Yes, we're the baddies now

 Never to be heard from again.

They're doing their level best to start riots in Chicago.

UPDATE 11/14/2025:  Simply evil.

A contract of mutual deceit

This is from a 1992 novel by James Lee Burke titled "A Stained White Radiance"...

"I was guilty of that age old presumption that the origins of social evil can be traced to villainous individuals. That we just need to identify them, lock them in cages, or even march them to the executioner's wall and this time, yes, this time, we'll catch a fresh breeze in our sails and set ourselves on a true course.

But [politician] Bobby Earl is out there by consent. He has his thumb on a dark pulse, and like all confidence men, he knows that his audience wishes to be conned. He learned long ago to listen. He knows that if he listens carefully, they'll tell him what they need to hear. It's a contract of mutual deceit by which they open up their flack vests and take it right through the breastbone. If it weren't he, it would be someone like him. Misanthropic, beguiling, educated. Someone who, as an ex-president's wife once said, allows the rest of us to feel comfortable with our prejudices.

I think the end for Bobby Earl will come in the fashion that it does for all his kind. [His kind] wants power so badly, that at some point in their lives, they make a conscious choice to embrace evil. It's not a gradual seduction. They do it without reservation, and that's when they leave the rest of us. You know it when it happens, too. No amount of cosmetic surgery can mask the psychological deformity in their eye. Then, unbeknownst to themselves, they set about erecting their own scaffold. Their most loyal adherents become their executioners, just as Mussolini's people hanged him upside down in a filling station, and Robespierre's followers trundled him over their heads to the guillotine. Then the audience moves on and seeks a new magician."

Democrats just got a campaign talking point

The Trump campaign responded Saturday [...]

“President Trump will once again take the oath of office on January 20th, 2025, and will swear ‘to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said.

  WBEZ

And we have seen what that oath meant to him.

“Has he been advised maybe not to sign it because maybe there’s some legal exposures…given that oath, if he signed it, would be a violation of everything he actually did on Jan. 6th, 2021, and leading up to it?” [Adam] Kinzinger said.

I don't see why. He swore an oath in 2020 that he violated, and he hasn't been held to account yet.

“Pledging not to overthrow our democracy is a hard thing to do when you’ve already attempted it once,” [Gov. JB] Pritzker spokeswoman Christina Amestoy told WBEZ.

[...]

In part of the oath, candidates swear they are not communists nor affiliated with communist organizations. In the latter part of the oath, candidates attest that they “do not directly or indirectly teach or advocate the overthrow of the government of the United States or of this state or any unlawful change in the form of the governments thereof by force or any unlawful means.”

So, maybe he's a communist.

Signing it is entirely optional now after federal courts ruled it unconstitutional on free-speech grounds, but Illinois lawmakers left it in state law.

Well, if it's Illinois state law, then he shouldn't be allowed on the ballot in Illinois.

State election records show that Trump’s other GOP primary opponents, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, did not sign the state loyalty oath. Christie signed the document during his 2016 run for president.

Then they shouldn't be on the Illinois ballot, either.

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

UPDATE 05:00 pm:

Despot in a nutshell

Kudos to the Houston Chronicle editors

At a rally Wednesday, after indulging in an extended, falsehood-filled rant against Omar, Trump basked with approving silence at the crowd’s raucous chanting — “Send her back! Send her back!” — only to later say he didn’t agree with the statement.

At one point during the week, [President] Trump tweeted: “This is about love for America.”

We beg to differ.

To love America is to love that it was born to stand against ancient notions of people’s coercive loyalty and allegiance to power. Obedience and compliance are the stuff of totalitarian regimes — not of the Declaration of Independence, which states: “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” any government that has become destructive.

[...]

Our country and our ‘leaders’ are getting dumber all the time.

The world is laughing at us. We’re like a bunch of patsies.

Our country is in serious trouble; we don’t have victories anymore.

Clearly, the above statements, on their face, are not pro-American. But are they anti-American?

The answer for too many of us depends on who is doing the speaking.

It was President Donald J. Trump who uttered those comments, and his supporters would say he did so with an intent to make America better.

[...]

His own inauguration speech was a dystopian vision of “American carnage” and “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones.”

  Houston Chronicle

Yes. As others have pointed out, it's ironic that someone wearing a MAGA hat would insist people who are unhappy with the country should leave it. But then, someone wearing a MAGA hat probably doesn't understand irony.

They might assign a different intent altogether if the speaker were someone else — someone such as U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, whose birthplace of Somalia, Arabic name, head scarf and skin color have led some to question her American bona fides. Even though she’s a duly elected congresswoman. Even though she swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. Even though she’s an American citizen who came here as a child refugee.

[...]

What makes a true American?

Is it someone who blindly supports the current occupant of the White House — right or wrong? And if so, how many of us would truly meet that standard — either now or during President Obama’s administration? Or is it someone who believes as Carl Schurz, a German-born U.S. senator said in 1871: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”?

The latter, of course. And that's what all the MAGA voters were saying (MAGA) before Trump suggested four dark-skinned Congresswomen should get out of the country (ignorantly saying they should go back to their "own" countries, when three of the four were born in America).

Americans have always debated this question, and politicians have always exploited it. During McCarthy’s communist witch hunts, during Vietnam, and now.

Not to mention, during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Other Republicans parroted [Trump's] derision [of their fellow Congress members], and only four out of 191 in the U.S. House — among them, Texas’ Rep. Will Hurd of Helotes — voted to condemn it.

[...]

The oath of citizenship doesn’t require a vow of silence; new citizens pledge to “support and defend the Constitution,” which protects dissent.

[...]

True love of country is expansive, encompassing both pride in America’s exceptionalism and obligation to speak out against her failings.

[...]

Over its 243-year history, our country has often been prodded onto a better path by those who raised their voices against injustice — from the founding fathers who sloughed off the yoke of monarchy to the abolitionists who worked to dismantle slavery, from suffragettes who fought for a woman’s right to vote to Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders (also branded as anti-American at the time) who marched for equality.

Trump, who also told black athlete Colin Kaepernick to “find another country” after he protested police brutality, parades in the mantle of American iconography -- claiming he is defending the anthem, the flag, the Fourth of July — while he tramples the values those symbols represent.

[...]

As Americans, born here or journeyed here, it is our highest calling to work to “form a more perfect union,” to speak truth to power through votes and words. It is our duty to push back against despotism and those who would seek to divide us — especially if the divider resides in the White House.

UPDATE: Also, this president often remarks that we don't want criminal elements coming into this country, usually specified as rapists and sex traffickers. He's been credibly accused of rape by more than one woman, and he has a history of association with Jeffrey Epstein, a man who escaped justice over a decade ago and about to be tried again in another state for sex trafficking.



UPDATE:







I'm sensing a pattern.

UPDATE:





UPDATE:

He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue

As much as I hate the trope...imagine if Obama had made love to Kim like Trump has.  What song would Tucker be singing?

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

UPDATE:  Also Tucker Carlson...