Yes, it’s still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is the author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy.
Jimmy last night:
Rape and revenge: The Justice Dept. has opened an investigation into E. Jean Carroll, who accused Donald Trump of rape. In her civil case against him, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll.
CBS News has declined to renew its contract with the “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, six months after her segment on torture in Salvadoran prisons was pulled off the air abruptly by the news division’s editor in chief, Bari Weiss. “It sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom,” Ms. Alfonsi said. “I think it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.”
Lindsey Graham last night: “They should change the Nobel Prize to the Trump Prize.”
Heather Cox Richardson:
Trump appears to see politics as a dominance sport, much like the mixed martial arts fighting promoted by Ultimate Fighting Championship, whose arena is currently going up on the lawn of the White House for the fights Trump will host on his birthday, June 14. Brian Wiechert of WBAL-TV explains that workers are putting up a massive 90-foot-tall structure called The Claw to loom over a temporary octagon fighting arena in a way that the White House and the Washington Monument will be framed for television during the event.
With his destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the paving of the Rose Garden to create a patio that looks like the one at Mar-a-Lago, and now the framing of the White House through a UFC arena, Trump has asserted his dominance over the People’s House. Similarly, with his purging even of loyalists in favor of extremists, he is asserting his dominance over the Republican Party, turning it fully into the MAGA Party.
Buy your tickets now! What a lineup! So great Kid Rock could not make the cut!
Lucian Truscott IV:
On Tuesday, Trump spent several hours at Walter Reed Medical Center for what was advertised as his “regular” medical checkup. It’s his third yearly checkup in 13 months. He’s a wreck. He falls asleep moments after he sits down, and it doesn’t matter where he is, or who is present. His chin hits his chest in the Oval Office with cabinet members, sports teams, school children, senators and members of the House and the entire White House press pool in attendance, cameras on. On Monday, he fell asleep at Arlington National Cemetery during the solemn ceremony to mark Memorial Day. He brags constantly about “acing” a test that measures cognitive health with simple questions such as identifying animals and drawing a clock. The test doesn’t measure intelligence. It measures how close you are to dementia. Doctors say that when a cognitive test is given repeatedly, it is being used to monitor dementia.
He looks like hell. His mouth droops. His makeup is badly misapplied. His hands are spackled with pancake makeup to conceal injection sites, sometimes both at once. On Monday, as he walked across the plaza at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he repeatedly slapped the side of his thigh with an open hand, as if he couldn’t control himself. When he stood at attention for the ceremony, he couldn’t keep still, his body rocking back and forth, his shoulders moving side to side….
The real question right now is how bad is the collapse of his physical and mental health? With no one in the White House and no one in Congress who is willing to risk telling him no about anything, how far down will his spiral go?
Music Pick
Near the close of last night’s concert with The E Street Band at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., Bruce Springsteen yelled “Let ‘em hear you at the fucking White House!” before the chant-along “ICE Out Now!” line of “Streets of Minneapolis.” Then he made news by telling the crowd about an upcoming protest concert.
“In the future, we want to keep raising our voices for hope and justice, together,” Springsteen said. “Tom Morello and I will be back again here in D.C. on Oct. 3 for another night of music and resistance. The first-ever Power to the People Festival will be announced to the world, tomorrow. But you’re hearing about it first, here, tonight,
“Tom will be there, Dave Matthews, The Foo Fighters. My friends The Dropkick Murphy will be there. I’ll be back guesting and playing on a few songs with Tom and his band. We encourage you to come out and make a goddamn ruckus along with us.” Details today. Joan Baez added. And will be in Maryland. Poster below by Shepard Fairey.
Today’s Toons
Luckovich:
Telnaes:
Bramhall:
Brodner:
Anderson:
Bramhall again:
Photo Finish
From my camera to you: “Headless Heron on the Hudson.”
Bruce should do a concert around July 4 near or in D.C.. to draw off spectators from Trumps debacle. It would drive the orange 💩 nuts!
I wonder which Milli Vanilli will perform. The lip-syncers or the real singers. It's Trump’s day, so I'm guessing that the performance will be with the fake band.
Milli Vanilli was a band created by Frank Farian in 1988. It consisted of Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus as the lip-syncing performers, with the two actual main studio singers, Brad Howell and John Davis.