REFUSALS: The president's parents saved the world!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 27, 2026

So says the sitting president: We had planned to focus our reports this week on Michelle Goldberg's column for the New York Times.   

In our view, Goldberg is an increasingly valuable observer of the increasingly dangerous scene. In print editions, her column appeared in last weekend's Sunday Opinion section. 

Online, headline included, the column grows from this basic overview:

Why Do We Keep Imagining a New Civil War?

[...]

For at least the last decade, a florid, aggressive contempt has been a constant in our politics. Donald Trump, after all, doesn’t just shower liberal cities and states with insults (and, in a demented A.I. video he posted, with excrement). His presidency has been devoted to punishing the places that didn’t vote for him, including by withholding health care and disaster funding. One of the things his voters have long loved about him is the humiliation and despair he causes their fellow citizens.

Many of those Trump partisans are still smarting over Hillary Clinton calling some of them “deplorables.” For decades they’ve been seething at the disrespect they feel emanating from America’s cultural capitals. It seems obvious to me that blue America is more abused than abuser, but that doesn’t really matter; the impossibility of coming to any agreement about the commensurability of our grievances just underlines the toxicity of the relationship.

An aggressive contempt has been a constant in our politics, Goldberg says. She refers to "the toxicity of the relationship" between our Reds and our Blues.

Also, the headline above her essay refers to a civil war.

We don't necessarily agree with every word in Goldberg's column. For example, depending on where your chronology starts, we don't think it's obvious that Blue America "is more abused than abuser."

That said, we agree with Goldberg on this—at this point, a question like that "doesn’t really matter."

It seems to us that the situation is dire, and that the bulk of the problem, at this moment, involves the fury of the sitting president—the "insults" and the "demented" conduct in which he often engages.

We got knocked off course from what we had planned to do this week. We now expect to build next week's reports out of Goldberg's column.   

As for the sitting president, his peculiar behavior continued yesterday. So did the endless normalization as the high-end press corps keeps refusing to report his weird behavior.

Lesser orgs still report! Concerning yesterday's weirdness, the Daily Beast starts like this:

Trump Fires Off 46 Posts in Manic Two-Hour Spree  

 Donald Trump apparently found a two-hour break in his presidential schedule Wednesday to fire off 46 posts in rapid succession on Truth Social. 

Trump's manic posting spree covered a range of topics. At one point, he was airing his unprompted frustration that athlete Roger Clemens is not in the National Baseball Hall of Fame...

He even had time for that! 

More strikingly, the sitting president informed the world that it's MISSION ACCOMPLISHED in Iran, a puzzling claim he didn't try to justify or explain. To see that particular Truth Social post, you can just click here. 

Inevitably, the post includes a putdown of a former president, in this case George W. Bush. In other posts, he creates unflattering visual portraits of former president Obama, and he presents a photo of his mother and father above this nutty caption:   

The parents who save [sic] the world.  

Yes, that's what the caption says. And yes, it was actually posted.

(The Daily Beast presents a paywall. For an unrestricted review of these 46 posts, you can click here for The Mirror.)   

Is something wrong with the sitting president? Starting with Monday's report about The Motorcade Which Conquered the Reflecting Pool, we drifted back onto that tired old theme this week.  

We also returned to a tired old fact: 

No matter how strange the president's conduct becomes, the major news orgs and journalists of our own Blue America will never examine that question.  

In fairness, yesterday's 46 posts were fairly tame, as compared to the astoundingly toxic posting the president has done in the past. But of one thing we can all feel certain:

No matter how strange the conduct gets, the strangeness will be ignored. The oddness will be disappeared and thus normalized. Nothing to look at, we'll (inferentially) be told.  

The press is obeying a very old rule. In fairness, it was a very good journalistic rule, until the time came when it wasn't.

Also, we'll guess that various orgs don't want to get sued or prosecuted. For reasons like those, our favorite stars on MS NOW will never speak to medical specialists about the president's fury or about the wide range of his very strange conduct. 

(That conduct "will only worsen," various medical specialists have said.)

In some ways, it's just as well that the interviews won't be conducted. Truth be told, our upper-end American press corps isn't amazingly sharp. They would have little sense of the appropriate way to explore the possibility that the most powerful person on the face of the earth might be (dangerously) "mentally ill."  

(Ethical reminders: In our view, a serious "mental illness" is a serious illness. Also, people who are seriously mentally ill didn't choose to be mentally ill.

(In our view, mental illness shouldn't be treated as an occasion for insult. I will not abandon one person, Dolly Parton is said to have said.)    

At any rate, is something wrong with the sitting president? They wouldn't know how to examine that question, and they've taken a vow not to ask!   

We offer one more point:   

The president's aide isn't the issue. The issue is the (far more dangerous) sitting president himself.  

Dating back to the dawn of time, it's always been fun to beat on "the girl." In the current situation, it's also a dereliction of duty—the latest refusal to serve.

Over the past quite a few years, "a florid, aggressive contempt has been a constant in our politics." In the current circumstance, a great deal of that fury has come from one man. 

There's no telling what he might decide to do—how many East Wings he might tear down—after November 3.

Is a medical problem involved? To a man, to a woman, your "journalists" have agreed not to ask!