I was taken by surprise yesterday when general Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking military person in the US, issued a strong condemnation of the confederacy in his congressional testimony, calling it an “act of treason” and confederate leaders as traitors. This was surprising because Donald Trump, who is the commander in chief of the US armed forces and thus Milley’s ultimate boss, has opposed the removal of monuments and other symbols of the confederacy using coded language aimed to appeal to white nationalists, such as “protecting the nation’s heritage” and “preserving history”. In particular, Trump said that he would oppose the renaming of military bases named after confederate leaders, even to the extent of threatening to veto any defense bill that contains such provisions. Since Trump likes to pander to the military, he is unlikely to condemn Milley’s remarks the way he would have done if anyone else had made those statements. But it must rankle him.

But Milley was unequivocal.
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Donald Trump’s fixation with building his stupid wall along the Mexico border is enabling grifters to make money, and ProPublica describes one such effort.

The length of the border between the US and Mexico in Texas consists of the Rio Grande, so an imaginary line along the middle of the river marks the boundary. Of course, you cannot build in the river so the fence has to be built on land inside the US creating a weird no-man’s land between the fence and the river, land that belongs to the US but will become unusable, depriving the owners of the land of its use. Furthermore, since at times the river overflows and floods the banks creating swamps, the fence has to be built well inside US territory. In one region, the US government fence is more than a mile from the river.
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Tim Miller, himself a former Republican political consultant who worked for Jeb Bush and is now a member of the Never Trump movement, asked some of his consultant colleagues for Republican candidates in races around the country why, given Trump’s plummeting poll numbers, their candidates don’t try to distance themselves from him, at least a little.
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The new book by Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, exposes him to the world. The unsuccessful attempts to block publication resulted in the Streisand effect kicking in big time and greatly increasing interest in the book. As a result, the publisher shifted up the release date to Tuesday, July 14 but they also sent copies to the media and you can read excerpts from it in many places, such as this one.

Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, paints her uncle the president in a horrifying light and reveals explosive details about his character and disparaging comments made by his sister, retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry.

“If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy,” Mary bluntly declares in the book. “Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with complicity, silence, and inaction from his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.”

While the excerpts quoted in the article suggest that the book will make for entertaining reading, it also induces the sobering feeling of “How the hell could such a person end up president? What does it say about a country that would vote him in?”

In another article, Mary Trump’s lawyer Ted Boutrous is quoted as saying, “The more people see what he was like before, and really understand the kind of person he is and was, the more people will be horrified that he’s the president.”

I am not so sanguine that this statement applies to Trump’s supporters because they are a cult and cult members either refuse to believe anything negative about their Dear Leader or view what others see as his faults as actual virtues.