Trump the Shark

Since Kamala Harris had her political career abruptly terminated last year, so many people I admired, from celebrities to strangers I thought were my friends (to cop a phrase from Bob Seger), have let me down by bending their knees to Donald Trump and MAGA.  Mika Brzezinski, Kristen Welker, Bill Maher, Kasie Hunt, Jake Tapper - the list is endless, made more infinite by people who embraced MAGA before Trump forced Harris into early retirement, such as James Howard Kunstler and Elon Musk.  So you can imagine how tested I was when I found a testimonial post for the late Charlie Kirk on the Instagram page of one of my favorite fashion models from the 1980s, Kim Alexis.

Kim (I call her by her first name because not only do I follow her on Facebook, I am one of her personal friends on Facebook, and remember, I have met her in person) expressed her sorrow over Kirk's death, and she also extended her condolences to Kirk's family.  The reason Kim voiced  sympathies for Kirk is because she had actually met him and found him to be a personable and likeable guy.  Black women - including Beverly Johnson, whom Kim has worked with (and the results of their work together are stunning, of course) - would likely beg to differ, given Kirk's questionable questioning of black women's brain power, and so would I, except for a few things.

Remember, just because Charlie Kirk was a rhymes-with-glass-pole doesn't mean he couldn't be charming and engaging in a one-on-one engagement.  After all, Harry Truman, upon meeting Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Potsdam conference, took a liking to him, and actor Jack Lemmon, upon meeting Fidel Castro at a film festival in Havana, said that the Cuban leader had charm "right down to his toenails."  I'm sure Kim was charmed greatly by Kirk when their respective paths crossed.   I'm sure Kirk - who was young enough to be my son - would have charmed me.  And Kirk, to be honest, could exude charm in a public setting.  One video of Kirk engaging with a transsexual person making a transition from male to female caught him saying that he personally hated the idea of injecting sex-altering drugs into anyone to change their sex and telling the individual that he/she should look inward and determine through introspection what sort of body he/she felt comfortable in.  He said he was confident that he/she would make the right decision for himself/herself.

Of course, Kirk probably hoped that he/she would stay a he, but he grasped that that was not a decision for anyone other than the individual to make.

None of this, of course, excuses Kirk for being a racist, homophobic, misogynistic Christian nationalist.  But none of his character deficiencies apply to Kim Alexis.  Kim is a Christian, but she is not a die-hard fundamentalist.  She's not a Christian nationalist.  Good grief, her husband is Jewish.  And I know she's not racist - not because she has black friends, but because she has white friends (some of whom I know, like her fellow models) who would not be friends with Kim if they had reason to believe she was a bigot.  In short, she is not MAGA.  As a Christian, she was showing charity on Instagram toward a fellow human being who was needlessly shot to death in a country with too many guns and too many people who have no qualms about using them.  

And that Instagram post?  Well, that's what I was slowly getting to.  It's not there anymore.  Kim took down the post?  She did more than that.  She took down her whole Instagram account.  When I first saw the Kirk post, I did not leave a comment because I, quite frankly, didn't know what to say.  I tried to go back to her post to see what other people were saying in response, and that's when I saw that her account was no longer available.  It may remain unavailable for along time.  (Her Facebook accounts, where she did not mention Kirk, are still up.)

Even though Kim did not provoke the same visceral reaction in me that made me stop watching "Morning Joe" (and the rest of MSNBC as well) when Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski confessed their pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago two weeks after the election - I didn't unfriend her on social media - she certainly hit many a raw nerve.  So did Lisa MacKenzie (née Moberg), a Swedish veteran model living in the U.S. who also expressed sorrow about Charlie Kirk's death.  I'm friends with her on Facebook as well, and a lot of her other Facebook friends excoriated her for her thoughts and prayers, and I had to explain to her that Americans aren't as nice to each other as Swedes are. 

Kim's and Lisa's sentiments were clearly meant to be above politics, but this is a time when nothing is above politics, so it helps to be able to tell when someone is genuinely trying to express sorrow for a fellow human being's death and and when an extremist is martyring a fellow extremist.  I did not find their comments worthy of me needing to cancel them.  But long before Kirk was killed, I had to cancel a lot of people who expressed strong support for MAGA or bent their knees to it, be they people I knew personally or famous people I admired.  And that brings my post full circle.  I'm sorry to say that Kim and Lisa - both of whom I featured on my beautiful-women picture blog - are exceptions to the rule that anyone who expresses conciliatory or complimentary comments about MAGA figures ought to be canceled.

Speaking of my beautiful-women picture blog . . . It's been three months and change since I terminated it, and given how many of the women I featured turned out to lack inner beauty - most of them corporate-media reporters who coddle Trump when they should know better - I don't regret my decision one iota.

Dress Code

Why are people making fun of this?

Everyone in the media is laughing at Republicans who support Donald Trump for President showing up at his 2016 election interference trial all dressed like Trump - in blue suits and red ties.

Everyone thinks it's a hoot that Trump and the Republican politicians who want to be his running mate of one of his Cabinet secretaries should he win wear matching outfits.  It's no laughing matter. Because I recall that, back in the 1930s, a bunch of guys in the same party in a European country also wore matching outfits.

So why aren't the media drawing the obvious parallels between MAGA suits and ties and National Socialist attire?

But hey, if the suit fits . . . 

Adios, Johnny Bravo.  

Donald Trump Superstar

Well, I hope we're not too messianic 

Or a trifle too satanic . . . 

We love to play the blues. 

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Not to be content with hawking Bibles with Lee Greenwood, the worst country singer of all time (and the Michael Bolton of country and western), Donald Trump has made himself out to be a modern messiah out to save the Union, fashioning himself not in comparison to Abraham Lincoln but to Jesus Christ.

Trump has never come out and said he is a Christ-like figure, but, through insinuations both subtle and obvious, he's let his MAGA supporters believe that.  He's insisted that the multiple indictments against him are not actually directed at him but an effort by the Deep State to neutralize his power as part of an effort to go after ordinary Americans, and he's suffering the slings and arrows on their behalf, almost as a human shield for the little guy (a human shield who actually lives in a gold-plated castle in Florida).  His supporters actually talk about how Donald Trump is suffering for them, how he's sacrificing himself for them, leading them to revere him like, if not like Christ, at least like an Old Testament prophet.

So it shouldn't seem so surprising that MAGA folks hold their index fingers up in a prayerful mood at Trump's rallies, which is actually a QAnon gesture.

I can think of another finger I'd like to give to Trump.

And so this is why so many evangelicals support Trump.  Even as they acknowledge his sins - while Trump doesn't acknowledge his own, bragging how he has nothing to apologize for or confess to - they reason their support for him as an example of how the Lord works in mysterious ways by sending them a flawed hedonist to save Christianity, or at least their nationalistic version of it, which sees America as a citadel of Christian civilization.   They fear the citadel is under attack from forces of depravity, Islam, non-heterosexual culture, Islam, tree-hugging pagans, Islam, secular humanism, Islam, Taylor Swift, Islam, vegans, Islam, abortion, Islam. and of course, loudmouthed Puerto Rican and potty-mouthed Palestinian congresswomen.   

Did I happen to mention that they also fear Islam?

The idea that America is a citadel of Christian virtue is nothing new.  The Reagan administration played up the idea of the U.S. as a moral beacon in the 1980s, and many Americans concurred with that sentiment.  "God intended for us to have the highest moral country in the world," an Oregon nurse told a newspaper reporter in the early nineties.  But while Ronald Reagan believed that God intended that he be spared and live virtuously after being nearly killed by a deranged would-be assassin in 1981, he, as his son Ron noted, "accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate."  Nor did Reagan accept that as a messianic mission, as opposed to Trump's insinuation as "the chosen one."

If Trump is a savior, why didn't he save this country from COVID?  Why did he suggest injecting ourselves with bleach instead?  And would a modern savior put out a social-media post like this on Easter Sunday?

Even Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has repeatedly mocked Christianity for making its holiest day a moveable feast for lack of a permanent date ("I know what day my leader died") and secularizing it with rabbits and eggs (because rabbits don't lay eggs), has shown more respect for Easter than this.

And while President Biden, a devout Roman Catholic, was offering best wishes to the nation on Easter Sunday, March 31, he also put out a proclamation acknowledging March 31 as Transgender Visibility Day.  This offended MAGA Republicans who charged the President of placing the honoring of "depraved" transsexual culture over the solemnity of Easter.  But unlike Easter, Transgender Visibility Day, which was first observed in 2009, has always been on the last day of March, and has only coincided with Easter twice - in 2013 and in this year - since then.

Next year, when Trump could be President again and his administration could be transforming the country into a fascist police state along the guidelines of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, Easter Sunday falls on April 20.

Adolf Hitler's birthday.