Trump Can't Even Die Good
After a lifetime failing at life, Trump appears to be failing at dying, as well
Sept. 2: Trump insists he’s not dead yet and that he feels happy … America turns out for Workers Over Billionaires rallies … Trump not sure whether to declare another emergency crisis or crisis emergency … Genocide scholars declare Gaza genocide a genocide …
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This is the kind of thing TFN exists to ignore — this weekend’s rampant online speculation that Pres. Donald Trump is dead or dying and that he’ll announce his recent or imminent death — or an invasion of Chicago or something worse — at his mystery-subject presidential announcement today at 2pm eastern. We try to ignore this kind of thing because corporate media are already over-consumed by the easy coverage of what might happen instead of the hard work of unearthing what is happening.
So what’s my excuse? Mostly because I’m guessing you’ve already heard something about it. Trump’s lack of public activities over the past few days — he didn’t even show up at a Workers Over Billionaires rally! — and mounting health woes lies drove rampant speculation about his health this weekend. Literally, “Trump Is Dead” was trending.
A post by Trump — or was it?!? — that he “never felt better in my life” didn’t help him, as no 79-year-old since Methuselah ever felt better in their life at that age than ever before. Especially not with his ankles now resembling literal gas bags and his hands turning into raw steaks.
It also doesn’t help when the White House tries to turn the bruised backs of his hands into a backhanded compliment by saying he shakes hands all day. With Satan, apparently.
Vice Pres. JD Vance is also not helping, as he is wont not to do. Last week, Vance said he’d make a pretty good president if Trump dropped dead. “[I]f, God forbid, there's a terrible tragedy, I can't think of better on-the-job training than what I've gotten over the last 200 days,” he said. I mean, I can…
Trump’s mental state also appears to be deteriorating. Y’know, from the soaring pinnacles it once occupied.
And Trump’s healing power — his ability to recover from brutal handshaking — appears to have diminished significantly since just last year when his ear instantly regrew the entire chunk allegedly ripped out by a gunman’s bullet1.
All in all, it adds up to Trump apparently falling apart and lying about it piece by piece instead of aging and failing mentally and physically with dignity. In fact, the only mortality thing Trump seems to have accomplished is creating a gaudy, gold-lined mausoleum for himself. Mission accomplished!
DIGNITY Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) announced Monday that he won’t seek re-election next year, after seeing that whole Pres. Joe Biden thing last year. Signaling that it’s time for change, Nadler spoke about his departure with independent media the New York Times, the sworn enemy of change. Sigh.
“Watching the Biden thing really said something about the necessity for generational change in the party, and I think I want to respect that,” Nadler said. “[A] certain amount of change is very helpful, especially when we face the challenge of Trump and his incipient fascism.”
Nadler’s New York City seat is virtually impossible for Republicans to win, so Democratic leaders are expected to recruit a candidate as close to Republican as possible.
Workers Over Billionaires Rallies Rule the Weekend
An estimated 865 rallies around the country Monday featured hundreds of thousands of people standing up for organized labor, disorganized labor, undocumented labor, documented labor, and pretty much any labor standing up to the second residency of Pres. Donald Trump.
The rallies were organized by May Day Strong, a coalition of labor groups including the AFL-CIO, One Fair Wage, and other unions and organizations.
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said there was a reason not to center the protests in Washington: “This is about organic, grassroots organizing, and we intentionally wanted it to be outside of Washington DC, because that’s where the impacts are being felt.” (Which doesn’t mean DC didn’t turn out, too!)
Trump’s Inability to Run Things Without Emergency Powers May Extend to Housing
The Trump administration is considering declaring housing prices the tenth (10th!) national emergency of his administration, not including his administration. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview this weekend that Pres. Donald Trump hasn’t yet figured out whether housing prices are an emergency or what to do about it, but that someday he might.
Bessent told the right-wing Washington Examiner, “We may declare a national housing emergency in the fall,” depending on what’s in fashion and when pumpkin starts turning up in everyfuckingthing.
“We’re trying to figure out what we can do,” said Bessent, adding, “I think everything is on the table.” Which, historically, means they’re open to using nukes.
Hilariously and lyingly, Bessent said, “We don’t want to step into the business of states, counties, and municipal governments,” even though the Trump administration has made a business of goose-stepping into the business of states, counties, municipal governments, and business.
Hilarious-also-ly, Bessent said that “affordability” will be a big theme of the 2026 congressional campaigns.
FASC-FORWARD Everyone in the healthcare industry is warning that affordability will fall next year as costs rise and the GOP makes affordability its 2026 campaign theme without offering concrete remedies such as a full pardon for Luigi Mangione.
Guess What the International Association of Genocide Scholars Just Said About Gaza!
(Ed. note: This story has been updated with details about the vote turnout)
I’ve been reticent for a number of reasons to call Israel’s obscene response to the obscene Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, genocide. That’s a legal determination, for one thing. And while some experts have said Israel’s slaughter and destruction in Gaza qualify as genocide, I lacked the knowledge, conviction, and possibly courage to venture my own assessment.
Helpfully, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution on Sunday saying that Israel is guilty of genocide. Only 28% of the members voted, but of those, 86% voted for the resolution. So I guess I’m calling it genocide. I mean, follow the science!
The mistake I’ve made — based on my ignorance about the legalities — was that I believed that genocide implied intent of total annihilation. Oops.
In fact, it’s defined as acts to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
“…in whole or in part…” So here we are, and who am I to argue with the International Association of Genocide Scholars?
Bessent Belied
The right-wing “thought (sic) leaders (sic)” — who used to be party leaders when the party used to have thought — lost their minds over Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s lies about Pres. Donald Trump’s tariffs this weekend.
The White House pushed out a Fox clip of Bessent being pressed yessed about the claim that tariffs are a “hidden (sic) tax” on consumers. Bessent, a Wall Street guy, responded, “If they’re so bad, and the American consumer’s paying them, why do we hear the European companies or the Chinese companies or the Chinese complaining about tariffs if it's all being borne by the American people?”
This is standard-issue White House dishonesty, of course, and the only reason I’m addressing it today is that the right wing missed the point. Which is that it’s important to recognize the language of lying-without-lying. Bessent asks a question. That’s one way of dodging.
His other linguistic legerdemain is “all.” Why are other countries complaining if it’s all being borne by American consumers. Well, it’s not all being borne by them! Companies here and abroad are eating some of the costs.
Plus, the obvious reason companies in other countries would complain is that U.S. consumers will buy less of their stuff if it costs more!
Now, a savvy journalist, or a real one, would’ve pressed Bessent on his flim-flam chicanery. But Bessent was speaking with Lara Trump on “My View with Lara Trump,” which is either hosted by an unknown second host to whom “my” refers or is titled, in effect, “My View with Me.”
Spoiler: Trump did not press. To get a sense of her powers of discernment, consider her meet-cute story about her now-husband, Eric.
Lara Trump, who is 5’11”, met Eric while hanging out with mutual friends at a bar. Eric won her over with his charm wit kindness altitude. Years later she recalled the profound impact his intellect character insight height had on her:
Eric is 6'5" and I was like, “I don’t know, this guy. I could get down with this. This guy's taller than me in heels. So, it could work out.”
The couple got married and had two children thanks to Eric’s devotion to the cause of maintaining a consistent elevation of his face off the ground.
It’s like The Princess Bride, but sad throughout.
Luckily Deservedly for Lara, the party of merit and skill-based (not identity-based) hiring has made her a TV host, co-chair of the Republican National Committee, and would’ve given her the North Carolina GOP Senate nomination if she wanted it.
New York Times Paywalls Story About Poor People Not Getting Access to Things
The New York Times ran a fantastic new opinion piece about going to Disney World that’s also about our world going to shit.
The microcosm of it is one family’s struggle to afford a trip to Disney World, juxtaposed with a rich family’s not-at-all struggle to do the same. But it’s not about the trip, it’s the juxtaposition in experience.
Once upon a time, once you paid your nut to get in, a Disney World experience was the same for everyone. Why? Because the middle class was huge and so Disney aimed its world at the middle class.
Now, Daniel Currell, a management consultant (please hold your boos til the end), writes that the middle class no longer has enough money for Disney’s algorithms to Hoover. And the amount of money that’s been centrifuged away from the middle class — as if they’d spent the last 50 years on EPCOT’s Mission: SPACE ride — is now so great that Disney World is targeted at the rich.
Three Quickies
Pres. Donald Trump is stiffing his stormtroopers. National Guard troops are supposed to get bonuses if a deployment hits 30 days, even for an unconstitutional attack on an American city. So, obviously, Trump is limiting deployments to 29 days and passing the savings on to you along with the fascism. (h/t)
The American Prospect’s David Dayen scoops the story of an anti-union law firm advising clients that violating the law to bust unions might be risky but might also be cool. How come? Mostly because no one’s enforcing the laws that protect organized labor.
The Jan. 6 traitors are launching an effort to seek compensation for the hell they were put through even though all they did was illegally enter the U.S. Capitol, violently breach it, attack cops defending it, chase Congress out to prevent certification of the 2020 presidential election, and call for the murder and rape of U.S. elected officials. One of their lawyers is pitching the Dept. of Justice to create a panel to determine how much taxpayers should pay the Jan. 6 traitors in reparations for prosecuting some of them. If approved, the panel would calculate the damages done to the Jan. 6 traitors by the Capitol Building and its protectors getting in their way, similar to that incident when those buildings rotated with the Earth’s surface to strike those hijacked airplanes.
FLASHBACK Eighty-three percent of Americans thought Trump’s clemency for the Jan. 6 attackers was a microwaved bag of shit. Please consider reparations!
Recommended Reading or Listening If You Must
Remember the whole Cracker Barrel kerfuffel? Turns out it was goosed by a Cracker Barrel investor who doesn’t like how Cracker Barrel is run and just wanted to dump on and take a dump on Cracker Barrel’s “woke” (yawn) management. And, yes, of course they’re MAGA. And, yes, of course they’re the son of a brigadier general who worked for the tyrannical shah of Iran.
TCB
ICYMI Good morning from Virginia, where my son and I spent the night on our road trip taking him to college. However, TFN rolls on! If you missed any of it, here’s what we’ve done since Friday’s TFN:
Friday: I joined Blue Amp’s Cliff Schecter for a debate over making former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) a national model for Democrats. You can watch me change Cliff’s mind about things here.
Saturday: I compiled the most comprehensive inventorying I’ve yet seen of Democrats doing what I argued back in May that they should do: Warning federal rank and file that there will be consequences for just following (unlawful) orders. Now they’re doing it. And it’s not just Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL).
Sunday: If you missed it, I published a bonus edition of TFN for the long weekend, leading off with news that Health (sic) and Human (sic) Services (sic) Secretary Robert Flinching Kennedy, Jr., is not the be-all-and-end-all-human-life of public health. A growing coalition of Democratic officials and private medical types are rapidly assembling parallel public-health regimens based on sanity.
Labor Day: Yes, I labored unironically on Labor Day. How come? To share the forgotten history of what the future of labor looked like just 100 years ago. That dream is now virtually ignored even by Democrats. But it’s only dead if we choose to let it shake hands all day with Satan.
But, you ask, didn’t I also start our college road trip yesterday? Newsfucker, I did. We arrive tonight, move my son in on Wednesday, and then I fly home Thursday. You might ask, why not take a break from TFN during all this?
Honestly? That’s not a luxury I can afford. As you must be tired of hearing by now, summers are tough for the news business. The good news is that new, free subscriptions are now picking up — welcome, new Newsfuckers! — but all of this means now would be a really, really bad time not to provide fresh newsfucking every day.
It helps keep TFN on Substack’s list of top newsletters, and it helps TFN keep moving toward financial sustainability. Which, yes, despite the summer slowdown, we are still on track to hit later this year if Newsfuckers new and old continue upgrading, just a few every day, to paid subscriptions. Thank you. E pluribus fuckem.
NEWSFUCKING IN THE WILD My regular Monday stint on The Nicole Sandler Show resumes next Monday at 3:30pm eastern and you can watch it, and past segments, for free, right here.
Superstar superhero writer Mark Waid joins me for a live chat on Monday, Sept. 15, at 4:30pm eastern time to talk about men and supermen and the Superman movie.
RESOURCES
Go get ‘em, kids! There’s only so many more hands he can shake…
TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.
No, TFN doesn’t subscribe to a single conspiracy theory about the shooting. But TFN does have a paid, upgraded subscription to the theory that the bullet didn’t actually strike Trump, but came close enough fast enough that the shock wave both stung him and ripped the skin. Which would explain why he didn’t lose a chunk of ear meat or lobe flesh.
Thanks for soldiering on under pressure. I have erected a small bodhisattva shrine for you right where I can honor it as I walk by for a second cup of coffee (with or without whisky, depending on the news) of the morning. Hope you and your son shed a few tears together in at least some degree of acknowledgement of the love, the care, and the sheer hard work it takes to get a kid all the way into college. Sincere congrats.
Checked the brief bio at the end of this morning’s TFN, and…Chris Hayes, yes, yes…Keith Olbermann, check. Air America Radio, uh-huh…and not a word about being on hand for the Titan submersible of the news business, Al Jazeera America. I’m hurt. Have me on your show to talk about immigration and “We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century.” I give good guest.