All of Trump's horses and all of Trump's men

There has been precious little good news of late on any front. The Supreme Court is at this point almost comically corrupt in their largely unexplained legal interventions benefiting their Big Special Boy. That Big Special Boy is trying very hard to normalize military deployments to our own cities.

Oh, and Congress has reconvened after their long break, and the first item on the Republican agenda is the same as it was when they last left: covering up for child predators. It's like Republicanism finally found its true calling. Forget all of that nonsense about small government or budgets or corporate deregulation, it turns out House Speaker Mike Johnson was put on this earth to pretend that Donald Trump's perverted and signed drawing in his self-described best friend and notorious pedophile freak's birthday book was uuuuuuuh maybe a forgery? One that was kept hidden for over 20 years so it could be used against Trump only after he won his second of two elections, for some reason?

Yeah, I think I speak for all of us when I say: Shut up, dweeb.

But there is some weird news, too, and I'm going to count this one as not entirely bad news even though it will probably hasten Trump's descent into madness nearly as much as not getting a Nobel Peace Prize has. On Tuesday evening, Trump deigned to be driven a few hundred feet to a steakhouse and seafood restaurant close to the White House. He brought along burgeoning international criminal Marco Rubio, professional raving drunkard Pete Hegseth, and JD Vance for some reason.

And the first thing that happened as the gaggle went to sit down inside? Reader, they got booed.

Donald Trump faced protesters shouting “Free DC! Free Palestine! Trump is the Hitler of our time!” as he dined at a Washington restaurant, videos posted online showed.

The US president approached the shouting protesters in the restaurant, pausing a few feet away from them for a few moments, nodding and smiling without offering a response.

Seconds later, Trump gestured for the area to be cleared out, saying: “Come on, let’s go.”

Secret Service agents then moved the protesters, who waved Palestinian flags. Others in the restaurant can be heard booing or chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

Code Pink claimed credit for the interruption, which was brief.

You can read through accounts in multiple media outlets, and most of them seem eager to downplay the extent to which Dear Leader was rattled. (The video showed he recovered his composure when it became clear the protesters were going to be content with chanting and there was no real threat.) But yeah, things were a bit touch and go there for a moment.

Yeah, those are the faces of two people who aren't having a good time. And those are the eyes of two people who might just be beginning to realize that the price of being an authoritarian's lackey is never being able to feel "safe" in public again.

Sigh. There is so, so much that's weird about this story. I am not exactly an expert on This Stuff, but does it strike nobody else as strange to have the President of the United States, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of State all popping in to the same seafood restaurant for the same meal? Who was the designated survivor, in this setup?

I have watched a lot of movies, and there is one movie in particular that warned us all of the dangers involved in having every important person in a group all eat seafood at the same time. That movie is Airplane!, and in its gritty telling of the enshittification of industries and growing lack of institutional competence I believe it to have been prophetic.

What we have here is the top national security officials in the country—well, and JD Vance—all one polonium-dusted handtowel or radioactive bag of shrimp away from being put in flag-draped coffins and displayed in the Rotunda. And for what? The whole stunt was Trump's attempt to claim that he had cleansed the city of crime by having the National Guard wander around picking up trash and mulching trees for a month.

His motorcade traveled the short distance to Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab on 15th Street in the Northwest quadrant of the city after weeks of the president boasting about mobilizing federal authorities and the military that he says have made Washington “a safe zone”.

Cheers were heard as the president stepped out of his limo, along with a smattering of boos and chants from protesters opposing US policy in support of Israel in its war with Hamas in Gaza.

“We’re standing right in the middle of DC, which as you know about, over the last year, was a very unsafe place – over the last 20 years – and now it’s got virtually no crime,” Trump told reporters.

He added that he would not have stood out “in the middle of the street” as recently as a couple of months ago.

Listen to this creepy lying old man brag about doing what everyone else in DC does every day, all the time, and without the benefit of an army of Secret Service agents standing between them and whoever else happens to be using the same sidewalk. The man wobbles his way into Joe's Seafood, for Christ's sake, and thinks he just planted the flag on Iwo Jima.

No wonder these people are all terrified of subways, if it takes them a month and the National Guard to work up the courage to go to Joe's Seafood.

Everything about this story is goofy. You might wonder how Code Pink, an organization infamous for disrupting political events everywhere, learned that a good chunk of the current authoritarian Cabinet was going to have a photo op at Joe's. Well, it's because the Secret Service swarmed the damn place earlier in the day, so it was pretty damn clear that's what Trump's destination was going to be.

Does nobody else find it strange that in the middle of a supposed crime-ending law enforcement surge in DC, in a time when the sitting president is considered by a large chunk of the American public to be a coup-supporting bribe-seeking criminal threat to the republic, that we might have been one dedicated "protester" away from one of these officials getting a steak knife to the face? The Secret Service may have wanded the public to ensure nobody could get near the group with a Perfectly Authorized And Patriotic Assault Rifle That God Himself Says Americans Are Allowed To Strap On, but this small group of protesters showed that the only true protection is going to be for Trump to stay sealed off from the public he hates for the rest of his shortening natural life.

What about the kitchen? What if one of the cooks had a fentanyl? What if a random line cook slipped a fentanyl into the table's meals, and all those important people touched the fentanyl, and everybody exploded and died? (I am not very clear on the fentanyls but my understanding from police reports is that if you so much as look at a fentanyl you are likely to explode and/or die.)

How pissed off must Trump be, right now? All of this work to look like a tough guy, and he jumped like a rabbit when protesters popped up two tables over—as well he should have.

Nothing about this story sits right, it's all just too weird in the way that every story involving these cretins is weird. What we do know, however, is that every time JD Vance, Rubio, or Hegseth shows up to promote their little National Guard stunt they get booed and ridiculed by actual DC residents.

They're never going to have the compliant public they want, not ever. No matter what laws they pass, no matter how wide they cast the security net, they are never going to be rid of Americans making fun of them. And that's probably going to make Trump even more insane than he already is.