Trump Trolls Trump
Week 79
Absurd. Yes, that is exactly the right word to describe these people, none of whom, by the way, has ever been to an Olive Garden. Apparently, this week’s Republican talking point is that a private restaurant promotion and a constitutional right are somehow equivalent. Newsflash: they are not. Yet this manufactured crisis, entirely of the Republicans’ own making, may only be the beginning. There are already reports of underage kids using fake IDs to gain access to Olive Garden’s Never Ending Pasta Pass. I hope you’re sitting down with your excessively creamy, garlicky, never ending fettuccine Alfredo because, apparently, that requires identification. How is that allowed to happen in a communist country?
Of course, we are not a communist country. We are still a democracy, and we are a democracy fueled by capitalism, which is precisely why you have to show an ID if you want the Never Ending Pasta Pass. Otherwise, Olive Garden would eventually go out of business. The comparison really is that simple. American democracy, on the other hand, will go out of business if Republicans continue making it harder and harder for American citizens to vote, which is exactly what they are trying to do.
So yes, welcome to this week’s edition of Trump Trolls Trump. It has been another week, another year, another decade, another millennium. In fact, it has now been seventy nine interminable weeks since this entire nightmare began, also known as the Golden Age, and five hundred fifty one days since Inauguration Day 2025.
Once again, the biggest story of the week is election denialism, the endless effort to relitigate the 2020 election, which has already been litigated to death. Donald lost that election by almost eight million votes, and he still refuses to admit it. It is pathetic. It simply is. That is not how a mature adult behaves. You take the loss and you move on. Donald cannot do that because he cannot survive the narcissistic injury of having lost. His fragile ego simply will not allow it.
Unfortunately, this is no longer just about Donald’s ego. He has transformed his personal inability to accept defeat into a sustained effort to undermine Americans’ faith in free and fair elections, and the Republican Party has enthusiastically joined him. Rather than protecting our democratic institutions, they have chosen to protect Donald’s feelings. That tells you everything you need to know about their priorities.
Do you remember the Green Bay Sweep? It has been a while since we talked about it. That was Peter Navarro’s plan to delay the certification of the 2020 Electoral College vote by pressuring Republican controlled state legislatures to challenge the election results. Yes, that Peter Navarro, Donald’s longtime economic adviser and one of the loudest election deniers in the country. He returned this week to inflict yet another spectacularly ridiculous comment on the American people.
While discussing the economy on Newsmax, Navarro decided to warn the nation about what he described as one of our most pressing economic threats.
Peter Navarro: The trends are down, which is not to say we don’t have some issues. Beef has been kind of the holy grail of me trying to figure out the best ways to get it down. So we’re cracking down on the cartels that run the beef processing, things like that.
I honestly do not know how to respond to that.
What exactly is a beef cartel?
Seriously.
I think the biggest problem facing the beef industry is that Donald’s regime has so thoroughly gutted the Food and Drug Administration that our cattle are now being threatened by a deadly parasite. That probably has far more to do with rising beef prices than whatever imaginary criminal organization Peter Navarro has invented. Then again, Donald seems considerably more interested in helping prop up Argentina’s economy than supporting American farmers, so perhaps none of this should surprise us anymore.
Every now and then something happens that perfectly captures what it is like to live under the Trump regime. We have seen this pattern for decades. Donald creates a mess because he is incapable of admitting he made a mistake. Instead of fixing the problem, he tries to cover it up. In the process, however, he inevitably draws even more attention to the disaster he created in the first place.
The reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial has become the latest monument to that pattern.
By now, we have heard far more about this reflecting pool than any of us ever wanted to know. Nevertheless, it has become an almost perfect metaphor for Donald’s presidency.
Let’s briefly review what happened.
Donald awarded a no bid contract to one of his friends to renovate the reflecting pool. The project was originally expected to cost approximately 1.8 million dollars. Instead, it ballooned into a staggering boondoggle that has now cost taxpayers more than 15 billion dollars. The contractor apparently had little idea what he was doing, but competence has never been a prerequisite for receiving lucrative contracts from Donald Trump.
Before the new liner had even finished curing, Donald, displaying the engineering expertise for which he is famously not known, decided it would be a wonderful idea to drive his presidential motorcade directly across the bottom of the empty reflecting pool. The presidential limousine alone weighs well over twenty thousand pounds. Unsurprisingly, that decision appears to have been catastrophic.
Soon after the pool was refilled, algae blooms spread rapidly across the water. The liner itself began peeling away from the bottom. The decision to paint the pool a darker color only made the algae problem worse, while removing the bubblers created additional maintenance problems. Every decision seemed designed to compound the previous mistake until the entire project became a national embarrassment.
Faced with this self inflicted disaster, Donald did what he always does. Rather than accepting responsibility, he blamed someone else. American citizens were actually arrested after being accused of cutting holes in the bottom of the reflecting pool with box cutters, an accusation that is as absurd as it is dangerous. Innocent people now have to defend themselves against charges that never should have been brought in the first place because Donald once again needed somebody else to blame for his own incompetence.
When blaming innocent people failed to solve the problem, the administration turned to its next favorite strategy: hiding the evidence. A large tarp was erected to conceal the construction site from public view. Predictably, even that failed. The tarp detached almost immediately and began flapping wildly in the wind, exposing the very mess it was supposed to hide.
It is difficult to imagine a more fitting metaphor for Donald Trump.
The self proclaimed master builder could not successfully renovate a reflecting pool. He could not keep costs under control. He could not avoid damaging the project before it was even completed. He could not resist blaming innocent people when everything predictably fell apart. And when he tried to cover up the evidence of his own failure, even the cover up failed.
Well done, Donald.
In a strange way, this entire Trump Trolls Trump tells us more truthfully who Donald is than almost anything he says about himself. Everything he touches becomes a monument to incompetence. Everything he builds eventually begins to crumble. Everything that goes wrong becomes someone else’s fault. And when reality becomes impossible to ignore, he simply tries to cover it with another layer of gold paint and hopes nobody notices what is falling apart underneath.
Donald and far too many of the people who surround him seem to inhabit a world entirely of their own creation. Actually, let me correct that because there is only one reality. There are not competing realities that are equally valid. There is reality, and then there is the fantasy Donald constructs every day, a fantasy built on lies, grievances, and endless distortions of the truth. Unfortunately, too many people have chosen to move into that fantasy with him.
Some of that is understandable, at least in the sense that the people closest to Donald know their careers, and in many cases their political futures, depend upon keeping him happy. They spend their days feeding his ego, validating his delusions, and assuring him that he is always right. But much of it goes beyond simple self-preservation. It is an endless exercise in twisting facts until they fit whatever Donald happens to believe on any given day. It must be exhausting. Every now and then, however, someone manages to say something so extraordinary that it deserves special recognition.
Florida Congressman Carlos Gimenez accomplished exactly that during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. The discussion centered on Donald’s unconstitutional war of choice against Iran and the administration’s continuing effort to pretend the American people overwhelmingly support it despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Wolf Blitzer: President Trump this morning said that Americans “aren’t against the war.”
This is what Carlos Gimenez said:
Americans aren’t against the war. A poll just came out. Americans don’t want to have gasoline prices, but they’re not against the war.
Wolf Blitzer responded by pointing out what the polling actually showed.
In a recent Washington Post Ipsos survey, 68 percent of Americans said the war was not worth fighting while 28 percent said it was. How do you explain the disconnect between what the president says and how Americans feel according to almost all of these most recent polls?
Carlos Gimenez’s response somehow managed to make even less sense than his first answer.
Well, I’m not going to speak for the president. I’m not going to dispute the polls either, but I also know that prior to World War II, 85 percent of Americans were not in favor of entering the war. And then it all changed in one day.
What?
Is that supposed to be a serious answer?
Apparently, it is.
Carlos Gimenez begins by acknowledging that he is not disputing the polling, then immediately proceeds to dismiss the polling by comparing Donald’s unconstitutional war of choice against Iran to World War II. It is difficult to imagine a more offensive historical comparison. The United States entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor as part of a global effort to defeat fascism. Donald chose this war. Congress never authorized it. The circumstances are not remotely comparable.
It is also worth remembering who opposed America’s involvement in World War II until Pearl Harbor forced the issue. There was indeed a vocal isolationist movement, but it also included people who openly sympathized with authoritarian governments overseas. That history should not be casually invoked to defend Donald’s latest foreign policy disaster.
The larger point, however, is that Republicans continue refusing to acknowledge objective reality whenever it becomes politically inconvenient. Polls no longer matter if Donald dislikes the results. Facts become optional. History becomes whatever comparison happens to serve the political moment. It is all part of the same strategy. If reality refuses to support Donald’s narrative, then reality itself must be dismissed.
Speaking of people who seem increasingly detached from reality, it is time to talk about Pete Hegseth.
The Secretary of Defense appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee requesting another seventy billion dollars to fund a war he has repeatedly insisted the United States has already won and that has supposedly destroyed Iran’s military capabilities. That request comes on top of at least thirty seven and a half billion dollars already spent, as well as Donald’s separate 1.5 trillion dollar defense budget proposal for fiscal year 2027.
One obvious question immediately comes to mind.
If the war has already been won, why exactly do they need another seventy billion dollars?
Republicans spend an extraordinary amount of time talking about waste, fraud, and abuse. Speaker Mike Johnson repeats those words almost as frequently as Donald invents new grievances. Yet somehow none of those concerns seem to apply when the administration wants another seventy billion dollars for a war they insist has already achieved all of its objectives.
That naturally raises another question.
Where is congressional oversight?
As it turns out, according to Republican Senator Steve Daines, oversight is apparently much easier than the rest of us realized.
This is what Fox Business host Stuart Varney asked:
Should the Senate step in and exercise some more control over the war?
This is what Senator Steve Daines said:
Stuart, we always have the ability to exercise oversight. Just look at yesterday. We had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, in front of the Appropriations Committee. You’ve got Secretary Hegseth. You’ve got Secretary Rubio who are in routine contact with members of the U.S. Senate. So we’re always engaged. I was at Vice President Vance’s residence recently having dinner talking about Iran. So we have lots of opportunity to issue oversight.
Apparently, congressional oversight now consists of having dinner with the Vice President.
Who knew?
J.D. Vance is, of course, Vice President of the United States, although it remains difficult to understand exactly what role he is playing in this war beyond privately opposing it while publicly pretending to support it. Like so many people around Donald, he seems perfectly willing to say one thing behind closed doors and another whenever a television camera is present.
The far more important issue is that Senate Republicans have completely abdicated one of their most fundamental constitutional responsibilities. Congress possesses the authority to check the executive branch. Congress controls appropriations. Congress can demand accountability. Congress can end this war whenever it chooses. Instead, Republican senators continue behaving as though casual conversations over dinner somehow satisfy their constitutional obligation to oversee an administration that has already asked taxpayers to spend well over a trillion dollars on national defense while repeatedly refusing to answer basic questions about strategy, costs, or long-term objectives.
Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio have demonstrated time and again that they cannot be trusted to manage America’s national security responsibly. Frankly, I would hesitate to trust them with five dollars, much less nearly one point seven five trillion. Yet here we are, watching Republicans applaud another massive spending request while pretending they have exercised meaningful oversight simply because they occasionally have dinner with the people making the decisions.
That is not oversight.
It is surrender.
Entirely because of Donald’s staggering ignorance when it comes to national security, and because some of the least qualified people imaginable are now responsible for protecting this country, we spend an extraordinary amount of time talking about very real threats facing the United States. Every now and then, however, the administration introduces a danger so bizarre that you almost have to remind yourself they are speaking seriously. That happened this week during Donald’s rally in Georgia, where he warned the country about what he apparently believes is our most immediate national security threat.
I hope you’re sitting down for this one because I honestly hesitate to repeat it.
Donald: As I said in my recent address at Mount Rushmore recently, I don’t know if anybody saw it. It’s such a beautiful place. The communists want to take it down. They can try taking Mount Rushmore down. They want to blow it up. They want to take it down. They shouldn’t be up there. These people are crazy. But communism is, in my opinion, communism is the single greatest threat to our country and its history, including even World War I and World War II, Pearl Harbor, 9/11. I think it’s the greatest threat that I’ve ever seen to our country. These people are stone cold crazy.
Donald really needs to stop looking in the mirror every time he talks about the greatest threat facing America because the person posing the greatest threat to this country is the one delivering that speech. The idea that communism represents a greater danger to the United States than two world wars, Pearl Harbor, September 11, or the authoritarian movement currently taking hold inside our own government is so detached from reality that it would almost be funny if Donald were not the President of the United States.
Communism?
Really?
Do American communists even exist in any meaningful sense anymore? Do they exist anywhere in numbers that remotely justify this kind of panic? Personally, I am considerably more concerned about the fascists currently running large portions of the American government than I am about an imaginary communist movement plotting to destroy Mount Rushmore.
That, of course, raises another question.
Why Mount Rushmore?
Why has Donald become so singularly obsessed with protecting that monument? My suspicion is that it has considerably less to do with preserving history than with preserving his own fantasy. Donald has made little secret over the years of his desire to see his own face carved into Mount Rushmore alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. Once you understand that, his sudden concern about the monument begins making a great deal more sense. If you believe your own likeness belongs on the mountain, you are probably going to become rather invested in convincing people someone is trying to destroy it.
The irony, of course, is that Mount Rushmore itself remains one of the most controversial monuments in the country. It was carved into land sacred to the Lakota people after the United States violated its own treaty obligations. There are entirely legitimate conversations to be had about that history, but Donald is not interested in history. He is interested in manufacturing enemies because fear has always been one of his most effective political tools.
This obsession with communism also feels strangely frozen in time. Donald remains trapped in the political worldview of the 1980s, or perhaps even earlier. Roy Cohn, Donald’s longtime mentor and one of the most destructive figures in modern American political history, built much of his career alongside Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare. McCarthyism depended on convincing Americans that communists were lurking everywhere, waiting to destroy the country from within. It was a campaign built on fear, conspiracy theories, and the destruction of innocent people’s lives. Donald absorbed those lessons well. He continues using the same language, invoking the same imaginary enemies, and relying on the same politics of fear because it has shaped the way he understands power for most of his life.
It is no coincidence that Republicans continue returning to the same collection of words whenever they need to distract the public. Communism. Waste. Fraud. Abuse. They repeat them endlessly because they believe repetition eventually becomes truth. They hope that if they invoke those phrases often enough, Americans will stop paying attention to the genuine dangers confronting this country. The real threat is not an imaginary communist conspiracy to destroy Mount Rushmore. The real threat is an increasingly authoritarian movement that continues concentrating power, attacking democratic institutions, and convincing Americans to distrust one another.
That is why ridicule remains so important.
Authoritarians depend upon appearing powerful. They depend upon convincing people they are inevitable, unstoppable, and worthy of fear. One of the most effective ways to weaken them is to expose just how absurd they actually are. Donald spends an extraordinary amount of time demanding that people take him seriously. Yet the same man who warns about communist plots against Mount Rushmore also managed to destroy a reflecting pool, blame innocent Americans for his own incompetence, invent beef cartels, and ask taxpayers for another seventy billion dollars to continue funding a war he insists has already been won.
These are not the actions of serious people.
They are the actions of profoundly unserious people exercising enormous power.
That is precisely why mockery matters. Ridicule strips away the illusion of competence. It reminds us that beneath the manufactured spectacle, the endless self-promotion, and the constant attempts to intimidate the public are people who repeatedly reveal themselves to be incompetent, dishonest, and frequently ridiculous. Donald wants Americans to fear him. He wants us to believe he is larger than life, uniquely powerful, and beyond accountability. Nothing undermines that mythology faster than exposing the absurdity at its core.
That is why we keep showing up every week. Not simply to criticize Donald or to catalogue another week’s worth of scandals, but to remind ourselves that these people are not invincible. They are absurd. They are incompetent. They are laughable. They deserve to be held accountable, but they also deserve to be ridiculed because ridicule weakens authoritarians in ways they understand all too well.
Mockery really is one of our superpowers.
We will continue using it because it remains one of the most effective ways to puncture the mythology Donald has spent a lifetime constructing around himself. Every joke that exposes his incompetence, every moment that reveals the gap between his promises and reality, and every instance in which we refuse to treat the absurd as normal chips away at the illusion that sustains him.
So we will keep doing exactly that.
Week after week, we will continue calling out the lies, exposing the corruption, highlighting the incompetence, and reminding ourselves that democracy is strengthened not only by vigilance, but also by refusing to surrender our ability to laugh at those who so desperately want us to fear them.
