EVERYMAN, PREDICTION, GIDDY-UP

A ceremony was held at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas last Friday, during which President Trump awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to the Artemis II crew, recognizing the four astronauts for their historic lunar flyby in April during which they set a new human spaceflight distance record of 252,756 miles from Earth. According to journalist Aaron Rupar, the president was more than an hour late, so in the interim the attendees were treated to long videos and ambient music as they waited for the MeMeMe routine to play out. Rupar live tweeted that once his speech began, he spoke to complete silence — no applause or reactions to his “brazenly partisan speech.”

“This is one of those instances where Trump’s inability to deliver a speech that’s under a half hour long really hurts him. Nobody wants to hear him riff about Venezuela and Iran for an hour+ at an event that’s supposed to be nonpartisan and in honor of other people. Complete silence at the NASA Center as Trump brags about the stock market and touts fake foreign investment numbers. Just a brutally awkward speech that is going over like farts in church,” reported Rupar. Instead of honoring the Artemis II astronauts, he talked about himself, making it a partisan speech of lies, playing his greatest hits, a total lead balloon to the scientists, astronauts, staff and their families, who sat in stony silence.

Daily Dose of Democracy’s take on the event reported that the president’s “demented brain STRUGGLED to come up with things to say to the well-educated crowd, his fryer-grease-soaked cerebellum coming up with ‘I had an uncle who was a great scientist, a great man. Was at MIT for 41 years, Dr. John Trump. And he loved space. He use to tell me about space, space, all space. He would throw in the word ‘nuclear’ every once in a while. But he loved space. I guess we have genetically, we sort of, believe in that stuff. I love it. I find it so interesting, so amazing. It’s very special.’ If there is one thing Donald Trump 100% does not care about, it’s space. There are no show tunes, fast food joints, big tough guys, scantily clad women, concrete, golden toilets, golf courses, or steam airplane catapults in space. Side note: we WOULD LOVE to hear more about the science of uncle-genes. Sigh. Houston…we have a problem.”

Trump’s struggling “to come up with things to say” is a bit more concerning to John Paul Garrison, a Georgia-based clinical and forensic psychologist, who analyzed footage of the president’s speech, in what he called the “most concerning footage” he has seen yet. His observations of various neurological concerns and some steep decline over the past few months compared to the Space Center speech “is extremely concerning.” As Trump boasted about the stock market’s performance, he briefly paused mid-sentence as his body twitched, in Garrison’s opinion, a neurological event that crosses both hemispheres in his brain. The psychologist describes his right arm jerking, eyes blinking, voice hesitating, and then the left arm jerking — not simple muscle spasms, and no sign of pain — which he terms a ‘focal aware seizure,’ or a brief epileptic event. Garrison is insisting this is not a diagnosis, but it is consistent with those who have suffered strokes, clearly neurological.

Trump did manage to announce the establishment of the US Space Academy, which will be modeled after traditional military service academies like West Point, for the purpose of training graduates for the US Space Force, NASA, and the commercial spaceflight industry. A specific location for the academy has not yet been selected, but look for a quid pro quo as Trump considers offers from contenders.

Among the cast of characters created by the late author and cartoonist Jules Feiffer was Everyman, an astute observer of the state of the nation dispensing his thoughts and ideas in serial panels. During the Reagan presidency, Everyman shared these ideas: 1. Truth hurts; 2. Before truth, this was a happy country; 3. But look what truth did to us in Vietnam; 4. Look how the truth fouled up the 1960s and the 1970s; 5. Truth has changed us from a nation of optimists to a nation of pessimists; 6. So when the president makes it a crime for Government workers to go public with truth, I say, ‘Hoorah!‘; 7. And when he bars the press from reporting our wars, I say, ‘About time!‘; 8. America doesn’t need any more truth; 9. It needs to feel better. Columnist Molly Ivins wrote, “Ronald Reagan, Feiffer observed elsewhere, represented a return to innocence; a new moral, ethical, and political Victorianism. Reagan’s Victorianism transcends truth. It circumvents politics. It gives America what it demands in a time of insoluble crisis: fairy tales.” With Trump’s embrace of space we have added yet another dimension for more of his exaggerations and lies. Tell us another one, Uncle Donny!

Thankfully, those attending the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks at Ground Zero won’t be subjected to any of President Trump’s MeMeMe routines. His team made advance site visits to Manhattan, as Trump was expressing to the planners an interest in speaking at the event; but since it is established policy to disallow politicians from speaking at anniversary events, he will have to riff somewhere else — be forewarned that he will be at the Pentagon, coming from the weekend’s midterm convention in Dallas with new stories/lies to spread. A 9/11 Memorial and Museum statement said that the president is “always welcome to attend the ceremony,” however, VP Vance will be representing the administration in Manhattan.

A few weeks after launching his war with Iran, the president said that he had “predicted” that “Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center,” a year before the attacks. “I said, ‘You better get him. He’s a bad guy.’ I watched him be interviewed one time, and I said, ‘That’s a bad guy. You’d better get him. One year before exactly. I wrote it in a book,” Trump insisted. “You can even check, about a year before the World Trade Center came down.” According to a CNN fact check, Trump’s 2000 book ‘The America We Deserve‘ only mentioned bin Laden once and did not call for him to be killed or warn of any attack. Tell us another one, Uncle Donny!

Trump envisioned himself as a caped crusader, coming to the rescue of consumers in the personage of Hamburger Helper, as he initiated a plan to import beef from Argentina. Beef prices have been escalating, so the president suspended tariffs on up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef for the next three months, throwing Capitol Hill Republicans into a full-blown meltdown. Promising to sell it at 25% below current market prices may sound gratifying to consumers but America’s ranchers and cattlemen — a hefty portion of the MAGA base — charge that they will be destroyed. Senator Cotton of Arkansas was vocal about this plan, writing on social media that market prices are high because cattle herds are small, as producers struggle against meatpacking monopolies.

Some staff members inside Congress are saying Trump is “an idiot who doesn’t understand economics and doesn’t understand math, who simply doesn’t grasp the laws of supply and demand.” One House Republican said that Trump is “Democrats’ secret weapon for success.” Additionally, onlookers are disturbed given Argentina’s recent history of shipping potentially health-hazardous beef, with China suspending a shipment after detecting the presence of chloramphenicol, and antibiotic that carries rare, but documented, risks of fatal side effects. Musician and social activist Bill Madden posted on X about the China incident, writing, “With serial-lying psychopath Trump as president, God help us.”

A statement released by Good Ranchers, a Texas-based direct-to-consumer meat company, says, “This isn’t alarmism. History is worth paying attention to. In 2013, Europe went through a massive food fraud scandal when products labeled beef tested anywhere from 30% to 100% horse meat. The package said beef. It wasn’t beef.” Wyoming-based beef company, Meriwhether Farms, issued a sarcastic warning to consumers earlier this year: “Chloramphenicol is banned in the US because it can cause fatal aplastic anemia in humans, but don’t worry, the US has increased beef imports from Argentina — without implementing mandatory country of origin labeling requirements!”

Andy Borowitz writes in his book, ‘Profiles in Ignorance‘, that “Donald J. Trump was born into third generation family wealth. His grandfather Friedrich Trump struck it rich during the Klondike Gold Rush not by mining gold but by ‘mining the miners,’ in the words of Trump family historian Gwenda Blair. After thousands of would-be prospectors abandoned their worn-out steeds on a treacherous mountain pass aptly named Dead Horse Gulch, Friedrich saw his big chance to break into the restaurant industry. In a forerunner of Trump Steaks, he repurposed the horseflesh as tasty entrées for famished Gold Rushers, thus launching a portfolio of businesses that soon included a highly regarded Arctic brothel. Inheriting the commercial savvy that enabled Friedrich to sell quarter-pound ‘horseberders,’ his son Fred created a thriving real estate business in New York, building thousands of apartments. ‘My father taught me everything I know,'” Donald later said. Well, giddy-up!

Not content to let his earlier Venezuelan intrusion lie dormant, Trump posted that he has locked up majority control of more than 65B barrels of that country’s proven oil reserves — the biggest oil deal in history, in ALL CAPS, he claims. The problem is that this is a geological estimate, not oil that can be pumped, refined, and sold, since it will take enormous investments and years of infrastructure work before any benefit can be realized. So, Trump’s promise of quickly lowering of prices can only be seen as another letdown. Because the Venezuelan crude is a heavy, degraded oil, a ‘sour’ oil high in sulfur content, most US refineries aren’t able to handle it, requiring new refineries that will take up to fifteen years to build.

Venezuelan leader Rodriguez announced that investment of a hundred billion dollars is backing the move, but nobody knows where it’s coming from — not Exxon, not Conoco — perhaps a newly created US entity, which would need congressional approval. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chevron and other US companies were nearing a deal to invest billions (not a hundred billion), but most companies are leery since Venezuela nationalized their assets in 2007, as they fight for restitution. Exxon declared the country as uninvestable without more durable investment protections in place.

There has been no public accounting of the $8B for 100M barrels of oil which has moved through the system in the months since the US took control of Venezuela’s oil exports. Supposedly the money sits in a Qatari bank account, but the Trump administration has failed to explain what safeguards exist to keep that cash from accumulating in a Trump slush fund. Actual production is stagnant — about 1.1M barrels per day — with risk analyst Brett Erickson calling it a blatantly corrupt deal and a clear robbery of Venezuela’s resources against the will of its own people, as he warns that the struggling population may see the truth and respond accordingly.

Economists estimate the ‘deal’ will generate tax revenue of only $3.22 per barrel of oil — less than half that of historical earnings — an unusually low figure and a complete lack of transparency. A Venezuelan opposition figure, unaligned with the previous Maduro regime, calls this a massive land grab by a rapacious mafioso US. We have to remember that Trump had praise for the so-called Freedom Fuel Network for pricing gas at $3.47 at the pump in about 20 locations, as they undercut other marketers. Turns out that Mansfield Oil Company filed a federal lawsuit against KRSM Inc. and its president, alleging KRSM took more than a million gallons of fuel valued at nearly $4M, then never paid up as it supplied the Freedom Fuel Stations. Hmmm…suspicious?

Calling it Trump’s Venezuela ‘steal,’ Ben Meiselas of MeidasTouch calls the plan “absurd and dangerous,” in misleading us to believe there is suddenly a gusher of oil to relieve our pain at the pump. Private investment companies are not identified, nor are there commitments, written agreements, and no congressional authorization for Pentagon involvement. Suddenly this underground cache will become part of the American energy supply? “Yet, Trump throws out these insane and gigantic numbers because that what he’s always done. Announce the biggest number imaginable and hope everybody repeats it before anybody asks whether it’s real. The point right now is to simply create the perception that enormous new oil supplies are coming. It’s part of this broader effort to manipulate expectations around energy prices while pretending everything is going to plan. Obviously, we’ve seen versions of this with Iran too. Announce deals that don’t really exist, claims shipping is returning to normal, talk about tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz as though everything is back to where it was, even as the numbers tell a very different story,” charges Meiselas.

“Let’s be clear: this isn’t a win,” wrote Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen in a social media post. “This is proof Trump put our service members at risk to get Venezuelan oil for his billionaire buddies. Putting our soldiers’ lives on the line for private profit is a gross dereliction of his constitutional duty.” Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, accused the president of using Maduro’s ouster to “control Venezuelan oil.” “Will prices come down for Americans? Who knows, but not likely as much as Trump has forced them up through his idiotic Iran War. But here’s a guarantee — this will pad the pockets of Trump family and Big Oil companies and delay transition to cleaner energy. Bottom line — using our troops for a private oil grab is corruption at epic scale,” Kaine wrote on X.

Well, Trump has now scooped The Onion and Andy Borowitz with the satirical profundity of the season as he ‘changes’ the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America, then heads them off with the suggestion that the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans may be next in his sights for an assignation. As Arwa Mahdawi of The Guardian suggests, “Don’t mention the war! Or the economy, for that matter. Or the Epstein files. Or Natalie Harp. Or ‘affordability.’ Best not to talk about anything that affects ordinary people our embarrasses the president, really. Instead, let’s all rejoice in Trump’s latest triumph: renaming Lake Ontario, which is shared by Canada and the US, as Lake America. On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to America-fy the lake’s name on US maps and documents, which is an excellent use of time and resources. I suppose we can at least be thankful that the president, who is trying to slap his own name on everything from airports to the Kennedy Center, didn’t decree that the body of water be called Lake Trump.”

With trade negotiations between Canada and the US collapsing, that’ll show ’em we mean business! A US president ordering the name change of a Great Lake in order to antagonize a close ally would have been headline news in a normal timeline — now it’s just another Silly Thursday stunt that governmental entities will ignore, because it demonstrates that Trump is out of ideas, a desperate, isolated, weak and floundering wannabe god-king. Of course, MAGA believes it will lower our grocery bills, decrease gas prices and make healthcare more affordable as we plunge into the abyss of uncharted stupidity. One poster on social media suggested we make another lake name change — how does Lake Barack Obama is Superior sound to you? No matter how many executive orders Trump signs for inclusion in his Mar-a-Lago-bound file box, Lake Ontario will be Lake Ontario long after we stop calling Trump ‘president.’