persuade Trump to participate in the book and told him that President George W. Bush once cooperated with a Woodward book and it turned out far better as a result, one White House aide said. Graham did not return a call for comment.

Especially after being excoriated by Tucker Carlson on air for his role.

Bush’s longtime strategist Karl Rove remembered it differently, however. “Every president does a Bob Woodward book and gives him plenty of interviews and then later comes to regret it, and this is probably one of those instances,” he told Fox News on Wednesday.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Bingo

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Woodward sequel to "Fear" comes out September 15

Bob Woodward’s second book on the Trump White House [...] promises to reveal the secrets of “25 personal letters exchanged between [Donald] Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that have not been public before”.

In the letters, according to details from Simon & Schuster published on the book’s Amazon page on Wednesday night, “Kim describes the bond between the two leaders as out of a ‘fantasy film’, as the two leaders engage in an extraordinary diplomatic minuet”.

  Guardian

A fantasy film. He's speaking Trump's language.

Simon & Schuster promised “an unprecedented and intimate tour de force of original reporting on the Trump presidency … with stunning new details about early national security decisions and operations and Trump’s moves as he faces a global pandemic, economic disaster and racial unrest”.

[...]

Trump’s engagement with the totalitarian state to the north has produced three meetings with Kim and exchanges of kind words, but no deal on denuclearisation and other concerns.

Woodward did not interview Trump for Fear, which the president called “a piece of fiction” by a “liar” with “phony sources”. But in January this year, the president told Fox News the two men had spoken.

“I was interviewed by a very, very good writer, reporter,” Trump said. “I can say Bob Woodward. He said he’s doing something and this time I said, ‘Maybe I’ll sit down.’”

A liar with phony sources, but a very, very good reporter. He "sat down" to spin a bunch of lies he hoped would get into the second book without any fact-checking. That won't have happened with very, very good reporter Bob Woodward.

According to the publisher, “what is not known is that Trump provided Woodward a window into his mind through a series of exclusive interviews.

“At key decision points, Rage shows how Trump’s responses to the crises of 2020 were rooted in the instincts, habits and style he developed during his first three years as president.

[...]

Its title may have derived from a conversation Woodward had with Trump – and Bob Costa of the Washington Post – at Trump’s hotel in Washington on 31 March 2016.

Responding to Woodward’s contention that the Republican party had become home to “a lot of angst and rage and distress”, the then candidate for the party’s presidential nomination said: “I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have. I think it was ... I don’t know if that’s an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do.

Intentionally, I guess.

“I also bring great unity out, ultimately. I’ve had many occasions like this, where people have hated me more than any human being they’ve ever met. And after it’s all over, they end up being my friends. And I see that happening here.”

Brilliant. Wait till the book reviews start coming out. Or until he reads this article. (Sorry.  Until someone who reads this article talks about it on CNN and he sees the segment.)

John Dowd, a lawyer who worked for the president during the Mueller investigation into Russian election interference and links between the Trump campaign and Moscow, was one of Woodward’s sources.

“In the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw,” Woodward wrote.

“In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying ‘Fake News’, the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: ‘You’re a fucking liar.’”

Even John Dowd wants to change his image as a Trumpie now.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  And there it is.  He's heard.

The "China plague" is beating Trump

"I don’t know if you’ve seen, the polls have been going up like a rocket ship. George Washington would have had a hard time beating me before the plague came in, before the China plague. And then, you know, like every other nation, like other countries, when you get hit, it affects you, and we went down a little bit," Trump told conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt.

  The Hill

JFC.  George Washington. 

Also, if he'd been competent, the "China plague" could have actually boosted his chance of winning in November instead of destroying it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

If true....

Indeed, the Republican Party needs to be annihilated.  But I'm slightly skeptical of this, because I think if there WERE such a thing, Trump would have made a big deal out of it, and we'd have seen it.

Last year, months before President Trump’s July 4th fireworks celebration at Mount Rushmore, a White House aide reportedly contacted South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s office to inquire about the steps that need to be taken to add more presidents to the national memorial. Noem, who previously said Trump confided in her that it was his “dream” to appear among the former presidents on the monument, apparently decided to encourage his fantasy when she sought to charm him as he arrived in Black Hills for the holiday celebration last month: She even presented him with a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore with his face on it, according to The New York Times.

  Daily Beast

Introducing Mr. Trump against the floodlit backdrop of his carved predecessors, the governor played to the president’s craving for adulation by noting that in just three days more than 125,000 people had signed up for only 7,500 seats; she likened him to Theodore Roosevelt, a leader who “braves the dangers of the arena”; and she mimicked the president’s rhetoric by scorning protesters who she said were seeking to discredit the country’s founders.

In private, the efforts to charm Mr. Trump were more pointed, according to a person familiar with the episode: Ms. Noem greeted him with a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included a fifth presidential likeness: his.

[...]

But less than three weeks later, Ms. Noem came to the White House with far less fanfare — to meet not with Mr. Trump, but with Vice President Mike Pence. Word had circulated through the Trump administration that she was ingratiating herself with the president, fueling suspicions that there might have been a discussion about her serving as his running mate in November. Ms. Noem assured Mr. Pence that she wanted to help the ticket however she could, according to an official present.

  NYT

She had to go to the Whie House in person for that?

The governor, 48, has installed a TV studio in her state capitol, become a Fox News regular and started taking advice from Mr. Trump’s former 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who still has the president’s ear.

[...]

To the surprise of some of her own advisers, Ms. Noem flew with Mr. Trump to Washington on Air Force One late in the evening after his Mount Rushmore speech. Joined by Mr. Lewandowski, she and the president spoke for over an hour privately during the flight — a fact that Mr. Trump and some of his aides soon shared with other Republicans, according to officials familiar with his disclosure.

[...]

Ms. Noem has been a steadfast ally of Mr. Trump and has mirrored his handling of the virus.

She has pushed for schools to reopen for in-person classes, denounced mask mandates and had South Dakota participate in a study on hydroxychloroquine, the malaria treatment Mr. Trump has trumpeted.

[...]

Recognizing the president’s immense interest in [Mt. Rushore], Ms. Noem worked with his Interior Department to ensure there would be fireworks for the [4th of July] celebration, a longstanding priority for Mr. Trump. There had been no fireworks there for the previous decade because of environmental and fire-risk concerns.

In the weeks leading up to the event, Ms. Noem went on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News to make clear she was expecting to “have a large event” for the president and would not require social distancing or masks.

Yeah, she wants to be VP.

A White House official laughed at the notion that Mr. Trump is open to replacing Mr. Pence, a move that, among other things, would exude desperation.

And your point is?

For a time in 2018, Mr. Trump queried people about Mr. Pence’s loyalty. And officials in the administration, including some close to Mr. Pence, said they believed that Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump were angling to replace him with [Nikki] Haley.

In his memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” the former national security adviser John R. Bolton recounts how, flying to Iraq on Christmas night in 2018, the president asked him for his opinion on jettisoning Mr. Pence.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Sure seems that way.

Was there a contest to see if you could get Trump to retweet you?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The charts!

Created especially for the children in the audience?

Here's the whole thing if you can stomach it. I've just been seeing clips, and OMG. I haven't worked up my courage enough to watch the whole thing yet.

   

And the makeup.  Yeesh.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

He just can't stand anyone but him getting attention

Three days ago...

Today...

Sure.  You can tell by looking:

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

What's important

Setting aside the fact that whether he looks good in a mask is completely irrelevant, he wouldn't look good even if he put a bag over his head.  Better, yes.  And he does look better in a mask. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Good point

Someone else said they print these out to show him to make him happy.  JFC.  Probably true.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Note to MAGA: Masks are good now (but it's too late for some*)

"I'm all for masks. I think masks are good," Trump told Fox Business in an interview on Wednesday.

  alJazeera

He keeps their heads spinning.

"If I were in a tight situation with people, I would absolutely [wear a mask]," Trump said in the interview, adding that people have seen him wearing a mask before.

Too bad those 6,200 people in Tulsa didn't know that when he held his rally a couple weeks ago.

In early April, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended people wear cloth face coverings in public settings where other physical distancing measures were difficult to maintain.

Trump immediately undercut the CDC guidance by flatly stating that he would not be following it, suggesting it would be unseemly for the commander-in-chief to wear a mask as he meets with heads of state.

But on Wednesday, he sounded a different tone, saying he liked the way he looked wearing it.

"It looked like the Lone Ranger," he said, a reference to the fictional law-and-order character who wore a black eye mask. "I have no problem with that, and if people feel good about it, they should do it."

The Lone Ranger wore a mask covering the top of his face, not his nose and mouth.

Of course, masks are worn to reduce the spread of the virus, not for fashion. It's not about how he looks in a mask, the fucking vain idiot. He looks ridiculous without one. He should wear a paper bag over his head.

"When there's nobody around, I don't see any reason to be wearing it," Trump said in a separate interview on Wednesday on "America This Week".

No shit. What a brilliant observation.

*And, speaking of the Tulsa fiasco...

Former presidential candidate Herman Cain announced on Thursday that he has been hospitalized with Covid-19, almost two weeks after attending President Donald Trump’s Tulsa, Okla., rally.

  Politico

Well, well, well.

Cain was diagnosed with coronavirus on June 29, nine days after the president's Tulsa rally, and his symptoms worsened and required hospitalization on July 1, according to a statement from his Twitter account.

“He spent the past night in a hospital and as of today, Thursday July 2, he is resting comfortably in an Atlanta-area hospital,” the statement read, adding that Cain did not need a respirator. “There is no way of knowing for sure how or where Mr. Cain contracted the coronavirus.”

LOL.

Cain, briefly a frontrunner in the 2012 GOP presidential primary, tweeted a picture on June 20 of himself and others at Trump’s indoor rally.

“Here’s just a few of the #BlackVoicesForTrump at tonight’s rally! Having a fantastic time!” the caption read. No one in the picture was wearing a mask.

I bet those other people are getting tested and not having such a fantastic time right now.

Cain has frequently downplayed the risk of Covid-19 on social media. As he was in the hospital yesterday, Cain’s account tweeted approvingly of the lack of social distancing restrictions at Trump’s upcoming Mount Rushmore event.

“Masks will not be mandatory for the event, which will be attended by President Trump,” Cain wrote on Twitter. “PEOPLE ARE FED UP!”

On June 29, the day he tested positive, Cain downplayed the threat of coronavirus in Florida amid record hospitalizations and cases in the state.

“The news is better than what you're being told,” Cain wrote on Twitter. And on June 8, Cain wondered on Twitter if the virus was weakening.

And the man is a doctor, ffs.

In Tulsa, the 7-day average of cases was 104.4 on July 1, an increase from 17.4 on June 1, according to figures from the Tulsa Health Department.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Amazing: crowd growth just keeps going up

He actually has three "never before" numbers in this clip.  He's simply amazing!

I'll give him this: nobody's ever seen a president of the United States like this before.  And if the gods haven't totally abandoned the planet, they never will again.

Bullshit.  I'm from Missouri, you're going to have to show me.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Sad!

[O]ver the past month, the Trump campaign has spent slightly more than $400,000 on cable news ads in the Washington, D.C., area, buying time largely on Fox News but with some smaller buys on CNN and MSNBC as well, according to filings with the Federal Communications Commission. The ads began running in late May and are scheduled through June 23. It is, on a purely electoral level, a remarkably quixotic use of campaign cash. The purchases have no real shot of moving D.C., Maryland, or Virginia into the Trump column.

But that wasn’t the point. The Trump campaign said the ad buys were an attempt to reinvigorate and reassure the president’s supporters in the nation’s capital. “We want members of Congress and our DC-based surrogates to see the ads so they know our strong arguments for President Trump and against Joe Biden,” wrote Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director, in an email on Monday.

  Daily Beast

Odd use of campaign funds. But maybe not. Maybe they think even the base will abandon him if they don't make him look better.

[T]wo knowledgeable sources—one a Trump campaign adviser, the other an individual close to the president—said the D.C.-area ads had another purpose as well: to put the president himself at ease.

As much TV as he watches, I'm sure he'll see them often. He won't have the sense to ask where the ads are running.

In recent weeks, Trump has grown visibly distraught at his prospects for re-election, with recent polling showing his standing in the race declining dramatically. [...] Things have gotten so bad that after CNN came out with a survey on Monday showing Trump trailing Biden by 14 points, Trump’s campaign’s pollster crafted a memo—subsequently posted to the president’s Twitter account—accusing presidential pollsters of a deliberate effort to “counter the enthusiasm of Trump voters.”

He could have come up with that one himself.

These sources also said the campaign is hoping to counter-program recent ads by critics that have driven the president to public outbursts. The ads in question were the work of the Lincoln Project, a super PAC run by a group of dissident conservatives, and elicited furious reactions from the president’s Twitter feed. The Lincoln Project aired a recent, hard-hitting ad called “Mourning in America” on Fox News in the D.C. media market with the explicit goal of getting the president’s attention.

Seems like they put one out about every week and run it on Fox News. They must have deep pockets.

[A]ccording to George Conway, a Lincoln Project co-founder and the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, the group got the idea from the Trump campaign, and specifically from Brad Parscale, the former top Trump digital aide who now runs the president’s re-election effort.

“[H]is people had bought ads in the District of Columbia—which you don't do in a presidential election! There are no persuadable voters in the District of Columbia,” Conway said in a May interview with The Daily Beast podcast The New Abnormal, co-hosted by his fellow Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson.

“That stuck in my mind,” Conway recalled. “I was thinking, ‘Well, why can’t you just run an ad on the cable provider for the White House, so that some certain individual would see it?’”

And here's their latest:

He's always been Donald Trump, Asshole Narcissist Fraud

Check out this New Yorker article from 1997.

And whose idea was that picture?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

More numbers out of his ass

They just keep coming, and he's got a great big ass, so I'm sure they will continue to do so.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's always nice when you can rate yourself

Nobody broke the law regarding General Flynn.  But he's right about one thing:  "Nobody's done anywhere close to what we've done."

And hopefully nobody ever will again.

Is this from one of her Chinese trademarks?

No, they weren't.

Is that a verse from the King Donald version of the Bible?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Pomp and Circumstance for the Emperor!

In the past week or so, President Trump, losing his public relations battle against the coronavirus, has cloaked himself in the mantle of commander in chief.

[...]

“I want to see those shows,” Trump said of the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels, who will fly over New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania at midday Tuesday in the first of the events that will combine the skills of the two squadrons. Of his Independence Day pageant, Trump noted that even though it was pouring last year, that “didn’t bother the pilots, didn’t bother the military,” and “we’re going to be doing that again on July Fourth.” (As a former Army officer, I can tell you that it’s not fun for soldiers to participate in these things; they have to work on a rare holiday and spend days and often nights of hard work preparing behind the scenes.) As for the U.S. Military Academy graduation, he commented that he didn’t care for the look of a ceremony with social distancing — he prefers the “nice and tight” look — but that he had done the commencement addresses at the other service academies and “I’m doing it at West Point.”

In all these anticipated events of martial showmanship — all announced at coronavirus task force briefings ostensibly intended to update the American public on the pandemic — the common denominator is the president’s desire to appropriate the military as a symbol not of the nation but of himself.

[...]

At a time of unprecedented loss and disruption to all aspects of American life, the president’s obsession with military adoration is objectively wasteful and dangerous: Whether they are Blue Angels or academy cadets, the armed forces do not exist to provide photo ops for Trump.

  WaPo

Apparently they do.

The Pentagon paints the flyovers as a way “to thank first responders, essential personnel, and military service members as we collectively battle the spread of COVID-19,” according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.

[...]

[H]ow many of the people being honored will get the chance to be inspired by these demonstrations, given the importance of their lifesaving work and the fact that the aeronautical thank-yous will avoid flight paths that would make it easy for people to congregate? Moreover, these flights cost $60,000 an hour. The cost of Trump’s military-inspired Fourth of July celebration is unknown, but certainly any amount of money devoted to such things is poorly spent at this juncture, and elite pilots’ lives are always at risk in these daring demonstrations.

[...]

A true leader would forgo the privilege and publicity of a U.S. Military Academy commencement address in the interests of the troops’ welfare. The Air Force Academy already held commencement exercises, with cadets seated six feet apart and parents watching at home. The Naval Academy chose to cancel graduation altogether. But this year was Trump’s turn to speak at the oldest and most storied of the academies, and he appears unwilling to give up the backdrop of 1,000 cadets and the million-dollar view of the Hudson Valley. [...] As U.S. Military Academy graduate, Lt. Gen. (retired) Mark Hertling, former commander of the Army in Europe, wrote in an op-ed for CNN, it’s more like mandatory fun for a president to fulfill his “political desires,” and that “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.” The muted graduation event will be little more than a campaign rally with the cadets’ big day as background and footnote.

[...]

Trump is adding burdens by requiring all cadets to be there at the same time and most likely for longer periods, with all the expenses associated with supporting the corps, from laundry to mess hall staff to food. The academy is more than a school; it is a working Army base with military police and other active-duty soldiers who would need to be on duty to support not only graduation but also the intensive security procedures associated with a presidential visit (not to mention civilian law enforcement). The academy historically has adapted to accomplish its mission even in times of crisis. [...] In the midst of a pandemic, there is simply no good reason to hold a ceremony and risk the lives of all involved.

[...]

The president seeks to surround himself by military pomp to lend the appearance of strong leadership. It is the emptiest of gestures. The military parades he favors are, historically, the purview of dictators. They symbolize not just military power, but military power subservient to a supreme leader.

[...]

Perhaps Trump’s unilateral willingness to seek a militaristic solution to his pandemic failures should not be surprising. After all, based largely on his whim, a Space Force has made its debut as a branch of the armed services, costing billions to establish and appearing to be largely redundant, another entry in Trump’s “catalog of bad ideas.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.