Of the monstrosity of Rapist In Chief Trump and his loathsome crimes of sexual terror, his myriad perversions and madness, and his fascist regime of lies and grift, I offer here a brief summation of my writings on his character profile as a rapist, whoremonger, and child predator and sex trafficker relevant to his relationship with co-conspirator Epstein in possibly the most horrific crime syndicate of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.
If I could display him in a cage like a beast as he merits, the sign before the door of this atrocity exhibit would say Keep Back From the Cage, Children; the President Grabs.
And remember, folks; you can always tell a Republican’s secret name they use among themselves; it’s their act of treason plus their sex crime.
As I wrote in my post of January 17 2024, Thanks For Showing Us All What’s Under Your Masks, Republicans: the Case of E. Jean Carroll Versus Donald Trump; Why do so many follow Trump enthusiastically, openly embracing treason, white supremacist terror, and patriarchal sexual terror?
We cannot deny the obvious answer; because his actions grant permission for them to do the same.
This week we witnessed the triumph of Traitor Trump in the Iowa Caucus which anoints the Republican candidate as challenger to Biden and the Restoration of America in our next election, and his clear dominance of the Republican Party, concurrent with his courtroom appearance to determine what he owes E. Jean Carroll.
The meaning of this hideous juxtaposition and interdependence of events is undeniable; the Republican Party is the Party of Rape as well as racism and the subversion of democracy.
It also leaves us with a question; a wonderful, terrible question, whose answer will define us as a nation and for all future generations; what does he owe to all of us?
As I wrote in my post of June 22 2019, Our Predator In Chief; Treason. Racism. Untruth. Misogyny. Predator. Its like a cheer; how do you spell Trump?
Its that last one, Predator, that concerns me today. My image of our President will always begin and end with him peeping at the fifteen year olds in the Miss America pageant. This is the beginning of him, and all that he means in the end; a psychopath to whom others are not humans but things which he might use for his own amusement. And for whom the only passion is control and dominance, the terror he might evoke from his victims, and the degradation of the innocent.
Apparently he is not only driven by his avarice for children, whether the beauty queens he sought to own as trophies or the migrants stolen from their families to fuel his lust for power and cruelty and whatever wealth he could amass from the over one thousand children who vanished without a trace in the most horrific slavery conspiracy in modern times, but also is a target of opportunity ambush predator of women in general.
Trump casts a shadow like a giant bird-eating spider, loathsome and vile, a crawling thing whose mission is to find and consume beauty.
It is why I call Trump and the Patriarchy perverse; a term I am careful with, I who value transgression of the Forbidden and the Frightening of the Horses among the highest ideals of our civilization, as forms of self-questioning and instruments of autonomous self-creation and liberation from the tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue. For me, perversion is defined as the substitution of power and control for joy and equality of partnership, dominion and subjugation for love, because it dehumanizes.
Fear, power, force; such is Wagnerian Ring of systemic violence which consumes souls to create elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Today we must add the name of Jean Carroll to the list of his accusers; Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles.
How many more names must there be before America and the world see Trump and the party of misogyny he leads for the monsters that they are?
As written by E Jean Carroll in her fearless witness of history; “Which brings me to the other rich boy. Before I discuss him, I must mention that there are two great handicaps to telling you what happened to me in Bergdorf’s: (a) The man I will be talking about denies it, as he has denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by at least 15 credible women, namely, Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles. (Here’s what the White House said: “This is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the President look bad.”) And (b) I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did.
His admirers can’t get enough of hearing that he’s rich enough, lusty enough, and powerful enough to be sued by and to pay off every splashy porn star or Playboy Playmate who “comes forward,” so I can’t imagine how ecstatic the poor saps will be to hear their favorite Walking Phallus got it on with an old lady in the world’s most prestigious department store.
This is during the years I am doing a daily Ask E. Jean TV show for the cable station America’s Talking, a precursor to MSNBC launched by Roger Ailes (who, by the way, is No. 16 on my list).
Early one evening, as I am about to go out Bergdorf’s revolving door on 58th Street, and one of New York’s most famous men comes in the revolving door, or it could have been a regular door at that time, I can’t recall, and he says: “Hey, you’re that advice lady!”
And I say to No. 20 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List: “Hey, you’re that real-estate tycoon!”
I am surprised at how good-looking he is. We’ve met once before, and perhaps it is the dusky light but he looks prettier than ever. This has to be in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996 because he’s garbed in a faultless topcoat and I’m wearing my black wool Donna Karan coatdress and high heels but not a coat.
“Come advise me,” says the man. “I gotta buy a present.”
“Oh!” I say, charmed. “For whom?”
“A girl,” he says.
“Don’t the assistants of your secretaries buy things like that?” I say.
“Not this one,” he says. Or perhaps he says, “Not this time.” I can’t recall. He is a big talker, and from the instant we collide, he yammers about himself like he’s Alexander the Great ready to loot Babylon.
As we are standing just inside the door, I point to the handbags. “How about—”
“No!” he says, making the face where he pulls up both lips like he’s balancing a spoon under his nose, and begins talking about how he once thought about buying Bergdorf ’s.
“Or … a hat!” I say enthusiastically, walking toward the handbags, which, at the period I’m telling you about — and Bergdorf’s has been redone two or three times since then — are mixed in with, and displayed next to, the hats. “She’ll love a hat! You can’t go wrong with a hat!”
I don’t remember what he says, but he comes striding along — greeting a Bergdorf sales attendant like he owns the joint and permitting a shopper to gape in awe at him — and goes right for a fur number.
“Please,” I say. “No woman would wear a dead animal on her head!”
What he replies I don’t recall, but I remember he coddles the fur hat like it’s a baby otter.
“How old is the lady in question?” I ask.
“How old are you?” replies the man, fondling the hat and looking at me like Louis Leakey carbon-dating a thighbone he’s found in Olduvai Gorge.
“I’m 52,” I tell him.
“You’re so old!” he says, laughing — he was around 50 himself — and it’s at about this point that he drops the hat, looks in the direction of the escalator, and says, “Lingerie!” Or he may have said “Underwear!” So we stroll to the escalator. I don’t remember anybody else greeting him or galloping up to talk to him, which indicates how very few people are in the store at the time.
I have no recollection where lingerie is in that era of Bergdorf’s, but it seems to me it is on a floor with the evening gowns and bathing suits, and when the man and
I arrive — and my memory now is vivid — no one is present.
There are two or three dainty boxes and a lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray on the counter. The man snatches the bodysuit up and says: “Go try this on!”
“You try it on,” I say, laughing. “It’s your color.”
“Try it on, come on,” he says, throwing it at me.
“It goes with your eyes,” I say, laughing and throwing it back.
“You’re in good shape,” he says, holding the filmy thing up against me. “I wanna see how this looks.”
“But it’s your size,” I say, laughing and trying to slap him back with one of the boxes on the counter.
“Come on,” he says, taking my arm. “Let’s put this on.”
This is gonna be hilarious, I’m saying to myself — and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity. As we head to the dressing rooms, I’m laughing aloud and saying in my mind: I’m gonna make him put this thing on over his pants!
There are several facts about what happens next that are so odd I want to clear them up before I go any further:
Did I report it to the police?
No.
Did I tell anyone about it?
Yes. I told two close friends. The first, a journalist, magazine writer, correspondent on the TV morning shows, author of many books, etc., begged me to go to the police.
“He raped you,” she kept repeating when I called her. “He raped you. Go to the police! I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.”
My second friend is also a journalist, a New York anchorwoman. She grew very quiet when I told her, then she grasped both my hands in her own and said, “Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.” (Two decades later, both still remember the incident clearly and confirmed their accounts to New York.)
Do I have photos or any visual evidence?
Bergdorf’s security cameras must have picked us up at the 58th Street entrance of the store. We would have been filmed on the ground floor in the bags-and-hats sections. Cameras also must have captured us going up the escalator and into the lingerie department. New York law at the time did not explicitly prohibit security cameras in dressing rooms to “prevent theft.” But even if it had been captured on tape, depending on the position of the camera, it would be very difficult to see the man unzipping his pants, because he was wearing a topcoat. The struggle might simply have read as “sexy.” The speculation is moot, anyway: The department store has confirmed that it no longer has tapes from that time.
Why were there no sales attendants in the lingerie department?
Bergdorf Goodman’s perfections are so well known — it is a store so noble, so clubby, so posh — that it is almost easier to accept the fact that I was attacked than the fact that, for a very brief period, there was no sales attendant in the lingerie department. Inconceivable is the word. Sometimes a person won’t find a sales attendant in Saks, it’s true; sometimes one has to look for a sales associate in Barneys, Bloomingdale’s, or even Tiffany’s; but 99 percent of the time, you will have an attendant in Bergdorf’s. All I can say is I did not, in this fleeting episode, see an attendant. And the other odd thing is that a dressing-room door was open. In Bergdorf’s dressing rooms, doors are usually locked until a client wants to try something on.
Why haven’t I “come forward” before now?
Receiving death threats, being driven from my home, being dismissed, being dragged through the mud, and joining the 15 women who’ve come forward with credible stories about how the man grabbed, badgered, belittled, mauled, molested, and assaulted them, only to see the man turn it around, deny, threaten, and attack them, never sounded like much fun. Also, I am a coward.
So now I will tell you what happened:
The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.
I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.
The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes. I do not believe he ejaculates. I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through the store and out the door — I don’t recall which door — and find myself outside on Fifth Avenue.
And that was my last hideous man. The Donna Karan coatdress still hangs on the back of my closet door, unworn and unlaundered since that evening. And whether it’s my age, the fact that I haven’t met anyone fascinating enough over the past couple of decades to feel “the sap rising,” as Tom Wolfe put it, or if it’s the blot of the real-estate tycoon, I can’t say. But I have never had sex with anybody ever again.”
As written by Joanna Walters in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump testified E Jean Carroll was ‘nut job’ who said she enjoyed being sexually assaulted; “Donald Trump called the writer E Jean Carroll a “nut job” in video testimony last year and falsely claimed she had enjoyed being sexually assaulted – prompting her lawyer to ask if he was admitting he had raped her, according to freshly unsealed testimony.
Questioned for a lawsuit, Trump, the former US president, angrily hurled insults and threatened to sue the columnist who accused him of raping her in the New York upscale department store Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s, according to excerpts of his videotaped testimony. The tapes were recorded last October and unsealed by a court on Friday.
The New York court on Friday also rejected as “absurd” Trump’s attempt to have dismissed the two lawsuits against him by Carroll, alleging rape and libel. An April trial is planned.
“She said that I did something to her that never took place. There was no anything. I know nothing about this nut job,” he said, according to the transcript of the October testimony.
The excerpts reveal a contentious battle in the civil case, between Trump and Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, who questioned him as Trump called Carroll, a former longtime Elle magazine columnist, the perpetrator of “a complete scam.”
He accused her of describing the alleged rape as she “was promoting a really crummy book”.
Trump added: “I will sue her after this is over, and that’s the thing I really look forward to doing. And I’ll sue you too,” he told Kaplan.
Trump said he knew it wasn’t “politically correct” to say “she’s not my type” when he previously responded to claims, shortly after Carroll’s 2019 book was published. The writer alleged she was attacked by Trump in a dressing room after they had a chance meeting in the store and she agreed to help him pick out lingerie for a friend.
“But I’ll say it anyway,” he said. “She’s accusing me of rape, a woman that I have no idea who she is. It came out of the blue. She’s accusing me of raping her, the worst thing you can do, the worst charge.”
Trump called Carroll “sick, mentally sick”. And he mischaracterized an interview Carroll had given on CNN, falsely claiming she had talked about enjoying being sexually assaulted. “She actually indicated that she loved it. OK? She loved it until commercial break,” Trump said. “In fact, I think she said it was sexy, didn’t she? She said it was very sexy to be raped. Didn’t she say that?”
Kaplan then tried to elicit from Trump that he had raped her client.
“So, sir, I just want to confirm: it’s your testimony that E Jean Carroll said that she loved being sexually assaulted by you?”
Trump answered: “Well, based on her interview with [CNN’s] Anderson Cooper, I believe that’s what took place. And we can define that … I think she said that rape was sexy – which it’s not, by the way.”
What Carroll had described is that she prefers to use the word fight, not rape because some other people “think rape is sexy”.
Also on Friday, Trump’s real estate business empire, the Trump Organization, was hit with the largest allowable fine of $1.6m after being convicted of tax fraud, another in his long string of serious legal troubles, from Georgia to New York.”
As written by Larry Neumeister in Huffpost, in an article entitled Under Oath, Donald Trump Hurled Insults About Woman Who Accuses Him Of Rape; ” Questioned for a lawsuit, former President Donald Trump angrily hurled insults and threatened to sue the columnist who accused him of raping her in a department store in the 1990s, according to excerpts of his videotaped testimony unsealed by a court on Friday.
Portions of his 5 1/2-hour October deposition in a lawsuit filed by columnist E. Jean Carroll were released publicly after a federal judge rejected his lawyers’ request that it remained sealed.
“She said that I did something to her that never took place. There was no anything. I know nothing about this nut job,” he said, according to the transcript.
The excerpts reveal a contentious battle between Trump and Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, who questioned him as Trump called the former longtime Elle magazine columnist the perpetrator of “a complete scam” in which she described the rape as she “was promoting a really crummy book.”
“I will sue her after this is over, and that’s the thing I really look forward to doing. And I’ll sue you too,” he told Kaplan.
The release of excerpts from the deposition came the same day as Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, unrelated to the lawyer, also refused a request by Trump’s attorneys to toss out two lawsuits by Carroll alleging defamation and rape. An April trial is planned.
Trump said he knew it wasn’t “politically correct” to say “she’s not my type” when he responded to claims shortly after Carroll’s 2019 book was published. The writer alleged she was attacked by Trump in a dressing room after they had a chance meeting in the store and she agreed to help him pick out lingerie for a friend.
“But I’ll say it anyway,” he said. “She’s accusing me of rape, a woman that I have no idea who she is. It came out of the blue. She’s accusing me of raping her, the worst thing you can do, the worst charge.”
Speaking to her attorney, he added: “And you know it’s not true too. You’re a political operative also. You’re a disgrace. But she’s accusing me and so are you of rape, and it never took place.”
At one point in the deposition, Trump called Carroll “sick, mentally sick.” He mischaracterized an interview Carroll had given on CNN, falsely claiming she had talked about enjoying being sexually assaulted. “She actually indicated that she loved it. Okay? She loved it until commercial break,” Trump said. “In fact, I think she said it was sexy, didn’t she? She said it was very sexy to be raped. Didn’t she say that?”
Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, then tried to elicit from Trump that he raped her client.
“So, sir, I just want to confirm: It’s your testimony that E. Jean Carroll said that she loved being sexually assaulted by you?”
Trump answered: “Well, based on her interview with Anderson Cooper, I believe that’s what took place. And we can define that. … I think she said that rape was sexy – which it’s not, by the way.”
What Carroll has said in her writing, and in the interview with Cooper, is that she doesn’t like to use the word rape because some other people “think rape is sexy.” She said she preferred the term “fight.”
In his ruling, the judge said the Adult Survivor’s Act was similar to the Child Victims Act, another New York state law that temporarily allowed victims of sexual assaults when they were children to sue their abusers years later.
Carroll initially sued Trump for defamation after he mocked her claims he sexually assaulted her. Carroll sued Trump with the rape claim in November, when the Adult Survivor’s Act took effect.”
As I wrote in my post of January 13 2023, A Closing Net May Capture Yet Our Predator In Chief; On this Friday the Thirteenth we Americans are haunted by a specter of our past defilement and violation, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, whose testimony in the rape of a journalist, literally this time though all who follow the path of journalism and the witness of history as a sacred calling to pursue the truth metaphorically shared her fate during his capture of the state as a Russian agent and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, along with his complicity in the grotesque and aberrant butchery of the heroic Khashoggi, reeks with the arrogance of power, misogyny, amoral narcissism, and psychopathy for which he is so infamous and idolized by this dishonorable and treasonous adherents, the Confederate-Nazi revivalists and criminals of white supremacist and Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror who are both his electoral voting base and resource of deniable forces such as those who assaulted our capital in the January 6 Insurrection.
When the history of the Fall of America which preceded and set the stage for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Third World War is written, we must remember and assign Trump his true role with his fellow predators Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and Larry Nassar.
In literature Trump finds his mirror image in fascist apologist Ayn Rand’s rapist protagonist Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, whose reply to a question, “who will let you?”, summarizes her ideology of nihilism and amoral power, appropriated from Stalin’s assassin Molotov, as justifications for the dominion of hegemonic elites; “That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”
That would be all of us, my brothers, sisters, and others, all who love liberty, affirm the value of our common humanity and our duty of care for each other, choose hope over fear, love over hate, and faith in each other as solidarity of action, democracy over tyranny, and a free society of equals over a world of slaves and the ruthless predators of depravity who subjugate them through terror and the learned helplessness of brutal repression and carceral states of force and control, the falsification of lies and illusions, rewritten histories, cults of lunatic conspiracy theories and alternate realities, the commodification of economic warfare which reduces humans to a value as cash and makes of us all cogs in a vast machine in service to the wealth of those who buy our time, and in its final stage dehumanization.
And this we must resist; fear as the basis of human exchange, falsification and division, commodification, dehumanization; systemic fascisms of patriarchy, blood, faith, and soil.
Every loyal American, every woman on earth and all men who love women as equals, mothers, sisters, partners, daughters; all who believe in the dream of democracy and the idea that all human beings are created equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights, among these being the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, rights Trump stole from E Jean Carroll and still wishes to steal from us all, all of us, all who can see themselves in E Jean Carroll who in her witness of history and truth telling exposes and brings a Reckoning to a monster who would dehumanize us and steal our souls.
On the witness stand, E Jean Carroll speaks for us all.
A closing net may capture yet our Predator In Chief.
As I wrote in my post of May 14 2023, This Mother’s Day, the Citizenship and Autonomy of Women Are In Question: the Case of E. Jean Carroll and CNN’s Town Hall; On this Mother’s Day, when the citizenship and autonomy of women are in question and the fate of our nation yet hangs in the balance, I think of my mother who carried me on her shoulders when we seized the Hall of Justice in San Francisco in 1968, of her life of liberation struggle and the championing of others, and against systems and forces of unequal power and the idea of biology as destiny, as imposed conditions of struggle both as the limits of our form- fourteen miscarriages and nearly forty years of recurring cancer since her first surgery- and institutional Patriarchy as she changed fields at university because all the posted science jobs said “no women need apply” right out in print for all the world to see.
I think now of what remains to be achieved in seizures of power from those who would enslave us in the shadow of CNN’s Town Hall and the vindication of E. Jean Carroll of which the Republicans made a joke.
Behind the Republican Party’s mask of macho glorification of violence and our right to kill each other en masse with military firearms, of centralization of power to the state in the militarization of police as enforcers of theocratic Gideonite virtue as defined by authority, of capitalist war on nature as limitless need for control of our wildness which is driving our species to extinction, of systems of unequal power and the need for force and control itself, lies a simple motive; fear.
Fear of Otherness, of loss of power and elite hegemonies of wealth, privilege, and the use of social force, and of the inchoate and chaotic forces of desire which are life itself and topple all structures of social control as unanswerable tides of being and truths written in our flesh.
Fear is the forge of power, especially in the context of identitarian politics, tyrannical regimes, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and fear shaped by authority in service to power through division and narratives of victimization. Politics is the Art of Fear, as my father once taught me, and the power of authority rests on the Calculus of Fear, how much fear is used in its primary mission of social control, and how it is used; too little fear and order collapses, too much and it creates its own counterforce as resistance and revolution.
I have thought of resistance and revolution much in days of study of the Party of Treason’s reaction to the vindication in court of the heroic truthteller E. Jean Carroll as performed in CNN’s Town Hall, wherein the Third Primary Duty of a Citizen, Mock Authority, has been deployed by authority itself as a strategy of reaction and counter-revolution.
This is pathetic, Absurd which I capitalize in reference to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty from which Republican propaganda is derived, politics as spectacle which induces horror and revulsion, and a typical performance by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, but I cannot overstate its peril. The purpose of such propaganda is to unify group identity and mobilize its forces; and we see how well it works in the January 6 Insurrection.
The American Fourth Reich and its captured glove the Republican Party demonstrates in the CNN Town Hall the flag it rallies round, Patriarchy and sexual terror, the silencing, commodification, and dehumanization of women and the theft of women’s citizenship as vote suppression and repression of dissent and public witness, and the disempowerment and theft of autonomy of women in legal and political actions to keep control of women’s bodies and reproductive rights in male hands. In this key mission, the Grabber is a figure of predation who grants permission and immunity to his followers as loaned power, and it is the power of sexual terror Republicans want most of all.
Thanks for showing us all what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
How shall we answer this? As written in the weekly editorial of LeftLinks, entitled A Lesson from CNN: Trump Doesn’t Play By the Rules…Neither Should We!; “What makes the cartoon to the right useful is how it sums up a complicated lesson is a very simple way. ‘Seeking truth from facts,’ in Trump’s mind, is a method for wimps and losers.
Better to use the irrationalism of fascism: Create your own ‘truthworld’ by assertion and repetition of the dogma of the day: war is peace, enslaved work makes you free, might makes right, women crave dominance and violence, it’s been that way for a million years, and so on.
For Trump, campaigns are all about spectacle, a ‘reality’ show where he’s in charge and we are the players on his stage. We shouldn’t fall for it. Among ourselves and our base and allies, we can use rational discourse and compelling narratives about who we are and whom we aspire to become.
But when dealing with Trump and his minions, if we engage directly at all, we meet spectacle with counter-spectacle. We run the stage and script, and we make the Trumpsters our props. Learning how best to write a counter-script is not so simple. I would recommend some of Wilhelm Reich’s works on the mass psychology of fascism. If you know the hidden appeal and fears being played, it’s easier to disarm and lampoon them.”
As written by Sasha Abramsky in Truthout, in an article entitled CNN’s Town Hall Didn’t Hold Trump Accountable — It Normalized His Lies: This media spectacle served to normalize the immoral and the destructive; “ In the run up to Wednesday night’s CNN town hall with Donald Trump, I was on the fence as to whether it was a good idea to give the Mar-a-Lago troll such a platform. On the one hand, it offered an opportunity for viewers to see just how mendacious, mean and shifty this man is; on the other, it provided Trump with 90 minutes of free primetime to air his noxious views.
Having watched as much of it as I could stomach, all ambiguity I might have had on this question was gone. It was, from start to finish, an absolute disgrace. If I could scrub away the memory, I would.
From the get-go, this CNN spectacle served to normalize the immoral and the destructive. In the hour leading in, Wolf Blitzer corralled a group of talking heads to welcome viewers to what he earnestly termed “an important night here in the United States.” Let’s be clear: There was nothing inherently “important” about it; it was an event conjured out of whole cloth by CNN executives looking to cash in on Trump’s notoriety and ability to draw a crowd. A day after Trump was found liable by a New York jury of sexually battering and defaming E. Jean Carroll, Blitzer stewarded a conversation about the verdict as if he were referring to an obscure-but-bizarre policy question, such as the imposition of tariffs on Lego sets, or whether O.J. Simpson should have a national holiday named after him. Perhaps the most distasteful line came from a male talking head who opined that “politically speaking, [the verdict] is a loser. His closest political advisers do not think this is a winner for him.” Um? Really? That’s how we talk about sexual assault these days? As if it’s something that, with the right spinmeisters just might be somehow spinnable as a political plus?
The town hall itself was no better. Held in front of a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire, it was made up exclusively of people who intended to vote in the GOP primary — and that seemed, even within that narrow cohort of the American voting public, to have been further winnowed to include a suspiciously large number of Trumpies. The town hall ended up being simply a platform for the U.S.’s only twice-impeached, indicted and recently-found-liable-for-sexual-assault ex-president to recycle old and untrue canards, as well as to turn the Carroll verdict into something akin to an aging midcentury comic’s standup routine in a down-at-the-mouth casino.
The moderator, Kaitlan Collins, who had previously worked for the right-wing Daily Caller, actually did her best to rein Trump in, and, every so often, to hold his feet to the fire. But hers was, truly, a Sisyphean task.
Trump flat-out lied at warp speed. He repeatedly spat out falsehoods about the 2020 election result, doubling down on his allegations of fraud. He refused to apologize for putting Mike Pence’s life in danger, falsely asserting that his vice president “did something wrong” by not refusing to recognize Biden electors. He claimed that he had told the crowd on January 6 to act peacefully, and that most of them had; that they were there with “love in their heart,” and that “it was a beautiful day.” He asserted he would pardon most of the January 6 insurrectionists because they had done nothing wrong and were living in “hell” as a result of malign prosecutions. He said he had ordered the military and national guard in to protect the Capitol but that “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” had nixed this idea.
Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie… It made my head feel heavy just trying to imagine how much energy has to go into concocting such a barrage of untruths. Does Trump literally spend time in front of the mirror preening his toupee and trying on lies for size?
Trump — who had just been found liable for defamation and ordered to retract his defamatory comments — instead used this free primetime platform to call E. Jean Carroll a “wack job” and told a rambling story about how he had wanted to introduce into evidence the fact that she had once named either her pet dog or her pet cat “vagina,” as if that somehow negated her ability to recall being assaulted. Then, once his audience was warmed up, he explained how the “horrible Clinton-appointed judge” had refused to allow this into the record.
He opined that the House Republicans should force a default on the national debt unless they succeeded in securing deep budget cuts from Biden — despite the fact that pretty much every economist of any credibility has averred that such a default would presage a global economic catastrophe and likely cost millions of jobs stateside. One can only hope that even the spineless Kevin McCarthy will realize this is a bridge too far.
Trump coyly refused to say what sort of national abortion ban he would favor, if any — but then doubled down on his lies that Democrats wanted fetuses to be aborted at nine months of pregnancy, or even, somehow, after birth. (Just to be clear, since CNN somehow neglected to inform viewers of this, Democrats are not roaming the countryside looking for women about to give birth whom they can persuade to instead abort their fetuses.)
Collins pushed back occasionally, and at times quite forcefully, but on the whole, she was steamrolled. The longer the night went on, the more Collins looked like she had accidentally swallowed a frog that was performing yoga exercises on her insides. She looked positively sickened by it all. But there was no relief; she had, quite clearly, been hung out to dry by the CNN executives who had agreed to this inane format.
There was no real-time fact-checking. Inexplicably, there was no chyron reminding viewers that Trump was wrong, that he was playing fast-and-loose with the truth, that he was, in short, conjuring up “facts” out of his derrière. Given a platform to spew venom largely without consequence, this soulless grifter lapped it up, taking one softball question after another from the audience, basking in their applause and laughter as he pursued his grotesque comedy routine about E. Jean Carroll.
After 45 minutes I’d had enough — pretty much anything would have been better than this. Watching the Christmas log burn again and again on replay would have been more entertaining. Listening to coyotes howling would have been more politically informative.
But I read later that one of the highlights of the second half of this ridiculous spectacle was when Trump refused to say which side he’d support in the Russia-Ukraine war if he was returned to power. That is, I guess, on a par with his appalling comment, after the fascist march on Charlottesville in 2017, that there were “very fine people” on both sides.
That Trump is an inveterate liar, an egotistical coup plotter and a charlatan has been shown beyond doubt. A month ago he was indicted for his role in the paying of hush money to Stormy Daniels. A jury has just concluded that he is a brutal sexual assaulter. He will, in the coming months, likely be indicted for a host of other crimes. All of that was public knowledge, yet CNN chose anyway to normalize this man and to give him 90 minutes to peddle his bile. The network gave him a platform to defame anew a woman who just won millions of dollars from him for his earlier rounds of defamation. And CNN gave him free rein to further attack the country’s already damaged democratic institutions. This ghastly spectacle must surely rank as one of the lowest moments in television news’ storied history. Edward R. Murrow, the CBS anchor who, 70 years ago, had the fortitude to take on — and help take down — the demagogic Sen. Joe McCarthy, must, after this grotesquery, be turning in his grave.”
How does CNN itself describe this loathsome event? As written by Oliver Darcy in CNN’s Reliable Sources; “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening.
Kaitlan Collins is as tough and knowledgable of an interviewer as they come. She fact-checked Trump throughout the 70-minute town hall. Over and over and over again, she told him that the election was not stolen. That it was not rigged. That there was no evidence for the lies he was disseminating on stage.
“The election was not rigged, Mr. President,” Collins told Trump at one point during the event. “You cannot keep saying that all night long.”
Yet, he did. Trump frequently ignored or spoke over Collins throughout the evening as he unleashed a firehose of disinformation upon the country, which a sizable swath of the GOP continues to believe. A professional lie machine, Trump fired off falsehoods at a rapid clip while using his bluster to overwhelm Collins, stealing command of the stage at some points of the town hall.
Trump lied about the 2020 election. He took no responsibility for the January 6 insurrection that those very lies incited. And he mocked E. Jean Carroll’s allegations of sexual assault, which a jury found him liable for on Tuesday.
And CNN aired it all. On and on it went. It felt like 2016 all over again. It was Trump’s unhinged social media feed brought to life on stage. And Collins was put in an uncomfortable position, given the town hall was conducted in front of a Republican audience that applauded Trump, giving a sense of unintended endorsement to his shameful antics.
Yes, some news was made. The town hall spotlighted his insistence on continuing to peddle 2020 election lies. Additionally, he said the US should default on its debt if the White House does not agree to Republican spending cuts, refused to say whether he wants Ukraine or Russia to win the war, and declined to give a straight answer on abortion.
But for most of the night, the nation’s eyes were transfixed on Trump’s abuse of the platform that he was given. At one point, he even insulted Collins, calling her a “nasty person,” to which the crowd of New Hampshire Republican primary voters broke out in cheers.
“We don’t have enough time to fact-check every lie he told,” anchor Jake Tapper candidly said after the event wrapped up.
Trump’s team was, naturally, delighted with the result, according to reports. “Advisers to Trump are thrilled at how this is going so far for him,” The NYT’s Jonathan Swan reported. “They can’t believe he is getting an hour on CNN with an audience that cheers his every line and laughs at his every joke.”
Neither could anyone else.
While Collins is largely receiving praise for her relentless fact-checking of the former president, she was facing an impossible task. CNN and new network boss Chris Licht are facing a fury of criticism — both internally and externally over the event.
How Licht and other CNN executives address the criticism in the coming days and weeks will be crucial. Will they defend what transpired at Saint Anselm College? Or will they express some regret?
For now, CNN is defending itself.
“Tonight Kaitlan Collins exemplified what it means to be a world-class journalist. She asked tough, fair and revealing questions,” a network spokesperson said. “And she followed up and fact-checked President Trump in real time to arm voters with crucial information about his positions as he enters the 2024 election as the Republican frontrunner.”
Second among the atrocity exhibits of Trump’s misogyny, perversions, and sexual terrorism must come the Stormy Daniels trial which exposed his general need to turn women into things to be used, for dehumanization underlies all of his other sex crimes, including the trafficking of children as a partner of Epstein through his control of the modeling and beauty pageant industry.
As I wrote in my post of April 16 2025, Whoremonger In Chief: Anniversary of the Stormy Daniels Hush Money Trial; In the Stormy Daniels hush money trial of our Rapist and Whoremonger In Chief, Traitor Trump, a shifting constellation of evils is displayed before the stage of the world; sin and depravity, secrecy and the catch and kill system of bent journalism as subversion of our elections, criminality in service to power, and the manufacture of false identity and history as idolatry; yet the bottomless depths of Trump’s perversions and use of sexual terror neither begin nor end here.
Beginnings are such curious things; the origins of the Trump family fortune in the trafficking of Native American women during the Klondike gold rush, which finds reflection in Trump’s use of the modeling and beauty pageant system he once owned to exploit and globally traffic teenage girls, like the crimes of his buddy Epstein but industrialized on a mass scale.
Often have I wondered if Trump hired Stormy Daniels to prove to the world and his donors that he has normal sexual identity, in the wake of the loss of the beauty and modeling network amid exposure of his peeping at young girls, the exposure and fall of the Epstein trafficking network, of his rape of E Jean Carroll, and of his public use of his daughter from childhood as an erotic proxy. And these are only the perversions we know about.
Imagine the family dynamics created by the kind of crimes possible when only fear and power are real and have meaning; did the Trump Patriarch commit acts including the raiding and burning of villages, abduction, and mass enslavement of women kept in chains like livestock in the Trump string of brothels over a century ago, tortured and horsewhipped into submission and sometimes exhibited like trained animals in grotesque circus acts? Here I merely question, for I was not there nor do I possess historical documents of witnesses; but how if such horrors form the basis of the Trump family crime syndicate as a multigenerational cult of sexual terror?
When the Republicans speak of family values, this is what they really mean; the right of a man to do anything imaginable to women as patriarchal sexual terror and the dehumanization of women authorized by theocracy.
And remember, friends, you can always tell the secret name of a Republican; it’s their act of treason plus their sex crime.
In closing my case for the madness and amoral sexual terrorism of Trump as a predator of women, I turn now to the interrogation of his psychopathy as a child molester, rapist, and whoremonger.
As I wrote in my post of December 17 2019, On the Madness of Donald Trump; On the eve of his impeachment, Donald Trump has sent an illuminating letter to Nancy Pelosi in which his delusional psychopathy and the near idiot level disfunction of his diseased and shattered mind are on full display. Its interesting to read the letter as a window into madness and the origins of evil and tyranny.
I’ve written a number of essays on this subject, so I thought I’d reshare some of them today.
As I wrote in my post of August 7, 2019 psychopathy and the nature of evil: the parallel cases of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Next I must quote myself out of chronological order as I applied Waite’s methods to a second set of parallel lives on October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: parallel lives and reflections; The personal and historical forces which create tyrants and monsters among us have been a lifelong study of mine, aspects of a curiosity regarding the origins and nature of evil born of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird and focused by the classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, both of which I read as a junior in high school. Thus I became fascinated by the intersections of literature, philosophy, history, and psychology.
As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.
A full psychological and historical study of al-Baghdadi in the context of civilizational conflicts would require a book of Biblical proportions and thesis-level scholarship such as Waite’s brilliant work on Hitler. Here I note only some of the obvious alignments and congruences; both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator. Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremberg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump, Hitler, and al-Baghdadi, as monsters and tyrants who reflect one another and as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art.
For their performances of leadership as clowns of terror and madness provide mirror opposite images of the reign of the Roman Emperor described with wit and guile by Antonin Artaud in his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, a figure who disrupted norms as an agent of change and chaos to transform an inert and ossified society, whereas Trump and al-Baghdadi have acted as partners in reaction to return us to a pre-democratic civilization.
Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.
Also out of order per a timeline but next in thematic rank, October 19 2019, Trump the predator exposed in All the President’s Women; How do you spell Trump? Treason. Racism. Untruth. Misogyny. Predator.
Hey Republicans, thanks for showing us what’s under your masks.
You know, I can understand how the Fourth Reich conspiracy of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Nazified Klan white supremacists, and their plutocrat and foreign puppetmasters might claim the first four parts of the Trump program of subversion of democracy with defiant pride amongst themselves, but that last one baffles me. Its as if the whole Republican Party decided to adopt a new nickname on their first day of prison, and started introducing themselves as Short Eyes.
Its all recounted in horrific detail in All The President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator by Barry Levine & Monique El-Faizy; the casual sexual assaults committed in an arrogance of power and privilege which echoes the aristocratic Right of Seigneur, perversions of cruelty and ownership of others as a form of dominion which are extensions of his psychopathy, and among the most terrible signs of his inhumanity and amorality his acquisition of a beauty pageant monopoly for the purpose of access to underage girls.
Trump’s whole life purpose and goal is to perv Miss America. Republicans, are you really going to claim that legacy as your own? Are the rest of us going to let it go unchallenged?
Let us unite together in this purpose; to restore the honor and morality of America, and vote Trump out of our government.
And as I wrote on September 13 2019, Trump’s foreign policy: sabotage of America’s global hegemony of power and privilege; After three years of idiocy and madness, pathological lies and perversions, what is the legacy of Trump and his monkeywrenching of America?
Childstealing and whatever Trump and his Epstein buddies did which required the disappearance of witnesses and hundreds of missing migrant children.
Use of white supremacist terrorists as deniable assets to enable the theft of our freedoms and the transformation of our democracy into a police state of totalitarian force and surveillance.
Campaigns of racist ethnic cleansing and genocide against nonwhite immigrants and Muslims.
I could go on, but what is the point? What norms and values of America have Trump and the Republicans not violated? In domestic policy the Trump administration has been a disaster it will take a generation to recover from, if America survives at all.
As regards foreign policy, Trump has alienated our allies and emboldened our enemies, damaged our credibility and poisoned our diplomatic relations.
We have surrendered our ideals and our leadership of the world as its primary guarantor of democracy and human rights, and won nothing in return. I’m surprised anyone accepts our money; certainly the words of our President are meaningless and worth nothing.
As I wrote in my post of September 16 2019, Trump’s New World Order: madness and tyranny; In a brilliant thumbnail analysis of Trump’s impact on the state of the world in terms of foreign policy, Simon Tisdall writing in The Guardian describes his policy of vacuous sound bites, staged publicity images, the diplomacy of a man totally ignorant of human relationships beyond the golf course and of any strategy of action to achieve goals other than grabbing the world by the crotch and hanging on while gobbling and ululating meaningless bestial sounds as if negotiating for slops in a hog trough.
Trump has discovered it’s not as easy to rape nations as it is to corner little girls in the dressing room of a beauty pageant, or even an adult one at Bloomingdales.
Not if we unite together in Resistance.
America now has a common cause with many nations of the world in overcoming fascist tyranny and rescuing democracy and the rule of law, of defeating the imperial conquest and subjugation of the earth by Trump and other figureheads of the Fourth Reich, and in the liberation of humankind and the restoration of the sovereignty of citizens.”
And finally, herein is the text of my post in celebration of the start of the Impeachment process on September 24 2019, America rediscovers its values: the impeachment of Pennywise; ”Jubilation in the streets as America rediscovers its values and begins the impeachment of Pennywise, demonic clown and cannibalistic monster who dwells beneath the human face of Trump, a mask of flesh stolen from the abducted and enslaved women in the brothels his grandfather built the Trump family fortune on during the Alaska Gold Rush, and who today carries forward the legacy of terror and misogyny he was raised with, whose election should be de-certified as the coup of a foreign power and whose Presidency has no legitimacy.
History will remember Trump as the standard bearer of the global Fourth Reich and its assault on democracy, stealer of children for his vile and twisted purposes, author of genocidal ethnic cleansing and builder of concentration camps, pathological liar and ignorant fool, whose alliance of xenophobic racists and white supremacists, Christian Identity fanatics and other Gideonite fundamentalists who dream of the restoration of the Patriarchy under medieval Biblical law as a tyranny of the Elect, and amoral Plutocrats out to loot America for all the wealth they can send offshore while sabotaging our economy and driving our nation into collapse, thereby removing the major guarantor of freedom and human rights in the world and opening everything to exploitation.
A full accounting of the treasons and crimes of Trump and his Republican conspirators would fill a thousand pages and more, would roll on like the endless night litany of the death of God during an Orthodox Easter service; but this is the moment of its end, wherein the chanting turns to rapture and joy at the break of dawn, for Nancy Pelosi and the power brokers of the Democratic Party have rummaged around in Pandora’s Box and found at last our hope, calling for impeachment and the restoration of the rule of law just at the point of no return, before the legitimacy of our government and the values on which it is built, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, are forever lost and America falls to fascism and tyranny, and with it the world descends into a second Dark Age.
It took a millennia to emerge from the last one; civilization may not be recoverable again, should it fall under conditions of fascism and totalitarian regimes of absolute state power and surveillance, war, ethnostates and genocides, and unbridled extractive plunder of the earth. And this we must resist.
Therefore celebrate with me the call for impeachment, and prepare ourselves for the great struggle ahead to make it real, to reawaken America’s values and to save democracy and universal human rights throughout the world.
So for our problematization of the three primary layers of Trump’s madness as it manifests in sexual terror and predation; how are the personal flaws of one man shaping America and the future of humankind?
As I wrote in my post of January 11 2021, Allegories and Symbols of the Fall of America: the January 6 Insurrection as Theatre of Cruelty; Here is an expanded version of my post of January 6 on the Surrealist film Gummo as a satire of the Deplorables who committed treason and armed insurrection against our nation at the command of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump; on Insurrection Day, I offer for your consideration the film Gummo, a sensitive and elegant documentary of the Deplorables from whom the Fourth Reich cadre who staged the assault on Congress were recruited, and an allegory of America.
Bacon? Stapled to the wall, a strip of bacon captures ones attention as a symbol of degeneration and barbarian atavisms of instinct. Werner Herzog signposted it for our attention, and it persists as a symbol of degeneration to an animal state, like a trophy of wealth which is also offal above a bathtub filled with filth as our young protagonist eats spaghetti, his mouth smeared with red like the cannibals adrift on Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa so brilliantly described in Julian Barnes’ History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters; an unforgettable image of the fallen American Dream. A reproduction of the painting in miniature hangs by my writing desk, to remind me of the stakes as our civilization collapses from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions.
It is the little things which disturb, provoke, and incite us to challenge normality, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, the authorized identities of hegemonic elites and divisions of otherness, and to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden with glorious sins of beatification.
Here as always, all true art defiles and exalts.
We dine in filth on the carrion of others lives and by their labor. This is a Surrealist film intended as an allegory of America and a thematic interrogation of our flaws and dark legacies of injustice, and in large part restates Nietzsche’s critique of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and the idea of the innate depravity of man, an extension of the doctrine of original sin, on which all our law is based, as Nikos Kazantzakis argues in his thesis Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.
So also does the film restate William S. Burroughs’ analysis of capitalism and imperialism as the Algebra of Need, in which drug addiction becomes a metaphor of our addiction to wealth, power, and privilege, an engine of self-destruction, commodification, and dehumanization which feeds on and worsens our most atavistic instincts. Here the flaws of our humanity, fear and rage, vanity and jealousy, the need to dominate and control, become the instruments of our subjugation to hegemonic elites through divisions of exclusionary otherness and to tyrants of force and control and the imperial and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
The film itself is brutally shocking, grotesque, and borders on the obscene; which is why I adore it so. I must warn you that while I like it as an allegory of America’s flaws, and to poke fun at Trump’ s followers, this is brutal and depressing; anyone with suicidal ideation should avoid it. This debut of a heralded wonder of the new age as director was not understood as a critique of state power as a force of dehumanization and regression to an animal state, like that of the Deplorables, and unjustly derailed a promising career; a historical injustice I would like to redeem, because Gummo is a film we need now.
We must see the enemies of Liberty as they truly are, if we are to heal our nation from the primary trauma of fracture they enacted in the January 6 Insurrection.
Both the Insurrection and the film Gummo, like the Trump presidency as a whole, must be interpreted as performances of the Theatre of Cruelty as articulated by Antonin Artaud in his manifesto The Theatre And Its Double. Trump is a figure of the mad emperor from his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist; his performances as a clown of terror, disruption, and sadism were also brilliantly prophesized by Robert Coover in The Public Burning, A Political Fable, written as a satire of Nixon.
Let us see beyond the lies and illusions with which Trump and his Deplorables conceal their subversions of democracy, sabotage of our institutions, and violations of our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s never anything but “just an old humbug.”
Gummo film trailer
All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator,
Barry Levine, Monique El-Faizy
A List of the Crimes of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-complete-listing-atrocities-1-1-056
E Jean Carroll on the Hideous Trump
https://www.thecut.com/2019/06/donald-trump-assault-e-jean-carroll-other-hideous-men.html
What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal, by E. Jean Carroll
News on the Epstein Files
‘The ghost of Epstein is haunting Trump’s presidency’: inside the ‘Maga’ revolt
David Smith
Trump cannot dispel the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein, Sidney Blumenthal
Trump’s endless toying with conspiracy theories has finally come back to bite him, Moira Donegan
‘He’s a lot of fun to be with’: Trump and Epstein were close friends for 15 years
References
The Public Burning, by Robert Coover, William H. Gass (Introduction)
Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, by Antonin Artaud
The Theatre and Its Double, Antonin Artaud
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/325546.The_Theatre_and_Its_Double?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_26
Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right And the State, Nikos Kazantzakis
The Algebra of Need, William S. Burroughs, Eric Mottram (Editor)
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
My Writing on the Monstrosity of Trump
March 5 2025 Trump Is An Illusion Made Of Lies, But How Is He Constructed and How Can He Be Unmade? Case of Trump’s Address to Congress
October 22 2024 Crimes of Traitor Trump: A Retrospective
August 27 2023 Behold the Monster: Trump Surrenders to Justice
Werner Herzog, a reading list
Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir, Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo,
Werner Herzog
Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of Heart of Glass, Alan Greenberg, Werner Herzog (Foreword)
Werner Herzog: Ecstatic Truth and Other Useless Conquests, Kristoffer Hegnsvad
The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth, Brad Prager
Torch of Liberty 