In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Over the past week, I think there's been a major shift in polite opinion, prompted in part -- but not completely -- by the Wall Street Journal piece that simply gave everyone permission to admit what people had been seeing for months, if not indeed years. The other factor is that Trump's conviction in the New York "hush money" trial gave him, if anything, a slight boost in the polls , but it also fed $400 million in donations in the week following the verdict. This brings to mind the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I think we can say that polite opinion in the wake of these developments has moved entirely past denial. A week ago, in the immediate wake of the guilty verdict and beginning to recognize that calling Trump a "convicted felon" wasn't going to change a thing, Harold Myerson got mad in The American Prospect, calling Trump The Martyr of Mar-a-Lago: The political consequen...

Yesterday I referred once again to the UK constitutional crisis of 1936, when rumors of Edward VIII's intent to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson were all over US, Canadian, and Australian papers, but there was a taboo against mentioning it in the UK press -- at least until some remarks by an obscure Church of England bishop were interpreted as the Establishment giving "permission" to bring it up publicly, although it had been a full-blown crisis behind the scenes for months. Edward abdicated within a week of the UK papers finally picking it up. Greg Gutfeld, one of the most insightful commentators lately, referred last night as I did yesterday to the Wall Street Journal story of Joe faltering behind the scenes as a "permission slip" to talk openly about a smiliar constitutional crisis . At 4:30: Now, is it news that Biden's a mess? No. We hear it every time he opens his mouth and the moths fly out. The White House doctor can pump him f...

Lately, I've been looking at Greg Gutfeld as one of the more insightful commentators. Here was his take on the Wall Street Journal's headline yesterday about Joe showing signs of slipping (at 0:30): The Wall Street Journal revealed that Joe Biden may be suffering cognitive decline. Talk about breaking news. Nice work there, Wall Street Journal! I wonder what stocks your financial section will be recommending. Perhaps those little-known startups like Apple and Micsrosoft? Tucker Carlson is even closer to the point . He brings up the backlash against former White House physician Ronny Jackson, who was publicly reprimanded by Barack Obama when he posted on Twitter during the 2020 campaign that Biden should undergo a cognitive test when he said in a speech, "My name is Joe Biden, and I'm a Democratic cndidate for the United States Senate." Tucker went on to say that Jackson was given the uniform command of the people who run the Democratic P...

It's remarkable how quickly the Trump hush money trial and conviction have faded into the rear view mirror -- by the weekend, legacy media was gloating that Trump was ahead by as low as 0.6 points in the meaningless RealClearPolitics popular vote average, but as of this morning, he's back up at 1.1, basically no change from before the verdict. So they've moved on to Hunter's gun trial, which is soap-opera clickbait with a juror getting weepy during Abbe Lowell's opening statement . But I can't resist posting on one footnote. Kevin Morris, Hunter's "sugar bro", attended at least the first day of Hunter's trial on Monday to support him, although as I posted here , after spending at least $6.5 million to pay Hunter's lawyers and fund his lifestyle, he's said to be out of money. I've been increasingly skeptical of the conventional Morris narrative -- he's a "Hollywood lawyer" who stopped practicing law 15 years ago, and...

As a successful comic, Gutfeld has an instinctive insight into humor, but standup is also a peculiarly American institution, part of our popular culture. For the last several days I've been talking about Trump's relation to the popular culture superhero paradigm, in which a reactive superhero consistently improvises to escape the elaborate schemes of an intellectual, deliberative supervillain. We see this when Batman fights the Joker. but we see it even more clearly as we watch the Road Runner foil the elaborate machinations of Wile E Coyote. Gutfeld made a very similar point in last night's monologue . At 3:28: So the saga of Donald J Trump continues. Really, what did we talk about before him? . . . But have you noticed the reaction to the Trump conviction? It's more muted than my TV during Jesse's show. Of course, there are the usual nut cases where anything related to Trump is cause for incontinence. [Switches to clip of Joy Behar on The View talking about...

The possibility of prison for Trump when Judge Merchan sentences him on July 11 quickly arose on Friday : 'The View’ co-host Sunny Hostin, who seemed quite pleased with the developments, shared on the air that she had spoken with someone from Bragg’s office. . . . “I spent this morning speaking to someone from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. They’re called street fighters. He believes that they will recommend a one-year term in prison. And that is because when you spend a year in prison in New York or under, you serve in Rikers Island,” Austin said. According to Hostin, this recommendation serves not just as punishment but as a stern message to society that such conduct will not be tolerated again. Victoria Taft at PJ Media answered, Of Course They'll Put Trump in Jail , and Trump himself made it plain that he's fully aware of the contingency : “I’m okay with it,” Trump said when asked about the potential of house arrest or even jail during a “Fox ...

What almost nobody has mentioned about Joe's Friday Dr Evil grin is that it was made just incidentally following his announcement of a new Gaza cease-fire plan, which itself incidentally followed his comments on Trump's conviction . Under the guise of announcing a proposed ceasefire agreement in the Israel-Gaza war, Biden took to a podium in the White House state dining room at 1:30 p.m. on Friday. He began his statement not with details of the peace plan but rather with a lecture about how the “rule of law” prevailed in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump. “Donald Trump was given every opportunity to defend himself,” Biden said of his 2024 Republican presidential rival. “And after careful deliberation, the jury reached a unanimous verdict. They found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts.” . . . “It’s reckless, it’s dangerous, and it’s irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don’t like the verdict.” But ...