I hear it frequently on my radio/TV program : Americans are baffled about what’s happened to Donald Trump . He used to seem so formidable, a very real threat to American democracy, the pal of dictators around the world. Now even Putin is dissing him, cutting the very prisoner deal with President Biden that Trump said a few weeks ago the Russian dictator would only do with him.
He’s gone, in the minds of many Americans, from being a danger to being merely weird. What happened? The simple reality is that Trump has entered the Fat Elvis phase of his career. He hasn’t grown or developed new routines; he’s just reliving his old hits every day, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days.
His pathetic attempt to question the racial identity of Vice President Harris was just a warmed-over version of his Obama Birther slanders; they played well back in the first decade of this century, but now they’re just old and flat. His claim that Hispanic immigrants and asylum seekers are “taking Black jobs” is just a makeover of his 2015 coming-down-the-escalator pitch. It was new and novel then and caught the love and attention of racists all across America; now it’s just a tired retread.
His forcing Republicans in the House to vote down the border bill that Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford principally wrote just adds to the perception that he’s a rank hypocrite with little interest in actually solving America’s problems. His newest fundraising grifts — “gold” tennis shoes, bloody-ear bobble head dolls , raising the Mar-a-Lago entrance fee for spies and hangers-on to $1,000,000 — are every bit as pathetic and sloppy as his old pitches for Trump steaks, Trump water, and his failed Trump “First Class” Airline. His entire career in the media has been characterized by rich-frat-boy flamboyance and testosterone-driven excess, from publicly cheating on each of his three wives to bragging about leering in the dressing rooms of teen beauty pageants to his faux “successful businessman” routine on NBC.
Today, though, nobody is shocked, amazed, or impressed; more Americans pity him than are in awe of his proclaimed masculinity. The one aspect of his public persona that hasn’t much changed is his naked racism, although even that has become boring. He’s now desperately trying to slice-and-dice the American electorate so he can pit separate groups of people against each other or suck up to whatever faction he thinks might save his doomed candidacy.
He’s trying to appeal to boomers by saying he’ll repeal the income tax Reagan put on Social Security; it’s not working because boomers remember that every one of the four budgets his administration produced when he was president called for radical cuts in Social Security. He thinks he can ingratiate himself with Jews by saying that Kamala Harris “doesn’t like Jewish people” when most Americans know she’s married to one. When that didn’t work, he tried sucking up to Benjamin Netanyahu and inviting him to Mar-a-Lago; most Americans realize that both men are spinning political plates in the air as fast as they can to avoid going to prison for corruption.
Now he just sounds like an aging antisemite afraid of jail. He believes young people will swoon when he says he wants to eliminate income taxes on tips, but most young workers are still old enough to remember that in 2020, as the Economic Policy Institute noted in their headline , “Trump administration finalizes regulation that will cost tipped workers more than $700 million annually.” He thinks trash-talking women, calling them “nasty” and other epithets, will bond men to him; instead, they imagine him bursting in on their mothers, sisters, wives, or daughters in a Bergdorf-Goodman dressing room.
In each one of these efforts to either turn Americans against each other or slice off and nail down a segment of the electorate, Trump is ignoring what most citizens are fundamentally concerned about: the physical, emotional, and fiscal health of our entire country. Nobody — outside of his Greene/Gaetz/Boebert fan club in the House — believes his promise to pardon the people who tried to beat over 140 police officers to death is righteous; it just makes him look and sound like a sleazy, washed-up, wannabee mob boss who hates cops. The only “new” policies Fat Elvis Trump has come up with are those brought to him by billionaires dangling campaign contributions: — He wanted TikTok banned until billionaire Jeff Yass — the largest American investor in the platform — visited him at his shabby golf motel.
— He correctly pointed out that Bitcoin is a risky commodity rather than a currency until Bitcoin aficionados and billionaires Elon Musk, Joe Lonsdale, Doug Leone, Shaun Maguire, Antonio Gracias, and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss came to his defense. He doesn’t have any new vision for America: he just wants to be the star of his own version of The Apprentice , reliving the highlights from his glory days and, of course, keeping himself out of prison by taking control of the Department of Justice. He oversaw the unnecessary deaths of a half-million Americans, giving America the second-worst Covid death rate in the world because of his incompetence.
He gave us the worst economy since the Republican Great Depression of the 1920s. He nearly destroyed an international alliance of democracies that it took good men and women across dozens of nations — and two bloody world wars — a century to put together. Fat Elvis Trump thinks he can keep spinning the old hits, but polls now show that — outside of his elderly white rally audiences — Americans have figured him out, are tired of his cons, and have moved on.
And it couldn’t happen at a better time: A new day is at hand if enough of us will simply show up and vote this November. NOW READ: 'It reeks': Law enforcement balks at Trump's 'Secretary of Retribution' plan Hurricane Debby landed in Florida Monday bringing high winds, pouring rain -- and 25 tightly wrapped packages of cocaine worth more than $1 million. Debby, which hit the state's northern Big Bend region as a Category One hurricane but has since been downgraded to a tropical storm, washed the trove of drugs ashore along Florida's southernmost tip.
"Hurricane Debby blew 25 packages of cocaine (70 lbs.) onto a beach in the Florida Keys," US Border Patrol acting chief patrol Agent Samuel Briggs II wrote on X. The load of drugs, which Briggs reported was valued at more than $1 million, was discovered by a good Samaritan who contacted the authorities.
In July of 2023, the mayor of Tampa, Florida similarly discovered 70 pounds (31.7 kilograms) of cocaine that had been washed ashore in the Florida Keys, while enjoying a vacation day. In addition to bringing cocaine, Debby has killed one person, knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of people, and could produce life-threatening storm surges as well as catastrophic flooding.
The Keys, a string of islands stretching off the state's southern tip, are located in close proximity to a number of Caribbean countries that serve as a transit hub for cocaine being trafficked from South America to Europe and North America, including into Florida. © Agence France-Presse CONTINUE READING Show less A jailed Kurdish leader and a Turkish writer on the other side of the bars have used their penpal exchanges to write one of Turkey's highest-selling books. The crime novel "Duet in Purgatory", which features a retired left-wing lawyer and a bitter ageing general with a tortuous past, has been a roaring success.
The two writers developed the story, which spans the last 40 years of Turkey's tumultuous history and the long-standing Kurdish conflict, without ever discussing the plot. "It was a risky gamble to try and write a novel like you'd play chess, move by move, without agreeing on the plot, the characters or the style -- nothing," Selahattin Demirtas told a literary critic in an interview from prison. The writing of the story began when author and translator Yigit Bener sent the jailed Kurdish leader Demirtas, who is serving a 42-year sentence, a copy of Louis-Ferdinand Celine's classic novel "Journey to the End of the Night".
He also put a note inside -- "the expression of my solidarity". Demirtas, who is 51 and a former co-president of the third largest political party in Turkey's parliament was jailed in 2016 with the European Court of Human Rights later condemning his detention as political and calling for his release. "I couldn't accept that this man for whom, like six million others, I had voted for, and whose ideas I share, found himself behind bars while I am free," said Bener.
- 'A lot of fun' - Bener, who lived in exile in the 1980s, had praised Demirtas's collection of short stories "Dawn", and the two began corresponding via the politician's lawyer. The re-election of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in May 2023 killed Demirtas's hope of an early release, so Bener pitched the idea of taking their correspondence further. "What if we wrote a novel, both of us?" Bener suggested, although he had not thought about a plot or characters and hadn't intended it as a serious project.
While the idea originally sought to keep the prisoner busy, the duo soon wrapped 13 chapters. Bener refused to say who wrote first, but said that the pair took turns to write. "We had a lot of fun but we had to finish," said Bener.
"We put it aside for two months before we had a few friends read it." Demirtas's publishing house Dipnot, which has put out his previous novels and short stories, initially printed 55,000 copies last month, with more to come in September. "Our personal stories, mine and Yigit's trajectories contributed to shaping the novel.
He motivated me when I needed it," said the Kurdish political leader. The secret behind the novel's success is its timely relevance, said Bener. "The book poses the question of reconciliation through two characters from the same generation of losers who share the same feeling of defeat," said Bener.
"The idea speaks to today's Turkey which is more polarised than ever." Bener was "extremely emotional" when he finally got permission to meet Demirtas in Edirne prison in northwest Turkey on the day of the book's release, as the opposition leader is in isolation and only allowed weekly visits from his lawyer or family. Exceptionally, he was let out of the small cell where he has been locked up for eight years, which he shares with a former mayor of the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, Adnan Selcuk Mizrakli.
Critics have praised the "funny, fast-paced and spirited narrative", with readers rushing to see the free half of the writing duo as he tours bookshops. CONTINUE READING Show less A U.S.
judge on Monday handed Google a major legal blow, ruling in a landmark anti-trust case that it has maintained a monopoly with its dominant search engine. The court decision against a "big tech" giant could alter how the sector operates in future. District Court Judge Amit Mehta found that Google had a monopoly for search and for text ads through exclusive distribution agreements that made it the "default" option that people were likely to use on devices.
"After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," Mehta wrote in his ruling. The internet behemoth "has a major, largely unseen advantage over its rivals: default distribution," he wrote. The anti-trust trial pitting US prosecutors and nearly a dozen states against Google ended in May.
"This victory against Google is an historic win for the American people," said US Attorney General Merrick Garland. "No company -- no matter how large or influential -- is above the law." Google will appeal the verdict, according to global affairs president Kent Walker.
Walker pointed out that Mehta concludes Google is the industry's highest quality search engine, particularly on mobile devices. "Given this, and that people are increasingly looking for information in more and more ways, we plan to appeal," Walker said. "As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.
" - Damages? - It remained to be seen what remedies or damages the judge might order in the case. In one possible good sign for Google, Mehta concluded in his ruling that the tech titan's violation of the Sherman Act did not have "anticompetitive effects." "Google's loss in its search antitrust trial could be a huge deal -- depending on the remedy," said Emarketer senior analyst Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf.
"A forced divestiture of the search business would sever Alphabet from its largest source of revenue," she added, referring to Google's parent company. Even losing the option of making exclusive deals to be the default option on browsers, smartphones or computers would hurt Google, according to the analyst. Google's search business would be hampered as generative artificial intelligence wielded by Microsoft's Bing and OpenAI budding "SearchGPT" ramp up competition.
"The biggest winner from today's ruling isn't consumers or little tech, it's Microsoft,” said Chamber of Progress CEO Adam Kovacevich. "Microsoft has underinvested in search for decades, but today’s ruling opens the door to a court mandate of default deals for Bing." Mitchell-Wolf expected a drawn-out appeals process to delay any immediate effects of the verdict on consumers or advertisers.
The trial was the first time the US Department of Justice has faced a big tech company in court since Microsoft was targeted more than two decades ago over the dominance of its Windows operating system. Mehta presided over several months of testimony late last year that saw Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other top executives take the stand. At the heart of the government's case was the massive payments made by Google to Apple and other companies to keep its world-leading search engine as the default on iPhones, web browsers and other products.
Court testimony revealed that these payments reach the tens of billions of dollars every year to keep its prime real estate on Apple hardware or the Safari and Mozilla browsers. Justice department lawyers argued that Google achieved and perpetuated its dominance -- and strangled rivals -- through these default deals that also expanded to Samsung and other device makers. CONTINUE READING Show less.
