DECLINE AND DEMOCRATIZATION: Jim Clyburn's neighbor makes a strange claim!

FRIDAY, MAY 22, 2026

No country for democratized men: Is it possible that the South Carolina legislature is redistricting the wrong man?

As we noted in Wednesday's afternoon post, the South Carolina House has created a new map aimed at eliminating Rep. Jim Clyburn's "majority minority" 6th congressional district. If the state's Senate goes along with the plan, Rep. Clyburn could be out after 34 years in the Congress.  

(Or possibly not, of course.)  

We ask an important question today—could the South Carolina GOP be trying to dump the wrong man? We base our question upon this report about Rep. Ralph Norman, Rep. Clyburn's next-door neighbor from the 5th congressional district:

GOP Rep. Says January 6 Was ‘Made Up’: ‘That Was A Staged Thing’   

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said on Thursday that the January 6 insurrection was “made up,” claiming that the event was “staged” by those who opposed President Donald Trump. 

Norman was asked by press about the Department of Justice’s new $1.776 billion fund set up as part of a settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the 2019 leak of his tax returns. The Department claimed the fund was meant “for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress,” leading many to question whether Jan. 6 rioters could receive money through the fund.

When pressed on this possibility, Norman claimed that the insurrection had not taken place in the way it's remembered, seen on video, and spoken about by those who saw or actively took part in the riot. 

You can read the full report yourselves. You can also watch the videotape, which includes this exchange:

REPORTER (5/21/26): Your colleagues, though, your Republican colleagues, ran for their life and barricaded themselves in their chamber. You think they were acting?

NORMAN: No, there was a riot there, but it was a self-made riot by members who hate Trump. It was made up. In my opinion. 

So said Clyburn's neighbor. We'll guess that he may have watched too many Tucker Carlson tapes—the carefully curated video clips which Carlson aired, night after night, on the Fox News Channel.  

Who the heck is Rep. Norman? For all we know, he may be the world's nicest person. The leading authority on his life offers this basket of insights:   

Ralph Norman

Ralph Warren Norman Jr. (born June 20, 1953) is an American politician and real estate developer who has served as the U.S. representative for South Carolina's 5th congressional district since 2017. His district includes most of the South Carolina side of the Charlotte metropolitan area, along with outer portions of the Upstate and Midlands. A member of the Republican Party, Norman served as the South Carolina state representative for the 48th district from 2005 to 2007 and from 2009 to 2017.

Norman won a special election after Mick Mulvaney vacated his seat in Congress upon being appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget by President Donald Trump. As of 2019, with a net worth of $18.3 million, Norman is the 28th wealthiest member of Congress. Govtrack.us ranked Norman as the most conservative member of the 117th Congress as of February 2023.   

He advocated for the implementation of martial law to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden in January 2021.   

And so on from there. For the record, those carefully curated neighboring districts have been engineered to present disparate profiles like these:  

South Carolina 5th congressional district (Norman):
White: 64.1%
Black: 23.8%
R+11

South Carolina 6th congressional district (Clyburn):
White: 41.6%
Black: 46.8%
D+13   

We'll take a wild guess with respect to one topic. The 6th district's representative probably has the clearer idea of what happened on January 6.

This is no country for democratized humans, our youthful analysts can sometimes be heard to exclaim. They're referring to the so-called "democratization of media"—the rise of the new media platforms which generated this new sociological state of affairs:   

Every nitwit a king!  

Talk radio arrived on the national scene in 1988, courtesy of Rush Limbaugh. As of March 1994, Limbaugh was telling a massive national audience that "Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton, and the body was then taken to Fort Marcy Park."

(By happenstance, we heard that fateful broadcast live as we motored through West Virginia.)

"Cable news" was already present. But soon there were three major "cable news" channels, and two of them eventually went largely or wholly partisan.

The Internet had arrived on the scene; it too went largely partisan. And then, at some point, the podcasters came into our lives. 

We humans weren't built for deluges like this:

Every podcaster a king!

At Fox, they let Tucker run his con about January 6, night after night after night. They disappeared the reams of videotape in which police officers were being beaten. 

Millions of Ralph Normans were produced in this way. Given the way we humans are wired, they frequently believed every word.  

(Also, people believed that President Obama had been born in Kenya. They believed that "death panels" lay at the heart of the fiendish Obamacare plan. People believed that the 2020 White House election had been stolen. Our human wiring makes us highly susceptible to bogus tribal belief, pretty much all the way down.)

We humans! We humans weren't built to evaluate the welter of claims this "democratization" dropped on our heads. According to all the experts, we human were wired for different ends:

We were wired to split into warring tribes and to craft and believe our own tribe's narratives!

The Reds believed that January 6 was staged by House members who hated President Trump. We Blues believed that the southern border was shut up tight, and we also believed that President Biden was actually fit as a fiddle.

Everyone else could see that these claims were wrong, but we Blues frequently fell in line behind a million other tribal assertions—tribal assertions which sent President Trump back to the White House for the current second term.  

Before he died this week, former congressman Barney Frank discussed the various ways we Blues went astray. Next week, we'll be looking at what he said, and we'll also be looking at Michelle Obama's recent comments about the (understandable) feelings of many Trump voters.  

While we're at it, we'll be looking at Helen Lewis' recent cover report in The Atlantic—her essay about "masculinism." (She failed to mention the ugly nightly fury of the Fox News Channel's Greg Gutfeld, whose undisguised loathing of the people he thinks of as women won't seem to let him go.) 

We'll also consider the state of Florida's new high school history curriculum, a curriculum the state will offer in place of the pre-existing Advanced Placement U.S. History course.  

We humans weren't built for democratization, or so our young analysts tell us. And, to a certain extent, they can sometimes almost seem to be at least partially right!

As a general matter, we Blues can see the shape of the problem when we look at the Reds. But we struggle to see the shape of the problem when we take a quick look at ourselves. 

Along with the sudden democratization, we were hit with a president who is almost surely mentally ill and/or in some sort of cognitive decline. We remind you that people who are (severely) mentally ill didn't choose to be mentally ill. But this last factor, layered atop the rampant democratization, gives our ardent analysts sick nightly dreams of demise.

Eventually, we'll return to what Rep. Clyburn recently said—to his surprising claim that Democrats might win three (3!) House seats in South Carolina if his district gets broken up. 

(A major South Carolina Republican warned his colleagues in the GOP that the number could be two!)

Rep. Clyburn may not have believed what he said, but he plainly said it. More broadly, his statement points in an intriguing direction as we fight through the profoundly unhelpful Blue agitprop which has followed the Callais decision.

(It's the stolen valor which gets our goat. That is plainly not a comment about Rep. Clyburn.)

The United States is no country for democratized men! So President Putin has sometimes said, in slightly different words. 

Beyond that, President Xi may think that we're a nation in decline. If he does believe such a thing, does any sane person, looking around, really think that the amazingly tall Asian strongman might not have a hint of a point?

THURSDAY: O'Donnell walked the cognition beat!

THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2026

We're sorry we (almost) missed it: We're sorry we missed Lawrence O'Donnell's presentation on last evening's Last Word. We're going to attribute it to an "On Demand malfunction."

Walking the "possible cognitive decline" beat, O'Donnell recalled a report in the Washington Post from March 2024. Headline included, the Post's report started like this:   

Shadowing Trump’s attacks on mental fitness—his own father’s dementia   

Donald Trump invited his extended family to Mar-a-Lago in the mid-1990s. As the clan gathered at the palatial Florida estate, though, his father was badly struggling, according to Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece.

Fred Trump Sr., the pugnacious developer then in his late 80s, didn’t recognize two of his children at the party, recalled Mary L. Trump, who attended the gathering. And when he did recognize Donald, the family patriarch approached his son with a picture of a Cadillac that he wanted to buy—as if he needed his son’s permission.

The incident, Mary L. Trump said, left Donald Trump visibly upset at his father’s descent into dementia, which medical records show had been diagnosed several years earlier. Trump reflected his anguish in an interview around that time, with Playboy in 1997 reporting that seeing his father “addled with Alzheimer’s” had left him wondering “out loud about the senselessness of life.”   

“Turning 50 does make you think about mortality, or immortality, or whatever,” Trump, who had recently reached that milestone, told the magazine. “It does hit you.”  

[...]  

Trump’s long fixation on mental fitness followed years of watching his father’s worsening dementia—a formative period that some associates said has been a defining and little-mentioned factor in his life, and which left him with an abiding concern that he might someday inherit the condition. While much remains unknown about Alzheimer’s, experts say there is an increased risk of inheriting a gene associated with the disease from a parent.   

Last night, O'Donnell spent a bit of time discussing the possibility, or perhaps the likelihood, that the sitting president is indeed in the grip of a cognitive decline, not unlike the dementia which afflicted his father. We know of few other topics that are more worth discussing at this point in time, but the people we accept as journalists simply aren't going to do that.  

Nor would they know how to approach the situation if they chose to take the journalistic leap.  

We don't recall seeing the piece, by Michael Kranish, back in 2024. In retrospect, Kranish stumbled a bit out of the gate, throwing shade at Trump's assertions, at that time, that President Biden was experiencing a cognitive decline.  

A few months later, everyone saw the meltdown which occurred during the June 2024 Trump-Biden debate. Even in the wake of that experience, our journalists agree that President Trump's mental health and cognitive state must not be discussed.  

It's intriguing to see Mary Trump cited at the start of the Kranish piece. She has recently said, once again, that her uncle is experiencing an "obvious" cognitive decline, layered atop decades of untreated (and serious) mental health issues.  

Our journos agree that this can't be discussed. We're a young nation saddled with an immature discourse. That isn't going to change.   

To see O'Donnell's brief discussion of this highly significant topic, you can start by clicking here.

DEMOS / DEMOCRATIZATION: Eric Holder states his view!

THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2026

But what did he actually say? Friend, it's very much as we told you all the way back on May 2: 

We tend to admire Eric Holder on this sprawling campus. 

In that original admission, we said we wouldn't mention the principal reason for our admiration. It involves Holder's contradiction, when he was serving as attorney general, of a key piece of Blue American agitprop, and so we fear that it might make the occasional reader dislike him.    

For that reason, we'll skip that bit of behavior again. But who the heck is Eric Holder? The moving finger writes, but still can't quite move on:  

Eric Holder

Eric Himpton Holder Jr. (born January 21, 1951) is an American lawyer who served as the 82nd United States attorney general from 2009 to 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, Holder was the first African American to hold the position.

Born in New York City to a middle-class family of Bajan origin, Holder graduated from Stuyvesant High School, Columbia College, and Columbia Law School. Following law school, he worked for the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice for twelve years. He next served as a judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia before being appointed by President Bill Clinton as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and subsequently U.S. deputy attorney general.  

And so on from there, with distinction. We regard the person in question as decent and highly sane.

(For the record, "Bajan" is a reference to Barbados, where Holder's father and maternal grandparents were born.)

We like this guy around here. That said, we ask a basic question again, the same question we asked on May 2:   

What does Holder think we Blues should do in response to the Supreme Court's Callais decision?   

What should we angry Blues do? Yesterday, print editions of the New York Times included a guest essay by Holder concerning that very question. Headline included, here's where his proposal begins:   

This Redistricting Chaos Must End 

[...]   

When Democrats eventually take control of Congress and the White House, top of their list should be banning partisan gerrymandering and mid-decade redistricting, along with reviving protections against racial gerrymandering and guarding against other forms of voter suppression. Democratic senators should exempt such a bill from being filibustered, preventing Republicans from blocking it. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema prevented this from happening in 2021 when Democrats had the power to do it, which is one reason the country is in its current mess.   

We agree with the general thrust of Holder's essay, as signaled in that headline. Ideally, the current rush toward "partisan gerrymandering" should be brought to an end.  

That said, will normal elections take place this fall? Will Democrats ever control the White House and the Congress again?  

We can't necessarily say that normal elections will proceed. But Holder assumes that Democrats will achieve full control at some point, and he says this again and again:

He says that Democrats should pass legislation which outlaws "partisan gerrymandering." 

Partisan gerrymanders have to go—but what is Holder's stance with respect to "racial gerrymandering?" We've read his essay more than once. And yet, just as it was at the start of the month, we still aren't able to say.

Citizens, listen up! Holder uses the term "partisan gerrymandering" six separate times in his essay. He leaves no doubt about his view—it's time for that practice to go.  

On the other hand, he refers to "racial gerrymandering" only once, in the passage we've posted above, and he does so somewhat murkily. Indeed, what's his prescription concerning that practice?

We can guess, but we can't really say.

We need "protections against racial gerrymandering," Holder explicitly says. It sounds like racial gerrymandering is an undesirable practice. 

But does that mean that states should be forbidden from creating the weirdly shaped "majority Black" congressional districts under review in Callais? We're going to guess that it possibly doesn't—but Holder, who is perfectly capable, is never quite willing to say.

In such ways, our floundering discourse constantly fails. We can't be sure, but we'll guess that Holder's view about "racial gerrymandering" may go like this:

Friend, there are two different practices which get described as "racial gerrymandering." We refer to the equal-but-opposite rhyming practices known as "packing" and "cracking."

In the practice known as "packing," a state legislature creates a sprawling, weirdly shaped congressional district for the purpose of making the district majority Black. 

In the practice known as "cracking," a state legislature splits a pre-existing majority Black area into two or more different congressional districts. Or it disassembles a gerrymandered majority Black district which its predecessors may have created in the past.

"Packing" creates congressional districts which are majority Black. "Cracking" splits such districts apart. 

Each practice has been described as "racial gerrymandering" down through the years. Our guess would be this:

We'll guess that Holder would seek protections against "cracking," but might let "packing" proceed, as it's been done in the past.

That would be our own best guess, but we don't actually know. Even in his lengthy guest essay, Holder fails to clarify this matter—and then too, we find this largely incoherent effort by Ezra Klein and a specialist guest:

THE EZRA KLEIN SHOW
How to End the Gerrymandering Doom Loop Forever

The piece appears at the New York Times site. Klein is understood to be one of the paper's brightest players, as he most probably is.

That said, the lengthy transcript goes on forever. If you listen to the audiotape of the discussion, you'll spend an hour and fourteen minutes—and we can't say that any part of this confusing topic gets clarified along the way. 

With that in mind, we offer this warning: 

When we the people can't speak with clarity, the agitprop tends to take over.

Is our nation in decline? Could it be that we've already became a failed state, but we just don't know it yet?

Our answer to that second question is a provisional yes. In our view, it's a form of "democratization" which has brought us to this low place. 

We'll continue from there on the morrow. For today, we'll leave you with this:

We the people have very limited cognitive skills. We routinely get lost in the mist as we try to explain elementary concepts, and at such times we may be inclined to move to the memorized agitprop.

Bajan refers to sun-splashed Barbados. Demos is (or was) a Greek term referring to us the people, an eternally challenged group.

We admire Holder at this site. With respect to this fascinatingly complex matter, we'd like to see him speak with greater clarity. We'd like to see him do better.

Tomorrow: Lord Russell's ginormous IQ?

WEDNESDAY: How many seats could the Democrats win?

WEDNESDAY, MAY 20, 2026

New districts beneath the palmettos: South Carolina is known as the Palmetto State, thanks to the sabal palmettos.

Now that state is involved in a great civil war. Before too long, there may be new congressional districts beneath the stately palmettos.

Rep. Clyburn, look out! The New York Times starts to explain:   

South Carolina House Passes New Map Aimed at Forcing Out Clyburn

The South Carolina House of Representatives passed a new congressional map early Wednesday morning aimed at eliminating the state’s only Democratic seat at the urging of President Trump.

Among the proposed changes is a significant, Republican-leaning shift of the Sixth Congressional District, which is currently represented by James E. Clyburn, a powerful Black Democrat.

The map now heads to the State Senate, where some conservative members have been more hesitant to jump into the nation’s redistricting battles. Republicans already hold six of the state’s seven congressional seats, and some lawmakers have expressed skepticism about possibly unseating Mr. Clyburn, a power broker who has funneled vast resources into South Carolina over the years.   

Long story short:   

At first, it looked like the state's GOP planned to leave Rep. Clyburn's district alone. At present, the state elects six Republicans to the House, along with the venerable Clyburn as the only Dem. 

At first, it looked like the state's map would be left that way. Then, President Trump insisted on getting his way, and Rep. Clyburn's district may now get broken up, in the hope that the state GOP can capture all seven House seats.  

That said, a problem may exist. Let's start with a quick description of Rep. Clyburn's district. At present, the scorecard looks like this:   

South Carolina's 6th congressional district
Black: 46.8%
White: 41.6%
Hispanic: 6.2%
D+13 

According to the leading authority, it's a fairly common story:

"The district's current configuration dates from a deal struck in the early 1990s between state Republicans and Democrats in the South Carolina General Assembly to create a majority-black district," the leading authority says.  

In the early 1990s! That was the time when various states, reacting to 1982 amendments to the original Voting Rights Act, moved to create majority Black districts, with the two major parties generally working together on the project.

Today, Rep. Clyburn's 6th Congressional District is a "majority minority" district. (For the record, no other district in South Carolina is more than 25% Black.)

Also this, for future reference:

Following the 2020 census, the state moved 30,000 Black voters from Rep. Nancy Mace's neighboring district into Rep. Clyburn's district, thereby making it easier for Mace to hold onto her seat.   

Rep. Clyburn is a giant in South Carolina. Under current configurations, he serves the state's only plus-Democrat district. 

Now, the state GOP, bowing to Trump, is on the verge of breaking his district up—but uh-oh! Look what Rep. Clyburn said when this idea hit the fan

‘Careful What You Pray For’: Jim Clyburn Warns GOP Redistricting Could Blow Up In Their Faces and Help Democrats

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) cautioned House Republicans should “be very careful” what they “pray for” as he claimed redistricting efforts in his state of South Carolina had opened the opportunity for three Democratic candidates to get elected.

The congressman appeared on CNN’s State of the Union to speak with anchor Jake Tapper who raised the “gerrymandering wars” that had begun across multiple states ahead of the midterms, “kicked off” by President Donald Trump’s push for Texas redistricting in 2024.  

[...]

“All I’m going to say to that is be very careful what you pray for,” [Clyburn] added. “Because what I do believe is that when they finish with the redistricting, there will be the possibilities of at least three Democrats getting elected here in South Carolina to the United States Congress.”

Say what? According to Clyburn, if the state's Republican poohbahs remove a bunch of Democratic voters from some new version of District 6, they could end up flipping election outcomes in two of the neighboring districts to which they had been moved. 

The state could end up with three Democratic House members, not the current one!   

Did Rep. Clyburn really mean that? Did he really believe that could happen?   

We don't know the answer to that. But soon thereafter, the Republican majority leader of the South Carolina Senate warned his colleagues that South Carolina Democrats could end up winning two House seats if Clyburn's district was reconfigured.

Disappointingly, David French wrote a column praising that solon as a type of "good government" hero. He failed to mention the stated partisan reason behind the solon's rejection of the redistricting proposal.  

What will happen if redistricting proceeds in the Palmetto State, as now seems possible? Especially in the current environment, is it possible that Palmetto Democrats could win two or three House seats, instead of the current one? 

We don't know the answer to that, but this turn of events helps lead to the not-so-secret political history of the way the two major parties cooperated in the 1990s, creating new majority Black districts and thereby increasing the number of Black congressional reps.   

People, why did Republicans want to cooperate in that historic undertaking? That's the not-so-secret story Carl Hulse told in a recent retrospective in the New York Times. 

We've seen no one else recall this part of our recent history in this convoluted, confusing area. 

Back in the 1990s, why did Republicans want to create those districts?  Tomorrow, we'll visit what Hulse wrote about this long, winding road. 

DEMISE: "I tremble for my country," he said!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 20, 2026

He managed to get that one right: Does President Xi believe that our nation is in decline? As he huddles in his Moscow safe rooms, does President Putin believe the same thing?   

As we noted yesterday, President Trump explained Xi's suggestion away during his recent sleepover. But are we merely in decline? Might we already be a "failed state?"   

Are we still a functioning nation state? Pew has started to wonder about that! As of last October 1, Pew had long since noticed such oddities as this:

Congress has long struggled to pass spending bills on time  

Large chunks of the federal government, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to the National Archives, are shut down because there’s no money to keep them open, and federal workers are facing possible mass layoffs. The new federal fiscal year began on Oct. 1, but Congress didn’t pass any of the dozen annual appropriations bills it’s supposed to enact. Nor did lawmakers pass a stopgap spending law to buy themselves more time.   

Congress’ chronic inability to follow its own appropriations process is hardly new. In the nearly five decades that the current system for budgeting and spending tax dollars has been in place, Congress has passed all its required appropriations measures on time only four times: fiscal 1977 (the first full fiscal year under the current system), 1989, 1995 and 1997. And even those last three times, Congress was late in passing the budget blueprint that, in theory at least, precedes the actual spending bills.  

Say what? Congress hasn't managed to pass a budget in time since 1997? But then again, whatever! And then again, also this, from a different source:

 It is an attack by white people against the very concept of Black representation. It is Jim Crow 2.0.

That was Elie Mystal, appearing on Velshi, speaking about that recent court decision. Mystal went to say this:

Unless white people get over themselves, unless they reverse themselves and their ancestors and their voting habits since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they will get exactly the racist country that they have long desired.

These White People Today! They need to get over themselves, he said, and then again they also need to reverse their ancestors.

On the Fox News Channel, they luv/luv/loved those remarks! When you wonder how the sitting president's approvals can possibly stay in the mid-30s (or may be even higher than that), we'd advise you to think about many possible explanations, not excluding the vague but deliciously righteous suggestion that it may be 1892 all over again.  

Full disclosure:  

It isn't 1892, and we haven't exactly found our way back to Jim Crow again. That doesn't mean that we haven't already become a failed state, because it may be that we have.   

With respect to that possibility, a question must be asked:

Does anyone think that our current rolling collapse is going to end right here? Does anyone think that it's going to end with the $1.8 billion "compensation fund," or with the agreement by the Justice Department that the sitting president—with all his peculiar financial behaviors—will of course never be audited?  

("No Kings?" That's what millions of protesters perfectly sensibly said.)

Stumblebums, please! Is anyone sure that we're going to have a normal set of elections this fall? Why would anyone doubt the possibility that schemes might already be in place—schemes which flow from ancient human desires, ugly schemes which have been designed to undermine our normal election procedures?  

Are we already in a state of demise, but we just don't know it yet? Is it possible that we just can't see or possibly say it yet? 

In this Best Picture-nominated 1999 film, Bruce Willis plays a character who doesn't know that he has already died. Might it be that way with us, in our state of demise or decline? 

In Camus' famous novel, The Plague, that's pretty much the way it was for the good and decent citizens of the fictional sun-splashed seaside city, Oran. As a plague invaded their city, here's how they didn't respond:

Camus, La Peste (The Plague)

Our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves. In other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions. 

Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views? They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences. 

Is that the way it is with us? Are we forgetting that ancient dreams of conquest and overthrow still lurk in the hearts of some modern women and men?

Is that the way it is with us when we rant and yell about Jim Crow 2.0? Or when a couple of white guys sittin' around talking, while getting drunk or getting stoned, come up with a groaner like this:  

‘Couch Money’: Bill Maher and John Fetterman Defend the Cost of Trump’s Ballroom   

Bill Maher and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) took turns defending the White House ballroom that President Donald Trump is building, with Maher saying it doesn’t make sense to get angry about it when the project will cost the equivalent of “couch money” to taxpayers.

The comic and senator talked about the ballroom at the start of Monday’s latest episode of Club Random.

“This thing won’t even be finished by the time he’s done!” Fetterman said. He then quipped Trump wasn’t building a “Dave and Buster[s],” which Maher got a kick out of.   

“Meanwhile the money is like one angstrom unit of a percentage point of what our budget is. So it doesn’t matter anyway,” Maher said. “It’s couch money.”

He added the price tag for the ballroom doesn’t sound outlandish to him. “$330 million is about what a ballroom costs,” Maher said. 

Bill has been pricing ballrooms! What in the world have they done with the highly perceptive Bill Maher?  

Motherfrumpers, please! Building a ballroom may (or may not) have been a good idea. Beyond that, the original (stated) cost of the ballroom may (or may not) have been completely OK.  

The warning signal in this event was not the idea-in-itself! It was the lunatic way the sitting president went about his treasured project—demolishing the East Wing of the White House on a series of weekday afternoons, after swearing that he'd do no such thing and after checking with no one.  

The pair of randos sat around saying a ballroom might be nice—but like many such denizens of our own Oran, they'd blown right past the main point. It was the remarkably peculiar way our president chose to blow the house down—the disturbing way he'd elected to do so without notice and no questions asked!

Ladies and gentlemen, might we speak? The sitting president seems to be mentally ill, and that's a dangerous state of affairs.

The sitting president is mentally ill? Like so many other savants, the stoners blew right past it! It's very hard to miss that fact, and yet the thought leaders of our declining society all seem to be eager to do it! 

Test scores are falling in our own Oran, but we the humans were never built to perform the task of spotting such things in the first place.   

The sitting president is mentally ill? We won't attempt to count the ways, but let us say this about that: 

People who are (severely) mentally ill didn't choose to be mentally ill.

People who are (severely) mentally ill quite often don't know that they are. Also, a mental illness is an actual illness, much as a physical illness is.   

In fact, a mental illness often is a physical illness, linked to genetics and to human physiology.

A mental illness frequently is a physical illness? As we've noted, the leading authority on this matter limns it as shown:

Most international clinical documents use the term mental "disorder," while "illness" is also common. It has been noted that using the term "mental" (i.e., of the mind) is not necessarily meant to imply separateness from the brain or body.

And so on from there. We should also mention this:

Mental illness ("mental disorder") should not be cause for insult. But our American journalistic culture is quite underdeveloped with respect to this complex topic, and insult is where we typically go when mental illness is colloquially implied.

"I tremble for my country," a president once said.

He seemed to think that a just God wouldn't tolerate our nation's misconduct forever. In our view, he pretty much got the ethics of that one right, adjusting for religious belief and for historical context.

No one living today engaged in the conduct to which he referred. But isn't there ample reason to tremble for our country today? To tremble for the fate of a nation which may already be a failed state? Which may already be The United States of the Bruce Willis Character?

Citoyens, a very important figure seems to be mentally ill—and that is always a personal tragedy. 

We'll guess that President Xi is aware of that fact—that he has factored it in.

Tomorrow: The late Barney Frank's lament?