From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.advocacy

No way to hide the ugly truth of the Trump regime
Updated 53 mins ago
Dec. 18, 2025


By Rosie DiMannoStar Columnist
Why is that man yelling? Why is he talking faster
than an auctioneer? Why does he sound like an
audio version of his own stupid all-cap tweets?
There was no pressing reason for President Donald
Trump to seize 15 minutes of prime time in his
Wednesday evening address to the nation. I mean,
he holds
media yak sessions almost every day and scarcely
lets a thought cross his
deranged mind without tapping the incoherent
stream-of-consciousness
blather onto his Truth Social platform, a bizarre
journalling record that
will endure unto perpetuity. The delivery actually
ran 18 minutes long,
although no network was about to cue the cut-off
music, as if Trump was
making a rambling Oscar acceptance speech. Without
a time limit, though,
he might have spun mendacity right into next year.
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
Ostensibly the purpose was to whip through a
recitation of his
accomplishments, the alleged come-to-fruition of
promises made during his
election campaign, the "Golden Age'' of America
avowed that more than 77
million saps bought into. The reality clangs
loudly when set against a
long inventory of exaggerations, twisted facts,
misleading pronouncements
and outright lies. Though the one subject Trump
avoided, after banging on
about it for the last few weeks, was the "hoax"
and "con job" Democrats
have perpetrated about a very real affordability
crisis. Crisis? What
crisis? The U. S. economy is purring. Of course
it's purring primarily for
the Trump clan of grifters and his billionaire
pals. But hey, the price of
eggs has gone down. Man cannot live by quiche
alone. Combatively, as if
shadowboxing with an invisible array of countless
enemies, jabbing and
rabbit-punching, looking for all the world like a
man in full-blown panic
mode, which is a Trump we've never seen before,
not in a courtroom under
indictment nor in the court of public opinion as
one scandal follows
another. The teleprompter kept him away from
digressing but he's never
been particularly effective on-script. It's the
asides that animate his
acolytes, the press-conference insults and
belittlement, the off-the-cuff
cruelties. And, of course, the Truth Social
degeneracy, a nadir point
reached earlier this week in his jaw-dropping
attack on the murdered Rob
Reiner. Has there ever been such a wretch? It
would be foolish to think
he's gone about as low as he can go. With Trump,
there's always a lower
rung of spleen and savagery. But I digress.
He launched his speech with Trumpian argy-bargy.
"I inherited a mess. ''
His go-to theme and we've had 11 months of it.
It's all the Democrats'
fault. It's all Joe Biden's fault. Some, perhaps a
lot of it, is. But he
promised to remedy it lickety-split. Except just
about everything his
administration has touched has made the American
commonweal worse. No
longer the "shining city upon a hill" that
President Ronald Reagan had
glorified — a beacon of freedom and opportunity —
but a dystopia
unrecognizable to itself and to the world,
overseen by Trump's incompetent
and malevolent minions, channelling his revenge
and resentment. ARTICLE
CONTINUES BELOW Look, I fixed it, Trump claimed,
striking jangly notes of
anger, belligerence and smugness. Illegal
immigrants rounded up and booted
by ICE, National Guard troops deployed to crime-
ridden streets, the gospel
of tariffs returning manufacturing jobs to the U.
S. , and here's a $1,776
one-time bonus for military service members. While
a presidential
candidate who lambasted American involvement in
foreign wars and regime
change is now, as commander-in-chief, sabre-
rattling with Venezuela. Says
it's about the drug cartels; it's really about the
oil. My former Star
colleague Daniel Dale, who pretty much invented
the whole fact-check
thing, banged off a litany of Trump's false claims
on CNN's website,
noting that much of the drivel had been thoroughly
debunked when asserted
on previous occasions. I can't squeeze all of the
liar-liar yips into one
column but herewith a selection: • Trump claimed
"inflation is stopped. "
It isn't. It was 3.0 per cent in September, same
as when Trump returned to
office in January. • Trump claimed grocery prices
have dropped. Consumer
Price Index data shows that a far greater number
of grocery items have
increased in price since he took office. • Trump
claimed, again, that an
executive order he issued on prescription drug
prices will cut those
prices by "as much as 400, 500, and even 600 per
cent. '' As Dale points
out, that would be mathematically impossible. •
Trump repeated his false
claim that there's been $18 trillion in investment
in the U. S. during his
second presidency. Dale notes: "This figure is
fiction. At the time he
spoke on Wednesday, the White House's own website
said the figure was
'$9.6 trillion' and even that is a major
exaggeration. " ARTICLE CONTINUES
BELOW • Trump claims he's settled eight wars in 10
months. Bollocks. He
can take credit for the ceasefire in Gaza but war
in the Congo — but one
of the conflicts for which Trump asserts having
engineered "a historic
peace deal'' — rages on. I love Dale. Others have
tried to follow in his
facts-untangling footsteps but nobody does it
better. Trump gives a
partisan prime-time address insisting the economy
is stronger than many
voters feel United States
Trump gives a partisan prime-time address
insisting the economy is
stronger than many voters feel Pancake makeup
couldn't hide the sags and
pouches and crevices in Trump's face. He's a 79-
year-old man with the
temperament of a child and cognitively
compromised. With, at the moment, a
chief of staff who spilled gallons of tea in an
astonishingly frank and
deeply damaging series of interviews for a two-
part piece by Chris
Whipple, a veteran journalist who's literally
written the book on White
House chiefs of staff. One can only sit back and
admire the bombshells
Whipple induced from Susie Wiles. But it's the
photos taken by Christopher
Anderson — unvarnished portraits of Wiles, Vice-
President J. D. Vance,
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump's Iago
Stephen Miller and White
House press secretary Karoline Leavitt — that have
Trump World in a tizzy.
The arresting close-ups so effectively evoke
what's inside the outside of
these misanthropes, not a blemish or nostril hair
— or Leavitt's lip
injection dots — airbrushed out. Anderson defended
his photos in an
interview with the Washington Post's Shane
O'Neill. "I didn't put the
injection sites on (Leavitt). People seem to be
shocked that I didn't use
Photoshop to retouch out blemishes and her
injection sites. I find it
shocking that someone would expect me to retouch
out those things. ''
Leavitt is 28 years old and really good at her
job, even if you deplore
what she says. But with all that cosmetic work on
her face she looks in
her mid-40s and her nose is disappearing. While
Trump's lie-stretching
nose grows ever longer. What a cast of dirtbags.
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