I Picked the Wrong Week to Quit Sniffing Glue

Trump Finds God and JD Vance and Aileen Cannon Puts Us All in Danger

I Picked the Wrong Week to Quit Sniffing Glue

My nausea today was not just from bad Chinese food

Earlier today, it being lunch time, I drifted over to the refrigerator and began to root around to see if there was a suitable meal lurking anywhere. What I found was a Chinese meal of indeterminate age that did not smell as though any botulism was present. (In writing this, dear reader, for your sake, I looked up whether botulism has a smell. It does not.  It is like many dangerous things, odorless, colorless and tasteless.)

So, I dug in, eating while working until all of a sudden I realized what a terrible mistake I had made. You don’t need to know the details.

It wasn’t pretty. But, now in retrospect, having followed all the news on this particularly miserable day for news, I have come to realize it was entirely unnecessary. I could have achieved just the same level of nausea and pain simply by scrolling through my favorite social media site or watching cable news.

It has been a very bad day for America. It has been one of those “I picked the wrong week to  quit sniffing glue” days.

Given the array of horribleness we have had to endure today, I will have to revert to the bulleted approach just to begin to be able to run them down without a.) taking hours of your time and b.) driving you to despair.

Here goes:

• We started off the morning with the deeply revolting display of Donald Trump, fresh from a tragedy that resulted in two deaths and severe injuries to two more people (not counting the divot in the former president’s ear), professing that he had been spared by divine intervention and that he was now a changed man. Gullible right wing media puppets and the MAGA media grapevine pushed the story that the world’s most Godless corrupt valueless heathen monster was now changed by the grace of higher powers. Trust me when I say that it does not take much scrutiny of what Trump has said or done even in the few days since the shooting demonstrate that if any supernatural force saved him it was not one from Heaven. (Though I tend to subscribe to the analysis that I saw somewhere in the social media melee that Trump survived because neither God nor the Devil wanted him.)

• I wrote about this at the Daily Beast so rather than rehashing it, you can simply read it for yourself. For those of you who are not going to click on the link or who don’t have Daily Beast subscriptions let me say that I conclude by saying that while I admire President Biden for his call for “unity” in the wake of the assassination attempt, it is important to recognize he did not mean that we should (as Republicans are suggesting) stop referring to fascists as fascist or coup leaders as fucking coup leaders. Because if we do we increase the likelihood that the future will hold even worse sorts of violence in store—violence sponsored by the government against its people, violence committed by the MAGA-Project 2025-Nostalgia for Fascism Committee against our institutions, rights and basic freedoms.

• One of the signs that Trump has not been redeemed is that he today announced that his running mate would be JD Vance, Senator of Ohio. This truly repellant news produced a torrent of reaction from the media and from me that seemed roughly akin to what the Chinese meal had triggered. For good reason. Vance is a perfect example of another toxin that is odorless, colorless and tasteless.

  Here are some of my immediate reactions, as presented earlier on one social media platform or another but presented here without the usual spelling errors and anti-Semitic slurs in the comments section. (I hope.)

• Trump-Vance sets a new record as the most odious ticket in U.S. history. Both men are bags of skin filled with pure undistilled personal ambition devoid of values such as judgment, decency or even the ability to recognize the truth. And they have broken the dial on the smarmy-o-meter. (My invention of the smarmy-o-meter received an enthusiastic response from the public and I will now both file for a patent and create great Need to Know-branded Smarmy-o-meters for your home and professional use.)

• I retweeted a link to McKay Coppins excellent Atlantic profileof Mitt Romney in which Romney says, “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance.”

• Trump-Vance will be the most anti-woman ticket in U.S. history. Pence was anti-woman too, but at least he loved “Mother.” If you have ever been associated with an ovary or a womb in any way, self-interest, concern for others and decency require you to actively oppose this new GOP ticket. Trump sure miscalculated if he thought this would help him win over undecided voters.

• So, apparently JD Vance has decided the sequel to his book “Hillbilly Elegy” should be entitled “American Eulogy.”

• Vladimir Putin could not have been happier with a Trump running mate had Trump picked Kremlin faves like “mad dog” Dmitry Medvedev, Kremlin philosopher of death Aleksandr Dugin or Putin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov as his running made. Trump-Vance could do more for Putin’s Ukraine war and anti-Western policies than anyone in the Kremlin. In addition to trashing support for Ukraine, Vance is a fanboy of Putin poodle Viktor Orban.

• Have you ever wondered what dangers might be posed by a smoother, less overtly disgusting and corrupt Trump? Look no further than Vance who is Trump 2.0 and ensure that should the big guy pass on while in office there will be no celebration anywhere. If you were worried about presidential succession for an elderly candidate for the Oval Office, look no further than Trump-Vance for your nightmare scenario. Now the U.S. is going to start appreciating how lucky we are to have a great Vice President like Kamala Harris. And oh man, I’ve already got the popcorn popping for the VP debate.

• Like Trump, Vance is a virulent anti-Semite. And like Trump, he lies about it. Calling him an anti-Semite, of course, understates it. He is a white male supremacist Christofascist.

• Suffice it to say that by picking Vance Trump has officially squandered any bump in support he may have gotten over the weekend. You can’t win sympathy by putting the entire nation in peril. Or by picking Evil Greg Marmalard as your running mate.

• Bad as all the above is, the worst development of the day, the one I took as a real blow to the gut on a day when that was the last thing I needed, was the decision by corrupt, incompetent Judge Aileen Cannon to throw out the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Never mind that legal scholars say it is likely she will be overturned because her assertion that Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel went against, as Smith’s spokesperson put it while announcing Smith’s almost instantaneous decision to appeal, “the uniform conclusion of all previous courts.” It is the utter contempt for the law and our institutions of rightwing political hacks like Cannon that is most wrenching.  I have written previously here at “Need to Know” that Cannon is part of a long-planned and thus far devastatingly successful judicial coup that has compromised our courts in unprecedented ways. (Which is appropriate given their contempt for precedent.)

As someone who has spent the bulk of his life studying and writing about the national security community, I feel it is important to add one more point in conclusion. While it may seem like what the judge did was legal news with political consequences, that is hardly the whole picture. Even just further postponing Trump from being held to account for stealing, mishandling and doing God knows what with our national secrets, Cannon has put this country and members of our national security community in jeopardy.

What Trump did with regard to those documents was egregious, is not protected by the Supreme Court’s recent perverse immunity decision, and without a trial we will not know the whole of it or the damage he did. We should have known before the election. If he wins, he will dismiss the case, wipe it away and do more damage confident in his impunity. It will put the sources and methods of our intel community at risk. It will alienate our allies who will no longer share intelligence with us. It will strengthen our enemies.

In short, while the decision may make you angry, it also puts you and the country at risk.

And now, with that, I think I will go have a small glass of room temperature fizzy water.