Trump Has Resorted to Openly Mocking His Supporters. So Why the Hell Do They Still Back Him?

10 min readOut on the Weekend(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog's Favourite Living Canadian.)I will grant you that the president commanding his audience to pledge their allegiance to him (and him alone) was surpassingly strange. But I can't take it for anything unusual for the members of the cult. Instead, and I swear to Baal that I believe this to be true, it was what passes for a joke from this president. Because he has a strong sociopathic streak, any attempts he makes at humor must involve inflicting some sort of cruelty toward a victim. (Ken Paxton seems to be the designated heavy bag for the duration.) So, by exhorting the crowd to join in his silly call-and-response exercise, I believe not only was he mocking them in the depths of his black heart, but he was getting them to mock themselves by looking ridiculous to that small slice of the country that was watching this whole mess.(And, not for nothing, Politico has a nice compendium of GOP slanders from the two-day pig pile.)Instead, Republicans have sought to tie Democratic candidates in competitive races to the progressive figures leading the farthest edge of the party’s left flank, while framing their candidates as defenders against a “radical” party. “If they win, the greatest legislative body in history will, for the first time ever, be controlled by a communist caucus,” President Donald Trump told the crowd Wednesday, his first of two headline speeches. “This is about common sense versus crazy,” North Carolina GOP Senate nominee Michael Whatley said in an interview, using the same phrase as numerous other Republican leaders, including National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson (R-N.C.),Speaker Mike Johnson and Vice President JD Vance. “These people are sick,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) said of Democrats from the podium. This midterm, we face the most dangerous, radical and frankly weird Democrat candidates in American history,” said Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee.And to think, a bunch of consultants talked Tim Walz out of calling Republicans "weird" just when that was beginning to bite.)Of all the senators likely to send The New York Times Scandal Alarm into the red zone, Kansas Senator Roger Marshall would be at or near the bottom of the list. A licensed physician, Marshall's career fairly defined nondescript, until this week, when the NYT teed him up as the warden of his own personal debtors prison.It was Easter weekend in 2007 when a police car pulled up to Joe Vasquez’s home in rural Kansas. A doctor had filed a lawsuit against him and his wife over an unpaid $4,561 bill from her emergency hysterectomy three years earlier. They had missed a court date, and the doctor’s lawyers asked the court to issue an arrest warrant. The police took the couple into custody as their grandchildren prepared for an egg hunt, Mr. Vasquez said. They spent two days in jail before their son could borrow the money to post bond.“We had no money to pay,” said Mr. Vasquez, now 68. At the time, his wife was working at a manufacturing plant and he was on disability, he said. The doctor who sued the couple was Roger Marshall, now a senator from Kansas. Mr. Marshall, a Republican who is seeking re-election this fall, filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, according to a New York Times analysis of Kansas court records.Patients were arrested in 81 of those cases for missing court dates, the records show. In an additional 13 lawsuits, Mr. Marshall’s lawyers sought warrants but it is unclear whether an arrest occurred. They also garnished patients’ paychecks and bank accounts. They routinely charged patients an 18 percent annual interest rate. The unpaid bills ranged from several thousand dollars to as little as $101. About half the lawsuits were filed under Mr. Marshall’s name and the rest by Heartland Regional OBGYN, the medical practice he solely owned from 1998 to 2012 and then co-owned with another doctor from 2013 to 2019.The American health-care system, if you haven't noticed, completely blows goats. One of the ways it does so is by leaving itself open to profiteering.Court records show that Mr. Marshall’s lawyers repeatedly requested arrest warrants, including in Mr. Vasquez’s case. They filed dozens of briefs arguing that warrants were needed because of the defendant’s “refusal to obey Court orders.” Steven Johnson, a lawyer who often represented Mr. Marshall in debt cases, defended the warrants and ensuing arrests as necessary to ensure that debtors attended court dates. “If defendants were allowed to appear only when they wanted to without any consequences the court would get no business done,” he wrote in a text message.He said that Mr. Marshall was “no different” than his other clients in allowing his law firm to take the steps it felt were necessary to pursue an outstanding bill. As a client, Mr. Marshall was not involved in decisions about when to seek warrants, arrests or garnishments, Mr. Johnson said, but did set the 18 percent interest rate in a contract he had patients sign. Mr. Marshall’s office did not respond to a question from The Times about who set the interest rate.Suddenly, in a state that hasn't sent a Democrat to the Senate since half-past never, Roberts is in trouble against Democratic candidate Adam Hamilton, a Methodist minister. Not only did the Times fall on his head, but his campaign produced a map of the state in which there weren't the full 105 counties, and some of the ones that were included on the map were in the wrong place. Then, the president declared a trade war against Bombardier, a Canadian aerospace company that employs 1,200 people in Kansas. The race is sliding toward a toss-up in the tout sheets. And there now exists at least a respectable longshot chance that Kansas will elect its first Democratic senator since 1932.Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: "Sugar In My Soul" (Mia Borders): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1920, "Professor" Albert Kemp plays piano for 105 consecutive hours. Apparently, an apple and a vigorous scalp massage were vital parts of the enterprise. Kemp was the musician who accompanied the silent movies in a theater in Croydon. Inside Croydon has the rest of the story.This was no easy task. After playing for 50 hours, Kemp’s fingers began to swell. During the Thursday night his left hand ring finger became so painful that his wedding ring had to be cut off. This was successfully done “without either hand leaving the keyboard”, wrote one reporter, who described Kemp as “the demon pianist.” At one point on the Thursday, Kemp began to doze, but a facial massage revived him. Friday evening was proving a real challenge as his stamina began to fail. His friends gave him milk and fish for nourishment, smelling salts to stimulate him and sprayed the piano keys with methylated spirits so his sweaty fingers didn’t stick to them.Kemp was washed and shaved and had his hair shampooed while he was playing. He also showed the large audience in the cinema how he could exercise his legs and lungs, said a report, without taking his hands off the keyboard.On the Saturday morning, at around 8am, Kemp began to experience some strange sensations. He’d by now been playing for 95 hours, with the record within his grasp. But he was sleep-deprived and close to exhaustion. “All of a sudden,” Kemp said, “things about me began to seem different, as if I was in some other place. I thought it was a loss of memory and I played mechanically. This queer feeling lasted for a half-an- hour. But it seemed like a year.”Kemp tossed the record back and forth with another pianist, a New Zealander named Albert Steele, who eventually won that competition in 1930. The current record is 130 hours, set in 2022 by Thurzo Zoltan of Romania. History is so cool.On Thursday night, vice-president J. Divan Vance delivered a rancid, racist address bristling with rancid, racist tropes—most notably, the idea that the country is now “dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous” because of the swarthy types who come here and eat our cats and dogs. None of those three things are true, especially the safety part, according to the statistics on homicides and other violent crimes. Nevertheless, much of the elite political media seems quite ready to soft-pedal the Replicant's vicious rhetoric and cast him as this cycle's Reasonable Republican. (All of those stories leaked out about Vance's doubts about the Iran adventure are likely no coincidence, either.) That's going to be my primary takeaway from the two days of depressing calumny in Dallas—watch out for the rehabilitation of J. Divan Vance, and remember how many people loved him when his trash-panda of a book came out.Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From the Montana Free Press: Just try to follow Scott Dersam as he talks breathlessly, at hyperspeed, about his prehistoric discoveries after a couple beers at 9,500 feet in the Beartooth Mountains. It’s hard to keep up.What Dersam means is this:We’re visiting one of several sites he’s unearthed that could shake up our understanding of both the human and geologic history of the whole region. Testing reveals the dirt he’s telling me about was exposed to sun at a time when the entire area should have been covered in a massive glacier. And he says along with that ancient soil, he’s found the highest- and potentially oldest-known human habitation sites anywhere in North America; maybe the Western Hemisphere. His findings suggest that humans lived here at least 13,000 years ago in a high-alpine ecosystem that prevailing knowledge says people couldn’t have accessed at all.“We could have the oldest Clovis sites in North America here and it happens to be in a place that shouldn’t exist in an ecosystem that shouldn’t exist,” he says. “It’s more than a monkey wrench to the current paradigm. It’s a full kick to the chest.”The Clovis people were the earliest inhabitants of this continent to have left consistent evidence of a culture, but this is the first time they've ever been discovered at altitude. (They got their name from the first site that was discovered, near Clovis, on the plains of New Mexico.) So they got around, they did.Hey, NPR, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!You know, you find your revelations where you find them.In 2016, David DeMar was doing field work in the rocky badlands of Montana in what's known as the Hell Creek Formation. "We all get down on our hands and knees," he recalls. "And I start crawling up the hill and I noticed this little dark, round object on the ground. It was kind of odd." DeMar, a lab manager at the Burke Museum in Seattle, picked up the cherry-sized fossil."I start looking at the surface of it," he says. "And then I rolled it over and I was like, 'You got to be kidding me.'" Embedded in a small crack on the surface was a tiny fossilized branching structure. As it turned out, this was the first fossilized feather from this part of the world. In addition, "it is, without a doubt, the best feather we've ever found from the age of dinosaurs," says Jingmai O'Connor, a bird expert and an associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.The round object that the feather was sitting in turned out to be a chunk of coprolite—that is, fossilized feces—produced by a large meat-eating dinosaur. "So I would argue that Tyrannosaurus rex or Nanotyrannus are the more likely candidates," says O'Connor. (This coprolite had actually broken off from a few larger, softball-sized pieces where additional clues may later be found.) The team CT-scanned the small coprolite and found it contained still other feathers, a couple of bone fragments, and two tiny fish scales. After studying the feathers and bones, O'Connor concluded they likely came from the same animal adapted to life in the water.Dino dung is regularly sold as a kind of semi-precious stone all over the Intertoobz. Bracelets. Earrings. Necklaces. And it's always been valued by scientists because of discoveries like that feather, which makes the scientists happy now.I'll be back on Tuesday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and any New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for all the victims of our current epidemics, includling the killer countertops, and for the victims of the horrific glacial collapse and flood in Nepal, and for Rep. Max Miller's wife and child, and for the Iranian people, and the Lebanese people and all the other people downrange in our newest war, and all the people in ICE detention, and the Epstein victims, whose trauma is back in the news again, and Eric Swalwell's victims,and the victims of the storms in Hawaii, and the victims of the Canadian wildfires, and also the ones in Spain, and the victims of the floods in Missouri, and the victims of the heat domes, and those affected around the world by wildfires, and the victims of the Venezuelan earthguake, and for the victims of the earthquake in Japan, and the victims and their families in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada, and for the shooting victims in Austin, and for the families of the victims of the mosque shooting in San Diego, and in Michigan, and in Virginia, and in Louisiana, and for the victims and their families of the shootings in Wilmington, Delaware and Kansas City, and for the families and victims of the mass shooting in Midland, Texas, and for the brilliant journalists of the Washington Post, and for the citizens of the occupied city of Minneapolis and South Burlington, Vermont, and for all the people and the people in the flooded areas of southern Africa, and in the flooded areas in Ireland, and in the flooded areas of Brazil, and for the storm-clobbered, flooded areas of the upper Midwest, including my alma mater, and in Georgia, and for the people affected by the tornados in Mississippi, and for people suffering from the hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius, the outbreaks of measles, the Hegseth Flu down in Texas, the explosive diarrhea bug, and the Legionnaire's disease outbreak in Harlem, and the victims of the heat wave in Europe, and for our LGBTQ+ citizens, who deserve so much more from this country than they're getting.