when it happens

I do not have a link for this post below. Found it on the net. Rick Wilson was theorizing on what might happen when Trump finally does shake off this (ugly bag of mostly water) mortal coil. And there will be rejoicing and dancing in the streets. But then we will still have JDV to deal with, and we know he's had the backing of Project 2025.

And he WILL die and when that happens the beans will be spilled by those who were afraid to say anything. It’ll be WAY worse than anyone imagines. Watch.

Following the brief online speculation that President Donald Trump had suffered a medical emergency, or even died, conservative strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project Rick Wilson laid out what a post-Trump world may look like, and what revelations would follow, in a column published Wednesday.

“When Donald Trump dies, the myth will begin to decay almost instantly; his cult will keep the flame alive for a while, but the records will outlive the rally faithful,” Wilson wrote on his Substack “Against All Enemies."

“History will not remember him as a king, or a savior. History will remember him as a small, ugly, sick man who happened to seize great power, who wielded it recklessly, and who left behind a trail of destruction, corruption and cowardice unmatched in American history.”

Sticking with Trump’s health, Wilson predicted that following Trump’s passing, a trove of documents related to his physical and mental condition would be unearthed, documents that would reveal that his “cardiac and mental decline was charted in careful, hidden memos.”

Wilson also anticipated that revelations around the president’s ties with Jeffrey Epstein – the convicted sex offender who died in 2019 awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges – would come to light, and made several startling predictions about who in Trump’s cabinet may be held to account for potentially covering up those ties.

“Epstein’s web of power, blackmail, and sexual exploitation reached deep into America’s elite, and we’ll learn Trump was in the thick of it,” Wilson wrote. “The [Justice Department’s] illegal Epstein coverup and corrupt pardon of Ghislaine Maxwell will unravel, and by the end, [Attorney General] Pam Bondi, [Deputy Attorney General] Todd Blanche, [FBI Director] Kash Patel, and [FBI Deputy Director] Dan Bongino will be in prison.”

Details on Trump’s business dealings, many of which have enriched the president to the tune of billions of dollars, would also be laid to bare following his passing, Wilson noted, details that he argued history would not look well upon.

“The Trumpcoin scams, the garbage social media platform, the grifty deals with foreign powers, the bribes for pardons…all of it will be seen for what it is; a criminal enterprise, a mobster bustout of an entire nation,” Wilson wrote.

“History will learn about the shell companies, the overseas accounts, the backroom deals where American policy was auctioned off like a Mar-a-Lago dinner table.”

Ultimately, Wilson argued that through the wave of revelations following the president’s passing, a clear picture of Trump would be painted: that of someone whose “only interest was control.”

Robert Reich

For being such a small guy, Robert Reich has always had some big ideas. He has been a professor at Brandeis University and UC-Berkeley, a writer of several books and has worked in the administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. He gets around.

The sleeping giant is awakening

After a week of authoritarian excess, the nation is turning on Trump

ROBERT REICH

SEP 23, 2025

Friends,

I can’t tell you exactly how I know, but after 60 years in and around politics I’ve developed a sixth sense, and my sixth sense tells me the tide is now turning on Trump. 

This past week did it. 

On Monday, he sued the Times in a lawsuit that, as CNN put it, read “like a pro-Trump op-ed, with page after page of gushing praise for the president.” 

On Tuesday, he accused reporter Jonathan Karl and his employer, ABC News, of engaging in hate speech against him and warned that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, might go after them. 

On Wednesday, after Brendan Carr, his lapdog chair of the FCC, pressured ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel, he claimed that Kimmel being “CANCELLED” was “Great News for America” and urged NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers next. 

On Thursday, he said broadcast networks have been mean to him and that Brendan Carr might have to start taking their licenses away. “When you have a network and you have evening shows, and all they do is hit Trump,” he said, “they’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that. They’re an arm of the Democrat Party.”

On Friday, he suggested that negative coverage about him is “really illegal.” Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office he said: “They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal,” adding, “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.”

On Saturday, he demanded that Bondi prosecute several of his political rivals even though grand juries and federal prosecutors couldn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing. He demanded that she do it “NOW!!!” 

On Sunday, at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, he said that he disagreed with Kirk’s supposed leniency toward his ideological foes, adding: “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.” 

You could almost feel the great sleeping giant of America open an eye and frown, then blink both eyes and sit up and stretch, and then roar, “What the hell is going on here?”

Immediately after Kimmel’s suspension, Disney viewers and customers began to cancel their subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu and threaten a broader consumer boycott.

According to Strength in Numbers, the Disney boycott quickly became four times as large as any boycott over the last five years.

Disney’s stock dipped about 3.5 percent and continued to trade lower in subsequent days — a loss in market value amounting to some $4 billion.

Even Ted Cruz — Ted Cruz! — began issuing grave warnings about censorship. 

By then the giant was roaring and stomping. 

By Monday, Disney decided to put Kimmel back on the air. 

Trump’s poll numbers were dipping even before last week’s explosion of authoritarianism. Now they’re in free fall. 

I’m old enough to have witnessed the great sleeping giant of America awaken before. 

Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt destroyed countless careers before the giant roared: “Have you no sense of decency?” 

McCarthy melted almost as quickly as the Wicked Witch of the West. His national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censored by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of 48. 

The giant roared again a decade later, after television showed civil rights marchers getting clobbered by white supremacists. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. 

It roared again after tens of thousands of young Americans were killed in the jungles of Vietnam, finally bringing to an end one of the nation’s costliest, deadliest, and stupidest wars. 

It roared again at Richard Nixon after Nixon was heard on tape plotting the cover-up of Watergate — then being forced to exit the White House by helicopter on his way back to California. 

It is starting to roar again now — at the sociopathic occupant of the Oval Office who won’t tolerate criticism, who in one wild week revealed his utter contempt for the freedom of Americans to criticize him, to write or speak negatively about him, even to joke about him. 

Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I’ve seen a lot. I know the signs. The sleeping giant always remains asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some action so disrespectful of the common good, some brutality so noisy, that he has no choice but to awaken. 

And when he does, the good sense of the American people causes him to put an end to whatever it was that awakened him.

Original.

Seth Andrews

I love Seth. He is an ex-evangelical who has turned atheist and now runs "The Thinking Atheist" site. Seth had a few words about Charlie Kirk, natch.

The Charlie Kirk Question No One is Asking

It's a difficult point, but it must be made.

SETH ANDREWS

SEP 22, 2025

We all knew that the Ministry of Truth would build a political rally on Charlie Kirk’s grave, so no one was surprised that a racist, sexist, right-wing podcaster was sent off like he was Ghandi. Approximately 63,000 people filled State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, with tens of thousands of others outside.

Cretins like Donald Trump Jr., Stephen Miller, and Benny Johnson took a few moments away from Paul-Pelosi-murdered-with-a-hammer jokes and “woke libs” demonization to wax about Kirk’s noble life and legacy. Of course, Donald Trump can’t even crawl a High Road, so he tossed in a lovely sentiment about the hate in his heart for all perceived enemies.

And, joy of joys, I awoke this morning to learn that Oklahoma state senators have introduced a bill requiring all state colleges to erect and protect Charlie Kirk statues on their campuses. Make no mistake. This isn’t about memory. It’s about marking territory.

None of this is a surprise. We knew Charlie Kirk’s horrible murder would gift a holy war narrative to the zealots and oligarchs, but there’s a question nobody is asking, so fine…I’ll ask it.

Was a lethal bullet to the throat Jesus’s method for calling Charlie Kirk home, or did Jesus simply sit back and allow an “evil murderer” [Erika Kirk’s words] to assassinate a child and champion spreading God’s message on the world stage?

It can’t be both. It can’t be part of a divine plan AND be the act of an evil agent shredding that plan…unless that plan was written so that Charlie Kirk’s murder was a foregone conclusion, which would make the Christian god guilty of premeditated infanticide. A god drew the blueprint for his child’s public execution.

Much of Christian destiny preaching is self-cancelling:

1. 1. A horror takes place.

2. 2. God has a plan. His will be done.

3. 3. But the plan can be derailed. Because evil.

4. 4. Yet God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God…

5. 5. As Satan steals, kills, and destroys the good things God has planned.

   
   

I asked a hard question this week after Grammy-winning songwriter Brett James was horribly killed in a North Carolina plane crash. Yet even as his loved ones grieve his loss and the rest of us lament a precious life cut short, we cannot ignore the irony that James penned the Carrie Underwood hit song, “Jesus Take the Wheel.”

At some point, the question must be asked. If Jesus had indeed been at the wheel, why did the plane splinter and leave three passengers dead?

The term “platitude” has an interesting etymology. It borrows from the French compound of “plat” (flat) and “tude” (ness). The 1694 definition is: the quality of banality. Yet fundie Christianity has adorned itself in banal, flat, empty-calorie platitudes like “Jesus Take the Wheel,” “God’s Will Be Done,” and “Everything Happens for a Reason”…unless the Reason was derailed because of those Evil Woke Libs who must be defeated!

Yet even if the shooter identified as a liberal, did that alleged Devil on Earth foil God’s plan or fulfill it? 

I’m reminded of the biblical Judas, the apostle loathed and lamented for the heinous betrayal that resulted in Jesus’s crucifixion. Yet crucifixion was always the plan, so how could Judas have been at fault? From birth, he was a dead man walking. Predestined. Doomed. God’s plan needed someone to appear to foil God’s plan in a deed that was both dastardly and destined.

Silly Putty apologetics are certainly nothing new to the church, and you and I will always get blasted for asking hard questions in the wake of tragedy. Yet if we waited for moments of convenience, nothing would ever get said. 

So I’m saying it. Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a horrifying and unconscionable act, and his killer must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but those claiming that either Jesus guided the bullet or failed to deflect it are shouting red-flag statements that make God either inept, unwilling, or guilty of premeditated murder.

Original.