SATURDAY: The very strange state the nation is in!

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2025

Yesterday's report: The world isn't going to come to an end because the East Wing is no longer standing.

It's also possible that the replacement ballroom, if it really gets built, will come to bs seen as a valuable addition to the White House property.

This is also true:

Destroying the East Wing in the way the president did was a remarkably strange thing to do. Again, the reason for that assessment is obvious:

As president, he doesn't own the White House. Indeed, he doesn't even pay rent. The East Wing didn't belong to him, at least under current understandings. 

But then again, so what?

We still owe you a reaction to Michelle Goldberg's recent column for the New York Times. Headline included, the column started like this:

Trump Posted a Video of Himself Dumping Excrement on Our Cities. It’s a Glimpse of His Deepest Drives.

This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.

On Saturday, perhaps stung by the enormous nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump posted an A.I.-generated video on Truth Social that inadvertently captured his approach to governing. In it the president, wearing a crown, flies a “Top Gun”-style fighter plane labeled “King Trump” above American cities crowded with demonstrators, dumping gargantuan loads of feces on them. Amplifying it on social media, the White House communications director Steven Cheung gleefully wrote that the president was defecating “all over these No Kings losers!”

That column principally concerned the videotape the president posted—the videotape in which he's dropping excrement on the heads of us the American people. We think she may have "taken the bait" in one way. We think she nailed something else.

First, the president posted that videotape. After that, the East Wing came down. Our advice to you would be this:

We advise you to look again at yesterday's report.

We'll have more on these topics next week. If the leading authority can be trusted, medical science has even identified the gene or genes by which this journalistically undiscussable state of affairs can be passed from parent to child.

PIECES OF WORK: At one time, he was two years old!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2025

Howling into the void: President Trump has been on a bit of a jag of late.

First, he gave us the magic beds. Then he identified the Democrats as "the party of Satan."

Last weekend, he posted an AI videotape in which he himself is dumping mountains of excrement on the heads of his fellow Americans. Then he called the backhoe in and, as Bing Crosby once sang, "the walls came tumbling down."

At one point, he had been two years old—two and a half, to be more precise. Then, a terrible medical incident disabled his mother and made a bad situation worse.

Now, as sitting American president, he's dumping waste on the heads of the American people and, out in the literal realm, he has knocked a large chunk of the White House down. These last two behaviors were so peculiar that even our own major news orgs took note. But nothing is ever going to make these trusted elites in our own Blue America come to terms with what is sitting right there before them—with the apparent situation concerning which they've been warned.

In our view, it isn't surprising that the president is targeting iconic representatives of the country over which he presides. A familiar backstory may help explain the hostility which might imaginably be seem to be lurking in his devolving behaviors. But it was the book which was edited by the Yale psychiatrist which put Blue America's major journalists on a type of early notice.

The book was a New York Times best-seller, but it wasn't reviewed by the Times. It was published by MacMillan, but this page for the audiobook seems to be the only remaining official evidence of that connection:

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump:
37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President — Updated and Expanded with New Essays

Author: Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div...

About This Book
As this bestseller predicted, Trump has only grown more erratic and dangerous as the pressures on him mount...

Has President Trump become "more erratic and dangerous?" Has he become dangerous at all?

That, of course, is a matter of judgement. But three years later, in the summer of 2020, the president's niece, a Ph.D.-wielding clinical therapist, published a second best-seller:

Mary L. Trump, PhD
Too Much and Never Enough:
How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

About The Book
In this revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald’s only niece, shines a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security, and social fabric.

Again, those judgments are matters of assessment, of personal and professional opinion. That said, the news orgs of Blue America had been issued a second warning. Their refusal to discuss such assessments has continued to the present say, with excrement raining down from the sky and the East Wing, all of a sudden, suddenly no longer there.

What might explain these manifestations? In the summer of 2020, the niece offered this:

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as “malignant narcissism” and “narcissistic personality disorder” in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.

[...]

Does Donald have other symptoms we aren’t aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

"A case could be made," the doctorate-wielding niece now said. Just for the record, the leading authority on the syndrome in question presents the symptoms of that disorder in the following manner:

Antisocial personality disorder

[...]

DSM-5

The main text of fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) defines antisocial personality disorder as being characterized by at least three of the following traits:

• Failure to conform to social norms and laws, indicated by repeatedly engaging in illegal activities.
• Deceitfulness, indicated by continuously lying, using aliases, or conning others for personal gain and pleasure.
• Exhibiting impulsivity or failing to plan ahead.
• Irritability and aggressiveness, indicated by repeatedly getting into fights or physically assaulting others.
• Reckless behaviors that disregard the safety of others.
• Irresponsibility, indicated by repeatedly failing to consistently work or honor financial obligations.
• Lack of remorse after hurting or mistreating another person.
• In order to be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder under. the DSM-5, one must be at least 18 years old, show evidence of onset of conduct disorder before age 15, and antisocial behavior cannot be explained by schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

That stands as the basic (rather familiar) list. In simpler narrative fashion, the authority posits this:

Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is a personality disorder defined by a chronic pattern of behavior that disregards the rights and well-being of others. People with ASPD often exhibit behavior that conflicts with social norms, leading to issues with interpersonal relationships, employment, and legal matters. The condition generally manifests in childhood or early adolescence, with a high rate of associated conduct problems and a tendency for symptoms to peak in late adolescence and early adulthood.

The prognosis for ASPD is complex, with high variability in outcomes...

[...]

People with ASPD may have a limited capacity for empathy and can be more interested in benefiting themselves than avoiding harm to others. They may have no regard for morals, social norms, or the rights of others. People with ASPD can have difficulty beginning or sustaining relationships. It is common for the interpersonal relationships of someone with ASPD to revolve around the exploitation and abuse of others. People with ASPD may display arrogance, think lowly and negatively of others, have limited remorse for their harmful actions, and have a callous attitude toward those they have harmed.

Just so you'll know, this branch of medical science holds that this syndrome—this unfortunate "mental disorder"—is perhaps more prevalent than one might suspect. Along the way in its lengthy presentation, the authority alleges this:

Prognosis

Boys are almost twice as likely to meet all of the diagnostic criteria for ASPD than girls and they will often start showing symptoms of the disorder much earlier in life. Children that do not show symptoms of the disease through age 15 will almost never develop ASPD later in life. If adults exhibit milder symptoms of ASPD, it is likely that they never met the criteria for the disorder in their childhood and were consequently never diagnosed. Overall, symptoms of ASPD tend to peak in late teens and early twenties but can often reduce or improve through age 40.

[...]

Epidemiology

The estimated lifetime prevalence of ASPD amongst the general population falls within 1% to 4%, skewed towards 6% men and 2% women.

The claim is something like a prevalence of six percent among men! Presumably, some afflictions of this "disease" (or this "disorder") are more substantial than others. But this is the general shape of the medical science which the major organs of our press corps have uniformly agreed to ignore.

For the record, medical science can always be wrong, and the very concept of "mental illness" (the term "mental disorder" is apparently now preferred) is much fuzzier—is much less clear—than is the concept of physical illness. When we say that someone is afflicted with a mental disorder, are we simply describing unusual conduct, or are we reporting a physiological impairment of some kind?

If our journalists would ever perform their function, we might see an informed discussion of an array of such points. Still, we already consider these assertions as made by the leading authority:

Causes

Personality disorders are generally believed to be caused by a combination and interaction of genetics and environmental influences. People with an antisocial or alcoholic parent are considered to be at higher risk of developing ASPD. Fire-setting and cruelty to animals during childhood are also linked to the development of an antisocial personality disorder, along with being more common in males...

[...]

Genetic

Research into genetic associations in antisocial personality disorder suggests that ASPD has some or even a strong genetic basis. The prevalence of ASPD is higher in people related to someone with the disorder. Twin studies, which are designed to discern between genetic and environmental effects, have reported significant genetic influences on antisocial behavior and conduct disorder.

In the specific genes that may be involved, one gene that has shown particular promise in its correlation with ASPD is the gene that encodes for monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A), an enzyme that breaks down monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin and norepinephrine. Various studies examining the gene's relationship to behavior have suggested that variants of the gene resulting in less MAO-A being produced (such as the 2R and 3R alleles of the promoter region) have associations with aggressive behavior in men.

This association is also influenced by negative experiences early in life, with children possessing a low-activity variant (MAOA-L) who have experienced negative circumstances being more likely to develop antisocial behavior than those with the high-activity variant (MAOA-H). Even when environmental interactions (e.g., emotional abuse) are taken out of the equation, a small association between MAOA-L and aggressive and antisocial behavior remains.

And on and on from there. In the case of the sitting president, some such "genetics" may have been contributed by his father, who is, rightly or wrongly, repeatedly described as a "sociopath" in Mary Trump's book. 

In this passage from that book, "Mary" and "Fred" are the president's parents:

Whereas Mary was needy, Fred seemed to have no emotional needs at all. In fact, he was a high-functioning sociopath. Although uncommon, sociopathy is not rare, afflicting as much as 3 percent of the population. Seventy-five percent of those diagnosed are men. Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others. Having a sociopath as a parent, especially if there is no one else around to mitigate the effects, all but guarantees severe disruption in how children understand themselves, regulate their emotions, and engage with the world.

Children of sociopaths face a difficult road. So said the clinical therapist, and so says the leading authority, right there in paragraph 2 of its lengthy report:

The prognosis for ASPD is complex, with high variability in outcomes. Individuals with severe ASPD symptoms may have difficulty forming stable relationships, maintaining employment, and avoiding criminal behavior, resulting in higher rates of divorce, unemployment, homelessness, and incarceration. In extreme cases, ASPD may lead to violent or criminal behaviors, often escalating in early adulthood. Research indicates that individuals with ASPD have an elevated risk of suicide, particularly those who also engage in substance misuse or have a history of incarceration. Additionally, children raised by parents with ASPD may be at greater risk of delinquency and mental health issues themselves.

There's more, much more to the way the niece's account of the family history dovetails with the leading authority's lengthy account of the way this syndrome is born. That said, the American press corps has steadfastly refused to discuss this part of the niece's best-selling book. 

Today, the uncle is soiling and demolishing leading emblems of the American nation. As this continues, our news orgs will continue to be shocked, shocked by the puzzlingly "erratic" behavior the president puts on display.

Will he have to knock the whole White House down to shake these elites from their lethargy? The president's devolving behavior tracks the state of medical science, but what explains the endless refusal to perform exhibited by the biggest stars of our realm?

Is the sitting president "a real piece of work" at the present time?  Under the circumstances, we think possible danger is plainly suggested by his increasingly erratic personal conduct. 

As we say that, we remember to pity the child, but we also leap to say that the adult may in fact be a dangerous person, as those two best-selling books have asserted right in their titles.

Is the sitting president a real piece of work? You may or may not want to use that language. But if the president is a piece of work, what about the other people with whom he's now surrounded? And what can we say about our journalists, who will happily go over the cliff before they agree to report the state of our medical science?

In our view, his behavior is becoming stranger and stranger, but so perhaps is theirs. The state of the science, such as it is, is still being ignored—disappeared.

Tomorrow: Much, much more 

THURSDAY: A diatribe and a bogus claim...

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2025

Life at the Bezos Post: Opinion writers have been fleeing the Washington Post ever since Jeff Bezos began to submit. 

That process may have been hurried along when Bezos announced "that the newspaper's opinion section will focus on supporting 'personal liberties and free markets,' and pieces opposing those views will not be published."

In some ways, the paper seems changed. In other ways, it doesn't. In the past two days, we've read two submissions which seemed to come outta the new way of life.

We'll start with Becca Rothfeld's review of Karine Jean-Pierre's new book.

For the record, we don't assume that Jean-Pierre has written a useful or coherent book. We're a bit flummoxed just by its title:

Independent:
A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines
By Karine Jean-Pierre
Legacy Lit. 172 pp. $30

That subtitle strikes us as hard to parse. But then, Rothfeld swings into action, and we truly do start to feel lost:

In her new book, Biden’s former press secretary lets Democrats have it

Imagine parting ways with the Democratic Party not because of its unwavering support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he violated international law and waged a bloody campaign against civilians in Gaza; not because of its humiliating failure to mount meaningful opposition to the Trump administration’s assault on just about everything of value in the country; not because it continues to run candidates in their 70s and 80s, one of whom opted to die in office at 90 rather than cede her seat to someone younger; not because of its inability to expand access to health care, or protect immigrants, or tax the wealthy, or really get anything done at all; not because of its politely noncommittal affect and rhetoric of facile uplift, or its members’ tendency to address the public as if they are delivering the keynote at a corporate retreat; not because the Democrats have no political vision, something of a liability for a political party; but rather because of the single sensible—if very belated—thing they have done in recent memory, which was to usher a doddering Joe Biden out of the 2024 presidential race.

We fought our way through that opening pavement. In paragraph 2, things almost seemed to get worse:

These contortions are hard to imagine from anyone but the most devoted apparatchik, which is exactly what Karine Jean-Pierre is....

And so on from there, at remarkable length. 

According to the leading authority, we share a bit of the old school tie with the reviewer in question:

Becca Rothfeld
Becca Rothfeld (born 8 October 1991) is an American literary critic, and essayist. She won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Silvers-Dudley Prize.

She attended Dartmouth College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Rothfeld later pursued a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Harvard University, but as of 2024 has not completed a dissertation. She is a book critic at The Washington Post.

We were once an undergraduate in that same department. The story we could tell!

Based upon her review, we'll guess that Rothfeld tilts toward Red, though that could always be wrong. We'll also guess that Jean-Pierre's book really isn't especially good—but based upon the tone of Rothfeld's review and based upon its ragged construction, we're inclined to agree with what AI Overview says about the roughly 600 comments:

AI Overview
The comments overwhelmingly criticize the article for being more of a political diatribe than a traditional book review. Many readers express dissatisfaction with the reviewer's perceived bias against the Democratic Party and Karine Jean-Pierre, arguing that the piece focuses too much on political opinions rather than the book's content...

We'll guess that the book may not be good. To our own refined ear, the review does read like a diatribe, and it just doesn't seem very good.

Yesterday, we fought our way through the book review. Today, we stumbled upon a bit of photo reporting, attributed to Amy B. Wang. Headline included, the report starts off like this:

Many presidents have renovated the White House. How Trump’s ballroom compares.

As construction is underway on President Donald Trump’s massive and extreme ballroom addition to the White House, images of part of the White House being torn down have caused a stir. It is not the first time the White House has undergone a major change in its more than 230-year history—nor the first time the changes have sparked controversy...

That almost sounds like someone may have been writing to spec. It sounds a lot like the official Trump Administration line—but as we clicked through the dozen captioned photographs portraying past changes to the White House, we found no claim that any of these relatively minor changes had actually been controversial, as the current demolition plainly is.

Our assessment? The woods are lovely, dark and deep, especially inside Harvard's Emerson Hall. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we the humans may not be built for this particular type of work.

PIECES OF WORK: Compagno is a piece of work!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2025

Sociopathy and the stupid: For starters, let the word go forth to the nations:

The world isn't going to come to an end because the sitting president has chosen to demolish the East Wing of the White House.

For whatever it may be worth, the behavior by the sitting president may not have been illegal. Given the endless complexification of all our American systems, that question will never be nailed down in any definitive way. But in this morning's New York Times, one experienced observer says this:

Architects Urged a Review of Trump’s Ballroom. Cue the Demolition Crew.

[...]

Edward Lengel, who served as chief historian of the White House Historical Association for two years until 2018, said he had been getting questions about the process. “People have asked me if this is illegal. I don’t think this is illegal,” he said. “I think this is a big loophole that has always been there. Previous presidents have observed precedent and not tried to exploit that loophole.”

Is Lengel right? We have no idea. But the president decided to have his way, and he tore that building down.

The world isn't going to come to an end, but the following ought to be said:

The White House doesn't belong to the sitting president. He doesn't even pay rent.

The White House, including each of its wings, is the property of the United States government. The complex belongs to the American people—or at least, that used to be the case, before the current regime came to town.

L'etat, c'est moi, the new monarch has said. This has produced dual headlines such as these, as found in today's New York Times:

Trump Is Wasting No Time in Tearing Down the East Wing
President Trump initially said the ballroom construction would not dismantle parts of the White House. His officials now say it is cheaper and more structurally sound to simply demolish the East Wing.

Trump Dismisses Another Inspector General, Fueling Oversight Concerns
With the firing of the Export-Import Bank’s inspector general, the president has sidelined around two dozen of the watchdogs who seek out fraud and mismanagement in federal agencies.

Trump Empowers Election Deniers, Still Fixated on 2020 Grievances
The president has placed proponents of his false claims into government jobs while dismantling systems built to secure voting, raising fears that he aims to seize authority over elections ahead of next year’s midterms.

The second and third of those headlines today may involve points of greater concern. But the president's decision to demolish the East Wing, absent any consultation and in the face of previous claim, suggest s a very important point:

If this president isn't a sociopath, he may be able to fill the bill until a real sociopath comes along.

Is something wrong with President Trump? With the people currently around him?

We've asked and we've asked and we've asked and we've asked. As we noted again, the finer people in Blue America aren't willing to go down that road. That said:

In recent weeks, he has given us a bizarre Truth Social post about those magic beds. He has told us that the Democratic Party is "the party of Satan."

He has posted a video in which he dumps barrels of human waste on his opponents' heads. And he has demolished the entire East Wing, in the face of previous statements of assurance.

Is something wrong with this man? To her credit, his niece was able to pity the child who was born to her own grandfather, who she describes as a sociopath.

That said, she speculated that her uncle may may also be a "sociopath." His demolition of property which wasn't his may seem to support some such tragic hypothesis.

Is something clinically wrong with President Trump? If so, that's a human tragedy—but your journalists have sworn not to ask.

That said, our rapidly failing society may be afflicted with something which even worse. Forget about the possible "sociopathy." Let's turn to the monstrously Stupid.

Last night's Gutfeld! program was worse. But for now, we're going to start with the opening segment of yesterday's The Five.

Thanks to the works of the Fox News Channel (and others), our society is awash in the artefacts of the astoundingly Stupid. Yesterday afternoon, at 5 o'clock sharp, guest co-host Emily Compagno, reciting obediently, introduced Segment One:

COMPAGNO (10/22/25): Hello, everyone. I'm Emily Compagno...It's 5 o'clock in New York City, and this is The Five.

The liberals are wokesing [sic] themselves into peak derangement over the construction of Trump's big, beautiful ballroom.

Hillary Clinton said, quote, "It's not his house. It's your house. And he's destroying it."

Compagno gave two more examples of deranged complaints by the libs. And then, she was even willing to read what follows. From the teleprompter to her lips to Red America's ears:

COMPAGNO: Never mind that Barack Obama built his basketball court, Richard Nixon rolled in a bowling alley, and plenty of other presidents did a little home renovation of their own. But President Trump adds a tax-payer free ballroom and suddenly the left is doing the meltdown mambo.

No, you can't get dumber. At 5:05, we got this:

COMPAGNO: I want to talk about the hypocrisy, for example, of Hillary Clinton chiming in. Her husband was one of those presidents. He, for example, brought the putting green closer to the Oval Office, so after he enjoys his cigars, he can take less steps?

She personally oversaw a complete renovation of the inside of the dining room. The list goes on. Are they going to exhume Woodrow Wilson for destroying the colonial garden?

No, you can't get dumber.

Bill Clinton moved the putting green, apparently to the original site of President Eisenhower's putting green. President Nixon installed a one-lane bowling alley in the White House basement.

To Compagno, demolishing the entire East Wing, absent any consultation and in the face of previous reassurance that the East Wing wouldn't even be touched, is an action on the order of such renovations as that.

The reference to President Clinton's cigars was the mandated bow to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. People like Compagno insist on playing these games in support of the president they revere—the president who has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 28 women, the president who is refusing to release the Epstein files.

Also, and just for the record:

In 1913, it was apparently Mrs. Woodrow Wilson who "destroyed the colonial garden." Actually, she replaced the colonial garden with what came to be called the Rose Garden, as you can recall in this report from The White House Museum.

Thanks to the leading authority on the topic, the story of the putting green can be remembered here. The (one-lane) basement bowling alley can be seen in the photographs which accompany this report.

Bill Clinton moved the putting green from one spot to another! But so it goes what an inveterate nutcase like Compagno starts pushing the corporate line—and this tribalized hysteria is now a major part of the failing American discourse. 

This imitation of human life takes place on the Fox News Channel from 5 a.m. right on into the night. There are plenty of real complaints which can be made, in a serious way, about Democratic Party governance and Blue American cultural positions—but the CEO of the Fox News Channel is determined to send in the clowns.

"There's no way to spin this," Compagno finally said, as she threw to Jesse Watters. "He's doing this for the people," she confidently announced.

"You're very excited today, aren't you, Emily?" Watters surprisingly said. Soon, he was offering his own irrelevant presentation about "the East Wing, or whatever you call it"—and yes, that's what he said

Remarkably, the messenger children of the Fox News Channel maintained this level of inanity all through the long broadcast night. If Clinton could move a putting green fifty yards, why couldn't President Trump demolish an historical building?

The rolling performance culminated in what may have been the craziest 17 minutes we've ever seen on an American "cable news" broadcast. We refer to the first 17 minutes of last evening's Gutfeld! show, during which Kat Timpf—the New York Times recently portrayed her as a beleaguered feminist—provided a striking account of the source of the fury within this stupidified tribe of lost, highly paid boys and girls.

You can't get dumber than what Compagno said. Because we've seen her many times on Gutfeld! shows, we weren't surprised by her rapid-fire anger or by her apparent true belief.

Needless to say, the producers who had fashioned her opening had been working from script. The Trump White House had already fashioned this brain-dead account of the way President Wilson "demolished the colonial garden." 

The channel, a mouthpiece for Trump, cut and pasted from there.

That said, the siting president has knocked the walls down—and he keeps firing providers of oversight. Along with that, it's the magic bed, and the plane dumping feces on the public's heads, and the Dems as "the party of Satan."

This is where our rapidly failing culture currently stands. In the face of our own Blue American silence, will there be some coming back?

Tomorrow: What Michelle Goldberg says she saw as the feces came raining down

WEDNESDAY: When Coons appeared on the Fox News Channel...

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2025

...a fuzzy dispute broke out: As we recently admitted, we're so old that we can remember when major news orgs tried to untangle basic factual disputes about fundamental policy matters.

It's one of the horses we rode in on! Way back in 1995 and 1996, our major orgs were trying to referee this never-ending dispute:

In his GOP Medicare proposal, was Speaker Gingrich trying to cut the Medicare program? Or was he simply trying to slow the rate at which the program would grow?

Al Franken, still a comedian, solved that riddle in his book, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot (and Other Observations). We explained it in a trio of posts, one of which Paul Krugman later linked to as the source for his own analysis of the question.

Cowed by threats from the newly ascendant Gingrich, mainstream journos never did manage to figure it out. But at least, back in those days and years, they tried and they tried and they tried.

Fast forward to today! With the zone being flooded anew every day, major orgs have largely stopped trying to fact-check, or to explain, fundamental policy matters. That leads to an intriguing report by Mediaite's Zachary Leenan.

What exactly do Democrats want in order to end the government shutdown? Yesterday, mid-afternoon, Senator Coons (D-Del.) appeared on the Fox News Channel with guest host Trace Gallagher.

What exactly do Democrats want? In this chunk of Leeman's report, we join the discussion in progress:

‘They Have Been Giving Health Care to Illegal Immigrants!’ Fox Anchor Brawls With Democrat Over Shutdown

[...]

Coons claimed he’s heard from doctors in his state who are “bracing for impact” over incoming “skyrocketing health insurance costs.” Democrats are currently in a standstill with Republicans over a continuing resolution to fund the government over Democrats’ demand that extensions of Affordable Care Act subsidies be included.

“You say, Senator, that you’ve heard from your doctors and they’re telling you about rising costs. We just heard from a doctor who also happens to be in the Senate, Bill Cassidy, who says your plan is going to drive costs up because you want to give health benefits to illegal immigrants, which by the way is true in a lot of cases,” Gallagher said.

Uh-oh! One the one hand, it's true! Democrats are insisting that "extensions of Affordable Care Act subsidies [must] be included" in an agreement to end the shutdown.

But at that point, up jumped Gallagher with a claim which viewers constantly hear on Fox News Channel programs. According to Gallagher, Democrats also "want to give health benefits to illegal immigrants!"

That's a common assertion at Fox. According to Leeman's report (videotape included), here's what happened next:

“That is not at all true,” Coons shot back, adding, “It is not legal to be enrolled in the Affordable Care Act or Medicare or Medicaid unless you’re in the United States legally.”

The two then sparred on the point of illegal immigrants receiving healthcare...

Friend, we're going to leave you right here! For ourselves, we still don't understand the issues which are involved in what happened next. And we've tried to fact-check those questions on more than a few occasions.

Explanations by various medical groups seem to contradict each other. Reading a welter of such reports reminds us of the old joke known as Goldberg's Law (source: Paul Reiser, mid-1980s):

The man with one watch always knows the time. The man with two watches is never quite sure.

Spoiler alert:

The California state program, Medi-Cal, instantly entered yesterday's dispute, as you can see at Mediaite. Our question would be this:

Who was actually right on what followed, Gallagher or Coons? It almost sounds like Coons backed down! But who was actually right about this particular point?

Alas! The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we are a failing dual nation in which very few fundamental facts are understood and generally known.

PIECES OF WORK: Is President Trump a piece of work?

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2025

And the walls came tumblin' down: Is President Trump a "piece of work" in the sense we're discussing this week?

We'd have to say that the answer is no. As we've noted, Prince Hamlet put it like this:

What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Speaking from a great despair, Hamlet said he no longer took joy in the noble reason and infinite faculty of his own human species. That said, as President Trump portrays himself dropping waste on the heads of the public:

As he tears the walls of the East Wing down;

As he backs away from his plan to stage another dog-and-pony show with Putin:

As he engages in these behaviors, we'd have to call him "a real piece of work" in a less flattering modern sense.

Tens of millions of voters disagree with our view. That said, we'll remind you of this:

We've often shown you what the president's niece said about her famous uncle. For example, we've shown you what she wrote about the time, after he finished seventh grade at a private school in Queens, when his "Conduct disorder" may have been acknowledged for the first time.

The president's father ("Fred") sat on the board at the private school. But enough had become too much:

Though Donald’s behavior [at age 12] didn’t bother Fred—given his long hours at the office, he wasn’t often around to witness much of what happened at home—it drove his mother to distraction. Mary couldn’t control him at all, and Donald disobeyed her at every turn. Any attempt at discipline by her was rebuffed. He talked back. He couldn’t ever admit he was wrong; he contradicted her even when she was right; and he refused to back down. He tormented his little brother and stole his toys. He refused to do his chores or anything else he was told to do...

Finally, by 1959, Donald’s misbehavior—fighting, bullying, arguing with teachers—had gone too far. [The private] Kew-Forest [School] had reached its limits. Fred’s being on the school’s board of trustees cut two ways: on the one hand, Donald’s behavior had been overlooked longer than it otherwise might have; on the other, it caused Fred some inconvenience. Name-calling and teasing kids too young to fight back had escalated into physical altercations. Fred didn’t mind Donald’s acting out, but it had become intrusive and time consuming for him. When one of his fellow board members at Kew-Forest recommended sending Donald to New York Military Academy as a way to rein him in, Fred went along with it.

The future president was sent to NYMA, a high discipline boarding school, for the rest of his junior high and high school years. 

(For extensive excerpts from Mary Trump's best-selling 2020 book, click here for our report about "The Great I-Am.")

Was a syndrome taking shape during those early years? When the president posted the bizarre video in which he drops mounds of excrement on the heads of us the people, we journeyed back into the world of the DSM to see what we could possibly find.

We knew that no "journalist" would follow this path. One click led to another. Eventually, we landed on this:

Conduct disorder

Conduct disorder (CD) is a mental disorder diagnosed in childhood or adolescence that presents itself through a repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior that includes theft, lies, physical violence that may lead to destruction, and reckless breaking of rules, in which the basic rights of others or major age-appropriate norms are violated. These behaviors are often referred to as "antisocial behaviors," and is often seen as the precursor to antisocial personality disorder; however, the latter, by definition, cannot be diagnosed until the individual is 18 years old. Conduct disorder may result from parental rejection and neglect and in such cases can be treated with family therapy, as well as behavioral modifications and pharmacotherapy.

"Conduct disorder!" As the name of a formal diagnosis, it almost sounds like an Onion parody—but, apparently, there it sits, a clinical diagnosis, in the (current) DSM-5:

Conduct disorder is classified in the fourth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). It is diagnosed based on a prolonged pattern of antisocial behavior such as serious violation of laws and social norms and rules in people younger than the age of 18. Similar criteria are used in those over the age of 18 for the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. No proposed revisions for the main criteria of conduct disorder exist in the DSM-5; there is a recommendation by the work group to add an additional specifier for callous and unemotional traits. According to DSM-5 criteria for conduct disorder, there are four categories that could be present in the child's behavior: aggression to people and animals, destruction of property, deceitfulness or theft, and serious violation of rules.

According to that same authority, "Conduct disorder" is seen as a precursor to antisocial personality disorder, which can't be diagnosed until the subject is 18 years of age. Concerning that particular syndrome, the president's niece—as you know, she's a doctorate-wielding clinical psychologist—said this is her best-selling book:

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as “malignant narcissism” and “narcissistic personality disorder” in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.

[...]

Does Donald have other symptoms we aren’t aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact that the president's niece said these things doesn't mean that the statements are accurate. That said, she describes the president's father—her own grandfather—as a "sociopath" (or as a "high-functioning sociopath") at various points in her book.

She stresses the fact that the children of a sociopath face a difficult path in life. She notes the fact that "sociopathy" is believed to be heritable, at least in part.

"Conduct disorder" may be diagnosed among children who behave in various ways. By the time such children reach age 18, that initial diagnosis may be replaced with a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. That said:

Over the weekend, thee he sat, posting a videotape which pictured him dropping human waste on the heads of his fellow citizens. By the start of the week, photos emerged of the way he was tearing the East Wing down, having failed to engage in normal types of consultations, with the Washington Post reporting this:

White House expands East Wing demolition as critics decry Trump overreach

A demolition job that began Monday with the disappearance of the White House’s eastern entrance advanced Tuesday with the destruction of much of the East Wing, according to a photograph obtained by The Washington Post and two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the scene.

Photos of construction teams knocking down portions of the East Wing, first revealed by The Washington Post on Monday, shocked preservationists, raised questions about White House overreach and lack of transparency, and sparked complaints from Democrats that President Donald Trump was damaging “The People’s House” to pursue a personal priority.

“They’re wrecking it,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist and professor emeritus at Towson University in Maryland. “And these are changes that can’t be undone. They’re destroying that history forever.”

[..]

A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing construction, said Tuesday that historic artifacts of the East Wing had been “preserved and stored” under the supervision of the White House Executive Residence and the National Park Service with support from the White House Historical Association, a nonprofit organization. The official cited items such as elements from Rosalynn Carter’s Office of the first lady, and said that there were plans to use them. The person did not say if any of the building itself would also be saved.

One of the people who witnessed the demolition Tuesday said that views of the site from the Treasury Department’s headquarters, which is next to the East Wing, amplify the demolition, but a large portion of the structure still remained by late afternoon. However, it appeared that what remained was also headed for demolition, with no evidence that the structure was being protected and only jagged damage visible in the exposed building.

This strikes us as extremely peculiar behavior. That said, the unusual aspects of the behavior align with standard checklists of the psychiatric syndrome in question.

Michelle Goldberg's latest column appears this morning in print editions of the New York Times. She didn't write about the demolition of the East Wing, a property which doesn't belong to President Trump.

She wrote about last weekend's dumping of the excrement. Headline included, this is the way she starts:

Trump Posted a Video of Himself Dumping Excrement on Our Cities. It’s a Glimpse of His Deepest Drives.

This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.

On Saturday, perhaps stung by the enormous nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump posted an A.I.-generated video on Truth Social that inadvertently captured his approach to governing. In it the president, wearing a crown, flies a “Top Gun”-style fighter plane labeled “King Trump” above American cities crowded with demonstrators, dumping gargantuan loads of feces on them. Amplifying it on social media, the White House communications director Steven Cheung gleefully wrote that the president was defecating “all over these No Kings losers!”

The column continues from there. 

Is President Trump a piece of work? It all depends on what the meaning of "piece of work" is.

Tomorrow and Friday, we'll show you what Goldberg took from last Saturday's bizarre piece of videotape. Also, we'll show you the way these recent behaviors read to us.

On the whole, we Blue Americans have been abandoned by our major journalists and by our major news orgs. A mere nine months into his term, the president is dropping excrement on the public's heads, and the walls have come tumbling down.

Is there a "mental health / mental disorder" aspect to these behaviors? Could some such situation point to danger ahead? In the next two days, we'll show you how the situation reads to Goldberg and how it reads to us.

One final note:

Yesterday afternoon, the corporate stumblebums at The Five pretended to discuss the East Wing demolition. 

The Five is our failing nation's most-watched "cable news" program. After producers played tape of Mika Brzezinski expressing concern about the demolition, one co-host mocked her with this:

"I understand Morning Joe [being] upset. Mika knows a bad facelift when she sees one."

That's the garbage which crawls out of the can when the CEO removes the lid. Over here in Silo Blue, our news orgs won't discuss that situation either. 

Tomorrow, we'll show you what Goldberg believes she saw when she watched the president's excrement tape. We'll also tell you what we think we might perhaps be seeing. 

Tomorrow: What Goldberg saw

TUESDAY: Who (or what) is The Big Weekend Show?

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2025

An imitation of life: Our kingdom for access to WordPad! 

As we continue to settle our sudden formatting problems, it occurred to us that this might be a good time to answer this question:

Just for the historical record, who the heck (or what the heck) is The Big Weekend Show?

You're asking an excellent question! We'll start with this recent surprise announcement from the Fox News Channel itself:

FOX NEWS CHANNEL ANNOUNCES NEW WEEKEND PROGRAMMING

September 10, 2025—FOX News Channel (FNC) will unveil a new weekend programming lineup beginning Saturday September 20th, announced FOX News Media president and executive editor Jay Wallace...Johnny Joey Jones and Tomi Lahren have been named two of the four co-hosts of The Big Weekend Show as the ensemble program expands to three hours (Saturdays & Sundays, 5-8 PM/ET).

Say what? The Big Weekend Show would now be going to three (3) hours? That was a remarkable change. First, a bit more from that press release about the expanding program:

Both Jones and Lahren will take on new roles as two of the four co-hosts of the weekend panel program The Big Weekend Show as the show expands to three hours (5-8 PM/ET) on Saturdays & Sundays. Joined by two rotating panelists each week, Jones and Lahren will delve into a variety of hot topics, from politics to pop culture. Currently, the program leads all competition throughout the weekend with over 1.2 million viewers dominating the early evening timeslot.

Do panelists on this "weekend panel show" really "delve into a variety of hot topics?" More accurately, they four-member panels now spend three (3) hours each weekend evening agreeing with every word each of the other panelists has just finished saying about a carefully selected set of topics designed to please the Fox News "cable news" audience. 

Never is heard a discouraging word from the MAGA perspective!  For better or worse, The Big Weekend Show is a message delivery system in which viewers in Red America are bombarded with tribal messaging of this nation-destroying type:

JONES (10/18/25): Good evening, everybody. I’m Joey Jones, along with Kayleigh McGhee White, Lydia Hu and Dr. Marc Siegel. And welcome to this Big Weekend Show.

We’ve got a big story tonight. It’s a Fox News Alert. Millions of far-left protestors are at anti-American rallies tonight across the country, and President Trump closes out his most successful week ever.

As we've noted, that's how Saturday's program started. As usual, President Trump had done everything right, and people who disagree with that assessment were said to be anti-American.

Jones said it at the start of the show. The other panelists all took turns agreeing. 

This is the way our "panel programs" tend to work on the Fox News Channel. (That's also true on MSNBC, with one rather large distinction.)

On Fox, the one great exception is The Five, a weekday program which is generally defined as The Big Weekend Show Plus the One Punching Bag. That program gains its sense of frisson as its four pro-MAGA panelists interrupt and overtalk the punching bag Jessica Tarlov.

Meanwhile, The Big Weekend Show will now run for three consecutive hours! The background seems to be this:

In the wake of last November's election, the channel began shedding programs from its "news division" and toughening its propaganda / messaging arm.

Neil Cavuto was first to go, replaced at 4 p.m. weekdays by former Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Will Cain. Beyond that, it seemed to us that some of the Fox News Channel contributors may have been told that they might want to toughen their game.

We could be completely wrong, but it seemed to us that Jones may be one such person. That's the way it has sometimes looked to us, but we could be totally wrong.

Alas! The Big Weekend Show had been robbed of one of its dominant messaging stars when President Trump fingered Tammy Bruce to work in his second administration. In much the same way, the president stole Judge Jeanine from The Five and Pete Hegseth from Fox & Friends Weekend.

Still, Big Weekend was growing like topsy! In a newly updated report, the leading authority explains:

The Big Weekend Show

The Big Weekend Show...is an American panel talk show on Fox News in which Joey Jones, Tomi Lahren and various Fox News personalities discuss current stories, political issues, and pop culture.

[...]

The show originally debuted on February 27, 2021, with hosts Lawrence B. Jones, Gillian Turner, Lisa Boothe and Sean Duffy. The program was featured regularly on weekends and was officially named part of Fox News' lineup in May 2021.

In May 2023, Fox News announced that The Big Saturday/Sunday show would be renamed The Big Weekend Show and would be moving from the 5 p.m. ET time slot to the 7 p.m. ET slot on June 3, 2023.

[...]

On January 13, 2025, it was announced that the show would expand to two hours beginning on January 18.

In September 2025 it was announced that Johnny "Joey" Jones and Tomi Lahren were named permanent co-hosts of the program and that the show would expand to three hours airing from 5pm-8pm beginning on September 20.

"News division" shows were pared. This particular messaging show was expanded from one glorious hour to two, and then why not three hours?

Your nation is dying under the onslaught produced by shows like this, which are built around the principle of "segregation by viewpoint." The panelists all know what they're expected to say. 

In the case of The Big Weekend Show, they show up at the appointed hour and they start trashing their fellow citizens who don't see things the Red American way.

Over here in Blue America, major news orgs refuse to report or discuss what happens on these ersatz "cable news" programs. Meanwhile, programs like The Big Weekend Show routinely trash the stars of Blue America's press. As this happens, Blue America's journalists refuse to even say the names of the Fox News Channel messenger children inside Silo Red.

We apologize for a bit of confusion this week. As we attempt to fashion a reunion with WordPad, we thought we could at least acquaint you with the way this messaging war rolls on.

Big Weekend is an imitation of life. No large modern nation can really expect to prosper, function or survive with such clowncar procedures in place.

The Big Weekend Show is a corporate imitation of life. So too with the silence from Silo Blue—the silence of the endless array of Blue American lambs.

PIECES OF WORK: First, the president dropped a bomb!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2025

Then he tore into the White House: We’re forced to admit to a secret belief:

We’re forced to admit to the secret belief that our nation, such as it ever was, has already ceased to exist—has already come to a secret end.

“And the war came,” the astonishing President Lincoln said. To our secret eye, to our hidden ear, we almost think we can see and hear an end of days in these two images this morning:

First image: The videotape of President Trump’s brown bomb dropped from the sky

Second image: The photos of the facade of the East Wing of the White House being torn to the ground.

Let's start with the president's bomb:

When we the people voted last fall, did anyone know that a President Trump, in a second term, was going to issue that insult to those who voted the other way? That he would be posting a vivid image of he himself, the American president, dropping human waste on their heads?

(Why on earth—why in the world—would an American president do that?)

Also this:

When we the people voted last fall, did we know that he would take it upon himself, absent consultation or wider consent, to revamp one of the world's most famous public buildings?

Did anyone know that he was going to do those things? Also, is anything actually wrong with either piece of behavior?

With respect to the commander’s brown bomb, Michelle Goldberg saw it a certain way. In full, the startling headline says this:

Trump Posted a Video of Himself Dumping Excrement on Our Cities. It's a Glimpse of His Deepest Drives.

That's what the full headline says. As she starts, Goldberg starts to explain what she thinks she saw in the videotape the sitting president posted: 

Trump Posted a Video of Himself...

This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.

On Saturday, perhaps stung by the enormous nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump posted an A.I.-generated video on Truth Social that inadvertently captured his approach to governing. In it the president, wearing a crown, flies a “Top Gun”-style fighter plane labeled “King Trump” above American cities crowded with demonstrators, dumping gargantuan loads of feces on them. Amplifying it on social media, the White House communications director Steven Cheung gleefully wrote that the president was defecating “all over these No Kings losers!”

Before we’re done, we’ll walk you through Goldberg's account of the way that video looked to her. For ourselves, that image conjured renewed intimations of madness, not necessarily in the colloquial sense.

For ourselves, that videotape seemed to suggest that the sitting president was perhaps in the grip of some form of (significant) mental illness (whatever that might secretly mean). As she continues her column, Goldberg takes it a good deal farther than that, in a productive way.

Still and all, let the world go forth to the nations! If the word of others can be believed, quite a few other citizens didn’t see the president's videotape in the way Goldberg did.

Shermichael Singleton, age 35, is a “Republican strategist” and a CNN contributor. In his appearances on CNN, he is routinely MAGA-friendly without being obnoxious or deranged in the Scott Jennings way.

We appreciate Singleton’s dignity—and yes, there’s plenty that Blue America has done, including during the Biden years, that would help explain why tens of millions of potential voters continue to walk the MAGA way.

We Blues have been very slow to come to terms with that fact. Meanwhile, if Shermichael Singleton can be believed, the videotape that the president posted didn’t look weird to him.

For Singleton, the tape seemed funny. It seemed like satire to him.

Yesterday afternoon, Singleton spoke with Jake Tapper. With respect to the bombardier in chief, this is what he said:

TAPPER (10/20/25): The point that he's making, Shermichael, is that he wishes he could drop feces on his fellow Americans.

SINGLETON: Look, this is what I think. I think a lot of Republicans look at this. And I've texted a lot of folks about it. They thought it was hilarious. They thought it was funny. Some of my Democratic friends thought it was a little over the top. But even they acknowledged to me, "You know, I got to give it to Trump. He is good at sort of goading our side with some of these sort of satirical videos" and other memes that he typically would post on social media. It makes him more relatable to the average person.

Even the Democrats saw it as satire! A bit later, responding to a Democratic strategist, Singleton described what he saw at the No Kings rallies themselves:

SINGLETON: Look, I spent about an hour over the weekend looking at some of the images and videos of people who were protesting at the No Kings rally. And it was mostly white people. I didn't see any men. You guys are struggling with that. I didn't see men of color. You guys are struggling with that. I didn't see a whole lot of black people, didn't see a whole lot of Hispanic people. I saw mostly white people. So if I— So as a Republican, I feel pretty confident about midterms next year based on what I saw over the weekend.

He didn’t see any men at all? That almost sounds like what he said!

Singleton omitted one part of the mantra which has been recited on the Fox News Channel whenever No Kings is discussed. He failed to say how old the rally-goers were—failed to say that, based on their advanced age, the rally-goers represent a dying generation which will soon be out of MAGA’s hair.

Saturday, on The Big Weekend Show, it fell to Kayleigh McGhee White, age 25, to recite that mantra. We've seen it said a thousand times since White introduced it:

WHITE (10/18/25): I don’t have a problem with people peacefully protesting, but one thing I noticed was what the group was made up of. I saw very few young people my age, which I thought was very interesting. This was mostly older liberal adults. And that tells me that this movement on behalf of the Democratic Party is really a dying movement. We’re sort of seeing the last gasp of liberalism as a functioning political party here.

It was mostly older people? We’ll guess that White may have noticed that in her production notes more than in any of her personal observations. From there, she went on to recite the talking point recited all over the Fox News Channel:

She said that President Trump must be “the worst king ever,” given the fact that the protest rallies had been allowed to occur.

White offered that recitation at 5:04 p.m. Three minutes earlier, Johnny Joey Jones had dropped a verbal bomb on millions of people who are still, at least technically, his fellow American citizens:

JONES: Good evening, everybody. I’m Joey Jones, along with Kayleigh McGhee White, Lydia Hu and Dr. Marc Siegel. And welcome to this Big Weekend Show.

We’ve got a big story tonight. It’s a Fox News Alert. Millions of far-left protestors are at anti-American rallies tonight across the country, and President Trump closes out his most successful week ever.

Reading from prompter, Jones said those aging liberals were actually “far left.” Then, he hit those millions with his own bomb:

The rallies they attended were “anti-American,” he said.

So said Jones, age 39, and movin' on up at the channel. We thought we might be seeing him selling his Dalton, Georgia soul as he opened The Big Weekend Show with that remarkable comment.

In the process, we wondered if we were seeing Jones agree to become the latest “piece of work" as a major well-known nation continues to fall apart.

Our impression could always be wrong, of course. Could it simply be that Jones was seeing things in precisely the way he said?

That said:

Could it be that Singleton’s conservative friends really did see the president's bomb as funny, a form of satire? We don’t really believe what Singleton said, but could we perhaps be wrong?

Simply put, we the humans aren't all just alike. Yevtushenko started People (in translation) by asserting this:

People

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
And planet is dissimilar from planet.

Planet is dissimilar from planet? Yevtushenko had never seen a Fox News Channel panel at work, of that we can feel sure!

At any rate, the sitting president had pictured himself dropping fecal matter on his fellow citizens' heads. After that, the walls of the East Wing came a-tumblin’ down.

At one point, Joshua fit the battle of Jericho. Also, Samson pulled a set of pillars down.

As the headline on her column suggests, Goldberg thought she saw the sitting president revealing his deepest impulses—and doing something disordered. For ourselves, we went looking, once again, for possible glimpses of recognition in the DSM.

Is something wrong with President Trump? What could possibly explain his decision to post that astonishing videotape? Also, what exactly may be going on as the walls of the East Wing come tumblin' down?

Trump supporters thought the video was funny, MAGA adherents have said. Was something more primal being expressed? 

With the nation having already reached its end, we're going to take some time this week. We're going to walk you through what Goldberg thought she saw—and we're also going to walk you through what we saw inside the DSM. 

We've already told you our secret belief. Will the government ever open again? 

We can't honestly say that we're completely certain.

Tomorrow: We landed on "Conduct Disorder"—but what could that possibly mean?

With apologies: The transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11 has us in a formatting mess. 

It arrived at a very bad time—near the end of a famous republic.