"Many business people and investors are still hoping Mr. Trump will recognize the havoc he is creating and ease off his tariffs. But so far, he doesn’t seem concerned...."

I'm reading a column by Steven Rattner, who was counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, in "'Few of Us Ever Imagined He Would Go This Far.'"

I think Trump is concerned. Just not the way Rattner and business people and investors are hoping he'll be concerned. 

Why is this article illustrated with an image of Trump atop a weather vane, with his hands outstretched to feel the wind blow, and moving from side to side? It doesn't reflect what Trump is doing. Is it a picture of the business people's hope?

I think Trump has chosen his solution to a problem — or set of problems — and he's locked in. If he could be shaken out of his resolve by cries of "havoc," virtually everything he's started he would have stopped.  

Side trip: What does it mean to "cry havoc"? It doesn't mean to cry out "This is havoc!" It means: "Let's wreak havoc!"

Elon as Braveheart.

Everybody dies, but not everybody lives https://t.co/rYtoq01ygH

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025

AND: There's also this, from Seneca (at page 46-47 of this collection (commission earned)): 

"One of his signature bits, where an advertising man coaches Abraham Lincoln before the Gettysburg Address..."

"... was a pointed critique of the cynicism of professional politics. 'Hi, Abe, sweetheart' begins the man from Madison Avenue, who encourages him to work in a plug for an Abraham Lincoln T-shirt. When the president says he wants to change 'four score and seven years ago' to '87,' the ad man first patiently explains they already test marketed this in Erie. Then he says: 'It’s sort of like Mark Antony saying "Friends, Romans, countrymen, I’ve got something I want to tell you."'"

Writes Jason Zinoman, in "Bob Newhart Holds Up/He basically invented the stand-up special in 1960 and continued to be a source of comic brilliance until his final years" (NYT).

Listen to the Abe Lincoln routine here (at YouTube).

I would have blogged that passage anyway, so it is by mere chance that in 2 posts in a row I'm quoting something that contains a quote from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." The line quoted above is from Act III, Scene II, with Antony speaking at Caesar's funeral:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones.

In the previous post, Maureen Dowd had written that Trump, at the convention, "played the Roman emperor, like a Julius Caesar who survived that 'foul deed' and 'bleeding piece of earth,' fist in the air, sitting high in the forum, gloating, as his vanquished foes bent the knee." The internal quotes, from Act III, Scene I, are spoken by Antony over the dead body of Julius Caesar:

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.

"Jill Biden, lacking the detachment of a Melania and enjoying the role of first lady more, has been pushing — and shielding — her husband..."

"... beyond a reasonable point. After Thursday’s embarrassing debate performance, she exhorted the crowd and played teacher to a prized student: 'You did a great job! You answered every question! You knew all the facts!' This, to the guy who controls the nuclear codes.... The Democratic strategist Paul Begala... explained on CNN: 'The first Democratic politician to call on Biden to step down, it’s going to end their career... None of them are going to say, 'Hey, let me step forward and knife Julius Caesar.' Biden is a beloved man in the Democratic Party.'... James Carville... told me Biden should call former Presidents Clinton and Obama to the White House and decide on five Democratic stars to address their convention in August.... Carville said the president should give a July 4 speech announcing he will let the next generation of Democratic leaders bloom.... And what if Joe and Jill cling on? In reply, Carville quoted... That which can’t continue, won’t."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "The Ghastly vs. the Ghostly" (NYT)(boldface added).

I don't get to use my "Julius Caesar" tag too often. I can't believe Dowd planted that in the text and then ended with "That which can’t continue, won’t." 

The adage is attributed to Herb Stein. See "Is Stein’s Law real?" (Robert J. Samuelson, WaPo, May 30, 2013):

"What else can they do?... Send some weasel out to do a faux Shakespearean we-mean-no-harm prologue...?"

I asked yesterday, speaking about the Public Theater's production of "Julius Caesar," which is losing sponsors because of the depiction of Julius Caesar as Donald Trump.

What else can they do? They thought of this:

"The Public took the 'we do not condone this production' statements, printed them out, and put them in people's Playbills tonight."



AND: My "weasel" suggestion also made it:

A brief clip of remarks from Oskar Eustis before the show begins. Happy opening, JULIUS CAESAR. pic.twitter.com/84zx8KgvxN

— The Public Theater (@PublicTheaterNY) June 13, 2017

Via the NYT, which says:

Shortly after the presidential election, Oskar Eustis, one of New York’s most successful theater executives, knew what he wanted to do. He would direct a production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” with the title character a provocative but inexact stand-in for President Trump.

Mr. Eustis was not alone. All over the country, from Oklahoma to Oregon, theaters have been staging “Julius Caesar” this year....

Yes, it's a hackneyed idea. 

[Last night] Mr. Eustis [devoted] his opening-night speech to a full-throated defense of the theater’s mission, which he urged audience members at the outdoor Delacorte Theater to record on their cellphones and share. “When we hold the mirror up to nature,” he said, “often what we reveal are disturbing, upsetting, provoking things. Thank God. That’s our job.”

It seems to me that theater should disturb, upset, and provoke the audience in the theater, not show them the things they already firmly believe are disturbing, upsetting, and provoking. So I'd say you are not doing your job. You're presenting hatred of Donald Trump in the center of Manhattan. Don't preen, and don't bring God into it. You've got "the mirror." Look at yourself. 

"I have one very specific reason I have a relationship with Bill Clinton: I admire what he does, and I want to be part of it."

"But I’ve never asked him for a damn thing," said Frank Giustra, who has given the Clinton Foundation over $100 million. He's described — in WaPo's "The Clintons, a luxury jet and their $100 million donor from Canada" — as a "Canadian mining magnate and onetime Hollywood studio owner.

Last week, the Clinton Foundation acknowledged that an affiliated Canadian charity founded in 2007 by Giustra kept its donors secret, despite a 2008 ethics agreement with the Obama administration promising to reveal the New York-based foundation’s donors.

The foundation said the arrangement conformed with Canadian law. But it also opened a way for anonymous donors, including foreign executives with business pending before the Hillary Clinton-led State Department, to direct money to the Clinton Foundation.

For Giustra, the partnership with Bill Clinton provided an introduction to the world of international philanthropy at the highest levels — a feel-good, reputation-enhancing effort that he said he finds more personally satisfying than amassing wealth.

At the same time, Giustra continued to expand his business empire, closing some of the biggest deals of his career in the same countries where he traveled with Clinton.

According to Giustra, you can believe that Bill Clinton didn't get involved in any of those business dealings, because Bill Clinton is utterly bored by that sort of thing: "He doesn’t care about that stuff. His eyes would glaze over." Even if that is to believed, Giustra could still have used the appearance of connection to the ex-President to leverage his business dealings.

As for Giustra's believability, consider that he also says that when Bill Clinton saw that that Giustra was carrying a biography of Julius Caesar, Clinton not only began talking about the book, he began "quoting whole passages of it from memory."

ADDED: By chance, there's a nice, big new essay about Julius Caesar by the great Roger Kimball in The New Criterion. Excerpt:

Alexander Hamilton once told Jefferson that Caesar was “the greatest man who ever lived.” Hamilton might have been tweaking his humorless rival. He knew that his own political opponents often compared him to Caesar, and deep down he probably shared their suspicion, not to say their loathing, of the dictator. But everyone acknowledged Caesar’s military genius. He was a master strategist whose tactics are still studied by generals. In Gaul, through the instrumentality of his legions, he killed or enslaved hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. Yet he brought stability and a semblance of the rule of law to those rude provinces. He greatly enriched himself at the expense of those he conquered. Yet he also greatly reformed provincial governance, sharply limiting the extent of “gifts” a Roman governor could (legally) help himself to.

The people instinctively know what Caesar knew: Don't trust skinny men.

In Shakespeare's telling of the tale, Julius Caesar says:

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

And according to a new study, people consider fat men in politics more "reliable, honest and even more inspiring" than thin men.

[Dr. Elizabeth Miller," a political scientist at the University of Missouri and a co-author] split 120 volunteers into four groups. Each group was presented with descriptions and photos of four separate phony candidates who had the same gender and body type: obese male, skinny male, obese female, skinny female. Within each group, each phony candidate's political views differed.

The study subjects then rated the candidates based on a series of criteria, including honesty and ability to perform. The obese males were viewed 6% more positively than skinny males, while skinny women were viewed 5% more positively than their full-figured counterparts. Overall, obese females were viewed 10% less favorably than obese males.

Yes, the preference was for non-skinny men. Women still need to be thin. "Let me have men about me that are fat." Men. What we trust in men and what we trust in women are 2 different things, then and now.

Shouting "tyrant!" at Michael Muskasey, did Washington Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders intend to cause fear of assassination?

Washington Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders confesses that he was the one who shouted "Tyrant! You are a tyrant!" at Attorney General Michael Mukasey, during Mukasey's speech at a Federalist Society dinner:

"Frankly, everybody in the room was applauding or sometimes laughing, and I thought, 'I've got to stand up and say something.' And I did," Sanders told The Seattle Times Tuesday. "I stood up and said, 'Tyrant,' then I sat down again, then I left."

It wasn't until the next morning — when he turned on the TV in his hotel room — that Sanders learned what happened after he departed: Mukasey, later in his speech, began slurring his words, slumped at the podium and passed out.

Mukasey didn't faint immediately upon hearing those words, so maybe you think it's hard to pin the fainting on Sanders. But consider how stressful it might be to hear "Tyrant! You are a tyrant!" shouted from a crowd like that.

The words immediately call to mind "sic semper tyrannis":

The phrase is a shortened version of Sic semper evello mortem Tyrannis, which translated means "Thus always death comes to tyrants." ...

The phrase is originally attributed to Marcus Junius Brutus, the central figure in the assassination of Julius Caesar on March 15, 44 BC.... In American history, because of the association with the assassination of Caesar, John Wilkes Booth reportedly shouted the phrase after shooting United States President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865. Timothy McVeigh was wearing a T-shirt with this phrase and a picture of Lincoln on it when he was arrested on April 19, 1995, the day of the Oklahoma City Bombing.

An unknown person in a large crowd shouts "tyrant" at a political leader. If he knows history, it should strike fear into his heart. It would feel like the prelude to assassination. And yet, you would keep speaking. Nothing has happened yet, so of course, you go on, terror gnawing at your consciousness...

... men’s hearts failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth....