10.6 Tina Brown: “The doom that Trump is now facing in the midterms is the result of getting exactly everything he wanted: A cabinet and a Congress of fawning enablers. So now like every authoritarian who banishes ground truth from his inner circle, he’s genuinely lost touch with planet Earth. In his interview with Time magazine last week Trump spent most of the session blaming the “corrupt” press and pollsters for numbers which are worse than Biden’s after his terminal debate and worse than Bush in his post-Katrina hurricane slump. He’s almost as low as Nixon before he resigned, which is perhaps why there’s a growing MAGA call to re-open Watergate and prove that Nixon was a victim of the deep state…. It has always been one of the biggest ironies of Trump’s appeal that many of the MAGA base who idolized him were the very people he has stiffed all his life – the construction workers, bartenders, plumbers; the list is legion in his lifelong habit of unpaid bills. The $5000 checks he’s promising to pay voters to turn out now are in the mail like all the rest…. Without ever being asked to either vote for or design it, humanity is being hijacked and bent into a direction dictated by an uber race of emotional metronomes and the money slaves who promote them….It beggars belief that Mark Zuckerberg drew up the first draft of the ‘White House AI safety accord’, added notes from his fellow tech deities and handed it over fully baked to the analog Bozo in the Oval Office. Trump, whose every action has blowtorched the mere concept of presidential restraint called the “self-policing” pledge the tech barons all signed “morally” binding. The whole chilling scene reminded me of the great set piece in John Milton’s epic 17th century poem “Paradise Lost,” when Satan assembles a grand infernal council of fallen angels to debate whether Hell’s forces should openly confront Heaven or devise a more sinister plan. Maybe Milton was reporting from our future and Trump and The Broligarchs were compiling the Final Part of our own Paradise Lost.”
10.5 Trump, at a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska:”And again, remember, with the war, it’s just artificial, it’s a little bit high, it’s a small price to pay. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, for keeping our country safe. They could take out a city. Let ’em take out Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with. But it’s going to end very soon, and it’s going to end one way or the other.”
10.5 Dennis Hastert dies at 84,
10.1 In a 5-1 Rangers victory over the Lightning, Igor Shesterkin becomes the first goalie in franchise history to score a goal.