SATURDAY: The president spoke for over an hour!

SATURDAY, JULY 25, 2026

A politics of meaning: Did the president really speak for over an hour?

Yes, he actually did! Beyond that, also this:   

We've told you, quite a few times, that (severe) mental illness is always a human tragedy. The same is true of serious cognitive decline, which joins mental illness is robbing its victim of his or her human capacities.    

We've also said that, as far as we know, serious mental illnesses are actual illnesses, often with physiological bases over which the afflicted individual has no control. We've suggested that, as a political matter, pity for an afflicted public figure might tend to move more votes, as opposed to the hostility and loathing to which we humans are all inclined.   

(Hostility and loathing harden tribal positions.)

That said, the person to whom we refer spoke for over an hour! King Lear wandered on the moors. Last night, the sitting president went to the Waldorf Astoria. 

Here's what the AP saw:   

Trump returns to correspondents’ dinner for a rambling, insult-filled speech 3 months after shooting   

President Donald Trump returned to the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Friday night, delivering a rambling, hour-long speech that praised some journalists, took potshots at others, made jokes about public figures’ weight and intellect, and quipped about a third presidential term.  

[...]  

Trump’s sometimes off-color speech, which lasted just over an hour, was full of vague potshots directed at individuals he doesn’t like—from Jane Fonda to Bruce Springsteen to “Barack Hussein Obama.” The audience, reacting at first with some friendly laughs, slowly quieted to scattered titters as the insults piled up.   

And so on from there.

"Insults" was by far the more accurate term, as opposed to the misleading "potshots." The Washington Post was perhaps a bit more direct:  

Trump’s insult-laden speech to press dinner draws mostly stunned silence   

President Donald Trump attacked a slew of journalists and some of his favorite political foils at a slimmed-down redo of the White House correspondents’ dinner on Friday, comparing one female reporter to a transgender social media star, mocking politicians’ physical appearances, and bringing his audience to mostly stunned silence for more than an hour before pulling out a red Trump 2028 cap and declaring he was running for another term.   

[...]  

He said that he had once mixed up CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins, whom he said “never smiles,” with a transgender social media personality, Dylan Mulvaney, after he called the 34-year-old cable news star a “young, attractive woman.”   

He said he planned to host twice-weekly fights at the White House.

“We will have sloppy Chris Christie, one of the sloppiest human beings, fighting,” Trump said to silence. “I could mention the governor of Chicago, but I’m going to mention instead Jerry Nadler. Oh my God! They’re fighting for a big piece of cheesecake, big fat piece of cheesecake.”  

For our money, the instant reports don't capture the pitiful squalor of what we saw as we watched the event on TV. 

Regarding the latest of the president's never-ending comments about Collins, we think we can tell you this:

Stating the obvious, Collins actually is "a young attractive woman," as judged by conventional norms of the culture. 

But what makes the person in question most impressive has been her forthright approach to her various journalistic tasks, especially those involving the president, dating back to his daily press events during the first Covid year. We refer to the uncomplicated moral clarity with which an elderly president seems to wish he had once affiliated himself in one of its various female forms. 

Just a guess! We'd say the president's endless comments with respect to Collins are an understandable, lingering form of recognizable human longing / regret. According to our inner eye, few things could be more clear.  

(Willa Cather's narrator, in My Antonia: "The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Antonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new.")

We expect to have more about last evening's event when transcripts become available. We haven't seen a report which captures how awful and sad the president's hour was.

For today, we'll link you to what Democracy Now once said, a long time ago, about the suggestion that we Americans need to develop a "politics of meaning."  

It was May 23, 1996. If you were willing to squint a bit, the shape of our current failing political culture had already come into view.

Democracy Now is an organ of what gets called "the left." Here's what Democracy Now said at that long-ago, distant time:   

Politics of Meaning  

There’s no doubt that we’re in a period of great cynicism about what government does or can do to improve our lives. Psychotherapist Michael Lerner believes this cynicism and the alienation that Americans feel are a direct result of the ethic of selfishness that pervades American politics, from the White House on down. 

Lerner is the author of a new book called The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism. Michael Lerner gained national exposure when Hillary Rodham Clinton used his phrase “Politics of Meaning” in a speech; the media then started calling Lerner “Hillary’s Guru”. 

Nonetheless, Lerner’s ideas are the foundation for a growing social movement in the U.S. that blends humanist politics with spirituality, and aims to provide a progressive answer to the power of religious right. Last month, over a thousand participants attended a first national conference in Washington D.C.

We’ll now hear an excerpt of a speech by Michael Lerner in which he explains his concept of a politics of meaning and its importance in this era of conservative domination.   

The audio is no longer there. Our comment would be this:   

Democracy Now was looking for a "progressive answer" to the culture then current on "the right." There's no reason why the people at that site shouldn't have felt that way, but in our view, we really need a new politics in which people from all major points of view can accept certain basic precepts.  

At present, we're all stuck within a failed state. We desperately need a new politics. 

Some current behaviors will have to go. What we're doing now isn't sustainable.

Next week: We Blues