At exactly 5 p.m. tonight, the entire room stood, phones held high in the air to capture the moment while “God Bless the USA” blasted from the speakers. Just then, Donald Trump appeared to the left, and with his right hand on the rail, he pushed himself up and onto the stage before walking to his place at the table. He stopped right behind his seat, where he smiled and said, “That’s a great song, that’s a great song.” And as the music kept playing, he made the entire room stay standing, cheering for him, until the last note of the music finally faded. And for the next 46 minutes, Donald Trump...
Thank you, Ms. Reese. Last night was the perfect marriage of two cons djt uses over and over and over. He floods the zone with b.s., as per steve bannon, and then adds kellyanne conway’s contribution to political manipulation, “alternative facts”.
Thank you for this much-needed clear-eyed assessment. I long for the day that our own version of Magyar states plainly that this has all been a lie and that the dismantling process has begun. Keep up the good fight. It’s going to take years to come back from this.
This is it - “The shame settles in quietly. And it keeps you from saying anything, because if everyone else is doing fine, admitting that you’re not feels like a personal failure.”
I see that clearly now. Especially in my Millennial kids and their peers’ lives.
They look at their parents and say “I did everything right, everything you told me to do, and for what? We’ll never have what you have.”
But it’s not just them. More and more are falling into that same sinkhole of “what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I keep up, let alone get ahead?”
I’ve always known Trump was a master of exploiting fear but, man, this just feels diabolically evil on a scale unimaginable.
Thanks for reminding me how important it is to keep speaking out, especially to those who are in an information bubble and may not otherwise hear about what is really happening
I feel like I’ve been shouting into the void for nearly 20 years trying to wake people up and help them see it. Maybe they needed to feel it instead.
Thanks for doing this nightly. It must be soul crushing at times, so I just wanted to take a moment to tell you that you motivate me to keep writing. To keep trying.
If you ever feel like you are yelling into the void, just know at least this girl heard you.
Thanks as always,Heather, for your clarifying focus, this time on the contradictions between Trump's insane bubble of oligarchic self-aggrandizement and the much larger real world outside, where so many need to work to survive what he has inflicted on us. Your help in piling up these contradictions, night after night, is having powerful influence.
I want to say something about Hungary's rise out of oppression: they put themselves there. Americans, Hungarians, Germans, Nigerians, Asians, east, west, north and south: people are all alike. Hungarians voted Orban in 16 years ago and kept voting him in, right? We can agree that the elections in Hungary, like our elections here, are fair. So why did they vote for this horrible creature? What is it we are not being told? Why is everyone shouting at Americans for not being more like the Hungarians?
We are. They are. Sixteen years ago, Hungarians, just like Americans, were convinced, easily, that immigrants were the problem. Not only outsiders coming into their country and taking their jobs, but also marrying into their "race." This was the reason Hungarians voted for Orban: fear of the stranger. It is the reason that our besties in Great Britain voted out of the European Union: fear of the aliens flooding their shores.
So please do not think that Hungarians have a recipe for a secret sauce they finally figured out. No, what they finally figured out that those who voted for Orban were just as culpable as any government agent working for Orban. They did not like what Orban did but they voted for him out of fear and perhaps hatred of the stranger. And what they got was a man and a machine that had his own ideas about freedom and democracy that were not aligned with anything that democracy stands for.
And so it goes in America. Those who voted for Twump mostly say it was about immigrants flooding into the country. What were those immigrants doing besides creating crime waves and eating their neighbors pets? They were doing dirty jobs, paying taxes, cutting their lawns and raising their children. Their real crime, of course, was being non-white.
No, the magats are coming home to roost and their larders are bare, their gas is expensive, their sons and daughters are being sent to another f*ed up war, their children are targets of AI techbros and their pocketbooks are holey - all because of those immigrants crossing the border.
The immigrant class did not lower taxes for billionaires, they did not cut medicaid, they did not take away healthcare for millions of Americans. Immigrants did not create the hatred surging through this country but they are the target for the anger most people walk around with and need a place to direct. We have become a country of magats.
We need real leadership. We need strength. We need to clean out the Christian nationalists and radical Catholics who are the true culprit of destroying our democracy and putting women in chains.
Fuck Orban, yes, but do not say that America is any different than Hungary, or that Hungarians are braver than us for flooding the streets in protest and for showing up to vote. They, like us, created their own mess, and when no one came to clean it up, they, like us, realized we better get a broom and mop because if we don't, we will all live in squalor. Except the Epstein class, they will be fine.
Katy, well said! Also, I fully believe that his last election was rigged and stolen with his Buddies, Elon, Thiel, Putin, etc., which hopefully will be revealed despite it being too late. We already know he’s an illegitimate Squatter in our White House after his Treasonous Act of his incitement of the Insurrection.
The other piece people don’t understand is he was groomed to be “president” and won the first term, but failed to complete his and their full objectives and therefore failed and thus Jan.6.. So his second term was rigged and stolen to “fix” the mistakes made the first time, The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025-26, and the “Big F-ing Ugly Bill.”
We do NEED to rise up together, but not like the Hungarians who kept him in power, but more like Minnesota!
We NEED a National Shutdown, but many people are exactly where they want us to be…exhausted, overwhelmed, struggling to get by, fear of kidnapping and ending up in Concentration Camps, fear of being Executed in broad daylight in your minivan, or help a stranger be safe, or looking the wrong way, or being investigated for being non-white, “other, “ “Domestic Terrorist, LGBTQ., etc., along with struggling financially as they squeeze us out while trump, his family, the Epstein Class and their Elite MAGA/MAWA- Make AmeriKKKa White (“christian”) Again, while his ICE Gestapo and MAGA KKKult bow to their KKKult leader.
trump=hitler and the Epstein Class, “Board of Peace” and wealthy Concentration Camps owners pay per head, RepubliKKKans and Benedict Fetterman and ALL the sycophantic and complicit loyalists get richer by the second on ALL this chaos.
If our elections have been messed with by anybody, that anybody should be sent to prison for a very long time and their name should be MUD. I hear the right side shouting loudly about election fraud but the only election fraud anyone could find was an unorganized handful (literally, under ten bad votes, I think) - across the nation - and the majority were Republicans. The machines have been tested, the votes have been recounted, the elections have been scrutinized. Maybe I'm an idiot but I believe that if any fraud is being committed, it is not high stakes but rather an ardent supporter working the polls finds a way to dispose of uncounted ballots. But again, no one has found evidence of that.
I'm the kind of person, unlike perhaps people who believe in invisible gods, who needs proof, not rumors or gut feelings.
Having said all that, I think it is wise to keep eyes on the elections as everything Twump says the opposition is doing is exactly what he is up to.
I cannot and will not argue on who is stronger: Hungarians or Americans because I believe we are exactly alike in strength and commitment to Democracy. I think Hungarians and Americans are united in this fight and we would fight for them and they would fight for us. Fighting takes many forms including fighting for peace.
Danielle, keep pushing us to be braver, to be stronger, to be willing to put our lives on the line for fellow human beings being oppressed, but like the Hungarians, expect us to make idiot mistakes. America has gotten lazy and complacent and truthfully, with phones in their hands and eyes on their phones, increasingly stupider. We are a huge country of 340M people (and over 400M legally owned guns), with way too many sources of information, much of which is made-up bullshit. But we have also great people and ardent leaders who, once they regain control and power, will right the ship. We hope. We hope. We hope.
Thank you for your daily reveal of our corrupt govenment and so-called 'leader'. If I were the Pope, I'd be talking to the 'Ndrangheta for their services....of course, a man of that substance and quality and kindness and inteligence would not dream of such a solution.
The “thumbs up“ sign is today’s Nazi salute. I take comfort knowing that one day this absolute POS will die. And when he does, not only will I feel a sense of relief, joy, and a deep sense of personal satisfaction, it will be the one and only time I give a double thumbs up. It won’t solve a damn thing probably. These days you take happiness, no matter how small it may be, when you can get it.
The break room television was mounted too high for anyone to adjust, and the volume had been set by someone who no longer worked there. Miguel watched it standing up because his feet hurt worse sitting down. Nine hours in, his lower back had settled into the particular ache that would not leave until Thursday. Ernesto sat on the overturned milk crate by the ice machine, unwrapping the ham sandwich his wife had made him at four.
On the screen the president was explaining their good fortune.
Every single American at every income level has more money in their pockets this week, the president said, and the room around him clapped, and the chyron read LAS VEGAS — TAX DAY ROUNDTABLE — NO TAX ON TIPS.
“He’s talking about us,” Ernesto said. He said it the way a man says it’s raining — not ironic, not angry. An observation about the weather outside a window.
Miguel pulled the folded bills from his apron and counted them a second time because the first count had embarrassed him. Two twenties from the four-top by the window, the one from the woman who had apologized for the split check. Forty-one dollars. He could tell by the folds which table each had come from — a thing he had not known he knew until tonight, when the stack was thin enough to read.
“Forty-one,” he said.
“Last April?”
“Ninety, a hundred. Some nights more.”
Ernesto nodded at the sandwich as if the sandwich had asked him something. On the screen the president was saying that refunds this year were coming back at five, six, seven, eight thousand dollars. Miguel’s refund, direct deposited Monday, had been eleven hundred and eighty. Most of it had gone toward the tooth his daughter’s dentist had been patient about since Christmas.
“He’s saying I’m doing better,” Miguel said.
Ernesto chewed. He had been a careful everything for thirty-one years on the floor.
“He’s saying everyone is doing better,” Ernesto said finally.
Miguel looked at the forty-one dollars in his hand. Then he looked at Ernesto, who was looking at his sandwich, who had not looked up at the screen once since the president began. And in that refusal — in the way a man who had stood on restaurant floors for thirty-one years would not give a face on a screen the courtesy of his eyes — Miguel saw the whole thing at once. Every room in the country. Every apron pocket. Every sandwich folded into quarters. Every text from a son. Every morning’s small careful lie.
“So which one of us is lying,” Miguel said. He did not say it as a question. He said it the way you say a thing out loud to see whether saying it out loud will make it less true.
Ernesto took a long time with the sandwich. When he spoke he spoke to the ice machine.
“My boy texted this morning. Says things are tight at his place. Asked if we could — you know. Just till the fifteenth.” He folded the wax paper very neatly into quarters. “I told him of course. I told him things were fine here.”
The break room was quiet except for the television and the ice machine cycling. On the screen the room of working Americans was still clapping — nice clothes, good haircuts, the kind of people who tipped on the pre-tax total and thought they were being generous. Miguel watched them clap and understood what he had already understood a moment before, and he understood now that Ernesto had understood it for years: that the clapping people were not villains but customers, the same customers who had left him forty-one dollars tonight, the same customers who would sit at Ernesto’s tables in the next hour and tell him their evening was lovely. The contract between them and the men in the break room was the oldest contract in the country, and the one that no one, on either side of it, could any longer afford to break.
He put the forty-one dollars back in his apron.
“Yeah,” he said. “Things are fine.”
Ernesto did not answer. He was already standing, already tying his apron, already walking back toward the floor, where the tables he had left were waiting, and where he would smile at the two tourists on Table Nine and ask them how their evening was going, and they would tell him, and he would believe them.
Heather, I am so thankful you pointed this out: "The shame settles in quietly. And it keeps you from saying anything, because if everyone else is doing fine, admitting that you’re not feels like a personal failure."
When people feel like they are a failure, they lose the courage to fight back, sometimes forever. But then some hit that tipping point, deep inside when they realize, NO...I am strong and can power on, fight back. That's when they need just one person to extend their hand to help pull them back up.
Reading this excellent and comprehensive summation of his symphony of lies in Las Vegas I am reminded of a slogan that was something I heard often in the area I grew up in. I was raised near a small town in PA called Kennett Square it was small in population but big in one particular industry…it was known as the “ Mushroom Capitol of the World”. There were many many mushroom growers in the area and they were known to use this description often when explaining how they successfully grow mushrooms…..”You keep them in the dark and feed them a lot of shit”. This is exactly his MO….he lies..he spins..he isn’t forthright…he keeps us in the dark and just keeps feeding us his bullshit. In Kennett Square,PA , with mushrooms ,that works….we are NOT mushrooms…we need light and truth….we must demand it like the people of Hungary did. November can’t come soon enough. Oh and BTW ..the air in Kennett Square was often almost unbreathable because of this way mushrooms are grown…our “air” stinks because of him too both literally and figuratively…..
t.rump cannot be farther removed from reality. I agree with the tax department, in our case no refund anywhere near his figures... And besides, refunds get cobbled up by indirect taxes on good and services and general price increases.
The you's and me's are definitely not better off, the contrary
How I wish that trump’s supporters could see, just as you portrayed, Heather, that he is a professional manipulator made of nothing but one repetitive sequence: 1. Throw a figurative bomb to destroy things; 2. Provide a superficial and ineffective “solution”; 3. Stand back, take credit as the hero, and expect to be adored.
Repeat hourly and daily. He really is that much of a simpleton.
Heather, your level-headed hopeful expression of our situation under the autocratic regime of Donald Trump is something I find not only educational but soothing. Trump keeps getting worse and worse... and We the People get madder and more energized to put a stop to him and his evil minions and handlers. Our situation out here in the real world deteriorates by the day.
I think we need a Democratic leader who has the presidential timber of FDR: a Big Thinker with a heart and a woman behind him to reminds him regularly to be his best self. Trump has injected cancer in almost every corner of our government, and it needs to be ripped out, not gently coaxed out. If you're over 60, you don't have the time to wait out the solutions.
First day in office, appoint a vicious ratdog prosecutor as your Attorney General and encourage them to look for corruption and grift that was ripe in the previous administration. Reappoint all the Inspectors General Trump fired. Propose a bipartisan Congressional Commission to study Social Security and make the suggestion to take off the cap on contributions to the fund. Billionaires pay in for every dollar they make. Contact Jack Smith and ask him if he would please restart the cases on Trump's Jan. 6th attempt to end run the Constitution and the one about his stolen documents. Work to protect our National Parks and Public Land from the extractive industries. Make Environmental Quality a watchword, something you do to improve as often as possible. Make a public statement: the nation must surrender its reliance on fossil fuels and work towards an Energy System that is primarily self-sustaining. Convene a team of scientists outside of the government and put them on studying the oceans and suggesting a series of actions that improve the health of oceans on a global scale.
And lastly, every day demonstrate why the Democratic Party which, for too long a time, lost its way in being the warrior for the Lower and Middle Classes - that Party is now back with a vengeance. Feel free to point out what the Republicans under Trump caused to happen to the US under his spell. They are complicit in the damage Trump has caused, so they should suffer the punishment merited by that kind of behavior. In many cases, they ignored their Constitutional duties for all those violations of Trump's oath the Constitution - inactions they thought they were insulated from.
A column like this one reminds me of just how much work there is to be done after we kick Trump to the curb. That action cannot come soon enough.
Thank you, Ms. Reese. Last night was the perfect marriage of two cons djt uses over and over and over. He floods the zone with b.s., as per steve bannon, and then adds kellyanne conway’s contribution to political manipulation, “alternative facts”.
Thank you for this much-needed clear-eyed assessment. I long for the day that our own version of Magyar states plainly that this has all been a lie and that the dismantling process has begun. Keep up the good fight. It’s going to take years to come back from this.
This is it - “The shame settles in quietly. And it keeps you from saying anything, because if everyone else is doing fine, admitting that you’re not feels like a personal failure.”
I see that clearly now. Especially in my Millennial kids and their peers’ lives.
They look at their parents and say “I did everything right, everything you told me to do, and for what? We’ll never have what you have.”
But it’s not just them. More and more are falling into that same sinkhole of “what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I keep up, let alone get ahead?”
I’ve always known Trump was a master of exploiting fear but, man, this just feels diabolically evil on a scale unimaginable.
Thanks for reminding me how important it is to keep speaking out, especially to those who are in an information bubble and may not otherwise hear about what is really happening
I feel like I’ve been shouting into the void for nearly 20 years trying to wake people up and help them see it. Maybe they needed to feel it instead.
Thanks for doing this nightly. It must be soul crushing at times, so I just wanted to take a moment to tell you that you motivate me to keep writing. To keep trying.
If you ever feel like you are yelling into the void, just know at least this girl heard you.
Thanks as always,Heather, for your clarifying focus, this time on the contradictions between Trump's insane bubble of oligarchic self-aggrandizement and the much larger real world outside, where so many need to work to survive what he has inflicted on us. Your help in piling up these contradictions, night after night, is having powerful influence.
I want to say something about Hungary's rise out of oppression: they put themselves there. Americans, Hungarians, Germans, Nigerians, Asians, east, west, north and south: people are all alike. Hungarians voted Orban in 16 years ago and kept voting him in, right? We can agree that the elections in Hungary, like our elections here, are fair. So why did they vote for this horrible creature? What is it we are not being told? Why is everyone shouting at Americans for not being more like the Hungarians?
We are. They are. Sixteen years ago, Hungarians, just like Americans, were convinced, easily, that immigrants were the problem. Not only outsiders coming into their country and taking their jobs, but also marrying into their "race." This was the reason Hungarians voted for Orban: fear of the stranger. It is the reason that our besties in Great Britain voted out of the European Union: fear of the aliens flooding their shores.
So please do not think that Hungarians have a recipe for a secret sauce they finally figured out. No, what they finally figured out that those who voted for Orban were just as culpable as any government agent working for Orban. They did not like what Orban did but they voted for him out of fear and perhaps hatred of the stranger. And what they got was a man and a machine that had his own ideas about freedom and democracy that were not aligned with anything that democracy stands for.
And so it goes in America. Those who voted for Twump mostly say it was about immigrants flooding into the country. What were those immigrants doing besides creating crime waves and eating their neighbors pets? They were doing dirty jobs, paying taxes, cutting their lawns and raising their children. Their real crime, of course, was being non-white.
No, the magats are coming home to roost and their larders are bare, their gas is expensive, their sons and daughters are being sent to another f*ed up war, their children are targets of AI techbros and their pocketbooks are holey - all because of those immigrants crossing the border.
The immigrant class did not lower taxes for billionaires, they did not cut medicaid, they did not take away healthcare for millions of Americans. Immigrants did not create the hatred surging through this country but they are the target for the anger most people walk around with and need a place to direct. We have become a country of magats.
We need real leadership. We need strength. We need to clean out the Christian nationalists and radical Catholics who are the true culprit of destroying our democracy and putting women in chains.
Fuck Orban, yes, but do not say that America is any different than Hungary, or that Hungarians are braver than us for flooding the streets in protest and for showing up to vote. They, like us, created their own mess, and when no one came to clean it up, they, like us, realized we better get a broom and mop because if we don't, we will all live in squalor. Except the Epstein class, they will be fine.
Katy, well said! Also, I fully believe that his last election was rigged and stolen with his Buddies, Elon, Thiel, Putin, etc., which hopefully will be revealed despite it being too late. We already know he’s an illegitimate Squatter in our White House after his Treasonous Act of his incitement of the Insurrection.
The other piece people don’t understand is he was groomed to be “president” and won the first term, but failed to complete his and their full objectives and therefore failed and thus Jan.6.. So his second term was rigged and stolen to “fix” the mistakes made the first time, The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025-26, and the “Big F-ing Ugly Bill.”
We do NEED to rise up together, but not like the Hungarians who kept him in power, but more like Minnesota!
We NEED a National Shutdown, but many people are exactly where they want us to be…exhausted, overwhelmed, struggling to get by, fear of kidnapping and ending up in Concentration Camps, fear of being Executed in broad daylight in your minivan, or help a stranger be safe, or looking the wrong way, or being investigated for being non-white, “other, “ “Domestic Terrorist, LGBTQ., etc., along with struggling financially as they squeeze us out while trump, his family, the Epstein Class and their Elite MAGA/MAWA- Make AmeriKKKa White (“christian”) Again, while his ICE Gestapo and MAGA KKKult bow to their KKKult leader.
trump=hitler and the Epstein Class, “Board of Peace” and wealthy Concentration Camps owners pay per head, RepubliKKKans and Benedict Fetterman and ALL the sycophantic and complicit loyalists get richer by the second on ALL this chaos.
UNITED WE STAND AND DIVIDED WE FALL❤️🩹
If our elections have been messed with by anybody, that anybody should be sent to prison for a very long time and their name should be MUD. I hear the right side shouting loudly about election fraud but the only election fraud anyone could find was an unorganized handful (literally, under ten bad votes, I think) - across the nation - and the majority were Republicans. The machines have been tested, the votes have been recounted, the elections have been scrutinized. Maybe I'm an idiot but I believe that if any fraud is being committed, it is not high stakes but rather an ardent supporter working the polls finds a way to dispose of uncounted ballots. But again, no one has found evidence of that.
I'm the kind of person, unlike perhaps people who believe in invisible gods, who needs proof, not rumors or gut feelings.
Having said all that, I think it is wise to keep eyes on the elections as everything Twump says the opposition is doing is exactly what he is up to.
I cannot and will not argue on who is stronger: Hungarians or Americans because I believe we are exactly alike in strength and commitment to Democracy. I think Hungarians and Americans are united in this fight and we would fight for them and they would fight for us. Fighting takes many forms including fighting for peace.
Danielle, keep pushing us to be braver, to be stronger, to be willing to put our lives on the line for fellow human beings being oppressed, but like the Hungarians, expect us to make idiot mistakes. America has gotten lazy and complacent and truthfully, with phones in their hands and eyes on their phones, increasingly stupider. We are a huge country of 340M people (and over 400M legally owned guns), with way too many sources of information, much of which is made-up bullshit. But we have also great people and ardent leaders who, once they regain control and power, will right the ship. We hope. We hope. We hope.
Thank you “Heather 1”. I have Heather Cox Richardson as “Heather 2.” 😄 Heather be thy names!
Thank you for your daily reveal of our corrupt govenment and so-called 'leader'. If I were the Pope, I'd be talking to the 'Ndrangheta for their services....of course, a man of that substance and quality and kindness and inteligence would not dream of such a solution.
I think.
The “thumbs up“ sign is today’s Nazi salute. I take comfort knowing that one day this absolute POS will die. And when he does, not only will I feel a sense of relief, joy, and a deep sense of personal satisfaction, it will be the one and only time I give a double thumbs up. It won’t solve a damn thing probably. These days you take happiness, no matter how small it may be, when you can get it.
Thank you! But... How many imbeciles will still vote for him and his corrupt republican gangsters? If midterms are still somehow on course. Doubtful
The Celebration
a story from within.
The break room television was mounted too high for anyone to adjust, and the volume had been set by someone who no longer worked there. Miguel watched it standing up because his feet hurt worse sitting down. Nine hours in, his lower back had settled into the particular ache that would not leave until Thursday. Ernesto sat on the overturned milk crate by the ice machine, unwrapping the ham sandwich his wife had made him at four.
On the screen the president was explaining their good fortune.
Every single American at every income level has more money in their pockets this week, the president said, and the room around him clapped, and the chyron read LAS VEGAS — TAX DAY ROUNDTABLE — NO TAX ON TIPS.
“He’s talking about us,” Ernesto said. He said it the way a man says it’s raining — not ironic, not angry. An observation about the weather outside a window.
Miguel pulled the folded bills from his apron and counted them a second time because the first count had embarrassed him. Two twenties from the four-top by the window, the one from the woman who had apologized for the split check. Forty-one dollars. He could tell by the folds which table each had come from — a thing he had not known he knew until tonight, when the stack was thin enough to read.
“Forty-one,” he said.
“Last April?”
“Ninety, a hundred. Some nights more.”
Ernesto nodded at the sandwich as if the sandwich had asked him something. On the screen the president was saying that refunds this year were coming back at five, six, seven, eight thousand dollars. Miguel’s refund, direct deposited Monday, had been eleven hundred and eighty. Most of it had gone toward the tooth his daughter’s dentist had been patient about since Christmas.
“He’s saying I’m doing better,” Miguel said.
Ernesto chewed. He had been a careful everything for thirty-one years on the floor.
“He’s saying everyone is doing better,” Ernesto said finally.
Miguel looked at the forty-one dollars in his hand. Then he looked at Ernesto, who was looking at his sandwich, who had not looked up at the screen once since the president began. And in that refusal — in the way a man who had stood on restaurant floors for thirty-one years would not give a face on a screen the courtesy of his eyes — Miguel saw the whole thing at once. Every room in the country. Every apron pocket. Every sandwich folded into quarters. Every text from a son. Every morning’s small careful lie.
“So which one of us is lying,” Miguel said. He did not say it as a question. He said it the way you say a thing out loud to see whether saying it out loud will make it less true.
Ernesto took a long time with the sandwich. When he spoke he spoke to the ice machine.
“My boy texted this morning. Says things are tight at his place. Asked if we could — you know. Just till the fifteenth.” He folded the wax paper very neatly into quarters. “I told him of course. I told him things were fine here.”
The break room was quiet except for the television and the ice machine cycling. On the screen the room of working Americans was still clapping — nice clothes, good haircuts, the kind of people who tipped on the pre-tax total and thought they were being generous. Miguel watched them clap and understood what he had already understood a moment before, and he understood now that Ernesto had understood it for years: that the clapping people were not villains but customers, the same customers who had left him forty-one dollars tonight, the same customers who would sit at Ernesto’s tables in the next hour and tell him their evening was lovely. The contract between them and the men in the break room was the oldest contract in the country, and the one that no one, on either side of it, could any longer afford to break.
He put the forty-one dollars back in his apron.
“Yeah,” he said. “Things are fine.”
Ernesto did not answer. He was already standing, already tying his apron, already walking back toward the floor, where the tables he had left were waiting, and where he would smile at the two tourists on Table Nine and ask them how their evening was going, and they would tell him, and he would believe them.
Heather, I am so thankful you pointed this out: "The shame settles in quietly. And it keeps you from saying anything, because if everyone else is doing fine, admitting that you’re not feels like a personal failure."
When people feel like they are a failure, they lose the courage to fight back, sometimes forever. But then some hit that tipping point, deep inside when they realize, NO...I am strong and can power on, fight back. That's when they need just one person to extend their hand to help pull them back up.
Reading this excellent and comprehensive summation of his symphony of lies in Las Vegas I am reminded of a slogan that was something I heard often in the area I grew up in. I was raised near a small town in PA called Kennett Square it was small in population but big in one particular industry…it was known as the “ Mushroom Capitol of the World”. There were many many mushroom growers in the area and they were known to use this description often when explaining how they successfully grow mushrooms…..”You keep them in the dark and feed them a lot of shit”. This is exactly his MO….he lies..he spins..he isn’t forthright…he keeps us in the dark and just keeps feeding us his bullshit. In Kennett Square,PA , with mushrooms ,that works….we are NOT mushrooms…we need light and truth….we must demand it like the people of Hungary did. November can’t come soon enough. Oh and BTW ..the air in Kennett Square was often almost unbreathable because of this way mushrooms are grown…our “air” stinks because of him too both literally and figuratively…..
You’re all coverage of events like this. That takes a lot of time just to. Jew, then analyze and then write. Thank you.
Not sure I got your reference to “Jew” here. You can explain but we generally block people like you.
I think she typo’d and meant “Chew, then analyze and then write.” I’ve heard and used that expression myself.
posters can edit. Perhaps she will... but your explanation is persuasive.
t.rump cannot be farther removed from reality. I agree with the tax department, in our case no refund anywhere near his figures... And besides, refunds get cobbled up by indirect taxes on good and services and general price increases.
The you's and me's are definitely not better off, the contrary
How I wish that trump’s supporters could see, just as you portrayed, Heather, that he is a professional manipulator made of nothing but one repetitive sequence: 1. Throw a figurative bomb to destroy things; 2. Provide a superficial and ineffective “solution”; 3. Stand back, take credit as the hero, and expect to be adored.
Repeat hourly and daily. He really is that much of a simpleton.
Heather, your level-headed hopeful expression of our situation under the autocratic regime of Donald Trump is something I find not only educational but soothing. Trump keeps getting worse and worse... and We the People get madder and more energized to put a stop to him and his evil minions and handlers. Our situation out here in the real world deteriorates by the day.
I think we need a Democratic leader who has the presidential timber of FDR: a Big Thinker with a heart and a woman behind him to reminds him regularly to be his best self. Trump has injected cancer in almost every corner of our government, and it needs to be ripped out, not gently coaxed out. If you're over 60, you don't have the time to wait out the solutions.
First day in office, appoint a vicious ratdog prosecutor as your Attorney General and encourage them to look for corruption and grift that was ripe in the previous administration. Reappoint all the Inspectors General Trump fired. Propose a bipartisan Congressional Commission to study Social Security and make the suggestion to take off the cap on contributions to the fund. Billionaires pay in for every dollar they make. Contact Jack Smith and ask him if he would please restart the cases on Trump's Jan. 6th attempt to end run the Constitution and the one about his stolen documents. Work to protect our National Parks and Public Land from the extractive industries. Make Environmental Quality a watchword, something you do to improve as often as possible. Make a public statement: the nation must surrender its reliance on fossil fuels and work towards an Energy System that is primarily self-sustaining. Convene a team of scientists outside of the government and put them on studying the oceans and suggesting a series of actions that improve the health of oceans on a global scale.
And lastly, every day demonstrate why the Democratic Party which, for too long a time, lost its way in being the warrior for the Lower and Middle Classes - that Party is now back with a vengeance. Feel free to point out what the Republicans under Trump caused to happen to the US under his spell. They are complicit in the damage Trump has caused, so they should suffer the punishment merited by that kind of behavior. In many cases, they ignored their Constitutional duties for all those violations of Trump's oath the Constitution - inactions they thought they were insulated from.
A column like this one reminds me of just how much work there is to be done after we kick Trump to the curb. That action cannot come soon enough.