What Fresh Hell . . .

So far, 2026 brings to mind Dorothy Parker’s legendary sigh, “What fresh hell is this?” It’s said to have been uttered when her doorbell rang, but it has other uses. Applied to our current year it makes Parker seem a prophet (though her politics and choices of friends tended to be terrible).

Two weeks ago I mentioned that we were half way through the first month of the new year and things were already awful. It’s been a steady stream of fresh hells since then, and the current administration has exacerbated each and every one of them, as we got increasing proof that Donald Trump and his vassals shouldn’t be free to roam the earth, never mind their being in positions of power.

Let’s begin by updating the pressing issues I mentioned week before last.

We started with Venezuela and the president’s sudden lack of interest in stopping the drug trade once he believed he had his short-fingered hands on that country’s oil. He had already betrayed the Venezuelan people — no surprise there — and as late as this week was speaking about his tremendous relationship with the country’s Communist dictatorship. But the dictator there, or acting dictator, or whatever she is, Delcy Rodriguez, said the opposite on Sunday. I do not speak Spanish, but I think her statement ended with something about “the horse he rode in on.”

Trump spoke proudly of a secret (until then) weapon that was used in Venezuela, called the “Discombobulator,” sparking me to wonder if Trump himself had wandered onto the range while it was being tested, in that it is said to scramble the brain. It’s increasingly evident that the current president and his predecessor are both insane.

The president has sold the oil seized from Venezuela, and no one seems to know what happened to the money.

Remember Greenland? Two weeks ago the orange man was going to achieve sovereignty over the world’s largest island “the easy way or the hard way.” Well, that aspiration took typically ridiculous turns, via typically Trumpian excesses. He sent one of his famously discombobulated notes to the prime minister of Norway. It never grows old, it is so unhinged. It began: “Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it's only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.” It should be pointed out that except for Trump’s description of his own feelings about the matter (which itself might not be honest) not a word of the note was true. Not one.

He them went off to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he was utterly upstaged — it is harder to pass under that bar than over it — by Mark Carney, prime minister of Canada, who owes his job to a Trumpian tantrum before last year’s Canadian elections. In Davos, Trump made a fool of himself, speaking before an audience more thoughtful than his usual crowd of professional wrestling fans. It accomplished nothing. Later, he unveiled his “Board of Peace,” a collection mostly of disreputable countries that he thinks will rule the world with himself as its head once he ceases to be president.

Later while in Davos, he had a private meeting with NATO secretary General Mark Rutte, whose diplomacy is not like Trump’s “do what I want or I’ll destroy you.” We cannot know whether Trump actually believed it — as is true of everything he says — but after the meeting he declared victory and went home, having gotten no concessions from anyone and having achieved nothing beyond the developed world getting confirmation yet again that Trump is a fool and a blowhard. He’s not been talking about Greenland lately.

You may not have heard much lately, either, about the Iranian uprising that looked as if it could overthrow the Islamic regime there. There is an update. Trump told the demonstrators to keep at it, that “help is on its way.” So they kept at it, and kept getting murdered by the thousands — between 12,000 and 30,000 of them, we’re told — and if help was ever on its way it took the scenic route, because it never arrived. There is, finally, a naval presence in the area, but it seems as if those trying to get rid of the Ayatollah mistakenly took Trump’s advice and are now dead.

Trump announced that through his efforts nearly 850 Iranians scheduled to be hanged had received reprieves. Who told him? The Ayatollah’s people. it turned out. For a man who has made a career promulgating falsehoods, Trump sure is gullible. The people scheduled for hanging, as well as many more, were executed by other means, such as shooting them to death in their hospital beds. And some of them were just hanged anyway.

As the naval contingent approaches, Trump keeps announcing that the Islamist rulers of Iran “want to male a deal.” On what, exactly? It is obvious — when is it not? — that the whole thing was in Trump’s mind a way for him to present himself as a hero, without facts to support the claim. As with the people of Venezuela, his efforts have not been out of concern for the Iranian people. I suspect that when the smoke — it is smoke? It doesn’t smell like smoke and seems to have come from the seat of his pants — clears, it will have been about oil all along. In the meantime, stay upwind.

The latest bellicose emissions from the president are in keeping with his belief that he can create distractions. You might remember the overwhelmingly approved legislation, signed by Trump, ordering the release of the Epstein papers. A few fluttered out. Then came a series of “discoveries” of millions of “Epstein papers” (perhaps they’re counting the scripts of old “Welcome Back, Kotter” episodes; one of the characters was named Epstein) and no releases since then. I think that Trump hopes you won’t notice.

Likewise, the ban on the Chinese online product TikTok, passed into law, signed by President Biden, and found Constitutionally sound by the Supreme Court before Trump took office. Trump, saying that many young “skulls full of mush,” as Rush Limbaugh used to put it, liked TikTok and voted for him, refused to enforce the ban and instead, employing the only trick in his book, turned the law into a shakedown operation over money but leaving the Chinese in control. The final deal was announced last week. Oddly, by this week the site was reportedly removing videos critical of Trump and his scandals. What a coincidence.

Two weeks ago there was a fuss about a the Trumpian “law enforcement officer” named Jonathan Ross having gunned down a woman in Minneapolis as she sat in her car, killing her. The gunsmoke had barely cleared when, on Saturday, a group of other Customs and Border Protection officers shooting and killing and then shooting some more a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at the local Veterans Administration hospital for the crime of protecting a woman they had attacked.

It is a good thing it’s winter, because the country’s fans won’t be usable until they’ve been thoroughly cleaned. They got contaminated in the aftermath of the shooting.

As expected, the dog-killing Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, like her employees, shot first and asked questions later, and denounced the dead man as a “domestic terrorist” and worse. She said Alex Pretti had used a gun when he attacked government agents. As she made her statements, video on the other side of the screen showed that every word she uttered was a lie, except for the part about Pretti being killed. Soon thereafter, German-army cosplayer and Border Patrol “Commander at Large” — are these guys serious? I mean, beyond killing people? Commander at Large? — Gregory Bovino repeated the same lies, which was kind of nauseatingly funny, in that Bovino looks and sounds like the late comedian Jim Varney.

And of course the assistant White House chief of staff, Dr. Evil lookalike Stephen Miller, came out to say that Pretti had planned to “assassinate” law enforcement officers. (Pretti was legally carrying a pistol and spare magazines, as is common throughout the country. They might as well have accused him of planning to commit rape, in that he was presumably equipped to do that, too.) When the trials come round, as one hopes they do, Noem and the “Commander at Large,” can plead not guilty by reason of rabies, but that’s not available to Miller, who is just a rotten human being.

This was too much for some congressional Republicans. They began to call for investigations and the firing of Noem; they were thrown the demotion and reassignment of the “No-Longer Commander at Large.” Trump announced an “investigation,” corrupt, of course. Trump said it would be “honorable,” a word he apparently just picked up without learning its meaning.

Even ICE agents seen to have had enough, coming down on the CBP street gang like a million-pound hammer. The reporter Ken Klippenstein wrote about his interviews with some of them.

“They paint a picture that is more Police Academy *(or even *Reno 911!) than a Gestapo on the march,” he said.

 ”[T]o a person, they all blame the shooter, one of their own.”

“An ICE agent was even more critical. ‘Yet another “justified” fatal shooting … ten versus one and somehow they couldn’t find a way to subdue the guy or use a less than lethal,’ the agent said. ‘They all carry belts and vests with 9,000 pieces of equipment on them and the best they can do is shoot a guy in the back?’”

Read the whole article.

The videos, which you’re likely to have seen, probably over and over, suggest a mood of “Oh boy! We get to shoot somebody!” — one guy even applauded — rather than serious law enforcement. I think that this may stem from the fact that as CBP agents, they’re accustomed to being border attendants, more like prison guards than police officers. Many have been hired by the triumvirate of malevolent clowns who rushed out with statements. (As did the head of the FBI, Kash Patel, who just wants to get along if it means he gets to have a cool car.)

“‘The brand new agents are idiots,’ an experienced ICE agent assigned to homeland security investigations told me,” continued Klipperstein.

“Even one of the new ICE recruits agreed with the experienced agent’s low assessment of the Trump freshman class. ‘A lot of the guys,’ he said, referring to the new ICE recruits he worked alongside, ‘are honestly pretty sketchy.

“‘I thought federal agents were supposed to be clean cut but some of them pass around a flask as we are watching a suspect,’ observing as well that the new guys ‘have some weird tattoos.’” As I said, read the whole thing.

Oh, and it snowed. Some places got tremendous amounts of snow. Some got tremendous amounts of ice. Here, several inches of snow were adorned with some ice, producing a deathly slippery inch and a half of stuff with the consistency of styrofoam on top.

Fresh hell indeed, in a year growing notable for it.