Camera time for Geraldo: "This is why Trump is triumphant!... That charisma is unbelievable! I could sing his praises forever. I wonder, if the markets were down, if I would be singing the same tune. I hope so...."

🚨NEW: Geraldo Rivera heaps praise on Trump over "BRILLIANT" tariff moves🚨

"I believe that he ambushed China ... I just think he wants the best possible deal he can get the United States of America. God bless him for that. That's why people really dig the guy. That's why he's… pic.twitter.com/IU2zwTvD2g

— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) April 9, 2025

When things go well, let loose with your Trump-is-a-genius tirade. 

Prompt I gave Grok this morning: "Write an essay 'On Gloating.'"

I don't like to quote A.I., because I don't think people want to consume material that didn't originate in a human mind, but some human-generated material is insipid — I can live without the emanations of the mind of Rivera — and my non-human companion brought up Shakespeare (and Napoleon), so I'm making an exception to quote 3 sentences:

"In literature and history, gloating often serves as a cautionary trope. Shakespeare’s Iago gloats over his manipulations in Othello, only to meet a grim fate. Victorious generals who boasted excessively, like Napoleon at the height of his power, often found their hubris prelude to downfall."

Remember, all gloating is pre-gloating. You could end up in a montage over which your enemies gloat:

The New York Times has its Trumpiest headline ever.

Here's the article: "Trump Asserts a Muscular Vision of Presidential Power on First Day Back/In a flurry of unilateral executive actions, Mr. Trump revived disputed claims of broad presidential authority from his first term — and made some new ones. Court battles seem likely."

That's by Charlie Savage. Excerpt:

"She was only 15 when Warren Beatty lent her Natalie Wood’s bathing suit and took her for cigarettes and a swim."

"She was 16 when she met the 11-years-older, mid-divorce Salvatore Phillip 'Sonny' Bono, who lied to her about being a descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte, and she moved into his apartment in exchange for cooking and cleaning — not sex, at first."

From "Becoming Cher Didn’t Come Easy/The first volume of her frank autobiography is a testament to resilience, chronicling a grim childhood and the brazen path to stardom, with and without Sonny" (NYT).

Will the history of Napoleon's return repeat itself?

I don't know, but let's compare 2 political cartoons on the subject.

First, here is what we get from The Washington Post today:

Second, here is what we got from Puck in 1912:

A philosophy is being "piped to Earth," and "It's a death cult... They are propagating the extinction of humanity and civilization."

Said Elon Musk:

Listen to the whole context. He's responding to Joe's prompt to tell us why he bought Twitter, and —warning that it would sound melodramatic — he says he thought that Twitter had taken the mindset of the San Francisco area and amplified it and made it dominant to the point where all life on Earth was in danger. There's quite a lot of talk of the "Extinctionist" movement, and the phrase "death cult" is used repeatedly. 

"If you take environmentalism to an extreme," Musk says, "You start to view humanity as a plague on the surface of the earth, like a mold or something." He asserts that the Earth could do well with 10 times as many people as we have now.

ADDED: Musk goes on to talk about AI: "If AI gets programmed by the Extinctionists, it's utility function will be the extinction of humanity."

AND: He asserts that Twitter had become "an arm of the government" — "a state publication." But: "Old Twitter was completely controlled by the far left." I think I see his point, but those statements don't fit together. The government is not the far left, so both can't be in complete control. 

ALSO: "San Francisco/Berkeley is a niche ideology.... Is there a place that's more far left?... From their standpoint, everything is to the right...," Musk says. Twitter was an "accidental far-left information weapon" because the technology happened to develop in that geographic area, and then people who couldn't have created the "weapon" were nevertheless there — "co-located" — where they could pick up the weapon and make it their own. 

That made me think of the old adage attributed to Napoleon: "The tools belong to the man who can use them." That seems applicable here. And then there's also the old Audre Lorde line which seems to say the opposite of what was happing at Old Twitter: "The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house."

BUT: "The tools belong to the man who can use them," but here, the tool that was once called Twitter belonged to the far-left denizens of San Francisco/Berkeley, but Musk arrived on the scene with enough money to buy it from them.

2 things at The New Yorker this morning resonated, and I took these screenshots.

That first article, the one about Trump (I'll get to the second article in another post):

The 4th clue in in today's "Name Drop" game:

“Students described him as both a talented lecturer who spoke French and did impressions of Napoleon and as a ‘freak’ who called his lover ‘Josephine’ and asked to be addressed as ‘Sire.’”

From “Russia professor admits murder after woman's arms found in bag” (BBC).

"I think the 'worst impeachment news of all' is just that Nancy Pelosi is calm."

I say out loud, after spending a couple minutes skimming "This might be the worst impeachment news of all for Trump" (a Karen Tumulty column at WaPo) looking for what it is now that's really going to finally, at long last, take down Trump. Several times a day, it's something new. You look at the headlines and this! — no, this! — is the last straw, the smoking gun, the end of the road, the opening of the floodgates, the breaking of the dam, the unraveling of the sweater, the handbasket to hell, Waterloo...



I think I'm tough, very resistant to hysterical headlines and numb to the hourly elbowings to pay attention to the newest pointy dart lobbed at the much-poked President. But "This might be the worst impeachment news of all for Trump" got me. I'm soul searching. I think it was that I wanted to increase my invulnerability to the nudgings of headlines. So this is "the worst"? Okay, hit me with your worst. Let me see if I can take it.

And look, it's a you-go-girl puff piece about Nancy Pelosi. She's "a study in serenity." She's "determined not to give in to the impulses of some Democrats" who want to make the impeachment about everything they hate about Trump. She's calm, and she's "settling in for the duration, however long it might be." And, "For a president who grows more agitated by the day, that might be the worst news of all."

Is Nancy really so calm and Trump so agitated? You could just as well say that Nancy's nervous and Trump is a happy warrior. But, okay, Nancy's emotional state might be the "worst news" for Trump. If WaPo's right, I'd say that's great news for Trump.

"The memorandum of Trump’s call with Zelensky appears remarkably different in speed and content from the full transcripts of calls between President Trump and foreign leaders..."

"The transcript of a 24-minute call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in which both the participants spoke English, included roughly 3,200 words, or about 133 words per minute. A 53-minute call with then-Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, in which both Trump and the Mexican president spoke through interpreters, included roughly 5,500 words, or about 102 words per minute. The White House summary of Trump’s 30-minute call with Zelensky — which included interpreters because Zelensky spoke Ukrainian while Trump spoke English — includes fewer than 2,000 words, or roughly 65 words per minute. That suggests that the rough transcript of the Zelensky call includes about half the number of words that would be expected if the call had proceeded at the same or similar pace as the previous calls."

From "Odd markings, ellipses fuel doubts about the rough transcript of Trump’s Ukraine call" (WaPo).

This attack on the transcript makes me think of something Trump said in his press conference yesterday (which I listened to, in full, twice as we drove 1,000 miles yesterday and overnight):

I thought that I would finish off the first term without the threat of people making false claims, but this one turned out to be incredible. All because they didn’t know that I had a transcript done by very, very talented people — word for word, comma for comma. Done by people that do it for a living. We had an exact transcript. And when we produced that transcript, they died.

When we produced that transcript, they died. That is, they were set to plunge into impeachment based on the whistleblower's complaint, and then Trump surprised them with the transcript. Now, they have to go forward on the transcript... unless they can delegitimatize the transcript. So, we're hearing of "odd markings," and there's a dispute about the meaning of ellipsis marks: Are there omitted words or is this the standard way to indicate an incompleted sentence, a shift midthought?

If the words per minute rate with the Ukrainian president was so much slower than with the Mexican president, it's some evidence that we're not getting all the words, but there are obviously other explanations: There might be an easier, more fluent relationship with Mexico; the Mexican president may be a much faster talker than the Ukrainian newcomer" the Spanish/English translators might work faster than the translators on the Zelensky call. What language was that? According to Wikipedia:

According to [Zelensky's wife] she and her husband grew up in an overtly and predominantly Russian-speaking environment and had no relatives who spoke Ukrainian, except for ones who used Surzhyk, a sociolect of Ukrainian and Russian.... She... told the BBC that she and her husband can freely communicate in Ukrainian, especially when he is not "influenced by stress and psychological pressure," but that her husband was still "trying to deepen his knowledge" of the Ukrainian language.

Certainly, speaking with the U.S. President would be "influenced by stress and psychological pressure," so if he were speaking Ukrainian, he might indeed have experienced some difficulty that would affect his words per minute.

I'm enjoying the minutiae of interpreting this tiny evidence about words and punctuation. It's right in my zone, the kind of thing I'm very comfortable uploading into my head and musing about. But I think I'm not typical and suspect that most Americans — unless they're hellbent on getting Trump — will view this dispute as hopelessly into the the weeds. Trump probably sees that and will call everybody out into the sunlight where we don't have to worry about that fussy nonsense which is all the Dems have after they "died" when he surprised them with the transcript.

By the way, here's the poster for "Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon," a 2012 Russian comedy movie (which, per Wikipedia, was a sequel to "Hitler goes Kaput!"). That's Volodymyr Zelensky in the role of Napoleon:



ADDED: I published this post without understanding what "odd markings" referred to. That is, even I, with an interest in picayune evidence and specifically wanting to know what were the "odd markings," wrote a post and was done with it without getting to the part that explained "odd markings." This makes me think that precious few people will get this far, but I did go back and track down the answer:

At the Man-of-Destiny Café...

... you can talk all night.

***

"The twelfth of May, 1796, in north Italy, at Tavazzano, on the road from Lodi to Milan. The afternoon sun is blazing serenely over the plains of Lombardy, treating the Alps with respect and the anthills with indulgence, not incommoded by the basking of the swine and oxen in the villages nor hurt by its cool reception in the churches, but fiercely disdainful of two hordes of mischievous insects which are the French and Austrian armies...."

ADDED: The play is "The Man of Destiny" by George Bernard Shaw (at The American Players Theater in Spring Green). There's another performance today at 1 pm, and I see one ticket available. There are 2 more performances, one of which is currently sold out and another, on the 28th — also a matinee — that has one ticket available. The "man of destiny" is Napoleon. As the play begins, Napoleon will be sitting at that table...

NAPOLEON (intent on his map, but cramming himself [with food] mechanically with his left hand). Don't talk. I'm busy.

GIUSEPPE (with perfect goodhumor). Excellency: I obey.

NAPOLEON. Some red ink.

GIUSEPPE. Alas! excellency, there is none.

NAPOLEON (with Corsican facetiousness). Kill something and bring me its blood.

GIUSEPPE (grinning). There is nothing but your excellency's horse, the sentinel, the lady upstairs, and my wife.

NAPOLEON. Kill your wife.

GIUSEPPE. Willingly, your excellency; but unhappily I am not strong enough. She would kill me.

NAPOLEON. That will do equally well.

GIUSEPPE. Your excellency does me too much honor. (Stretching his hand toward the flask.) Perhaps some wine will answer your excellency's purpose.

NAPOLEON (hastily protecting the flask, and becoming quite serious). Wine! No: that would be waste. You are all the same: waste! waste! waste! (He marks the map with gravy, using his fork as a pen.)

What? No Sharpie?

"I do not see in religion the mystery of the incarnation, but the mystery of the social order; religion attaches to heaven an idea of equality that stops the rich from being massacred by the poor."

Said Napoleon, in 1804. I'm reading Napoleon quotes, just because Napoleon came up as part of the random jumble in the previous post.

"Amelia Brookins, object handler, arranges a poster of Bella Abzug to be photographed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History."

Photo caption at "The Smithsonian is digitizing political and military posters — 18,000 of them/More than 200 posters a day are being converted to make them more accessible to the public" (WaPo).

I like that job title, "object handler."

From the article:

Neither of the young Smithsonian object handlers knew of the formidable New York feminist and three-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Brookins said she had heard of Abzug, who died 21 years ago, for the “first time in the poster.”...

The Bella Abzug poster, in orange, black and white, shows her in one of her trademark hats, along with the slogan “This Woman’s Place is in the House . . . the House of Representatives!” (The Smithsonian also has one of her hats.)

You'll have to imagine the orange lettering:

Pictures really do help us to remember. Pictures of posters, posters that helped us to have an idea of the candidate at the time. The hat helped too. It's another visual (and the Smithsonian is preserving one of her hats). This woman really did imprint herself on the public by wearing a hat. She was the one with the hat.

These days, Trump is the one with a hat, and he imprinted himself on us by making his head distinctive not with a hat but with a very odd hairstyle.

Anyway, these kids today. They don't know much about history. But maybe if you give them some pictures, some glimmer will arise. And what do you really know about history? What's there in your odd head? Isn't it — to be fair — just some posters? Stuff like...

Oh, my. Does he looks like Trump?

It's so powerful, the visual. In the visual archive of my own head, there is John McCain leaning over and muttering the names of dictators in the ear of Amy Klobuchar at the Trump inaugural. Trump/dictator. It's connected.

And look at the hands... Trump has tiny hands... what is he hiding?

What does the candle mean? Why is it burning low? Look at the other hand, look at the objects... the pen, the sword, the orb...

We are all object handlers in the mind's visual archive.

"Snuffing out Boney."

An 1814 cartoon by George Cruikshank.

George Cruikshank (27 September 1792 – 1 February 1878) was a British caricaturist and book illustrator, praised as the "modern Hogarth" during his life. His book illustrations for his friend Charles Dickens, and many other authors, reached an international audience.

"Boney" was a British epithet for Napoleon Bonaparte. Looking that up, I ran across the British cartoonist, James Gillray (1756 - 1815), called "the father of the political cartoon," whose "Maniac-raving's-or-Little Boney in a strong fit" is the reason for spread of the false belief that Napoleon was short:

In it, the famed caricaturist James Gillray portrays a diminutive Bonaparte flipping over furniture in a childish temper tantrum while raving about the “British Parliament” and “London Newspapers! Oh! Oh! Oh!”

That's enough revolution for now.

ADDED: My post title is my own cheeky interpretation of Drudge's use of Napoleon to represent Macron. But what connections are people making, other than that Macron is young (39) as he takes office and so was Napoleon? Here's WaPo:

Not since Napoleon has anybody leapt to the top of French public life with such speed. Not since World War II has anybody won the French presidency without a political party and a parliamentary base....

He was, it is true, extraordinarily lucky (luck being the quality that Napoleon said he most preferred in his generals). He benefited both from the flameout of Socialist President François Hollande, who decided not even to contest the election, and from a surprise series of personal scandals that dragged down the center-right’s candidate, François Fillon.....

AND: My post title assumes it was Le Pen whose rise was revolutionary, but consider this from The Guardian:

The 39-year-old [Macron] has vowed to bring a youthful “revolution” to French politics but also to return to the historic tradition of a strong leader who can “embody the nation”. He believes that ever since King Louis XVI’s head was chopped off in the revolution, France has been constantly trying to compensate for the lack of a true leader figure who could personify France.

Doesn't that put him on the counter-revolutionary side?

Macron, a centrist political novice, who had never before run for election and until three years ago was unknown, believes he can fill the role of republican guide of the nation.

Macron’s first public gesture as president was to deliberately, solemnly make a long walk alone under spotlights across the Louvre’s Napoleon courtyard to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the European anthem. It was a carefully coordinated reference to the style of the late Socialist president François Mitterrand, who presented himself as a kind of republican, elected monarch.

Every new French leader wants to contrast the style of the president who went before. If the Socialist François Hollande – who was once Macron’s mentor – was a plodding “ordinary bloke” who described himself as “President Normal” and turned his own door handles at the Elysée instead of waiting for a butler, Macron wants to bring back what he styles as a lofty poise and distance.

But it seems (from this distance) that Le Pen was the contrast to Normal and that people chose more normal. Did they seek normal and get a lofty monarch?



I hadn't noticed before that the Ode to Joy was the European anthem. Is it odd for the new president to do his victory promenade to the anthem of Europe and not France?

Donald Trump did not walk out on election night to the sound of the U.S. national anthem, but of course the music was American. Do you remember what it was? It was not "I'm Proud to Be an American." Listen:



It's the soundtrack to the movie "Air Force One" (in which Harrison Ford played an action-movie-hero President of the United States). He left the stage to the sound of the Rolling Stone's "You Can't Always Get What You Want," which, I guess, was reaching out to those who were shocked and disappointed, though I'm sure many experienced the line "You can't always get what you want" as a taunt and rankled at "But if you try sometimes well you might find you get what you need." I can hear the anti-Trumpist crying This is not what we need.

By the way, Trump's use of the song did not prevent New York Magazine's David Marchese from ranking "You Can't Always Get What You Want" as #1 of all 373 Rolling Stones songs:

There’s formal wit (the boys’ choir and French-horn lines), Mick’s keen and clear-eyed lyrics (he hits on envy, hope, spite, cynicism), Keith’s foundational riffing, and the rhythm section’s subtly powerful groove.... Also, how perfectly Stones-y is it that the best the band says you can hope for is the possibility of getting what you want? “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is more moving and deep than anything else from the band’s classic years, more ambitious than anything that came before, and more authentic and fluid than anything that would come after. When the tempo picks up, it’s sexy, too. Look, maybe “Gimme Shelter” was the band’s true peak, and that song lives in the darkness the Stones knew so well, knew better than any other band, but I’m putting this song at the top. It lets a little light in. Lord knows we need it.

And here are the lyrics to "Ode to Joy" (written by Friedrich Schiller) in case you want to think about how weird they are for a political anthem (but be aware that the lyrics were not adopted as the European anthem, only the music).

The coldness and the hotness — Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina on "Meet the Press."

On "Meet the Press" today (which began with an interview with Hillary). Brooks said:

Sometimes she's campaigning like she's in Napoleon's march on Moscow, just like a trudge through the winter. This was a little more upbeat, a little more fun...

A little more fun than this...



Brooks continues:

She's basically has a defensive posture. And that means she's erecting walls, not trusting people, and there's no romance. People, especially this year, they want a little romance, they want a lot of ideological action going outward. But she's on the defensive. And so that's the core problem. It's not the emails. Nobody's going to disqualify her as president because she used one server versus another. That's not a real scandal. It's her attitude.

Later, asked whether Hillary Clinton is "in tune with the mood of the electorate," Andrea Mitchell says she is not because...

She's not angry enough. She's not-- And it's hard for her to be angry because then you've got, you know, Donald Trump saying, "She's shrill," which is a sexist word, let's face it. But she has to get around that. But the anger, the passion is all on people going on the attack, whether it's, you know, whether it's Donald Trump, whether it's Carly Fiorina, or whether it's Bernie Sanders.

"Shrill," yeah, it is used to push women back, but Carly Fiorina is a woman, and she's not cowed at all. She, too, was interviewed earlier in the show, right after Hillary, and she was fierce, utterly on the attack, especially as Chuck Todd tried to get her to concede that she'd misstated what she thought she saw in that harvest-the-brain Planned Parenthood video. Watch it:



Why won't she concede that the fetus we see is stock footage, intercut to increase the emotional impact of the story that is related by a witness? I say it's a deliberate trap. The video makes us feel we saw the event. One could be wrong, and maybe eventually Carly will say she did look back and sees now that she was conflating the image with the spoken account. But until then, she's creating pressure on everyone to view the video for themselves, and once people do that, most will be horrified by the story and want to know if it's true, and those who want to say but Carly was wrong about seeing the incident in the video will seem morally unbalanced, perhaps monstrous. That's what you want to talk about?!

"When President Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in March 2012 that 'after my election I have more flexibility'..."

"...most assumed he was referring to foreign policy. It turns out Mr. Obama's ambitions weren't so limited."

IN THE COMMENTS: retail lawyer writes:

Question for Ann: How are law schools explaining this new flexibility, promulgation, the Take Care clause, etc.? How do you think they'll be teaching it in the future? Sometimes I wish I still were in law school.

And I said:

I'd quote Justice Jackson in the Steel Seizure Case:

I cannot be brought to believe that this country will suffer if the Court refuses further to aggrandize the presidential office, already so potent and so relatively immune from judicial review, at the expense of Congress.

But I have no illusion that any decision by this Court can keep power in the hands of Congress if it is not wise and timely in meeting its problems. A crisis that challenges the President equally, or perhaps primarily, challenges Congress. If not good law, there was worldly wisdom in the maxim attributed to Napoleon that "The tools belong to the man who can use them." We may say that power to legislate for emergencies belongs in the hands of Congress, but only Congress itself can prevent power from slipping through its fingers.

"The tools belong to the man who can use them."

It's a great line.

But sometimes you've just got tools lying around, and no one can use them too well, and some men and women try to use them to halfway build something and then they leave it leaking and creaking for some other man to whip into shape with those tools, which he's not too good at using, but he keeps tinkering away, ineptly, and everyone watches and bitches about it, and you've just got some huge hulking crappy thing that's never going to work right, but so much damned effort was put into building the thing that we just go ahead and use it anyway.

"American singer Bob Dylan has been decorated by France's Légion d'honneur..."

"... a spokesman for the historic French order said Monday, a move that raised hackles among some of the French elite."

The Légion honors foreign luminaries by granting them honorary titles within the order. They aren't considered full members of the order, which includes the likes of 19th-century French writer Alexis de Tocqueville....

The Légion was founded by Napoleon Bonaparte as a civil and military order that was open to members of society outside European nobility....

***

Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells
Speaking to some French girl
Who says she knows me well...

"In this bill we will nullify anything the president does that smacks of legislation."

"And there are several of the executive orders that appear as if he’s writing new law. That cannot happen.... I’m afraid that President Obama may have this 'king complex' sort of developing, and we’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen."

ADDED: "If not good law, there was worldly wisdom in the maxim attributed to Napoleon that 'The tools belong to the man who can use them.' We may say that power to legislate for emergencies belongs in the hands of Congress, but only Congress itself can prevent power from slipping through its fingers."

"I'm amused that right after 'potato, my penis droops' up pops Quayle."

I say, in the laughing-in-bed first-post-of-the-morning. 

Quayle is a regular commenter here, but — who knows, on the internet? — it might be Dan Quayle.



Quayle responds: "I carry the blood of polygamists in my veins. So one should expect that sort of thing, I guess." He adds: "I took the name from my great grandfather, pictured here surrounded by some new friends."



That's a photograph of taken at the Utah Penitentiary in 1889, showing men arrested under the Edmunds-Tucker Act, explained here. Included in the photo is John C. Bennett, who "taught a doctrine of 'spiritual wifery'":

He and associates sought to have illicit sexual relationships with women by telling them that they were married "spiritually," even if they had never been married formally, and that the Prophet approved the arrangement.

That wasn't the correct doctrine, and Bennett got excommunicated, and then he "toured the country speaking against the Latter-day Saints and published a bitter anti-Mormon exposé charging the Saints with licentiousness."

Here's John C. Bennett in happier days...



... posing like Napoleon:

"Caricature is the most evanescent and pedantic of the visual arts."

It's hard to look back.