Grandpa said some things last night

This (gift link) Peter Baker analysis of Trump’s speech last night, which I didn’t watch — I was in a hot tub at 10.000 feet watching the night mountain sky (winning!) — is remarkably straightforward, and therefore necessarily a brutal indictment of the worst piece of shit to ever hold political office in the history of the United States:

President Trump used a lot of alarming words on Thursday night as he addressed the American people about threats to the integrity of elections in the United States: “Deep state.” “Rigged and stolen.” “Conspiring.” “Manipulation.” “Corrupt.” “Fraud.” “Cover up.”

But the bottom-line message he clearly wanted to leave with the public was this: He is not a loser, regardless of the result of the 2020 election. There were dark forces at work to thwart him. And if his party loses this fall’s midterm election, he intimated, that may not be an honest outcome either.

Mr. Trump’s prime-time speech from the East Room of the White House was an astonishing spectacle featuring a president intent on persuading the country that its elections cannot be trusted, at least not the ones where he or his allies fall short. He cited selectively declassified documents to make sensational claims about vulnerabilities of the election system, although nothing he revealed proved any outcomes were actually changed.

The exercise underscored how much Mr. Trump in his second term has come to be obsessed with relitigating the 2020 election and finding ways to cast doubt on the 2026 election. In the 18 months since he returned to office, he has installed election deniers in key positions, sought to change the rules to make it harder to cast ballots, seized voting records in a bid to prove his conspiracy theories and purged officials who investigated his efforts to overturn his election defeat six years ago.

“It does feel a little like Captain Ahab in ‘Moby Dick,’” said Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. “He is just fixated on his claim that he didn’t lose the 2020 election. Armchair psychiatrists can say he doesn’t like losing, he can never admit he lost anything. But it’s clearly become an important part of his psyche and in some ways an important part of this administration.”

On one level, according to people close to him, Mr. Trump’s fixation on rewriting the history of 2020 is about salving the wounded ego of a man who constitutionally resists ever admitting that he has lost anything. He has made it a litmus test for anyone working for him to accede to, or at least not contradict, the lie that he won back then, not Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Trump has authorized investigations to revisit his many claims that have previously been debunked, inquiries seemingly aimed not at following wherever the facts may take them but in search of facts to back up his own unsubstantiated certitudes. It is hard to imagine that he would accept any investigation concluding that he lost fair and square.

But while part of this is about looking backward, it also is about looking forward. With Mr. Trump deeply unpopular, according to polls — just 37 percent approve of his performance in the latest Washington Post-Ipsos survey — his party faces a possible drubbing in congressional races in November. So Mr. Trump seems intent on laying a predicate that, at the least, could explain away a defeat and, at most, his critics fear, potentially justify direct intervention aimed at changing the results.

“It’s the standard approach to cast doubt on the electoral rules of the game where many populist authoritarians feel threatened by unpopularity at the polls or if the results declare them the loser at the ballot,” said Pippa Norris, who has taught political science at Harvard University for three decades and was the founding director of the Election Integrity Project. “Indeed, it’s been a leitmotif which the president has used for more than a decade now.”

The piece goes on to point out at length that Trump is lying about the 2020 election because he can’t tolerate the narcissistic injury of being a “loser,” and that he’s focused on China’s nascent and wholly impotent attempts to affect the 2020 election, while ignoring Russia’s far more significant efforts to help him in 2016 and 2024.

Such is the degeneracy of our times that the story doesn’t ever mention that during this speech Trump demanded that the broadcast licenses of two of the three traditional major networks be pulled for declining to televise his rant. This is yet another example of the there’s just too much thesis to explain the relative indifference of the broader American public to this totally insane situation.

Also too, a quiz question that Trump seems to be getting wrong along with so much of the feckless public is, who was president in 2020, when the Deep State ™ was doing all those Deep State things?

I cling to the hope that the relative indifference is being replaced gradually by boredom and disgust, and that the worst and most significant reality TV show of all time will be canceled permanently, and soon.

Komm, Trümpentod

And while we’re beseeching the Angel of Death, take Mark Burnett with you while you’re at it.

. . . I remember when this was a central plot point in The Sting and The Grifters:

Truth Social will sell Wall Street firms quicker access to market-moving posts from President Donald Trump, the company said on Thursday.

Truth Social, owned by Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT), has become the president’s go-to place for announcing policy decisions. The president’s posts frequently move markets, from stocks to oil.

Trump Media announced a new data feed, known as an API, or application programming interface, that will be available to institutional customers beginning on August 1. Competing social networks also sell traders access to their APIs.

The feed will provide real-time data from the top 10-ranking Truth Social accounts and deliver posts to customers “in milliseconds,” the company said. There was no available information on pricing.

The company said the faster-access offering would help add to Trump Media’s revenue stream. It serves as the latest in a growing list of examples of the president blurring the lines between his business and his White House duties.

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” Kevin McGurn, interim chief executive officer at TMTG, said in a statement.

“Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream,” McGurn added.

Wall Street trading desks use algorithms to scan for specific signals and execute trades automatically. Getting information even a scant few seconds faster can mean potentially massive profits for those algorithmic traders.