Follow the bouncing ball if you dare: Trump’s Truth Social post depicting the Obamas as apes went from 1) A ‘Lion King‘ meme, so stop being such sensitive you snowflakes, 2) A young, rogue staffer is to blame, 3) The President posted it without viewing it in its entirety, but no apology is forthcoming because the portion about the 2020 Big Lie Election Conspiracy is true. And there you have it — a despicable presentation by shameless, malignant racists. Roxane Gay on Bluesky punches back with her take: 1) It was not an accident, 2) It was not a staffer, 3) While the president may have dementia, his racism is not due to dementia, 4) He isn’t sorry; he means every racist thought he shares, 5) His base agrees with him, 6) He will do it again, 7) No one in power will hold him accountable.

Anthony Davis also fires back on his Substack post entitled ‘This Is Exactly Who We Are,’ subtitled, ‘Trump’s post depicting the Obamas as apes is not new.’ He writes, “Every time Donald Trump does something overtly racist, a familiar chorus rises up from pundits, politicians, and the professionally aghast: ‘This is not who we are as Americans.’ It’s a comforting phrase. It reassures the speaker that the rot is external, temporary, an infection rather than a condition. And yet, after nearly a decade of Trump’s racial provocations — rewarded, normalized, and repeatedly excused — the line sounds less like a moral claim and more like a lie we tell ourselves to avoid reckoning with reality. Trump’s repost of a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes should have been disqualifying on its face. The imagery is not subtle. It draws on one of the oldest racist tropes in Western history, a dehumanizing comparison used to justify enslavement, segregation, and violence. That the targets were the country’s first Black president and First Lady only sharpened the insult. This was not edgy humor or political satire. It was naked racial contempt.”

Elliot Kirschner prefaces his Through the Fog post on Substack with ‘venality and vanity, hatred and hubris, and farce and fascism.’ He questions whether we are able to take in the scale of this miserable tableau as we seesaw “between the ridiculous and the reprehensible, feeling the urge to both laugh and cry, recoil and bear witness.” His worry is that one of the most enduring failures of the MAGA era has been the inability of everyone to find an aperture wide enough to let in the full extent of Trump’s moral, psychological, constitutional, temperamental unfitness for the office of president. Kirschner concludes that, “He would fail even the lowest bar for any role of significance or power in a fair, decent, and just society. We have never seen in a president such a toxic mixture of petulance, pettiness, puerility, and perversity. Metaphors struggle to keep pace. Whatever bounds of credulity we inherited from past generations are stretched to a breaking point by what is before us now.”

As authoritarianism expert, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, writes in her New York Times essay, “Trump is falling into the same trap that has undone authoritarian-minded leaders throughout history — he believes his own hype, despite declining approval ratings.” Ben-Ghiat, author of ‘Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present’, has followed strongman megalomania and observed the adverse effects it has on leaders and their governments, and in her lectures at New York University, she describes the phenomenon as “autocratic backfire.” Trump has fallen into this trap by cutting himself off from expert advice and objective feedback, then “doubling down and engaging in even riskier behavior.” Ben-Ghiat sees the result in “a disillusioned population that loses faith in the leader and elites who begin to rethink their support,” citing Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Russian President Vladimir Putin as historical examples of the pattern she sees emerging around Donald Trump. Drawing parallels between Trump and past dictators, she notes that the president’s pompous self-praise echoes a fascist slogan from Mussolini’s Italy: “Mussolini is always right.”

Garry Kasparov writes on his ‘The Next Move‘ blog that though we are seeing the evisceration of the American news media with its alarming headlines and push notifications amid eroding journalistic standards, his personal antidote to being overwhelmed is in reading history. While this doesn’t guarantee a happy ending for the present situation, it can provide structure to strategies to be drawn from those who experienced similarities in the past. Authoritarians try to cultivate a sense of aimlessness by committing outrage after outrage, normalizing transgressions and numbing the senses — a new Watergate every hour, as Kasparov terms it. Though consequences are in short supply at present, we can only hope that the same fates await Trump and his MAGA crooks that befell Tricky Dick Nixon and his covert operatives.

Trump’s range of destruction and debasement is purposely overwhelming — the chaos serves his quest for power, to stay on the offensive, to move fast and break things such as doors, windows, bones, and skulls with no apologies. Never let the opposition gain a foothold and keep those federal forces on the march into local communities such as Minneapolis, and ignore the voices of dissent. The president did make a concession by replacing the Nazi-like Bovino with Border Czar Homan in the Twin Cities area, who then announced that 700 ICE agents would be sent packing — only 2,000 more to go, points out Jimmy Kimmel! In his monologue, Kimmel said, “Never in my lifetime did I imagine that we’d be celebrating a troop withdrawal from Minnesota, but 700 agents, as we speak, are packing up their 48″ waist, 28″ inch inseam Carhartt pants and their XXL Punisher T-shirts and heading home. Get ready, 700 moms of ICE agents. Your boys are coming back home to the basement.” And we might conclude that if the moms don’t lock the basement doors, her Proud Boy(s) will be using their baseball bats and flag staffs to disrupt the midterm elections.

The Lincoln Project sarcastically commended Trump for “firing the guy who walked like a Nazi, talked like a Nazi, and even dressed like a Nazi after he oversaw his SECOND murder in January. Kudos, fatso. You did the thing everybody else would’ve done a month ago. Second, we’d like to express our (expected) disappointment with Trump’s follow-up hire, Tom Homan. Also known as the only guy in this administration who gives Trump a run for his money as the most corrupt person in Washington. Come on, Tom. $50,000 in a fast food bag? From undercover agents? On video? And your defense is ‘I didn’t do it’? No wonder you’re in this bonehead administration. Seriously, though. Did Trump have to hire another criminal to head this thing up? Did he have to take the most dysfunctional and deadly area of our government and say, ‘Yeah, put the bribery guy in charge’?”

Satirist Andy Borowitz had to get in on this one: “As part of the DHS drawdown from Minneapolis, on Thursday Tom Homan ordered all 700 ICE agents leaving the city to return their signing bonuses to him in a paper bag. In a memo sent to all departing officers, the border czar instructed them to place $50,000 in a paper bag from the restaurant chain Cava, and meet him in the DHS parking lot after sundown. ‘And make sure no one’s freaking filming us,’ he added. While some ICE agents grumbled about transferring their signing bonuses to Homan, he sternly reminded them, ‘Taking away people’s freedom isn’t free.'”

Nick Turse on The Intercept has an unsettling story about the use of the ace of spades playing card — popularly known as a ‘death card‘ — by ICE officers in Eagle County, Colorado. Motor vehicles were discovered on the roadside, engines idling, hazard light flashing, and no occupants or drivers nearby. Family members arrived at the scene to discover that loved ones had been stopped by the notorious ‘fake traffic stops‘ used by ICE agents who then leave behind a customized ace of spades that read ‘ICE Denver Field Office‘ in place of the abducted vehicle occupants. “Leaving behind a racist death card after targeting Latino workers is an act of intimidation. This is not about public safety. It is about fear and control. It’s rooted in a very long history of racial violence,” said president Alex Sánchez of Voces Unitas, an immigrant rights group. “We are disgusted by ICE’s actions in Eagle County.”

During the Vietnam War, US troops were known to embellish corpses with ‘death cards,’ and the US Playing Card Company furnished thousands of these cards free to servicemen who requested them. Alex Sánchez has been given identical cards found by two different families, with the impression that the cards appear to be designed solely for use by the Denver ICE agents. A DHS spokesperson told the local NBC affiliate that the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility will “conduct a thorough investigation and will take appropriate and swift action.” One federal official pointed out that the ace of spades, in Spades, is the trump card and it’s possible the death card is an homage to President Trump — “these guys are not too subtle, to be honest.” Colorado’s Senator John Hickenlooper denounced the ICE calling cards since they have a history of being used by white supremacist groups for intimidation.

“Uh oh. Somebody’s about to get audited,” Sha Val posted on Bluesky after Illinois Representative Jonathan Jackson prayed to God to improve the president’s moral failings, with Trump standing just a few feet away after he had addressed the gathering at the bipartisan National Prayer Breakfast. Jackson prayed that God might open the president’s heart to greater compassion as he stood behind the representative, eyes cast down with pure venom in his closed heart, his eyebrows raising as if had been scolded. Jackson was applauded for his courage to call out the president amid the gathering of religious and political leaders with one observer saying, “This brave man has single-handedly salvaged what little was left of any genuine spirituality at the breakfast.”. “This is speaking truth to power in the best tradition of MLK,” applauded retired librarian morereading.” “Of course, we’ll hear about it in a late night rant,” posted Bluesky user Sure Bongiovi. “When you’re almost 80, old ducks rarely change their ways, especially malignant dementia-addled narcissistic ones.” “Representative Jackson: ‘We pray that you lead this president to greater levels of compassion,'” wrote Illinois State professor Yusuf Sarfati. “God: ‘Sorry, that’s above my pay grade.'”

A writer on Quora posted: “Trump has been vile since birth, and parading it for decades as a well-known public figure, MAGA seeing exactly what we see in Trump — the difference is they love it! So it’s best to face up to certain realities: MAGA worships Trump because of, not in spite of how vile he is; no amount of proof in the vileness area, not even some unlikely smoking gun surfacing from the recent flood of Epstein files, is going to dissuade the worshippers.” It’s pointless to expect MAGA’s regretfulness, since they are the ones most responsible for our current state. If the political pendulum swings one more time, we may yet save our democracy. If it doesn’t, worshipping Trump may soon become what is expected of all of us — only in public, of course.

In his analysis, The Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, David Smith, says Trump exposed the religious right’s “devil’s pact” in his performance at the National Prayer Breakfast, hurling insults at political enemies, taking swipes at “transgender insanity,” and quoting right-wing evangelist, Baptist Robert Jeffries. Trump hasn’t forgotten that Jeffries praised him, saying, “He may not be as good with the Bible as some of them. He may not have read the Bible as much as some of them. In fact, he may not have ever read the Bible, but he will be a much stronger messenger for us and he will get things done that no other man has the ability to get done.” Trump boasted, “You know, I didn’t want to admit anything, but that was very interesting and I think we’ve gotten more done than anybody could have ever gotten done.” So sayeth the religious right’s chosen instrument to turn the tide against liberal, godless America. Oh, and don’t worry about those shards of the Ten Commandments strewn in the pathway!

Emily Singer of Daily Kos covered the recent press conference in defense of Donald Trump’s “partying” — as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche debased himself — with Jeffrey Epstein and underaged girls that were trafficked. Blanche offered that it wasn’t a crime to “party,” nor is it “a crime to email with Mr. Epstein.” Trump and his wife, once close friends of Epstein, are referenced more than 38,000 times in files released so far according to The New York Times. Despite Blanche’s discounting that Trump’s actions aren’t necessarily a crime, on a basic human level, it looks horrible to have been a close associate of Epstein, traveling to his party island steeped in criminality. Democratic Representative Robert Garcia called Blanche’s comments “gross and sick” and he owes an apology to all the survivors who are seeking justice. Singer says, “Ultimately, the latest dump of Epstein files looks really bad for Trump and the people he surrounds himself with. And Blanche’s tone-deaf defense won’t do anything to change that.”

Andy Borowitz gets the last word on the Epstein affair as seen across the pond: “King Charles III of the United Kingdom announced on Tuesday that he was cancelling his upcoming trip to the United States and would send his disgraced brother, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, in his place. Charles gave no reason for the abrupt cancellation, saying only that Andrew was a ‘better fit’ for a visit to Donald J. Trump. ‘I’m sure they’ll have plenty to reminisce about,’ Charles said. ‘And if they run out of activities, Trump can always give Andrew a Sharpie and put him to work redacting those bloody files.'”