Happy Cinco De Mayo, fellow American peasants!

Today is the day Mexicans celebrate their country’s 1862 victory in the battle of Puebla over the forces of the French emperor, Napoleon III, whom they whooped just as the Haitians had done his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804. The war, over Mexico pausing its European debt repayments, began a year into the U.S. civil war. It was France’s last gasp at establishing a foothold for monarchy in the country, via a financial scheme between Napoleon and the archduke of Austria who for no good reason at all, was also the Emperor of Mexico. Just go with me on it, it’s a long, complicated story. Bottom lining it: the emperors did not fare well.

Which brings me to Donald Trump, who last week all-but announced to American children: “you greedy little monsters don’t need toys at Christmas, you have the Glory of Your Golden Emperor to enjoy! Hail him as he bears the crown as the only dolly you require…”

So sayeth Trump Antoinette! And yes I know Louis was technically the one in charge as the French monarchy lost its head, literally, but it was Marie who had the poor taste to say the quiet part out loud. Just like Don:

President Donald Trump on Wednesday defended his tariff approach with China by saying American children might end up with fewer toys — and the toys they do end up with might cost more.

During a Cabinet meeting at the White House, Trump was asked if he had spoken with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the commander-in-chief contended that China's factories "aren't doing business."

"They made a trillion dollars with [former President Joe] Biden … selling us stuff … much of it we don't need," Trump said. "Somebody said, 'Oh the shelves are going to be open.' Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls."

"Maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally," he added.

In recent weeks, there have been growing fears that a prolonged US-China trade war will cause major supply chain issues, as Trump earlier this month slapped 145% tariffs on Chinese goods.

China responded by upping the tariff rate on US goods to 125%, but on Wednesday, Reuters reported that the Chinese government has quietly exempted some products from the sky-high tariffs. The exact details of the exempted products are not yet clear.

This as U.S. ports, including in Los Angeles and Seattle are increasingly idle, meaning there will be less on the shelves for all consumers, and not just the crying American children at Christmastime. Bah Trumpbug!

To Donald and his yapping, scurrying minions like scary dolly Stephen Miller, the suffering of the American people under their mad dash toward a 19th century factory economy, with rampant measles, no vaccine mandates, no Sesame Street with all of its divisive “inclusiveness” and “tolerance” but nice, big internment camps for brown migrants and a creepy, 1930s Germany-style national registry for autistic people is minor stuff. You know … minor … like that whole “due process” nonsense, which Trump isn’t even sure applies to things he as president wants to do, like deport a bunch of brown people without hearings, or in defiance of judges’ orders …

I mean sure … it looks like Don and his Project 2025 buddies are erecting a white Christian nationalist Handmaids Tale America (under his eye…) with forced birth states threatening to imprison women for miscarrying the national offspring or taking anti-pregnancy pills, police snatching brown folks off the streets and shipping them off to domestic jails far from where they were grabbed, stateside concentration camps or foreign gulags due to the color of their skin or their political beliefs , no Black history in state education or in the official federal records of the nation, no books by Black people, gays or women but two copies of Mein Kampf approved for checkout at the military academy libraries, no trans individuals (THEY DO NOT EXIST!), the seizure of cultural institutions in Washington to infuse them with Christian Patriotism, and what sure looks like a scheme to corrupt both the military and the Department of the Interior, sell off our federal lands for “sovereign wealth” cash, and hawk any treasures that honor nonwhite Americans, while ushering in a shit economy skidding toward recession, where ordinary people can barely afford what little is on the half empty, tariff-addled store shelves.

Never mind all of that! What’s really important is that nobody blame Trump for their misery. Instead, The American People should sit back in their deteriorating Barcaloungers and enjoy him cosplaying as the Vicar of Christ, golfing a bunch, cheersing with his billionaire friends in the Oval, gwocking crypto billions for his personal enrichment and luxuriating in the apparently “rigged election” that brought him back to Glorious Power…

Your periodic reminder that Donald Trump bankrupted his inherited family real estate development business six times:

Trump’s Taj Mahal opened in April 1990 in Atlantic City, but six months later, “defaulted on interest payments to bondholders as his finances went into a tailspin,” The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow found. In July 1991, Trump’s Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy. He could not keep up with debts on two other Atlantic City casinos, and those two properties declared bankruptcy in 1992. A fourth property, the Plaza Hotel in New York, declared bankruptcy in 1992 after amassing debt.

PolitiFact uncovered two more bankruptcies filed after 1992, totaling six. Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts filed for bankruptcy again in 2004, after accruing about $1.8 billion in debt. Trump Entertainment Resorts also declared bankruptcy in 2009, after being hit hard during the 2008 recession.

And before you say “he’s just good at playing the market,” allow me to reiterate that Donald Trump bankrupted THREE casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where basically the whole economy IS CASINOS. He was such a shitty business man, he took the $413 million fortune he inherited from his tax-dodging father and drove it into a $916 million sinkhole. And that was in the BOOM TIME of the 1990s when even I was rolling in dough…

So when he confidently makes economic predictions based on his own “genius” 19th century-fixated policy ideas, you should do the opposite of believing him. At this point, the fact that Wall Street keeps betting on him should make us all question their intelligence.

This is a man, after all, who was found guilty of massive fraud in creating a fake university that scammed people out of millions of dollars, and of defrauding the State of New York to the tune of owing its taxpayers more than $350 million dollars of which he currently owes more than $500 million including interest (which he has still not paid) on top of the $86 million-plus dollars he still owes E. Jean Carrol for sexually abusing and then defaming her. (And that’s on top of the 34-count criminal/felon conviction he received for essentially defrauding voters in 2016 by paying off porn actress Stormy Daniels after cheating on Melania with her and then lying about it in his business records.)

Call some or even all of that “persecution” if you want. But it’s really hard to deny based on the plain facts of this man’s life — including the fact that he took the Apprentice job at a time when he really needed the money — that Donald Trump is not a capable businessman. Even if it did make sense for the government to be “run like a business” (which is actually a really stupid idea…) HE WOULD NOT BE THE BUSINESSMAN ANY SANE PERSON WHO KNOWS ANYTHING ABOUT BUSINESS WOULD CHOOSE. From the New York Times:

Ironically, Mr. Trump’s first business meltdown provided the narrative back story for the show’s introduction. Sure, he admits, surveying Moneytown from his self-branded whirlybird, he’d been through rough times. But that was “about 13 years ago.” Then, he says, “I fought back and I won, big league.”

As visual evidence, the sequence machine-guns the viewer with jackpot imagery. It shows us Mr. Trump’s name on casinos, skyscrapers and bottles of water. He works the phones, shakes hands with men in suits, watches a model on the catwalk. He is, the montage tells us, a big shot who does big things. Why would you doubt it? Look at all that gold! Look at his name everywhere!

In fact, Mr. Trump had emerged from the early ’90s greatly diminished. His business had become more about lending his name, playing the celebrity mascot — a Cap’n Crunch of capitalism, embodying a cartoon image of wealth and glamour — in order to keep the brand’s value up.

Mr. Trump’s actual financial comeback hadn’t happened yet. In fact, viewers were watching it begin before their eyes. But on TV, he looked the part, and that was all that mattered.

Mark Burnett, the producer of “Survivor,” knew how to create visceral TV rich with image and symbol. For “The Apprentice” he cast Mr. Trump, by then a fixture of New York tabloids and sitcom cameos.

Mr. Burnett knew that a reality show about business doesn’t need an actual, boring business success. It needs someone who can perform the facsimile of success on camera. That had, for years, been Mr. Trump’s job.

So yeah, he’s tanking the economy because his towering self-regard far outdistances his business and economic acumen. Flashback:

And millions of Americans choose to believe he must know something, because they’ve watched him on TV. And that, my friends, is how an empire falls. Shouts out to the right wingers triggered by my comparison of Trump’s America to a crumbling Roman empire. As the old folks say, a hit dog will holler.

Oh, and in case you missed it, here is that “rigged election” quote from the day after his 2025 inauguration…

Transcript:

I love what he said, like three Super Bowls a day for a month. That's what it is. That's really amazing when you think of it. I've never heard that expression. That's a lot. You know when we made this [plan] it was made during my term, my first term, and it was so sad because they said, 'Can you imagine? I'm [you're] not going to be president. And that's too bad.' And what happened is, they rigged the election, and I became president. So that was a good thing, that was a good thing, that was quite an achievement for both of us. So I'll be president during the World Cup.

And here is is doing it again last month:

Of course, these could be just the ravings of a 78 year old sundowning codger who can no longer get his words right, but you know … it’s a thing he apparently says on a fairly regular basis.

The Trumpmaid’s Tale

If you haven’t read the book or seen the streaming series, here is a good summary of the Handmaid’s Tale:

“The Handmaid’s Tale” portrays a dystopian view of an America overthrown by an autocratic theocracy whose aim is to repopulate the Earth after the rise of infertility threatens the extinction of the human race. To achieve its ends, the leaders of this new society force fertile women of “sinful” backgrounds into service as handmaids, whose sole purpose is to be impregnated by the godly, “chosen” men in power whose own wives are unable to conceive.

And here are the parallels to Project 2025 as described by Katie Bauer in the Press Herald:

Aside from the fact that it calls for the elimination of the Department of Education and that the first season, aired in 2017, depicts an attack on the Capitol, I was most struck by the following.

Promise #1 of Project 2025 is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” Within this promise, the plan calls “for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.”

The word “family/ies” is mentioned 215 times in this 900-page playbook, but it’s not until page 489 that it’s defined. According to Project 2025, “the Secretary should proudly state that men and women are biological realities that are crucial to the advancement of life sciences and medical care and that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.”

Project 2025 authors argue that “outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.”

At the present time, same-sex marriage is legal in all 50 states. Across the country, unmarried couples live together with and without children; single parents, mothers and fathers, raise biological and non-biological children by necessity and/or by desire. Single-family structures may be created by choice, through divorce, because of abuse. Children can be conceived deliberately through traditional or nontraditional means, by accident, and by criminally liable force.

The common American family today isn’t really nuclear; more like it went nuclear. And proponents who bemoan the loss of the “Leave it to Beaver” era of the stay-at-home wife and mother conveniently ignore the lack of other choices open to women by virtue of dependency within that time period. So, my question is this. How does Project 2025 propose “to restore” the nuclear family “us[ing] government power”?

How does a government go about dissolving same-sex marriage, turning one-parent households into two, preventing divorce, and preventing single persons from choosing to have and raise children alone? Without completely annihilating the unalienable rights set out in the Declaration of Independence?

Why are people are comparing Project 2025 to “The Handmaid’s Tale”? My guess is because they can still read.

Well they can, for now.

Under his eye.

Meanwhile, some kudos:

Kudos to 60 Minutes for ignoring Trump’s thuggery and running yet another critical segment on the lawless president, this time focusing on his attack on the legal profession. Watch it here:

Kudos to Latosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, for laying out in clear terms, Black America’s “rope-a-dope” strategy for fighting Trump fascism.

Kudos to whoever made this AI dystopian warning:

And kudos to the geniuses who came up with these Trump nicknames:

Here was the president acknowledging his trade war might cause real hardship for voters — many of whom elected him to bring down the cost of living and boost growth.

Trump’s enemies could hardly believe their luck. They mocked him on social media as a modern-day “Grinch who stole Christmas” and “Scrooge McTrump”. One television presenter, channelling the Sopranos, called him “Donny 2 Dolls”.

“‘Your family will have less, but it’ll be more expensive’ is definitely a solid economic pitch,” the stand-up comic Mike Drucker wrote on X.

I feel like “Donny 2 Dolls” is so genius it might stick.