Donald Trump Jr. and His Dad’s Band of Surrogates Don’t Care … – Esquire

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MILWAUKEE Much was made prior to Wednesday's debate of the fact that its organizers had banned various of the former president*'s surrogates from the post-debate spin room. Of course, this made all the sense in the world since El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago had declined to participate, opting instead for a touching bout of virtual make-up sex with Tucker Carlson. Because this move by the debate made such perfect sense, it naturally got all up the nose of people like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who whined so loudly that NORAD probably issued an alert. From Newsweek:

Not to worry, Marge. We were blessed by a visit from Donald Trump, Jr. and his inamorata, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who carried the former president's water, and bullshit, by the bucketful.

Sluggo scoffed at the very idea that his father, now d/b/a Inmate no. P01135809 in Fulton County, Georgia, even needed to hobnob with this pack of Lilliputian losers.

If you're wondering how this blithe dismissal of the competition, and of the debate itself, squares with the raging tantrums the Trump surrogates threw about being denied access to the spin room, you clearly have been in the northernmost regions of Finland, communing with reindeer, for the past seven years. Don't try to catch up all at once.

The Spokesman-Review in Spokane has found a woman who likely would disagree with Vivek Ramaswamy's contention that the climate crisis is a hoax.

You can see it coming, right?

There was an old episode of The Twilight Zone in which a survivor of the Titanic is picked up by the Lusitania and then picked up by another doomed ocean liner the Andrea Doria, I think and it's all a riff based on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Mary Kaneko is living that nightmare, and anyone who denies the crisis for which she has become a tragic focal point belongs in a zoo.

Remember when Inmate No. P01135809 came to Wisconsin with his golden shovel and turned the first earth on what he said was going to be the eighth wonder of the world -- a huge facility run by Taiwanese giant Foxconn that was going to employ 3000 people. Yeah, not so much. From the Washington Post:

This, of course, is a big part of the legacy of former governor Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. Foxconn played Walker and, later, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago for the suckers they plainly were. They rolled Walker for some $3 billion in tax credits, and it stuck the state and local governments for another $500 million in site improvements. And this was all without any real promises that the project would ever happen.

All hail the art of the deal.

You want something that could really scramble the 2024 elections? How about a massive strike in the automotive industries? From CNN:

Shawn Fain, the new UAW president, has been unsparing in his critique of how, by his lights, management has gotten off easy in negotiations over the past several years. He wants pay raises and he wants benefits returned to 2009 levels. Fain's mandate derives from a series of scandals at the top of the UAW that sent two previous presidents to jail. He also has been quite vocal on the subject of how the president must put up or shut up about his devotion to organized labor. My guess is they'll reach some sort of settlement. Whether or not the rank and file will approve it, however, is genuinely up for grabs. And that's going to be quite inflammatory on the campaign.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Down On The Levee Blues" (Sidney Bechet): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1963, we see London cracking down on the diesel lorries that are, as the narrator says, "belching smoke and smell." I do like the hilarious detail that "some tobacco manufacturers believe" that diesel smoke causes lung cancer. Informed sources say! Anyway, hard luck for the guy driving that "proper stinker." History is so cool.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Smithsonian:

Lakefront property always has been expensive.

Bruce Springsteen dropped Born To Run on this day in 1975. (It's also the anniversary of Keith Moon's driving a Lincoln Continental into a Holiday Inn swimming pool, which has something to do with BTR, but I can't quite put my finger on it.) Is it strange that, after all these years, and given the other tracks on the album, my favorite Springsteen track is still "Meeting Across The River"? It's stripped of all the grease-stained mythology that's drives all the other cuts on the record. Eddie and his partner are small-time semi-hoods who have to scramble even to get a ride into the city for a meeting with a guy that you just know isn't going to go well. They even have to fake being strapped. It reminds me of Vincent Patrick's great The Pope of Greenwich Village or, closer to home, George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle. And Randy Brecker's glorious trumpet accents lodge the story squarely in the traditions of the great films noir. The stuff that dreams are made of.

Hey, New York Times, is it a good day for dinosaur news? Its always a good day for dinosaur news!

Congratulations to India for joining the Brotherhood of Diplodocoid Nations. We'll be in touch about the dues. After all, even your dinos lived then to make us happy now.

I'll be back on Monday to see what other nuggets Vivek Ramaswamy has mined from the depths of American history. ("Do we really know that Custer was killed by indigenous soldiers? How do we know it wasn't Vikings?") Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline. Wear the damn mask. Take the damn shots, especially the damn boosters, especially the newest boosters. And spare a moment for the people of Ukraine, and of the earthquake zone in Turkey and Iraq, and in the flood zones of Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and Vermont. and in the fire zones in Canada, Hawaii, Washington state, Louisiana, and the Canary Islands, and for our fellow citzens of the LGBTQ+ communities, who deserve so much better than they're getting from their country.

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.

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Donald Trump Jr. and His Dad's Band of Surrogates Don't Care ... - Esquire