* Trump deserves the ultimate Ignoble Prize. Well-earned.
* What would pacify Trump on Greenland? Would he compromise and settle for naming rights? Maybe it could use one.
* “The greatest doctors in the country looked at my brain and came up empty.”—Donald Trump. That’s actually the best way of putting it.
* “The imperial boomerang”: Applicable term for adventures abroad coming back to haunt the home front.
* $obering bottom line: According to a report by the General Accounting Office, the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol resulted in property damage totaling $2.7 billion. It still pales in comparison to the damage done to American democracy and global image.
* “Government cannot prevent some individuals from making errors of judgment. But government can prevent to a very great degree the fooling of sensible people through misstatements and through the withholding of information.” That was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. That was then.
“I don’t think (Trump) wakes up thinking of retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”—White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
* Prompted by criticism, Trump belatedly recognized MLK Day. He was at Mar-a-Lago on Monday and then went to Miami for the national football championship game that night. MLK? Miami Likes Kings? BTW, MLK Day has been a federal holiday since 1983 when the bill was signed by–President Ronald Reagan.
* “We will rue the day when we put so much power into one man’s hands.” That was Iowa Republican Sen. L.J. Dickinson after the Senate passed Roosevelt’s CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) bill in early 1932. How ironically prescient.
* It’s obvious that American Pope Leo is more like the Cold War Polish Pope John Paul II than more recent papal predecessors. Leo is a counterweight to Trump’s America First MAGA maneuvers, lamenting Venezuela attacks and a military buildup in the Caribbean to the less-than-humane treatment of immigrants. JP II pushed back against the totalitarian Soviets and the Warsaw Pact.
Ironically, Pope Leo’s eldest brother, Louis Prevost, isn’t on his brother’s side. He’s a Trump devotee, one who has actually been hosted by Trump in the Oval Office as well as at Mar-a-Lago. Hardly a shock that Trump’s political impact on American families also includes the Prevosts.