FALLING APART: They didn't ask about President Biden!

TUESDAY, MAY 20, 2025

So too with President Trump: Friend, is the United States on the verge of becoming "a pitiful, helpless giant?"

On April 30, 1970, President Nixon said we were no such thing. In this morning's New York Times, Kyle Chan doesn't seem real sure.

Chan is "a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton who focuses on technology and industrial policy in China." In his guest essay in the Times, he offers this gloomy assessment:

In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant.

For years, theorists have posited the onset of a “Chinese century”: a world in which China finally harnesses its vast economic and technological potential to surpass the United States and reorient global power around a pole that runs through Beijing.

That century may already have dawned, and when historians look back they may very well pinpoint the early months of President Trump’s second term as the watershed moment when China pulled away and left the United States behind.

[...]

[China] leads global production in multiple industries—steel, aluminum, shipbuilding, batteries, solar power, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, 5G equipment, consumer electronics, active pharmaceutical ingredients and bullet trains. It is projected to account for 45 percent—nearly half—of global manufacturing by 2030. Beijing is also laser-focused on winning the future: In March it announced a $138 billion national venture capital fund that will make long-term investments in cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing and robotics, and increased its budget for public research and development.

[..]

Yet Mr. Trump remains fixated on tariffs. He doesn’t even seem to grasp the scale of the threat posed by China...

And so on from there.

Are we various American tribes on our way to "pitiful, helpless giant" status? Presumably, that's one of the possibilities. 

Presumably, better possibilities also exist. 

Meanwhile, it's as we noted yesterday. The man in charge was busy last weekend producing such undisguised madness as this:

Trump Posts Wild Video Full of Murder Conspiracy Theories...

President Donald Trump on Saturday shared a video pushing a long-debunked conspiracy theories about Bill and Hillary Clinton—as well as other Democrats—being the murderous forces behind multiple deaths.

The video, posted to his Truth Social account without comment, listed several individuals and implied they died under suspicious circumstances connected to the Clintons.

It is titled “THE VIDEO HILLARY CLINTON DOES NOT WANT YOU TO SEE.”

The madness of this presentation is thoroughly hard to miss. Today, we'll offer even more detail from the Mediaite report:

Trump’s Trump War Room account on X also shared the video...

Those featured in the clip included John F. Kennedy Jr., Vince Foster, and Seth Rich, among others.

The clip began with JFK Jr., who died in a 1999 plane crash. The NTSB ruled that the deadly crash pilot error. Trump’s video notes that Hillary Clinton won her New York Senate seat after his death.

Next up was Mary Mahoney, a White House intern who was murdered in a 1997 robbery. Her killer confessed and was not connected to the Clintons.

The clip then moved on to longtime Clinton ally Foster, who died by suicide in 1993. Multiple investigations confirmed his death was indeed by his own hand.

The video went on to cast doubt on the deaths of James McDougal, Walter Schieb, and Shawn Lucas.

Trump’s video presented the deaths in a sequence while implying a coordinated cover-up. All cases were investigated and attributed to natural causes, suicide, accidents, or unrelated crimes.

The video Trump shared has circulated for years in fringe circles despite being discredited. The same clip was shared on an Instagram page with 3,700 followers just a few weeks before Trump boosted it again Saturday.

The so-called “Clinton body count” conspiracy theory has been debunked over and over, but has permeated online for years.

This madness dates at least to 1994—to Rush Limbaugh's attempt to convince Red America that Hillary Clinton had been involved in the death of Vince Foster, which Limbaugh fashioned as an apparent murder. 

Before long, the amazingly pious Reverend Falwell was involved in this gruesome misconduct. We recall the evening in the late 1990s when Geraldo Rivera, then a Clinton defender, absolved Reverend Falwell of guilt for this conduct on Rivera's nightly CNBC program.

These claims have been debunked a million times, but the lunacy has lived on. The promulgation of these claims has long qualified as the definition of obvious crackpot behavior.

As of now, this insane behavior comes from this nation's sitting president—and the major players in the mainstream press corps have agreed, as they've done so many times, that they should avert their gaze.

In fairness, let's be fair! As we noted yesterday, the president's behavior was so crazy in this instance that the Washington Post even took notice. To peruse the Post's report about this madness, you can just click here. You will be taken to a report which appears beneath this headline:

Trump peddles false conspiracy theories tying Clintons to several deaths

Several deaths? We're counting at least seven! But so the madness goes as the world continues to turn, perhaps in the direction of an all-new Chinese century.

To its credit, the Post reported this instance of the ongoing madness. That said, across Blue America's major news orgs, this latest example of madness has occasioned no discussion. Our lords and ladies have agreed, once again, that Homey don't play it that way.

Why in the world would a sitting president engage in such ludicrous conduct? Two obvious possibilities come to mind, neither of which is encouraging:

Two major possibilities:

Possibility One: In a moment of overnight madness, President Trump actually believed the truth, or the possible truth, of the lunacy he was reposting.

Possibility Two: President Trump knew that the claims in question were madness. He simply chose to repost this madness as a distraction, or as a source of excitement—as a way of exciting a certain segment of his base.

Does the sitting president believe the various crazy things he says? We have no way of knowing. 

In this case, if he was merely trying to excite a certain type of voter, it's clear that his effort succeeded. Here's how things went on Monday morning, during Karoline Leavitt's latest imitation of a White House news briefing:

‘New Media’ Reporter Goes on Long Rant About ‘Clinton Body Count’, Confronts Karoline Leavitt on Epstein Files

After White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s opening announcements in Monday morning’s briefing, she opened the floor to questions and first called upon Liam Cosgrove of Zero Hedge. Cosgrove began his second question with a tangent about the “Clinton body count” theory—a conspiracy theory that suggests dozens of deaths over the last few decades were actually the handiwork of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. Believers in the theory claim the Clintons have been eliminating political opponents for years. Cosgrove brought up the theory after President Donald Trump posted a video about it.

[...]

Leavitt deferred to the Justice Department before moving on to other questions.

The imitation of a press secretary called on an imitation of a journalist. In that passage, you're reading a description of one of the ways things have been falling apart.

(Also, the Epstein files! Let's not leave them out!)

Quite rapidly, adherence to rational conduct is falling apart at the dawn of this new Chinese century. The madness starts with the sitting president, then spreads quickly from there.

How did it ever get this far? In the past, we've cited the so-called "democratization media"—the development of technologies which make "every man [sic] a king" in the realm of mass promulgation of claims, assessments and views.

We've also mentioned the corporate journalistic practice described as "segregation by viewpoint"—the destructive practice in which major news orgs exist to promulgate only one set of tribal claims and views.

In thrall to these developments, the madness spreads quickly and well. With respect to this latest event, one obvious question remains:

Is something wrong with President Trump? No really—is something wrong with a major figure who would engage in such ludicrous conduct?

Why does this powerful person engage in such obvious madness? Here in Blue America, our major news orgs—our journalistic stars—have agreed that this blindingly obvious question must never be asked.

Was something wrong with President Biden? It's being said, perhaps with reason, that our major orgs walked away from that important question when they should have asked.

Is something wrong with President Trump? It's the world's most obvious question, and they're taking a dive there too.

Things are falling apart as we speak! Our major stars, who aren't all that sharp, are averting their gaze again.

Tomorrow: Tub of lard sounds off