Enjoying the view from Limbo
The other day it was John Bolton, and I noted here, as many others did elsewhere, that this had nothing to do with “classified documents” and whatnot, but was a simple and straightforward personal attack against someone within the Republic sphere who had become a public critic of Donald Trump. Today it is Chris Christie. For the apparently no-longer-acceptable behavior of appearing on...
First, they came for the neocons, but I was not a neocon so I said nothing…. John Bolton’s house was raided by federal agents in the early morning hours of August 22nd. It was not a document request, not a subpoena, but an FBI raid — the showy and scary kind, with streets blocked off and boxes summarily removed, by uniformed federal officers...
Three and a half years into the Ukraine war, millions of people on both sides are dead or wounded — every single one of those casualties firmly and clearly resting on the head of one man, the man without whom the war would not exist, would have no reason to exist. Donald Trump’s mental acuity and moral compass are encapsulated in the fact...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 19, 2025 · Last modified August 20, 2025
Donald Trump began his second presidential term — Vanity Drain Unplugged, if you will — by gilding the Oval Office in a manner suggestive of a set for an off-Broadway show titled “Liberace: A Musical Fantasy!” He staged a Mussolini-esque military parade for which even most of his MAGA cult were too embarrassed to show up, an old pro-American habit of mind temporarily...
Well, Donald Trump has staged another of his great summits with a tyrant, in which the only clear purpose, as usual, was to legitimize and normalize the tyrant’s brutality while belittling The United States of America and marginalizing her Western “allies.” This time, most impressively — if you agree with me that unmitigated gall and civilizational suicide on a grand scale can be...
Friends.– No one has fewer natural friends than the tyrant, who is rivalled in this only by the philosopher — the former to the extent that he has reduced his soul to nothing but vested interests, the latter to the extent that he has expunged his soul of vested interests. The tyrant falls farthest away from the conditions that make true friendship possible;...
Does anyone believe that Donald Trump, who has been more consistent in his admiration for and allegiance to Vladimir Putin than he has been consistent in anything over the past ten years, apart from his ever-present scorn for everything that he does not perceive as serving his delusions of a very petty grandeur, is going to forsake his hero and geopolitical leash-holder at...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 1, 2025
In the past few days, Donald Trump has publicly floated the idea of granting a presidential pardon to a convicted serial sex trafficker and child abuser, even sending his own personal lawyer, who also happens to be the deputy attorney general of the United States, to meet with that vile creature to discuss her terms. Now, as an obvious adjunct of this transparently...
Donald Trump is parading around another “greatest deal ever made,” this one with the European Union. And once again, like his deal of the century with Japan, the trumpeted victory is a permanent (until Trump changes his whim of the month) fifteen percent tariff on most goods from Europe, as though fifteen percent were a great accomplishment because it is only half as...
Downtown at night.— I do not want what they are drinking. I do not want to hear what they are saying. I am repulsed by the thought of what they are thinking. My mind blacks out at the general noise, the mindlessly giddy laughter, the time-killing and cocksure banter, the publicly displayed “intimacies,” and the roiling sea of unmemorable faces in the artificial...
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