Bad polls, bad takes, and aliens

If you want to know how bad things are getting for Donald Trump (R-Sedition), last week the man said he would be ordering the government to release whatever classified information they have on the existence of space aliens—and nobody cared. You probably didn't even hear about it. But former president Barack Obama had opined to an interviewer that he believed alien life probably existed somewhere, given the odds of such things, and that pissed Trump off because he claimed Obama was divulging "classified information" by saying so, and Trump fired off a social media post announcing the move in an apparent attempt to seize back the initiative on space alien discourse or whatever the f--k was going through his mind.

And none of it made much of a blip, because we're long past the days when "president announces intention to release secret truths about space aliens" can muster up more than a moment's interest. That's just an average Friday now. If aliens landed on the White House lawn tomorrow, there's a good chance it wouldn't even be the third most bizarre story of that day. We're used to bizarre. Bizarre is our lives now.

As it becomes clear that Jeffrey Epstein acted as as pivot point for a much larger and more global ring of corruption, sex trafficking, and elite immunity than our government ever admitted to (see: Monday's arrest of former British ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson), and as the Supreme Court belatedly decides that Trump's ability to break whatever laws he wants to should not extend to imposing illegal tariffs that threaten the retirement funds of Supreme Court justices, and as Trump's own White House leaks a top general's warning that Trump's desired war with Iran may go very sideways very fast if he actually goes through with it, Trump has been scrambling to find solid ground in a news environment that he used to reliably control.

And it's just not happening for him. No matter what he bellows, he's not regaining control of the news cycle. There's just too much happening at once, and too many people are too fed up.

The federal assault on Minneapolis might well end up a turning point, because Trump's aides meant it to be a violence-infused celebration of white nationalist domination and instead it launched a national resistance movement that saw everyday Americans stomp out of their homes to not just express disgust with that violence, but to physically impede it. And no matter how intimidating federal shock troops may dress or how eager for violence they may be, it is impossible to project an air of invincible authority when you're being chased around the city by moms armed only with whistles and baskets of snacks.

Trump's poll numbers aren't just bad, after the murders of two Minnesotans at the hands of Border Patrol "commander" Greg Bovino's teams. They're catastrophic.

Americans are especially fed up with the white nationalist administration's would-be signature issue.

Republicans are hemorrhaging support. At some point before the midterms they might actually start to care.

In the meantime, Trump's incoherence keeps getting worse.

There is, in fact, a real possibility that some large percentage of Trump's military orders are based on hallucinations.

Nobody understands what he means here. The picture is an A.I.-generated image of the Navy hospital ship Mercy (currently in drydock in Alabama), there has been no medical issue in Greenland, a place where medical care is free to all residents, and it is unclear why Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (who Trump appointed an "envoy" to Greenland in an equally bizarre move) would have any involvement in such a deployment.

It's completely incoherent from top to bottom, nobody can figure out what in flying monkey hell the man is talking about. Or, as the New York Times so delicately puts it: "It was not clear why Mr. Trump planned to assist Greenland with its health care."

And again, this is our lives now. Nobody in the party or the media seems to believe it poses any notable problem to have a president announcing incoherently premised, possibly entirely imaginary military orders while wobbling his way towards another perhaps-war.

If there is one consistency in the last few weeks of coverage, it's that inside the Trump administration, things can always get worse.

That's the (checks notes) Trump administration's Director of the FBI, Kash Patel, crashing the U.S. Olympic hockey team's gold medal celebration party and chugging their drinks. You didn't know that was a duty of the Director of the FBI? You thought he would be sitting in an office somewhere, doing FBI stuff? Pfft.

Of course not. In these modern times, the head of the FBI has only two jobs. The first is to fly around on jets; the second is to crash other people's parties.

In this particular case it feels like hockey stolen valor, but it could always get even weirder!

Look, at this point I can't begin to tell you what the State of the Union is going to look like. Will Kash be chugging a six pack in the front row, or will he still be in Italy? Will Donald single out Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts for jeers? Will the man just wander off at some point, only to be found later in a Capitol broom closet?

Dunno. Don't care. But we're long past the point where Donald and his scruffy minions can pretend to have control of the national narrative no matter how much our wealth-captured media tries to help him do it, and that's not nothing. Fascism is premised on looking tough and acting tough, and all of this? It's not tough.

He looks incompetent and pathetic. His cabinet looks incompetent and pathetic. And there's really not much a would-be fascist can do to come back from that.