Prompt words for The Sunday Whirl are: spiral craft signal draft shallow rule dense send shell sham slapping laugh
“Life” for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 719, Aug 17, 2025
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Tag Archives: Political commentary
Nate White on Donald Trump
Someone asked “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?”
Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England, wrote this magnificent response: Taken from his X post at https://x.com/Ipitythepoorfo1/status/1317856496647049217
“A few things spring to mind.Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.
For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.
So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.
I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.
But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.
And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.
Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.
Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.
And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.
Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.
He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.
He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.
That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.
There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
* Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
* You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.
After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.
God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.
He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.
In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:
‘My God… what… have… I… created?
If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.”
With thanks to Rhonda Schrader, Ray DiFazio and Michael Lussier, who all republished this piece before it finally made its way to me.
Game of Cards, for dVerse Poets, Aug 12, 2025
Game of Cards
I would pay a pretty tuppence
to invest in his comeuppance.
His smug assurance, his galling preening.
He’s like a babe in need of weaning,
sucking at the teat of fame.
What other mortal needs his name
written on towers around the world?
He’s Ozymandias, stone lip curled
in cruel splendor, sure in his power
reasserted on every tower.
But remember, as he counts each coup,
how all the mighty have fallen, too.
False knights wear armor prone to tarnish.
His Midas touch will lose its varnish.
We’ll laud the day when he’ll be dumped—
That day when he’ll be over-trumped!
The dVerse prompt is Power.
“Coup d’état” For the Three Things Challenge 141, Aug 3, 2025
Coup d’état
Build up all your borders. Put truth behind a scrim.
Remove all your immigrants. Trim and trim and trim.
Box up all your freedoms and lock them safe away.
Amend the 10 Commandments to “Ye shall not be gay.”
Dumb down all our children to increase control
so you can assure that you’ll retain control.
Tear apart two hundred fifty years of “free”
to put into your control what once was liberty.
Subjugate your citizens and say it is God’s will.
Then provide the Kool-Aid to see if they will swill.
Prompt words for the Three Things Challenge are: BORDER, TRIM, BOX
New Political Era
Thanks, Forgottenman, for bringing this to my notice.
For The Sunday Whirl 711, June 22, 2025
Getty image War Games
Peaceful visions stream into space and speed along their way
as our president plays war games, deciding its the day
that he’ll become a soldier, bone spurs a lesser grief––
his soldiering tasks much easier as Commander in Chief
sitting in his desk chair, pushing buttons that
could bring about a world war (wearing his MAGA hat.)
These seeds of war he’s planted grow roots that quickly spread
around a breathing living world so easily turned dead.
Our freedom’s being stifled, the body of our nation
brought down by the curatailment of our health and education.
As this child plays his war games, are his minions listening
for the sounds of bombs in the sunlight swiftly glistening
speeding toward their targets in the good old U.S.A.
perhaps trained on the cities where your children play?
The Bible gives the message of an eye for an eye,
so as you hear the bombs they’ve returned swiftly going by,
will you finally admit that this man that you’ve elected
is one you might more wisely have summarily rejected?
For The Sunday Whirl Wordle #711 the prompt words are: sitting free space go roots body stream breathe listen seeds peace vision. (Getty image)
Don’t Miss This Possible Way Out of this Mess We Are In!!
Go here: https://okcforgottenman.wordpress.com/2025/06/16/ohh-thats-rich/ to hear some of the wisest words I’ve heard concerning how the Democratic party can best act to overcome Trump’s attempted coup. (My word, not his.):
“Rote Learning” For the Three Things Challenge
Rote Learning
As education
takes a vacation,
alas, we know
that even though
thoughts that astound
may well abound,
thinking aloud
is not allowed.
The three words for the Three Things Challenge are: ALLOWED
ALOUD ASTOUND
Trump administration considers slashing federal education money.
Not-so-common Sense, for Sunday Poser #236
Not-so-common Sense
The climate in the world today is generally tense.
So many of our leaders have lost their common sense––
basing their decisions just on thoughts of recompense.
For all of you who sit there, balanced on the fence
with regrets that your thinking formerly was dense,
please do better thinking as you vote forever hence
For Sunday Poser #236: Common Sense
Does the U.S. Need to Establish a Magna Carta????
From Heather Cox Richardson via Letters from an American
Today the story broke that a long-neglected document held by Harvard University Law School, believed to be a cheap copy of the Magna Carta, is in fact the real document. More than 700 years ago, the Magna Carta, or Great Charter, established the concept that kings must answer to the law. (If you wonder what relevance this has to the America of today, please be sure to read the last two paragraphs, printed in bold at the end of this post)
King John of England and a group of rebel barons agreed to the terms of the document on June 15, 1215, at Runnymede, a meadow a little less than an hour from London near the River Thames. After the king had raised taxes, barons rebelled, insisting that he was violating established custom. There were rumors of a plot to murder the king, and the barons armed themselves.
Those two armed camps met at Runnymede, where negotiators for the king and the barons hammered out a document with 63 clauses, mostly relating to feudal customs and the way the justice system would operate. But the document also began to articulate the principles central to modern democracies. The Magna Carta established the writ of habeas corpus—a prohibition on unlawful imprisonment—and the concept of the right to trial by jury.
Famously, it put into writing that: “No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.” It also provided that “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.”
The Magna Carta placed limits on the king’s ability to tax his subjects and established the law as an authority apart from the king. Anticipating the idea of checks and balances, it set up a council of barons to make sure the king obeyed the charter. If he did not, they could seize his lands and castles until he made amends.
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The original charter did not last. King John convinced the pope to declare the document illegal because it circumscribed the power of the monarch, and in reaction, barons fought for the rights outlined in the Magna Carta. After the death of King John in 1216, the Magna Carta was confirmed and reissued, becoming an accepted part of the understanding of British rights. In 1297, and then again in 1300, King Edward I reissued the Magna Carta and confirmed that it was part of England’s law. The copy in Harvard’s possession is from 1300. Harvard bought the document after World War II for $27.50, about $500 today. It is one of seven original copies of the 1300 Magna Carta, and in the United States of America in 2025, it is priceless. In the early 1600s, King James I and King Charles I both reasserted the power of the king. Jurist Sir Edward Coke used the Magna Carta to insist that longstanding English customs guaranteed liberties to British subjects and required the king to comply with the law. There were limits to a king’s power to tax his subjects and his power to punish them. This legal struggle was unfolding just as British subjects were colonizing the North American continent, and the charters of the new colonies echoed Coke’s arguments. The 1629 charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, for example, established that colonists and, crucially, the children they might have in the colony, “shall have and enjoy all liberties and Immunities of free and naturall Subiects.” As constitutional scholar Mary S. Bilder notes, lawyers and political figures put into the documents of the early British settlement of North America the belief that liberties were the birthright of English subjects. That belief informed colonists’ opposition to the 1765 Stamp Act, which imposed a new tax to which they had not given their consent and called for those who violated the law to be tried not by a jury of their peers but rather in admiralty courts. The Massachusetts Assembly declared the Stamp Act to be “against the Magna Carta and the natural rights of Englishmen, and therefore, according to Lord Coke, null and void.” British politician William Pitt told Parliament: “The Americans are the sons not the bastards of England.” In September 1774, as tensions between the king and the colonists intensified, the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and wrote a declaration of rights and grievances, claiming the liberties guaranteed by “the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts.” Showing the unity of the colonies, the Congress published an image of 12 arms holding a column crowned by a liberty cap and resting on the words “Magna Carta.” In 1776 the colonists threw off the monarchy to establish a government based on the idea that all people must answer to the law. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense: “in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” In 1776 the new states were writing their own constitutions that defended their liberties, including their protection from loss of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law. That concept went directly into the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known collectively as the Bill of Rights. The Fifth Amendment provided that no “person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment applied that principle to the states as well as the federal government, saying: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The Harvard document is not the only Magna Carta in the U.S. In 2007, philanthropist David Rubenstein bought a 1297 copy of the Magna Carta from former presidential candidate Ross Perot. It was the only copy in the U.S., and Perot had permitted the National Archives to display it. Rubenstein bought the document for $21.3 million, hoping to keep it in the U.S. “to ensure that Americans could continue to see it, and to thereby be continuously reminded of its importance to our country.” He promptly lent it to the National Archives for public display, “as modest repayment of my debt to this country for my good fortune in being an American.” And yet the fundamental principles on which the government of the United States is based are under attack. In an interview that aired on Sunday, May 4, President Donald J. Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker that he “didn’t know” if persons in the United States had a right to due process. When Welker reminded him that the right to due process is written into the Fifth Amendment, he said: “I don’t know. It seems—it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials.” Musician Bruce Springsteen has no doubts about those rights, embedded as they are in the country’s DNA. At a concert in Manchester, England, yesterday, he warned: “In America, the richest men… [are]… abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.” He criticized lawmakers who have “no…idea of what it means to be deeply American.” And yet, Springsteen told the crowd: “The America that I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and, regardless of its faults, is a great country with a great people, so we will survive this moment.” — Notes: https://apnews.com/article/harvard-magna-carta-rare-copy-97754aee08aaab65a36e49bedebd5992 https://www.parliament.uk/magnacarta/ https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-surrey-32828251 https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2010/winter/magna-carta.html https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mass03.asp Mary Sarah Bilder, Charter Constitutionalism: The Myth of Edward Coke and the Virginia Charter,” North Carolina Law Review 94 (June 2016): 1545–1592, at https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/magna-carta/legacy.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/magna_carta https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/politics/trump-meet-the-press-interview-due-process.html https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/magna-carta-muse-and-mentor/magna-carta-and-the-us-constitution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/world/europe/harvard-magna-carta-original.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2014/03/31/the-man-who-owns-a-magna-carta/ https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/15/entertainment/bruce-springsteen-trump-criticism-scli-intl
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lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 