The one where I agree with Mike Johnson

The speaker of the US House of Representatives has copped some flak recently for suggesting the current salary for members of Congress is not enough for them to support their families, and they should perhaps be allowed to supplement their income by trading stocks.

Stay with me here, but I think he makes a fair point.

If Speaker Johnson is saying that people who work long hours in high pressure jobs deserve to be remunerated in a way that covers their expenses, then I agree wholeheartedly. 

In fact, I’ve been saying that for 25 years. Seventeen years is far too long to go without a cost-of-living pay rise, even for federal representatives.

What I don’t understand is why Speaker Johnson, as a conservative MAGA Republican, does not apply established conservative principles to the problem he has identified.

American conservative economic theory assumes that every individual is wholly and solely responsible for their own circumstances. It is not the government’s place to help them out, be it through education, health care, mandatory minimum wages, or bending the laws in insider trading.

We all know the Republican answer for people who struggle to make ends meet. Say them along with me:

• Get a second job. Or a third one*. Sleep is for the weak and, as we have already established, everyone deserves their lot in life. So if you’re weak, stop being weak. There you go. Fixed!

• Educate yourself so as to get a better paying job. If you don’t have time for that with the three jobs you’re now working, you just have to organise your life better.

• Bring a flask of coffee to work instead of stopping in at Starbucks every morning. You’ll have that house deposit saved in no time**.

• Stop buying the fancy soda.

• Give up the avocado toast brunches.

• Cancel your streaming services and watch free-to-air TV or YouTube instead.

• Take the bus.

There you go, Mike! All fixed. You’re welcome.

…unless you want to tell me that those are all meaningless platitudes which have no basis in the real world.

* As if Congresspeople don’t already have second and third jobs.

** A bit over 19 years at $30 a week for a 10% deposit on a $300,000 home at today’s prices.

Reason #3,547: It’s a cult!

The beauty of mathematics is there will always be a single correct answer, and everything else is WRONG. 

No room for interpretation; no “it depends on what you mean by…” One right answer and nothing else.

Say what you like about Bobby Kennedy Jr, Mehmet Oz and Howard Lutnick. I certainly do. None of them are actually stupid.

 

RFK Jr: "A Democratic senator claimed it's mathematically impossible to have a drug drop by 600%. I said, 'Well, if the drug was $100 and it raises to $600, that would be a 600% rise. If it drops from $600 to $100, that's a 600% savings.'" Trump: "Right"

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 24, 2026 at 5:28 AM

And yet look at Lutnick and Oz nodding along as Kennedy – a lawyer by trade, where you can get any answer you want depending on how you ask the question – presents a mathematical argument that wouldn’t pass muster with a 6^th grader, much less your bank manager. Try it out if you don’t believe me.

They all know it’s stupid but they dutifully agree because the god king must not be shown to be wrong.

Tell me again it’s not a cult. 

Update:

The brilliant Stonekettle, Jim Wright, goes further, taking us into Godwin territory and with good reason.

There is a scene in The West Wing (and yes, I KNOW it’s a fantasy – that’s why I like it!) where Bartlett and his chief of staff test a new staffer by telling him something they know is untrue to see if he has the courage to speak truth to power and tell the president he is wrong.

The staffer passes the test. Yes, I told you it’s a fantasy.

If the Trump administration had the wit to apply such a test, the staffer would surely have been fired.

This is important because if the administration is filled with people who don’t have the backbone to correct the president about their own frigging shoe size, if they volunteer to invent a bullshit branch of mathematics as justification for their leader pulling a number out of his arse, who is going to tell him that his justification for attacking Iran was a fever dream? Who is going to tell him his tariffs and wars have led to higher prices, not lower? Who is going to tell him the only golden age America is seeing right now is Trump’s ongoing bedazzling of the White House?

It’s not as if this has all started recently. This is the man who told us in 2020 that Covid would disappear like, and this is a direct quote, a miracle. This is the man who suggested disinfectant or ultra violet light could be applied internally to treat Covid. And people still took him seriously.

The difference then was that there were still a few serious people in the US government who were willing to say it straight. That forced him to save face by claiming he was joking. Because a global pandemic is a big joke, isn’t it? I laughed. Did you?

If he did it today, tomorrow he would push Kennedy and Oz up to the podium to give a made up medical reason why injecting Lysol is just fine. And they would do it even though at least one of them knows it’s bullshit.

Despite some recent pushback from his base, there are still more than enough people willing to believe whatever the MAGA king says despite the evidence of their own eyes and lives. If you disagree and present your reasoning, they will just spew out some waffle about the woke left and legacy media.

 

We are not getting close to claiming the president’s Big Beautiful New Suit is invisible to those not smart enough to see it. We’re way beyond it.

If you have to turn off the rational thinking part of your brain in order for your politics to make sense, you’re doing both wrong.

Jim Wright’s comparison with the last days of the führer is a valid one, because those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.  

 

 

 

The line you won’t cross

When the current US president tried to Trumpsplain Catholicism to, um, the Pope(!) I commented on one post that he has officially entered his Henry VIII phase. 

Well, I was wrong.

You see, when Henry VIII had a beef with the Vatican, his response was ‘Fuck you, I’M the Pope now!’

Within hours, Trump has upped the ante to ‘Fuck you, I’m JESUS now!’ 

And to their great credit, his base are not happy about it.

A lot of people who chose to be on the right side of history from the beginning and follow the Jesus parts in the Bible are looking at the blowback from MAGAworld and saying, “Really? Of all the fundamentally un-Christian and blasphemous behaviour, that’s the line you won’t cross?”

It’s a fair comment but I don’t mind. I say it’s okay to do the right thing for the wrong reason. It would be better to do the right thing for the right reason, but so long as you’re doing the right thing, that’s progress and I welcome it.

If Trump has done anything for the world, it’s to show us exactly where everyone’s line in the sand is.

Be it sexual assault, bankrupting businesses, palling around with a known pdf, felony fraud (x34), refusing to accept the results of a free and fair election, inciting his mob to trash the capitol, stealing classified documents, calling journalists enemies of the state, filling the Cabinet with his favourite television personalities, belligerent expansionism, insulting allies, tantrums over bad press, building monuments to himself, hiring untrained goons who shoot citizens in the streets, starting a new foreign regime-change war after running on a platform of exactly not that, higher fuel prices, or sharing A.I. slop portraying himself as a Christ-like figure…

This will be Trump’s true legacy. Everyone alive from 2016 onwards will be partly defined by when and how they realised he’s a second-rate charlatan. Or if they did at all.

This time, it isn’t just a token expression of disapproval. Between this and the war, many of his supporters are openly wondering whether they’ve been conned, and questioning whether they ever should have believed him against all observable reality. This is fine. Some are even wondering if he’s the Anti-Christ.

And there will no doubt be others who see this as the god king’s genius at 40-dimensional chess. For sure, this is all part of the administration flooding the zone because – as I will expand upon in a future post – stupidity is easier to process than evil.

To those who are belatedly realising it, no shame, no judgement. Welcome back to reality.

All I ask is that you learn from this experience and act on what you’ve learnt.

 

And THIS is why you don’t let a 6x bankrupt run a country

 

Think the bankruptcies and the idiocy over attacking Iran aren’t connected?

Well, let’s think it through…

Okay, so the bankruptcies were technically legal and he used the system to his advantage so that makes him smart.

Whatever. That’s not the point.

The point is this is a man who is used to having someone else come in and clean up the mess he’s made while he wipes the slate clean and merrily staggers on to his next inevitable fuckup.

Look at his history. You know it’s true.

In fact, it’s this very appalling lack of consequences for decades of hubristic malfeasance that makes him a hero to many.

Turns out international relations don’t work that way. Who knew?

 

As that well-known anti-American radical leftist Colin “I’m not reading this, it’s bullshit” Powell said, You break it, you own it.

You wouldn’t drive your car into someone’s house and then expect them to fix the damage for you. Mind you, this numb nut possibly would.

My suggestion to the US administration is to take the advice of one of MAGA’s favourite thinkers: Clean your room!

 

How about we stop using soldiers’ lives as a thought experiment?

 

As the second Trump administration did the totally bloody thinkable and started a war with Iran, many are digging up old, and not so old comments from Trump and his cronies about how Obama and then Biden and then Harris were going to [checks notes] start a war with Iran.

The hypocrisy is a given and it will not hurt the administration one bit. They revel in it and their supporters love them for it. That’s not the point.

Ever since Vietnam, war has become an entirely abstract concept to the greater American populace, and to most of the westernised world for that matter. That was the last war where most people had a human connection. Since then, war is just something that happens to other people. Say “God bless our troops,” and you’ve done your bit. Paying taxes to make sure they’re properly equipped and supported if and when they return? That’s communism.

During the last Iraq war (and just think about that opening for a moment), when PBS Newshour showed the names and pictures of those killed in that war at the end of each bulletin, even that was labelled left wing bias. Apparently supporting the troops means keeping them nameless and faceless.

Even the president – any president, with or without appropriate headwear – having a photo-op with a coffin keeps the occupant anonymous. Do you know the name or face of the person in the box the president was saluting? Didn’t think so.

It’s said that the first rule of war is to dehumanise the enemy. It’s easier to kill someone if you don’t think they are a fellow human being who was thrown into this situation through no fault of their own just like you were.

If that’s true, then the second rule of modern war is to dehumanise your own side. It’s easier to get the people at home on board with “Send the Marines,” and “America, Fuck Yeah!” if you treat them as mere equipment, and not actual human beings. And it’s best to let the people think it’s a true volunteer army and not point out the fact that many of them have literally bet their life on a better future because they saw no other way. It’s not conscription if you do it by stealth.

And this is why PBS was accused of bias in honouring the dead. Giving a human face to the people whose lives are wasted in another international pissing contest isn’t good for the polls.

This is also why those who oppose a war with Iran – and up until a week ago, this included all of MAGAworld – invoke “your sons,” just as senior White House Ghoul Stephen Miller did in October 2024.

Predictably, and rightly, opponents of the administration clapped back:

But what do you notice about both sets of comments?

They’re still taking about other people. Whether it’s “your sons,” or “our kids,” they’re still talking about other people. The only difference is one of the appeals to empathy comes from people who are on record saying empathy is a weakness.

None of them have any real skin in the game. They know it won’t be their kids and they’re still using other people’s kids as a tactic, not as real people.

The most offensive aspect of this debate – and it’s a trap anti-war people fall into as well – is treating those who are sent to war as entirely hypothetical, without any agency of their own.

It’s true that soldiers have no agency in what they are sent to do. That’s how the military works. And as mentioned above, many had very little agency in volunteering to sacrifice that agency. But they are real people. They have hopes, and dreams, and they vote.

So if we really care about the lives of those who are sent to war, and those who may be, whether it’s because we want them to win or kept out of harm’s way in the first place, how about we start by not treating them as a mere thought experiment? How about we stop treating an entire generation as an emotional bargaining chip, whatever the objective may be?