At 2:50 this afternoon, the announcer's voice echoed through the factory floor: "The 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump." Seconds later, two Secret Service agents rushed out towards the stage before an unusually energetic Trump emerged beneath a massive American flag. Taking just a handful of steps at a time before stopping to catch his breath, Trump seemed painfully aware of every step he was taking as he grabbed the handrail and climbed the two final steps to the stage at the Mack Trucks manufacturing plant in Lower Macungie Township, Pennsylvania.
I watched this Mack Truck performance through a fog of tiredness here in my time zone and something irrelevant and amusing and frighteningly real came into my head.
Trump is a Muppet ! Not in the way that people call various other people 'muppets' in an exasperated, affectionate way when they do something dumb, but an actual Muppet.
If he was re-created and put on the show nothing would need to be exaggerated or played up and no physical characteristic would need be emphasised .
His orange mask, swollen slitted eyes, like those of a dead pig, his waving arms, his thin white ducktail and hunched shoulders could be produced wholesale, with nothing added for fun.
There you would have him, the president of the United States of America, for all the world to laugh at , sitting in the box above the stage and yucking it up and gurning and flapping his arms while a selected audience below grinned and cheered and clapped.
Let us all hope, and have faith in the signs that the applause is thinning.
If he were a muppet, he could retire his legs.That might be a good idea for him. The only problem of course, is who is going to put their hand up Twumps butt and make his mouth move?
Oh, please don’t taint the Muppets. Puppet is OK or just about anything else but the Muppets-capital-M- are incredible. But thanks for using lower case m!!
There was a video the other day where some shady FBI agents had gone to a man's house to harass him about some social media comment. The man in question quite rightly told 'em to fuck right off. A lot.
The point is, i saw what others did. That these goons behaved exactly like a horse in training, where they belligerently told him he was not very nice to chase them away. But then after saying over and over that they were trespassing, they slowly turned away, before leaving.
I see the same indications today. ABC showing some gumption because they realised that capitulation just leads to worse coercion, the Senate telling him politely to pull his head in, to polls showing his supporters abandoning ship just before the iceberg hits.
From my relatively safe distance, all I can do is cheer on the resistors, the campaigners, and the hard working organisers.
The tide is turning. Let's hope the iceberg does no more damage than scraping a few barnacles off.
With you Ken, from across the pond, and really want to see that iceberg (sent from Greenland of course) scrape ALL of the barnacles off the hull of Trump’s sinking ship!
Thank heaven the ABCs, Disney’s and other corporates are beginning to realise that the only path forward is to stand up against these ‘God-forsaken’ imbeciles for the good of the American people. Government is meant to be FOR the people, BY the people, not for the Trump family and his corrupt cabal of criminals!
Trump taught everyone he has attacked how to behave. They thought they could make him go away if they just capitulated once. When that didn’t satisfy him or his faithful minions, they realized the only way forward is to resist and fight both because they’re justifiably angry, and because that posture is the only action that will be effective. Trump’s gluttony is sowing the seeds of his own destruction.
We all know that Trump is a self-aggrandising, low IQ, criminal, who no doubt will get his comeuppance. We should not forget that he was put in place with the help of the Project 2025 crowd. Most of his executive orders come straight from the Project 2025 playbook, and he is surrounded by the projects contributors: Russel Vought, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Brendan Carr, John Ratcliffe, Paul Atkins, Peter Navarro….. The nazification of the USA in full swing!
Trump is an irrefutable self-centered sociopath. Of even greater concern is that, even so, he is only the current face of Project 2025. I think your point - which should scare all of us - is that the brains and body of the Project 2025 operation are comprised of many hive-minded sociopaths. Those sociopaths are flush with cash and determined to create a society where the many are relegated to the few and where the few get to decide who matters and who doesn't. We must defeat Trump. But we must also burn Project 2025 to the ground and send its acolytes packing.
Yes yes yes! Thank you. Focusing on gold toilet does not reflect reality and leaves people ignorant of what’s really going on. Though I’m grateful to Heather for keeping us informed of the mouthpiece, vulgar and ugly as it is.
Found the comments of the people who ‘had to’ attend his visit to Mack Truck in Pa. were truthful in their responses. In a quick capsule is “He said, nothing new” - “When will he get over being some victim” - “Yea he asked us all if we have 401k’s and we all know our 401k’s haven’t made as much as him since he’s been back to DC”..
Some left early cause it wasn’t worth sitting in traffic for hours afterwards…
I question why so many stood there and paid attention to his rhetoric, self-importance and blatant lies. Don’t you ALL get it yet? He is taking you all for low life (as he calls you himself), taking everything he can while he can from the ordinary people and leaving you and your kids to clean up the mess - and blaming everyone else for the mess!
Wake up America - you’re sleep-walking into a disastrous future. Anyone who votes for these money-grabbing criminals deserves what they get - and it won’t be ‘better times ahead’!
Ask the same question more than once daily Chris. It’s astonishing to watch, like sitting there knowing someone is going to fall on the snow & ice because they don’t have the proper shoes, you call out to them that what shoes they are wearing will not give them adequate footing to maneuver and then they slip and fall and break a bone. Some of those will cuss you out because you didn’t warn them “enough”, some will be embarrassed that they fell and just get up and grumble to themselves and move on and do it again and again, others will just say it was your fault because you didn’t go into the house and literally put the correct shoes on their feet. Astonishing…
God HELP America- if those who continue to support this brain-dead ‘leader’ of such a vital country to the security of the world continue to be charmed by his scripted speeches and blatant lies because the country and the rest of the world will suffer from his misuse of power long after he has gone. Hopefully, by the time his supporters realise the folly of believing his lies, he will have lost so much of his rational mental capacity (if there IS any still accessible) that even his most hardline supporters will know they’ve been hoodwinked into supporting what is actually a very simple ‘ME and ME only!’ playbook designed to take as much as he can from each and every person who can contribute to his political and personal agenda.
If you still believe you’re on the right side of history by now (after all the decisions that he and his enablers have been making in order to rape America of its long-established democratic institutions - not to mention the country’s legal and financial system) then you deserve the future that will inevitably follow and it won’t be as bright and productive as you might have been led to believe.
Wake up before the alarm goes off and you feel like the lowlife your president describes you as when he’s not trying to sell you his version of the future HE and his family will benefit from most of all!
Sometimes the truth is hard to face but when you finally face it you come to see that the lies you have been told were designed to make you believe that they would make your life better! They won’t, and you will lose more than you thought you would gain.
I observe from the outside so I am not here to persuade you one way or the other - but YOU must decide for yourself if what you’ve been told really is to your advantage in the future. Ask more questions and you might find more answers even if they don’t confirm the beliefs you have held up to now. We CAN all change our minds - it IS possible if you just think of your own mind as a parachute, which only works when it is OPEN.
You have been misled and now it’s time to stand up for the fundamental principles of the society you all live in, a society that belongs to YOU, not to a bunch of self-serving, money-grabbing oligarchs who USE you to achieve THEIR objectives!
This is YOUR country, not THEIRS! You deserve better! TAKE IT BACK on 4th July - protest like your lives depend on it - They DO!
It's extraordinary that the factory workers had to stand all that time listening to the Dumpkof's diatribe without Congressman Mackenzie's name even being mentioned. Surely having witnessed Trump's antics the workers will think twice before voting for Trump?
or they will go home, turn on Fox as usual and find out what a great speech Trump gave and what a great job he is doing in Iran and in prosecuting the antifa crazies who are messing up the Reflecting Pond...
Play that thought through. Because we can break it down into an individual, "FOX News" is one person: Rupert Murdoch, a horror of a man whose three out of four children don't speak to him which means that 75% of his grandchildren (I'm making an assumption that these grown children have their own children) do not speak to grandpa. (I do not know the status of Wendy's and his two younger daughters.)
Is that how you want your life to be lived? To control a media empire while your children and grandchildren hate you? We have very little time on this planet and one thing we should make sure we do is make it a better place for our children, who love us, respect us and take care of us like we took care of them.
Nah, let's make money, get a lot of divorces, and alienate our kids.
And not for nothing but that parade of talking heads at Fox seems to be cut from the same cloth. Boring.
ABC is doing what all the networks should be doing…challenging the blatant attempts by this administration to control what they do and to manipulate our Constitutional guarantees of free speech and freedom of the press. SUPPORT ABC.
ABC has a link to the FCC to file comments on what Carr is doing…GO ON RECORD ..let them know your thoughts…it’s very easy and it can MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
As far as that clown show in PA yesterday goes…it can be described in a word ..PATHETIC. He is a PATHETIC excuse for a President..a PATHETIC excuse for an intelligent competent leader..a PATHETIC excuse for a sane individual and all of that equals a disgraceful loser who is running out of material and in the old vaudeville days it would be said…it’s time to GET THE HOOK….get him off the stage.
His delusions of grandeur and power are over ..anyone who still buys into his lies is just as pathetic as he is ..they’re hoping and praying that a miracle will happen and all of his wrongs will somehow magically turn out to be ok..they won’t be..they can’t be..they’re too DISASTROUSLY WRONG.
The only thing that will save this country is a huge victory in November…that the voices of all who are not deluded by his lies are collectively heard loud and clear and the process of his undoing can and WILL begin.
Start NOW…file comments with the FCC supporting ABC and The View..call..write ..email representatives..support independent truth tellers like Heather and Meidas and Parnas and Heather Cox Richardson and Rather and ALL who speak out..share their posts with everyone you know.
And then get ready to do all you can to help get our voices heard on November 3rd.
The problem is not that Trump speaks for America and leads the world astray in ways that will take generations to repair. Everyone in the real world knows he is insane, stupid, corrupt and not to be trusted, that America and the rest of the world are suffering from our mistake of having elected him, and they can hardly wait for our mid-terms to rapidly begin the correction. It is a mistake now to exaggerate his real-world power as if he has not already dissipated it, to report and then diminish the reality of the whole situation and the correction that is already well under way.
6/23/2026 was a pretty good day! Primary voting results! Housing affordability bill! Vote to end The Trump war-that-is-not-a-war-that-really-is-a-war! Trump definitely showed Pennsylvania how out of control & whacked-out he is!!!!!! Yep, a pretty good day!
And yet, the crowd cheered him. He is no different in temperament and character and judgment than when he said that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the cats and dogs owned by the good white people in the 2024 debate with Kamala Harris. The pathology is weaker, but not sufficiently so.
Colombia is today’s story. If AI-generated Tigers paid for by anti democratic billions can swing elections to fascists then the billions spent in America stand to do the same for this blood-stained orange-atun (apologies to orangutans 🦧)
There is a scary failure mode characteristic of systems that have been constructed with superficially reassuring yet ultimately ineffective stabilizing mechanisms ("checks and balances", if you will): small oscillations get amplified by external factors until they become unbounded, and the system shakes itself to pieces. The "Galloping Gertie" suspension bridge is a famous physical example of this phenomenon. I fear that the last 50 years of history shows that our political system is entering just such a trap of fateful resonance. Each successive regime attempts to fix the mess created by the previous one, but fails for lack of time. They end up owning their failure, and the other side hands them an even greater defeat than the previous one. What is desperately needed is some kind of dire external threat that forces us to set aside our increasingly righteous agendas and unite against a common foe long enough to restore some sanity. I don't see it coming.
Good for ABC for standing up. Timothy Snyder says the only way forward is with action, and ABC is the model at this moment. Each of us has to figure out how we can resist as well. Thanks for a really good post. It's hard to be hopeful but we don't have much of an option.
All of these men, and some women for now, have their fat graspy hands out in imitation of Twump. Gimme, gimme, gimme. When the hurricane of the law is bearing down on them, they will grab the last dollar and head out the door. Let's watch as they swirl in the flooded eddies, and get swept away into the tide of arrests even as they are thrown a lifeline, they cannot let go of the dollar and they drown.
I watched this Mack Truck performance through a fog of tiredness here in my time zone and something irrelevant and amusing and frighteningly real came into my head.
Trump is a Muppet ! Not in the way that people call various other people 'muppets' in an exasperated, affectionate way when they do something dumb, but an actual Muppet.
If he was re-created and put on the show nothing would need to be exaggerated or played up and no physical characteristic would need be emphasised .
His orange mask, swollen slitted eyes, like those of a dead pig, his waving arms, his thin white ducktail and hunched shoulders could be produced wholesale, with nothing added for fun.
There you would have him, the president of the United States of America, for all the world to laugh at , sitting in the box above the stage and yucking it up and gurning and flapping his arms while a selected audience below grinned and cheered and clapped.
Let us all hope, and have faith in the signs that the applause is thinning.
If he were a muppet, he could retire his legs.That might be a good idea for him. The only problem of course, is who is going to put their hand up Twumps butt and make his mouth move?
Same people who are doing it now Katy.
Yeah, once I thought about it I realized they all have merde on their hands (pardon mon Francais).
Oh, please don’t taint the Muppets. Puppet is OK or just about anything else but the Muppets-capital-M- are incredible. But thanks for using lower case m!!
I was begging their royal forgiveness as I wrote Mary Ann .
Look up “puppet regime”
Perfect description!
Proud of ABC
There was a video the other day where some shady FBI agents had gone to a man's house to harass him about some social media comment. The man in question quite rightly told 'em to fuck right off. A lot.
The point is, i saw what others did. That these goons behaved exactly like a horse in training, where they belligerently told him he was not very nice to chase them away. But then after saying over and over that they were trespassing, they slowly turned away, before leaving.
I see the same indications today. ABC showing some gumption because they realised that capitulation just leads to worse coercion, the Senate telling him politely to pull his head in, to polls showing his supporters abandoning ship just before the iceberg hits.
From my relatively safe distance, all I can do is cheer on the resistors, the campaigners, and the hard working organisers.
The tide is turning. Let's hope the iceberg does no more damage than scraping a few barnacles off.
There is hope.
With you Ken, from across the pond, and really want to see that iceberg (sent from Greenland of course) scrape ALL of the barnacles off the hull of Trump’s sinking ship!
Thank heaven the ABCs, Disney’s and other corporates are beginning to realise that the only path forward is to stand up against these ‘God-forsaken’ imbeciles for the good of the American people. Government is meant to be FOR the people, BY the people, not for the Trump family and his corrupt cabal of criminals!
Trump taught everyone he has attacked how to behave. They thought they could make him go away if they just capitulated once. When that didn’t satisfy him or his faithful minions, they realized the only way forward is to resist and fight both because they’re justifiably angry, and because that posture is the only action that will be effective. Trump’s gluttony is sowing the seeds of his own destruction.
Hi Heather,
We all know that Trump is a self-aggrandising, low IQ, criminal, who no doubt will get his comeuppance. We should not forget that he was put in place with the help of the Project 2025 crowd. Most of his executive orders come straight from the Project 2025 playbook, and he is surrounded by the projects contributors: Russel Vought, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Brendan Carr, John Ratcliffe, Paul Atkins, Peter Navarro….. The nazification of the USA in full swing!
Trump is an irrefutable self-centered sociopath. Of even greater concern is that, even so, he is only the current face of Project 2025. I think your point - which should scare all of us - is that the brains and body of the Project 2025 operation are comprised of many hive-minded sociopaths. Those sociopaths are flush with cash and determined to create a society where the many are relegated to the few and where the few get to decide who matters and who doesn't. We must defeat Trump. But we must also burn Project 2025 to the ground and send its acolytes packing.
Or even burn it to the ground with the lickspittles still inside. You know they'll only come back and try again.
Everything you said is what really scares me the most.
Yes yes yes! Thank you. Focusing on gold toilet does not reflect reality and leaves people ignorant of what’s really going on. Though I’m grateful to Heather for keeping us informed of the mouthpiece, vulgar and ugly as it is.
Found the comments of the people who ‘had to’ attend his visit to Mack Truck in Pa. were truthful in their responses. In a quick capsule is “He said, nothing new” - “When will he get over being some victim” - “Yea he asked us all if we have 401k’s and we all know our 401k’s haven’t made as much as him since he’s been back to DC”..
Some left early cause it wasn’t worth sitting in traffic for hours afterwards…
I question why so many stood there and paid attention to his rhetoric, self-importance and blatant lies. Don’t you ALL get it yet? He is taking you all for low life (as he calls you himself), taking everything he can while he can from the ordinary people and leaving you and your kids to clean up the mess - and blaming everyone else for the mess!
Wake up America - you’re sleep-walking into a disastrous future. Anyone who votes for these money-grabbing criminals deserves what they get - and it won’t be ‘better times ahead’!
Ask the same question more than once daily Chris. It’s astonishing to watch, like sitting there knowing someone is going to fall on the snow & ice because they don’t have the proper shoes, you call out to them that what shoes they are wearing will not give them adequate footing to maneuver and then they slip and fall and break a bone. Some of those will cuss you out because you didn’t warn them “enough”, some will be embarrassed that they fell and just get up and grumble to themselves and move on and do it again and again, others will just say it was your fault because you didn’t go into the house and literally put the correct shoes on their feet. Astonishing…
God HELP America- if those who continue to support this brain-dead ‘leader’ of such a vital country to the security of the world continue to be charmed by his scripted speeches and blatant lies because the country and the rest of the world will suffer from his misuse of power long after he has gone. Hopefully, by the time his supporters realise the folly of believing his lies, he will have lost so much of his rational mental capacity (if there IS any still accessible) that even his most hardline supporters will know they’ve been hoodwinked into supporting what is actually a very simple ‘ME and ME only!’ playbook designed to take as much as he can from each and every person who can contribute to his political and personal agenda.
If you still believe you’re on the right side of history by now (after all the decisions that he and his enablers have been making in order to rape America of its long-established democratic institutions - not to mention the country’s legal and financial system) then you deserve the future that will inevitably follow and it won’t be as bright and productive as you might have been led to believe.
Wake up before the alarm goes off and you feel like the lowlife your president describes you as when he’s not trying to sell you his version of the future HE and his family will benefit from most of all!
Sometimes the truth is hard to face but when you finally face it you come to see that the lies you have been told were designed to make you believe that they would make your life better! They won’t, and you will lose more than you thought you would gain.
I observe from the outside so I am not here to persuade you one way or the other - but YOU must decide for yourself if what you’ve been told really is to your advantage in the future. Ask more questions and you might find more answers even if they don’t confirm the beliefs you have held up to now. We CAN all change our minds - it IS possible if you just think of your own mind as a parachute, which only works when it is OPEN.
You have been misled and now it’s time to stand up for the fundamental principles of the society you all live in, a society that belongs to YOU, not to a bunch of self-serving, money-grabbing oligarchs who USE you to achieve THEIR objectives!
This is YOUR country, not THEIRS! You deserve better! TAKE IT BACK on 4th July - protest like your lives depend on it - They DO!
It's extraordinary that the factory workers had to stand all that time listening to the Dumpkof's diatribe without Congressman Mackenzie's name even being mentioned. Surely having witnessed Trump's antics the workers will think twice before voting for Trump?
or they will go home, turn on Fox as usual and find out what a great speech Trump gave and what a great job he is doing in Iran and in prosecuting the antifa crazies who are messing up the Reflecting Pond...
Play that thought through. Because we can break it down into an individual, "FOX News" is one person: Rupert Murdoch, a horror of a man whose three out of four children don't speak to him which means that 75% of his grandchildren (I'm making an assumption that these grown children have their own children) do not speak to grandpa. (I do not know the status of Wendy's and his two younger daughters.)
Is that how you want your life to be lived? To control a media empire while your children and grandchildren hate you? We have very little time on this planet and one thing we should make sure we do is make it a better place for our children, who love us, respect us and take care of us like we took care of them.
Nah, let's make money, get a lot of divorces, and alienate our kids.
And not for nothing but that parade of talking heads at Fox seems to be cut from the same cloth. Boring.
ABC is doing what all the networks should be doing…challenging the blatant attempts by this administration to control what they do and to manipulate our Constitutional guarantees of free speech and freedom of the press. SUPPORT ABC.
ABC has a link to the FCC to file comments on what Carr is doing…GO ON RECORD ..let them know your thoughts…it’s very easy and it can MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
As far as that clown show in PA yesterday goes…it can be described in a word ..PATHETIC. He is a PATHETIC excuse for a President..a PATHETIC excuse for an intelligent competent leader..a PATHETIC excuse for a sane individual and all of that equals a disgraceful loser who is running out of material and in the old vaudeville days it would be said…it’s time to GET THE HOOK….get him off the stage.
His delusions of grandeur and power are over ..anyone who still buys into his lies is just as pathetic as he is ..they’re hoping and praying that a miracle will happen and all of his wrongs will somehow magically turn out to be ok..they won’t be..they can’t be..they’re too DISASTROUSLY WRONG.
The only thing that will save this country is a huge victory in November…that the voices of all who are not deluded by his lies are collectively heard loud and clear and the process of his undoing can and WILL begin.
Start NOW…file comments with the FCC supporting ABC and The View..call..write ..email representatives..support independent truth tellers like Heather and Meidas and Parnas and Heather Cox Richardson and Rather and ALL who speak out..share their posts with everyone you know.
And then get ready to do all you can to help get our voices heard on November 3rd.
The problem is not that Trump speaks for America and leads the world astray in ways that will take generations to repair. Everyone in the real world knows he is insane, stupid, corrupt and not to be trusted, that America and the rest of the world are suffering from our mistake of having elected him, and they can hardly wait for our mid-terms to rapidly begin the correction. It is a mistake now to exaggerate his real-world power as if he has not already dissipated it, to report and then diminish the reality of the whole situation and the correction that is already well under way.
6/23/2026 was a pretty good day! Primary voting results! Housing affordability bill! Vote to end The Trump war-that-is-not-a-war-that-really-is-a-war! Trump definitely showed Pennsylvania how out of control & whacked-out he is!!!!!! Yep, a pretty good day!
From me: Well, that got shot to hell
And yet, the crowd cheered him. He is no different in temperament and character and judgment than when he said that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the cats and dogs owned by the good white people in the 2024 debate with Kamala Harris. The pathology is weaker, but not sufficiently so.
Colombia is today’s story. If AI-generated Tigers paid for by anti democratic billions can swing elections to fascists then the billions spent in America stand to do the same for this blood-stained orange-atun (apologies to orangutans 🦧)
Can you provide the link to the FCC's comment system so we can support ABC?
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings
Enjoy!
Hi Randy, not sure where to go on that FCC site to leave a comment of support for ABC and The View?
Well, I was going to list the filing number, but then I saw that the deadline for comment was June 22, so I kind of lost the thread. Sorry about that.
Thanks!
Thank you once again, Heather, you give me hope.
There is a scary failure mode characteristic of systems that have been constructed with superficially reassuring yet ultimately ineffective stabilizing mechanisms ("checks and balances", if you will): small oscillations get amplified by external factors until they become unbounded, and the system shakes itself to pieces. The "Galloping Gertie" suspension bridge is a famous physical example of this phenomenon. I fear that the last 50 years of history shows that our political system is entering just such a trap of fateful resonance. Each successive regime attempts to fix the mess created by the previous one, but fails for lack of time. They end up owning their failure, and the other side hands them an even greater defeat than the previous one. What is desperately needed is some kind of dire external threat that forces us to set aside our increasingly righteous agendas and unite against a common foe long enough to restore some sanity. I don't see it coming.
To those of us outside America, Trump is that threat . Be assured.
Good for ABC for standing up. Timothy Snyder says the only way forward is with action, and ABC is the model at this moment. Each of us has to figure out how we can resist as well. Thanks for a really good post. It's hard to be hopeful but we don't have much of an option.
And yet no one intervenes?!
All of these men, and some women for now, have their fat graspy hands out in imitation of Twump. Gimme, gimme, gimme. When the hurricane of the law is bearing down on them, they will grab the last dollar and head out the door. Let's watch as they swirl in the flooded eddies, and get swept away into the tide of arrests even as they are thrown a lifeline, they cannot let go of the dollar and they drown.
The sad and frightening reality..