MAGA – Blood and Porridge

September 30, 2025

A month of ironies

© Maverick / Warner Bros.

September 2025 reminds me of the song Ironic by Alanis Morissette. The song’s lyrics contain many examples of things that are ironic, for example, “An old man turned ninety-eight / He won the lottery and died the next day,” or “a free ride when you’ve already paid”, or “ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.” Although, as the comedian Ed Byrne has pointed out, some of the situations mentioned in the song aren’t actually ironic. “A traffic jam when you’re already late,” for example. As Byrne observed, that’s really only ironic if you’re a city planner.

Anyway, should Alanis Morissette ever write a sequel to Ironic, the month that has just passed should provide her with more than enough material. To me, it’s the most ironic month I’ve ever experienced. Here are a few reasons why I think so.

[Incidentally, this blog-entry contains references to American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Please note that it’s possible to hold two opinions about Kirk at the same time, though many people out there are unable – or unwilling – to accept this.

Firstly, you can be horrified by Kirk’s murder, excoriate the fact that it happened while he was on a university campus exercising his right to free speech, and feel sorry for his young family. Secondly and simultaneously, you can detest many of the things that came out of his mouth. Things about black people. (“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling blacks go around for fun to… target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.”) About women. (“Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge… And most importantly, I can’t wait to go to a Taylor Kelce concert… You’ve got to change your name. If not, you don’t really mean it.”) About Islam. (“Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”) About trans-people. (“We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.”). And so on. Also, you can be dismayed by the fact he made himself very wealthy by saying such things.]

September 10^th

Charlie Kirk once said this of American gun ownership and the attendant, heavy toll of American gun-related deaths (16,576 in 2124, excluding suicides). “You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel… I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Today, while speaking at Utah Valley University, Kirk was shot dead by an American citizen, using a gun, which it was his God-given right to own under the Second Amendment. How tragically ironic and tragically American.

September 11^th

UK prime minister Keir Starmer sacked Peter Mandelson from his job as British ambassador to the USA. This was on account of Mandelson being an old friend of the late millionaire paedophile and human-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson had even waxed lyrically about Epstein in writing: “Once upon a time, an intelligent, sharp-witted man they call ‘mysterious’ parachuted into my life… wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!”

Five days later, another old friend of Jeffrey Epstein, who’d also, allegedly, waxed lyrically about him in writing (“We have certain things in common, Jeffrey. Yes, we do, come to think of it. Enigmas never age, have you noticed that…?”), arrived in Britain. This was Donald Trump. Starmer rolled out the red carpet and treated him to a state visit.

© Private Eye

September 13^th

Led by double-barrelled far-right rabble-rouser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, failed thespian nepo-baby Laurence Fox and others, and addressed on a big screen by Sieg Heil-ing billionaire Elon Musk, a crowd of more than 100,000 people marched through London to protest against immigrants. They were particularly against foreigners who were criminals and a danger to women being allowed into Britain. According to reports, some protestors wore MAGA – Make America Great Again – hats in honour of Donald Trump: a foreigner who’s a convicted criminal, and a proven danger to women, who was being allowed into Britain for a state visit the following week.

September 16^th

Donald Trump landed in Britain and his hosts immediately went into full pomp-and-ceremony grovelling mode. The orange American president got a royal salute, a lunch with the Royal Family, a tour of the Royal Collection, a ‘beating retreat’ military ceremony, a ride in a gilded coach, a state banquet at Windsor Castle, and a visit to Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, for a look at the Winston Churchill archives and a press conference.

Speaking at the state banquet, Trump declared, “…this is truly one of the highest honours of my life. Such respect for you and such respect for your country… The lionhearted people of this kingdom defeated Napoleon, unleashed the Industrial Revolution, destroyed slavery and defended civilization in the darkest days of fascism and communism. The British gave the world the Magna Carta, the modern parliament and Francis Bacon’s scientific method. They gave us the works of Locke, Hobbes, Smith and Burke, Newton and Blackstone. The legal, intellectual, cultural and political traditions of this kingdom have been among the highest achievements of mankind.”

A week later, Trump gave a speech to the United Nations and had this to say about London, capital of Britain, and Western Europe, of which Britain is a part: “And I have to say, I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to Sharia law, but you’re in a different country, you can’t do that. Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe if something is not done immediately… I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”

Maybe the grovelling hadn’t worked.

From wikipedia.org / © Executive Office of the President of the US

September 17^th

American late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended indefinitely by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), following comments he made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. These drew the ire of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC’s chair is Brendan Carr, a staunch Trump loyalist. Trump applauded Carr as ‘a great American patriot’ for his actions.

Funnily enough, in 2022, Carr had declared: “Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humour to draw more into the discussion. That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.” And Kirk himself once said of freedom of speech: “You should be allowed to say outrageous things.” But perhaps what they meant was political satire and outrageous things should only be expressed by people they agreed with.

September 22^nd

After an uproar from practically everybody, and their granny, and their dog, the forces that’d removed Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves backtracked. It was announced that he was being reinstated on ABC. A new episode of his show was broadcast the following evening. It achieved his highest ever ratings – 6.26 million viewers – and was viewed 26 million times on YouTube. Kimmel quipped about Trump’s likely reaction: “He might have to release the Epstein files to distract us from this now.”

In other words… The American right, which earlier in the month had worked so hard to make a martyr out of Charlie Kirk, blaming his death on the ‘radical left’ and threatening retribution against anyone who suggested he might be anything less than a saint, had inadvertently made a martyr out of Jimmy Kimmel instead.

September 23^rd

Trump delivered an hour-long speech to the United Nations. Besides condemning the institution for a malfunctioning teleprompter and an escalator that stopped working – him and his missus Melania had to climb the stationary escalator, which for someone of his considerable acreage must have been hard work – and besides ranting about ‘radicalised environmentalists’ (“No more cows. We don’t want cows anymore. I guess they want to kill all the cows.”), he boasted that he’d ended seven wars: “…Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda… Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.”

In fact, two of these wars didn’t exist, two have continued in terms of ceasefire violations and ongoing bloodshed, one was a war Trump helped to start and then participated in, one was a war where one of the countries denies that Trump had anything to do with settling it, and one ended with a peace-deal that hasn’t yet been ratified.

That last war, the one Trump actually came closest to ending, was the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. Previously, at the September 18^th press conference with Keir Starmer, Trump claimed to have stopped a war between Albania and Azerbaijan. And at a dinner in Vermont on September 20^th, Trump announced that he’d ended a war between Armenia and Cambodia. So maybe that’s why Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed on a peace-deal. One was so busy fighting Albania, and the other so busy fighting Cambodia, that they no longer had time to fight each other.

Come to think of it, none of this was ironic. It was just moronic.

September 26^th

The Ryder Cup, golf’s biennial contest between Europe and the USA, teed off at Bethpage State Park in New York State. Trump attended its opening day, making him the first sitting American president to do so. It’s fair to say that his attitude towards golf – win at all costs, even if it means getting caddies to plant new balls for you when the old ones land in inconvenient places – and his attitude towards competition generally – win at all costs, no matter what a bullying, graceless, ignorant chump it makes you look – infected the crowd. Taking their cue from their Dear Leader, they behaved like bullying, graceless, ignorant chumps for the next couple of days. They chanted “F*ck you Rory!” at Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy. They threw beer at McIlroy’s wife. They hurled insults at McIlroy’s fellow Irish golfer Shane Lowry about his weight. No wonder at one point McIlroy told them all to “Shut the f*ck up.”

Anyhow, Europe won the Ryder Cup by 15 to 13. That wasn’t ironic either. That was karma.

From wikipedia.org / © The White House

February 4, 2025

You won’t ever be happy

From pixabay.com / © clecaux

It’s been two weeks since Donald Trump’s inauguration as 47^th president of the United States. For the 49.8 percent of Americans who voted in November 2024’s presidential election and voted for him, his previous four-year stint as 45^th president obviously wasn’t enough.

Already those two weeks feel like two decades. I live in Singapore, a long way away from Trump’s USA, and yet his orange visage assails me non-stop, smirking and scowling out of photos in the news websites and social media accounts I peruse. I feel sorry for the poor folk who can’t stand the sight of him but have to live within the same country-borders as him.

It’s been relentless. One moment he’s pardoning the 1600-odd dingbats who attacked the US Capitol on January 6^th, 2021, including 600 who were charged with attacking or impeding law-enforcement officers, and including the lunatic shaman-guy in the buffalo horns who reacted to his pardon by posting on Twitter, “Now I am gonna by some motha f**kin guns!” The next moment he’s pulling the USA out of the Paris climate agreement (again) and halting Joe Biden’s Green New Deal – much to the delight, I’m sure, of the Chinese government, whom he blames for pushing the ‘hoax’ of man-made climate change. They’ll now seize the opportunity to establish their country as the world’s renewable-energy superpower.

And the next moment again he’s halting all American foreign aid, giving Elon Musk’s ‘Department of Governmental Efficiency’ (DOGE) free rein to destroy the US Agency for International Development (USAID), or as Musk calls it, ‘a viper’s nest of radical left-Marxists who hate America’. Again, I’m sure the Chinese government is cheering. As the US’s disease-prevention, food security, water security, education, etc., programmes in the Global South and elsewhere grind to a halt, they’ll swoop in and replace them, thus greatly extending China’s global soft power and influence.

What else? Trump’s pulled the US out of the World Health Organisation (WHO) – obviously, when there’s a deadly global pandemic, he doesn’t want medical experts interfering in how he runs his country and warning him that his proposed ‘inject yourself with bleach’ cure isn’t a good idea. He’s banned all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes in the belief that important jobs must be left to straight, fully-abled white men, who are inherently smarter than everyone else. Why, even before the bodies of those killed in January 29^th’s mid-air collision at Washington DC were cold, Trump raged that DEI policies were responsible for the tragedy.

He’s renamed the Gulf of Mexico ‘the Gulf of America’. (What next? One wag speculated on social media that he might rename the Oxford comma ‘the Comma of America’.) He’s tried to bully Denmark into handing over Greenland to him, as part of his expand-the-American-Empire project (no doubt inspired by his buddy Putin’s expand-the-Russian-Empire project). And he’s also tried to bully Mexico and Canada, by threatening to slap tariffs on their goods. I’m not a big fan of Pierre Trudeau, but his riposte to Trump’s blustering bollocks showed he has more class and statesmanship in the tip of his little finger than Trump has in his whole, gross body.

However, I’m sure that for tens of millions of Trump’s supporters, this is music to their ears. They must feel like they’re in heaven. Thanks to the antics of their orange hero, they’re now owning the libtards. They’re bathing in libtard tears. They’re loving the smell of napalmed libtards in the morning. They’re achieving their number-one objective, which is to cause maximum distress to those libtard snowflakes who want to deny them their constitutional right to stockpile huge quantities of military assault rifles, and their right to go ‘rolling coal’ in their modified diesel-engine trucks, and their right to grab women by the pussy without suffering consequences, and their right to live in neighbourhoods with zero numbers of people of colour, and so on. They’re all on Twitter, or ‘X’ as Musk insists on calling it, yeehawing their joy in their echo-chambers of MAGA-ites, incels, neo-Nazis and Russian bots at how President Trump is blasting those libtard wusses with both barrels.

Well, to the vast majority of Trump’s supporters – i.e., those not rich enough to qualify as being in the top 10 percent who own half the nation’s wealth – I have some bad news. You won’t ever be happy.

Firstly, your lives aren’t going to improve materially. The involvement in Trump’s project of Elon Musk, who’s the world’s richest human being and whose right arm had a Dr Strangelove-style tendency to slip into troubling, sloping salutes at the inauguration, should be a warning of that. So too should the prominent places given at that inauguration to Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Big tax-cuts are coming for Trump’s wealthy and super-wealthy friends. A large part of the bill for those will be shifted onto the working and middle-classes, for example, through the extra they’ll have to pay for goods when Trump starts imposing his beloved tariffs.

Some of these tax-cuts will also be financed through the axing of government services, which Musk is doing in his new, DOGE-eat-dog world right now. There’s always much whinging about how much is removed from your pay-packet and sent off to fund distant government departments. But when departments overseeing such things as social security, medical care, education, tax refunds, disease control, environmental protection, disaster relief and so on receive the chop, and the effects of their loss are felt, I suspect people’s tunes will change.

Incidentally, it’s ironic that far-right-wing commentators, influencers and social-media grifters have for years belched out claims that the world’s governments are secretly controlled by liberal-minded billionaires like Bill Gates or George Soros. They’ve also indulged in antisemitic dog-whistling by suggesting that billionaire banking family the Rothschilds are pulling the levers. (See, for instance, a 2023 complaint by the Board of Deputies of British Jews to GB News about their presenter and conspiracy fantasist Neil Oliver referencing the antisemitic, Rothschild-accusing document Silent Weapons for Silent Wars during one of his diatribes about impending ‘one-world government’.) Yet here we have a billionaire who, unelected and in plain sight, is heavily financing, influencing and manipulating an elected government for his own benefit. And there’s not a peep out of them.

Musk has even got access to classified US treasury files, which are full of confidential data about citizens’ social security and Medicare payment systems. You’d think this violation of people’s private information would give right-wing conspiracy nuts the heebie-geebies. But no, they’ve been strangely quiet. Maybe Musk’s salute at the inauguration did it. He showed these guys that they didn’t have to worry – he’s the type of billionaire they’d want to have controlling their government.

But returning to Trump, I don’t see how his antics are going to improve life for the average citizen who voted for him. If he carries out his witless threats to impose tariffs, he’ll drive up prices. Meanwhile, his belief that, conveniently, climate change is just a sham will no doubt see the American economy take a severe battering in the years ahead as the country itself takes a battering from increasingly inclement weather. Imagine what home-insurance bills will be like after a good chunk of Florida tips into the Atlantic Ocean.

Not that I think his supporters will be loudly belly-aching about their lives continuing to be shit, or being even shitter than they were previously. A lot of them will be conditioned by sunk-cost fallacy and keep quiet – having invested so much time and energy in backing Trump and his MAGA movement, they’ll be reluctant to admit they were wrong. Also, Trump now has X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and, most recently, Tik Tok singing his praises. He also has newspapers like Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times kowtowing and kissing his ring. The bulk of the American media will spend the next four years assuring the public they’ve never had it so good, when in all probability they’ve never had it so bad.

And that’s not all, Trump supporters. Even in the unlikely case of your circumstances getting better, you still won’t ever be happy. Trump and his lackeys won’t allow you to be happy. To illustrate what I mean, you only have to look at Britain and the nearest institution Britain has to Trumpism – that toxic far-right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail. Paul Dacre, its former editor and now the editor-in-chief of its publisher DMG Media, once remarked that the perfect Daily Mail story was one that (1) confirmed its readers’ worst fears and (2) gave them someone to blame for it. You can expect something similar in the US over the next few years. (Maybe forever, if Trump can change the constitution so that it resembles that of Putin’s Russia, and politicians who might oppose him in future elections start falling to their deaths out of windows.)

Everything that goes wrong will be the fault of immigrants eating people’s pets, or environmentalists not pumping enough water to put out wildfires, or Democrats controlling the weather, or Jewish space-lasers, or deadly aircraft-destroying DEI programmes. Even when things aren’t going wrong, Trump will still dial up the panic, make it look like crises are happening, and blame immigrants, liberals, working mothers, people of colour, etc. That’s because he can’t afford to let his base relax and simply get on with their lives. To ensure their ongoing support, he has to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and in constant readiness to lash out about it. They’re to be riled up, permanently.

So, Trump people, I’m sorry, but you won’t ever be happy. As someone once put it: “Hell is getting what you think it is you want.”