In 1961, Twilight Zone episode aired called “It’s a Good Life”. In it, Billy Mumy plays a seven-year-old boy who lives with his family on an isolated farm in Ohio. But the same people, all adults, are always in the house with them. These presumably neighbors from other farms. Despite the bucolic setting, however, the atmosphere is tense from the very beginning. Over time we begin to notice that the person who seems to be in charge of everything is Anthony Fremont, the child Billy Mummy plays. Why is he in charge? It turns out that despite his youth and immaturity, despite the fact that he has not evolved yet as a human being, Anthony Fremont has massive mental powers. He can literally make other people do whatever he wants them to do.
When one of the adults doesn’t give into him, doesn’t do his bidding, or doesn’t do everything in their power to fulfill his wishes, and especially when they defy him, Anthony gets upset. And what happens when Anthony gets upset? He turns the offending party into a Jack-in-the-box right there in the family living room. That might sound funny, but when you’re a tiny child watching this in syndication on WPIX Channel 11 in New York City with all the lights off, it’s absolutely terrifying. I think it scarred me. Watch the episode and I challenge you not to be horrified.
The adults in Anthony’s vicinity are so horrified by the grotesque creature that used to be their friend or neighbor or husband that, Anthony’s father begs him to send what had once been a human being out into the cornfield, away from the sight of the rest of them, which Anthony reluctantly does.
The greater Anthony’s willingness to use his power—and his increasing sensitivity to being thwarted—the more desperate, and in some cases more compliant, the adults become. His parents know what a monster he is, yet they want to protect him. Others are desperate to get rid of him without his becoming aware that they’re plotting against him. And then there’s the compliance--I think you understand where I’m going with this.
I’ve don’t quite understood why this episode of the Twilight Zone has not been referred repeatedly over the course of the last eight years--because this country is being run by that 7-year-old child. We see instances of this more and more frequently. If you say a mean thing about Donald Trump, you must be fired and lose your livelihood. If you refuse to do his bidding you won’t get you’re multi-billion-dollar government contract. If you have the audacity to do your job as a prosecutor, as a judge, as a congress person, you don’t deserve to be free because America is now run by a child with the kind of power the rest of us can only imagine.
Good evening everybody, and welcome to tonight’s episode of Mary Trump Live. It is wonderful to have you here. It’s Friday. How cool is that? We made it. Well, I’m not sure America made it entirely because last evening Donald and his Department of Justice violated norms, standards, traditions, and the law by instructing one of the prosecutors in the DOJ to indict former FBI Director James Comey.
A grand jury has indicted Comey after Donald’s newly-appointed US attorney in Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, presented the charges despite prosecutors refusing to do so earlier because they could not establish a probable cause.
The New York Times reports that these charges were rushed through by Halligan just days before the statute of limitations expired. She has zero experience as a prosecutor, and yet Donald gave her a job in which she will oversee over 300 prosecutors, this after pressuring Eric Siebert, the previous district US attorney, to resign.
Halligan sought the indictments despite repeated got from career prosecutors and her predecessor that the evidence against Comey was too weak to justify an indictment. This decision after Donald publicly called for prosecutions of Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff. This is the clearest example yet of Donald’s use of the DOJ for his own personal retribution. But this has been going on for a long time. The road signs have long been there. It follows a broader purge of career justice department officials since Donald was sworn in on January 20th of this year. It also comes after the corrupt, ilegitimate super-majority of the Supreme Court gave an a legally absurd ruling expanding Donald’s presidential immunity.
Donald and his allies are framing the indictment of Comey as overdue accountability, but legal experts warn that it signals a dangerous collapse of the DOJs independence. I think we can dispense with this notion—the DOJ is not an independent agency anymore. This once-storied institution is dead as we knew it. This is Donald Trump’s DOJ as led by Attorney General Pam Bondy. It is simply Donald Trump’s defense firm. He is using the agency and its extraordinary power to enact revenge on his behalf.
There’s been a discussion going on for a long time now Are we in a constitutional crisis? I think we’ve been in one for years. In fact, we’ve been in several simultaneously. Certainly when 78 million people decided to put back into the Oval Office a man who cited an insurrection against his own government, that seemed bad.
Everything that Donald and his enablers and sycophants have done since January 20th has just made it more and more clear that the guardrails are not holding. We are entirely uncharted territory and as far as I’m aware, there is nothing yet I’ve seen that can stop the continuing erosion of the rule of law and the constitution and our civil liberties. But we can speak out against it. In this instance, Donald has actually been overreaching so badly, going after targets so prominent, that people who wouldn’t normally pay attention are starting to. We saw this happening initially with the Trump regime’s horrific treatment of immigrants which included denying them the right to due process.
We’ve seen this with his corrupt abuse of the civil service. We saw it last week with his attempts to get Jimmy Kimmel fired. Now, Donald is using the DOJ to go after James Comey. The rule of law is dead in America and the right to free speech is hanging by a thread. All of this, hopefully, will shine a spotlight on all of the other ways in which the Trump regime is eroding this country’s freedoms and institutions.
Because no matter what lies Donald tries to tell us about the state of our economy, we know that it is currently a disaster. Everything that has happened on his watch is exactly the opposite of what he promised the American people during the 2024 campaign. Regardless of what the facts say, of what the data say, of what the numbers say, Donald is lying through his teeth every day in order to make it seem as if the economy strong and he is the one responsible for its success. While speaking to reporters on the White House lawn he said,
But the radical left Democrats want to shut [the government] down. I mean, it’s up to them. We have a great economy going. You saw the numbers yesterday. They’re fantastic. The economy’s doing well. Prices are down. We have virtually no inflation. Everything’s going good. We’re respected by every nation in the world. And you know what happened? The Democrats want to shut it down and they want to shut it down because they want to give billions, ultimately trillions of dollars to illegal migrants. People that came into our country illegally, some of those people are criminals, but they came into our country illegally and they want to give them essentially over the years trillions of dollars and our people aren’t going to stand for it. They also want to have open borders. They want to have men in women’s sports. They want have transgender for everybody. These people are crazy, the Democrats. So if it has to shut down, it’ll have to shut down, but they’re the ones that are shutting down
Let’s start with the basics. Prices are up. Inflation is slowly but surely on the rise. No world leaders have respect for Donald at all, especially the leaders Donald most admires, like Putin, Kim Jong Un Xi Jinping. They all think Donald is an utter moron, and a weak one at that.
He claims the Democrats are trying to shut down the government because they want to give billions—no, not billions—trillions of dollars to immigrants. They want transgender for everybody. What does that even mean? And what in God’s name does launching an assault against the most vulnerable population in this country have to do with the budget?
Donald can keep trying to distract us, but he has to get increasingly hyperbolic in order to do it. He has to go after bigger and bigger targets. And part of that, yes, is distraction, but part of it is also about assuaging his need for attention or to make him feel like a tough guy. he more he fails, the more desperate he gets. So of course, he’s also going to continue going after people who don’t have power, who can’t fight back, who can’t make him look bad, and mock him. Yes, the child with a massive amount of power he doesn’t understand and cannot yield responsibly, who instead uses it for his own selfish ends is in charge.
Donald’s confidence especially about inflation and prices is shocking if you actually think that he’s lying. But if we put it in the context of his psychology, it makes perfect sense—he cannot face facts because the facts tell the terrible story about his incompetence, ineptitude, and stupidity. The problem for him is that all of this is about to get worse. He’s just announced more tariffs on pharmaceuticals, semi-trucks, kitchen cabinets, and upholstered furniture. The new taxes range from the quite absurd 25% to the absolutely insane 100% and they’re likely to be felt throughout every sector of this economy from housing and healthcare to logistics. You would think there’s a line of Republicans out the door ready to stand up, finally, at long last to call Donald on this, right? No, they’re going to let him keep doing it. I just don’t know any more how these people benefit by capitulating to a child with an almost unlimited ability to punish people who, in his view, are his enemies. The only way this makes sense is if they have decided it’s just easier to obey obeying in advance, everybody else be damned.
As I said, as Donald becomes more desperate and feels he needs to go after bigger targets, it will backfire, as it has with his ploy to get Jimmy Kimmel off the air. After Kimmel’s show was reinstated by Disney, four times as many people tuned in than usual. Over 20 million people watched his monologue on YouTube. In other words, the person who has made a very good living out of mocking Donald for the last several years got much more attention.
Something many people generally speaking aren’t aware of is that Disney does not control all of the markets in which its network, ABC, airs. Local affiliates like Sinclair Broadcasting are in charge of those markets. Even after Disney reinstated Kimmel, Sinclair, which is aligned with Donald and the Republican Party, refused to do the same.
But a statement released this week by Sinclair read in part:
“We have received thoughtful feedback from viewers, advertisers, and community leaders representing a wide range of perspectives in our ongoing and constructive discussions with ABC. Sinclair proposed measures to strengthen accountability, viewer feedback, and a community dialogue including a network-wide independent ombudsman while ABC and Disney have not yet adopted these measures, and Sinclair respects their right to make those decisions under our network affiliate agreements, we believe such measures would strengthen trust and accountability.
What that means is that Sinclair caved and got nothing in return. This suggests to me that the viewers made a difference by putting pressure on Sinclair possibly because for the first time ever, a lot of people understood there are entities making choices for them and they don’t like it. People don’t like it when Donald tells them what they can and cannot watch on television. They do not like it when local affiliates say, “You may like this show, but we don’t agree with its content, so we won’t let you watch it anymore.” And also Sinclair probably lost a lot of money. That is always a prime motivator in this deeply broken country of ours.
