The nightmare will be televised — green waste edition::

“The black guy did it” ???????????????

— Dimitri Drekonja, MD, MS (@dimitridrekonja.bsky.social) 2026-06-22T22:00:41.869Z

Further:

Violent Slit is my new all-girl punk band.

— Mueller, She Wrote (@muellershewrote.com) 2026-06-22T21:06:57.319Z

An attitude — Michael Tomasky at The New Republic this afternoon:

You’d think a guy who just lost a war would have bigger matters on his mind, but to Trump, matters don’t come any bigger than the Reflecting Pool and the Kennedy Center, because they are about the thing that is most important to him: his monstrously large but porcelain-fragile ego. I don’t condone vandalism of government property, so if anyone did that, fine, arrest them (though it sounds like Hearn, whose hearing is slated for July 9, didn’t). But I submit to you that the real vandalism here is being committed by Trump.

Apparently, the Reflecting Pool had—still has—very serious drainage issues. So fine. Fix those. But the idea that the color of the pool was somehow inadequate never occurred to anyone until Trump came along. I’d imagine that over on Newsmax and One America News Network (Miller’s former employer, for what it’s worth), they’re selling the makeover as another shimmering example of Trump’s courageous patriotism that drives the woke liberals insane. But the design change is really chiefly about his vanity. He just aches to leave monuments to and reminders of himself across the nation’s capital. Or maybe, like Narcissus, he wants to visit the pool and stare endlessly at his own reflection.

Thusly, Paul Waldman at Public Notice, also this afternoon,:

We are neither psychiatrist nor gerontologists and therefore make no specific diagnosis of Trump’s mental or physical state. But we are all doing what those with aging relatives do: watching the signs of increasing mental and physical infirmity, asking what’s normal and what might require intervention, and wondering when we ought to be worried.

Some of those signs have little or no effect on his job performance, like the gruesome bruising on his hand or the swollen ankles.

Even the sleeping, one could argue, doesn’t matter all that much — it’s not as though genuine business is being conducted at those cabinet meetings and he needs to stay sharp for it.

But disinhibition is often associated with certain kinds of dementia, and Trump seems less inhibited than ever — even for someone who wasn’t particularly inhibited to begin with.

Every candidate and president makes “gaffes,” statements that when taken out of context can be used against them. But lately Trump has been making gaffes so obviously damaging that they would be too stupid for a politician on their first run for city council, let alone one who has spent a lifetime talking to reporters.

It isn’t just his increasing propensity to say inappropriate things — like asking a child “You think you could take me in a fight?” The ones that show how Trump is declining are the ones that do him deep political damage.

For example, when asked how much Americans’ financial situation played into his thinking about Iran, he responded, “Not even a little bit … I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody.”

[…]

Trump is not aging in the same way Joe Biden did.

Biden looked increasingly frail in his last year in office — his voice became quieter and raspier, he acquired a shuffling gait, and he sometimes got a confused look on his face. Though he didn’t mix up names or dates any more often than Trump does today, Biden could sound tentative where Trump speaks loudly and with complete confidence, which gives the appearance of more vigor.

But more importantly for the question of presidential aging, there was never much evidence that Biden’s aging had affected his decision-making in problematic ways. That isn’t to say it wouldn’t have had he gone through another term in office, but there isn’t anything we could point to and say “a younger Biden would never have decided to do that.”

[…]

But while Trump’s voice may still be relatively strong, there are lots of reasons to worry about how his advancing age is affecting his judgment, and the consequences are profound. Would a younger Trump have literally threatened genocide (“A whole civilization will die tonight”) against a people he claimed to be trying to help, or picked a fight with the Pope, then posted an AI image of himself as Jesus?

Would a younger Trump with his political skills and understanding of the attention economy spend so much time drawing attention to the catastrophe of his reflecting pool renovation? Would a younger and less addled Trump have decided that invading Iran was a great idea, and taken so long to get out?

There’s no way to know for sure. But the nature of Trump’s personalist presidency, in which the entire government is organized around turning his whims into reality and the barest hint of dissent is swiftly punished, makes the question of his age even more important than it was with Biden, who was surrounded by competent people who could run the government even when the president was less engaged than he ought to have been.

Unhinged:

Sick and crazy, full-color, surreal dream. or not, yet here we are once again …

(Illustration out front: Pablo Picasso’s “Self Portrait Facing Death,” oil, and found here.)