In an ‘angry’ phone call to The New York Times, Trump is said to have lashed the paper for claims he’d lied about a near-miss during a helicopter ride with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

NYT journalist Maggie Haberman – the paper’s star political reporter, who is said to have Trump’s ear –  said Trump angrily insisted he could provide proof of the near-death experience.

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The only NDE Trump can honestly point to is his current presidential campaign.

Mr. Miller stopped paying some of the family’s bills, including, according to a lawsuit, the maintenance and docking fees for their Van Dutch speedboat — a frequent backdrop for late-night parties shared on Instagram. Such models generally sell for more than $1 million…

… Emergency medical workers found Mr. Miller unconscious in a white Porsche Carrera that he had rigged to poison himself …

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UD never knows quite what to do with the NYT’s luridly fascinating chronicles of the downfall of high-flying, risk-taking idjits. She enjoys the F. Scott Fitzgerald fizz of these accounts, the lascivious tell of the departed’s lethally high-end products and adventures, his sudden weeping in corporate meeting rooms as the walls close in …

Since the fool in this case saw fit to borrow tens of millions of dollars he couldn’t pay back, and then to saddle his wife and small children with his debt (he left a big life insurance policy, but will it pay out?), one feels okay not feeling much. I mean, pity. I guess. But since the facts of the case are so stereotypically cautionary, so much the oldest allegory in the world, the specific person to whom it happened gets lost, and one not too guiltily feels comfortable reading the account the way most people are reading it – as a final twisted chapter of clueless conspicuous consumption, the short sad bio of an Instagram braggart who meets his apotheosis in a cloud of high-performance, super-exclusive, carbon monoxide.

… “quickly falls apart,” leaving the Trump campaign in …

… toxic shock.

… she looks great in jeans.

Owen Ziliak/The Republic

Interesting contrast.

Pete Buttigieg.

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“24 yrs of service is nothing to sneeze at, and Vance is running alongside a known draft dodger who has repeatedly disparaged veterans and Gold Star families. If Vance wants to critique a man’s honor, he should start with his running mate.”

Tampon Tim!

Toadstool-Dick Don!

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JD Vance has issued an official comment: “Tampon Tim made it easier for teenagers to staunch the very blood they should be glorying in, the blood that marks their initiation into reproductive culture. Let them bleed all over the school cafeteria! Let their precious blood flow unstaunched by soulless penetrative technology. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN”

… makes clear that generous government programs will never solve low birth rate.

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But the author doesn’t consider the Vance/Vermeule solution: Criminalize divorce, contraception, abortion, and pornography. Ban children’s books that acknowledge a world of non-straight, non-married, non-reproductive people. Ultimately, perhaps, impose a Catholic government that reserves the right to burn reproductive heretics at the stake.

It’s all a bit dark, to be sure. But unlike the wide range of incentives countries have so far tried, it’s highly likely to work.

It was only a matter of time before Harvard Law’s double hater (liberalism and democracy) emerged from the scholarly shadows to join his soulmate JV “Junior Varsity” Vance in the Trumpian spotlight. Damon Linker puts Adrian Vermeule at the heart of an emergent “politics of reactionary negation,” in which not even the fanatic Catholicism people like AV sashay around with has any real meaning to them. Rather, disgust at modernity altogether – a disgust as deep as the Mariana Trench – seems to propel world-loathers into Trumpworld.

Specifically, the double haters hate the “personal existential emptiness … the meaninglessness and inertia” with which contemporary secular American life oppresses us all. Only a Catholic theocracy (UD calls it a Cathophate) will smash a country where “liberalism is the great enemy that must be fought and defeated so that something more wholesome and spiritually invigorating can take its place.” The American government will be run by priests and their acolytes, and will graciously rid us of our personal existential emptiness.

There is no neutral ground on fundamental questions of God, good and evil, and the purpose of human life. Political conflict entails conflict about these ultimate things… Accordingly, [radical rightwing Catholics] view public institutions, social structures and religion as an integral whole. Nothing is truly private. Everything affects the common good; there is no private life or private conscience. The resulting vision is of a hierarchical society with concentrated power, close coordination between church and state, and public regulation of religious orthodoxy… [In short,] the Catholic Church should strategically co-opt the American state. The result would be a return of state-sanctioned religion and a politics that is at once socially conservative, statist and economically populist… [The ultimate goal of all human life] is heaven, and the integralist means of getting us to that destination is to subordinate politics to the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church.

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So here’s a modest policy suggestion from UD: Before fully committing themselves to the overthrow of American democracy, Vance and his army of reactionary negationists should ask themselves whether their sensation of personal emptiness and inertia has more to do with excess ejaculation than modernity.

It’s quite possible, in other words, that they are mainly reacting to the post orgasmic, post coital tristesse that tells you you’ve gone and emptied yourself of sperm yet again.

These men after all are America’s most prominent pronatalists, led ultimately by the hyper-childed, always depleted-looking, Elon Musk. Wouldn’t they all feel silly if the miserable hollowed out feeling they ascribe to the rest of us is an epiphenomenon of their excruciating coital self-coercion?

It’s important to remind ourselves that semen retention has a distinguished spiritual history:

• karezza (Italian)
• maithuna (Hindu Tantra)
• sahaja (Hindu Yoga)
• tantra (Hinduism and Buddhism)
• cai Yin pu Yang and cai Yang pu Yin (Taoist)

Every one of these traditions recognizes coitus reservatus as providing benefits in terms of focus, a greater sense of purpose, and overall harmony. I would urge Vance and his followers to give this a try before extending their own sense of emptiness to everyone else.

Remember: Our side is known as The Happy Warriors.

Trump’s news conference today will no doubt address this; but his main job now will be reassuring the nation that he is not insane and demented.

The only way to do that is to stop talking about the past (Kemp, Raffensperger, Jan. 6, etc.) and about sharks and Hannibal Lecter, and talk rationally and on point about the present.

Let’s see.

‘People say I’m weird because I buried my first wife on my golf course … [angrily] I meant no disrespect! I loved her! … Marla… [pondering] now Marla was just… younger … fresher…. I’m not saying it was her fault, but she used all her attractions to seduce me away from my wife and I regretted it IMMEDIATELY we divorced ALMOST IMMEDIATELY and I want my Christian supporters OOOH I love my Christians I’m a Christian I LOVE LOVE LOVE YOU MY CHRISTIANS I want you to know that I still felt married to Ivana in the eyes of God and then I only married Melania because she’s so pretty. [Campaign manager appears, whispers in Trump’s ear.] Oh ok. This guy… my campaign manager…. he’d be a nobody without me I made him I made his career and I can unmake it … This guy wants me to stick to the issues so ok three wives five children ya gotta say I got it done birthrate wise! Every one of these women dropped one or more kid and look at Kamabla NO KIDS no commitment to the future of this country and I mean look at me I’m in rut all the time so I had to get it on with Stormy Daniels when my wife was uh … postpartum indisposed… I’m still like … RAGING BULL like I’m 78 and rut-wise I mean don’t worry about it…’

In case you’re hankering for an update on higher ed in Iran.

“Biden is aging. Trump is dementing… He can’t get through a whole rally without revealing himself. And, because this is a progressive illness, he will continue to get worse. And if he is like most patients like this, at some point, he is literally going to fall off the cognitive cliff and he will be completely incapacitated... I am certain that if he is reelected, he will become cognitively incapacitated. There’s no way at the rate of deterioration that he’s showing that he can make it through four more years without falling off the cliff.”

“Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine,” [JD Vance said] three weeks after House Republicans blocked additional aid to help Kyiv repel the Russian invasion. “Two very senior guys reached out to me. The head of their intel. The head of the Air Force. Bitching about F16s.”

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On Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson:

“Never met him. He’s dead. Don’t care.”

She could have applied for Bangladeshi citizenship until she was 21, but did not, and the South Asian country has said there is “no question” of her obtaining citizenship now.

The UK Home Office stripped her of citizenship when she was 19 years old, meaning she still had time to file for Bangladeshi citizenship…

Plus Shamima Begum was married to a Dutch guy, so she might see whether that country would take her. Plus if it’s true she’s harmless now, let’s have her apply for a golden passport. She can set up a Go Fund Me page. She needs to raise about $20,000.

I don’t want to sound indifferent to the fate of this former terrorist who has possibly made an authentic and complete turnaround. I’m fully aware she languishes in a Beckettian hellscape where insane burqabis attempt every day to kill non-burqabis. (Begum no longer wears a burqa.) But she had options, which she rejected. She still has a few, but seems to be doing nothing about them.