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4/26/26

4/26/2026

A SHAMEFUL MEDIA BANQUET;
AN ASSASSINATION AVOIDED

TRUMP and others at the Correspondents' banquet head table just as security officials were about to move him after an attempted assassination. PHOTO CREDIT: C-SPAN video screenshot

I’M NOT AMONG THE PEOPLE who want Donald Trump to drop dead.
So, I’m glad that once again America’s unhinged president has escaped an assassin’s bullet.
Nor do I daydream about any other kind of removal-by-death before Trump’s term expires. I don’t war game scenarios in which his disgusting diet, declining physique and deteriorating brain brings his second term to a fatal, early close.
Nope. I wish him nothing but good health and an accident-free life.
Congratulations to the Secret Service and other protectors for thwarting Cole Allen’s Saturday sprint towards the ballroom containing Trump and his cabal of press-hating cronies, all the while lugging a shotgun, a handgun and knives to do in the Administration.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Trump is the most dangerous threat to U.S. democracy since the Second World War. I wish he’d never been born and gone on to bully his way through a young tabloid adulthood, fake business success, abuse women and con voters – TWICE – to sending him the White House, which he is now literally tearing apart.
What I’m hoping for is an end to the Trump Terror without resort to murder or its medical equivalent. I have fairy-tale fantasies that do the job by other means, and I’ll get to them in a moment.

BUT FIRST, I would like to take issue with the event where the assassination attempt occurred.
That would be the pukefest known as the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, to which the country’s supposedly top journalists had invited Trump.
Normally, I don’t mind reporters and the people they cover occasionally playing dress-up to share cafeteria food, trade good-natured barbs and acknowledge that, at least for the moment, professional adversaries are bona fide human beings.
However, these are not ordinary times. Donald Trump is an authoritarian nation-wrecker, who is so thoroughly evil that it would take many blog posts to do the topic justice.
Among his worst sins is his attacks on the news media and the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. His destructive campaign couldn't come at a worse time - when newspapers have collapsed as primary sources of information, without being replaced by anything that approaches a credible, expansive and financially viable new media.
So, in the run-up to the correspondents’ event, press critics like Dan Froomkin were savage in their attacks on the banquet sponsors and media Olympians who would attend.
In a “Press Watch” Substack essay last week, Froomkin compared the nation’s media elite to spouses trapped in an abusive relationship, not trying to fight back or escape.
The journalists, he said, had been insulted, sued, banished, subjected to ruinous regulation and legal jeopardy by Trump. While at the same time, the reporters were failing their audiences by depriving them an honest, candid account of Trump’s flawed character and performance.
“You cannot adequately explain what Trump says or does on a day-to-day basis without acknowledging where it all comes from:” he wrote. “His derangement, his ignorance, his authoritarianism, his lawbreaking, his corruption, and his racism.”
Which is to say the journalists would have been better off had they skipped this year’s banquet.
“To be clear: No self-respecting journalist should attend Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” Froomkin wrote. “Trump should play to a mostly empty room. “

WHICH LEADS US BACK TO THE MAIN ISSUE: What to do to about Trump overall?
As I said, assassination is just wrong. I’ve lived through some of the most heart-breaking:
Mahatma Gandhi, Jan. 30, 1948 (Granted, I was only 5 at the time); John F. Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963; Dr. Martin Luther King, April 4, 1968; and Robert F. Kennedy, June 6, 1968.
More recently, there were the political murders of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, on June 14, 2025. And Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, on Sept. 10, 2025.
We miss those leaders and their voices. Their deaths changed history, but never for the better and probably not as much as their assassins hoped.
Trump escaped death by an inch when a bullet grazed his ear at a campaign rally in Butler, PA on July 13, 2024; later, a gunman was spotted hiding in the bushes at a Florida golf course, Sept. 15, 2024.
Indeed, Trump has escaped other assassination and security threats. Wikipedia lists around 20 incidents, most minor, like a 2017 occasion in which a man stole a forklift with which he hoped to ram Trump’s car.
In any case, Trump’s premature death would hardly be the answer to the harm that he’s caused.
A better solution would be a huge Democratic sweep in the November midterm elections, which could restore Congress to its Constitutional role of being a formidable restraint on Trump's presidency.
Congress would checkmate the worst of his destructive programs, and Trump would hate that. And who knows, maybe a power-shift would result in an impeachment or two. He’d really hate that.
What would be even more fitting is if the nation finally turned its collective back on Trump, reaching a consensus that the word “Trump” should be added to the list of history's most notorious, obscene and despised names.
He’d absolutely hate that.

3 Comments

4/11/26

4/11/2026

5 Comments

DREAMING OF ARMAGEDDON,
AN UNHINGED, POTTY-MOUTHED
PRESIDENT MUST BE STOPPED

DONALD TRUMP'S Truth Social portrait, as if wearing war paint based on the US flag's red, white and blue.

I’M STILL SHAKING from the series of threats Donald Trump has been making this month about Iran, variously vowing to destroy its civilization and to bring it “back to the stone ages.”
I’m writing this on the evening of April 11, and so far, the commander-in-chief has not unleashed the ultimate dogs of war on the Middle East, despite the failure of his vice president, JD Vance, to negotiate a solution to the conflict after 21 hours of talks.
What 's next?
Who is to say America’s unhinged president won’t blow up Iran, or a good part of the world, before I finish this? You never know when he might get the urge to set of a nuke or two before breakfast.
Clearly, Trump has been daydreaming in perilous terms.
The remark about the “stone ages” was made on April 1, part of Trump’s TV address to explain the Iran war.
"Thanks to the progress we’ve made I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly. We are going to hit them extremely hard. Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong."
Given the date, it’s possible it was Trumpian humor, an April Fool’s joke.
The problem, though, is that Trump kept following the theme of terror and horror.
One statement that grabbed people’s attention came five days later, in a tweet discussed by my friend, Henry Abraham in a Substack column headlined “The F-bomb and the A-bomb.”

Trump's tweet was history-making, because it was the first public, deliberate and official use by a president of a derivative of “fuck.”
The tweet, which popped up at 8:03 a.m., April 5, on Trump’s “Truth Social” platform, was a masterpiece of concise writing.
In just one paragraph, Trump managed to get in six obscene, bullying and juvenile concepts, some of which might be found on the walls of a middle school bathroom:

War crimes – bombing civilian structures, namely bridges and generating stations.
Demands that Iranians cease their blockade of the “Fuckin’ Strait,” known on most maps as “the Strait of Hormuz.”
Name-calling,labeling Iranians as “crazy bastards.”
Bullying threats, that Iranians risked “living in Hell” for disobeying him.
Reliving his TV days, with this stay-tuned admonition: “JUST WATCH!”
A snide religious slur: “Praise be to Allah.”

Thinking about Trump’s tweet as the work of a middle-schooler, I wonder if the student would be hauled into the principal’s office, then to a police station, followed by months of supervised counseling while wearing an ankle bracelet.
Instead, the war raged on, and Trump authored another Truth Social tweet that envisioned a catastrophe unknown since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump mused, posting that tweet at 8:06 a.m. on April 7.

Later in the message, Trump seemed unsure of what might happen, typing: “WHO KNOWS?”

WHICH IS THE CENTRAL QUESTION of our time, similar to Hamlet’s anguished “To be or not to be” question.
However, the solution is not as unfathomable as Trump or Hamlet make it sound.
To continue being, instead of not-being, the United States needs only to remove Trump from office, preferably by impeachment.
Of course, it sounds preposterous, given the Republican majorities in Congress and their disgraceful devotion to Trump.
But for their own survival, Republicans, and all of us, should acknowledge the obvious, that Trump is unhinged.
Is he mentally ill? Just plain evil? It doesn’t matter. He’s been obsessing out loud about Armageddon, and that makes him dangerous, too dangerous, to be president.
Please don’t tell me that not even Donald J. Trump would use nuclear weapons, or their “conventional” equivalents.
Don’t argue that Trump himself has said his presidency is about preventing use of nuclear weapons.
Because, if we know one thing about Donald Trump, it’s that he’s a liar.
An unhinged, serial liar.

5 Comments

4/26/26

A SHAMEFUL MEDIA BANQUET;AN ASSASSINATION AVOIDED

4/11/26

DREAMING OF ARMAGEDDON,AN UNHINGED, POTTY-MOUTHEDPRESIDENT MUST BE STOPPED

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A SHAMEFUL MEDIA BANQUET;
AN ASSASSINATION AVOIDED

DREAMING OF ARMAGEDDON,
AN UNHINGED, POTTY-MOUTHED
PRESIDENT MUST BE STOPPED