He catastrophizes everything

My Sunday viewing was the first two episodes of season three of Young Royals. I watched season 1 almost two years ago and season 2 sixteen months ago. But season three just dropped – yeah, I’ve been watching for it and saw the release date announced a few weeks ago. When I wrote about the first two seasons I didn’t say much to avoid spoilers. Enough of that. So if you haven’t seen the earlier seasons (and I recommend you do) you might want to skip to the next topic and come back after 9 hours of viewing. As for these summaries of the earlier seasons, it’s been a while since I watched them. Hours of viewing will be compressed to a few paragraphs. Young Royals is the story of Prince Wilhelm of Sweden. In the first series he was sent off to boarding school at Hillerska. There he would have cousin August to watch over him. I see now when the series started that I though August was in his third (and last) year, but he’s still there in season 3, so they must be the same age. Which implies August was an excellent leader to get to be the rowing captain in his first year – or August was too useful an antagonist to be left out of the third season. In that first season Wilhelm falls in love with Simon, a commoner also attending the school. Wilhelm and Simon are making out as August records them through the window. August releases the video and Wilhelm has to deny his love. In season two Wilhelm is feeling a bit rebellious and gets into trouble. He and August play mind games with each other. August’s girlfriend figures out he made the video. August convinces a classmate to take the fall. But there is a showdown. At the end of the school year Wilhelm is to give a speech and he scraps the text supplied by the palace and admits that he was in the video with Simon. On to season three, episodes 1 and 2. It is now a couple months before graduation. Wilhelm and Simon can be open about their relationship, but there is now a great deal of scrutiny and paparazzi. Other students, ones who aren’t friends with Wilhelm, start spreading stories about some of the salacious parties and rituals at the school, which the paparazzi lap up. Most aren’t true. The students are given a curfew, including no cell phone use except an hour after dinner. Since Wilhelm lives at the school and Simon doesn’t they chafe at so little time together. At a social gathering towards the end of episode 2 one of Simon’s friends talks about his summer job. Wilhelm makes a social blunder by saying he will also have a summer job. Simon is annoyed because Wilhelm will be an adult and that job is a course in how to be a prince and assume royal duties. Simon accuses Wilhelm of being clueless about the privilege he has. That got me wondering whether the palace will require Simon to take lessons on how to be a proper prince consort. It would lessen the chance of Simon making inappropriate social media posts. In England did Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle take lessons on how to be wives of princes? Many times when Simon talks to his mother the show doesn’t dub their words into English, instead switches to subtitles. This has happened through the series. I realized why: They’re not speaking Swedish, they’re speaking his mother’s native language (which I don’t recognize). I’m pretty sure Simon’s dad is Swedish and it looks like his mother is an immigrant. The prince falling in love with an immigrant’s son is another dimension to the story. I reread what I wrote about seasons 1 and 2. At the end of season 1 I said I’d watch season 2, but probably not season 3. And here I am watching season 3 and will finish it. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data today. The website says March 12 was the last day the website would be updated with COVID cases and deaths, though the data would stay around. So the graph my program drew is based on data a week old. I’m disappointed the data won’t be updated because the graph shows COVID isn’t gone. Just three weeks ago the number of new cases per day almost hit one thousand. That number has dropped since then but just a few days before the data ended it was at 325 cases per day. That’s much better than the 1845 cases per day hit at the end of December, but about twice the rate of early last July. The number of deaths per day has been under ten since late January. Hunter of Daily Kos reported the nasty guy doesn’t have and can’t get the money to pay the $454 million fine in his civil fraud judgment. He wants to appeal the ruling but he must post a bond for the full amount before he can file the appeal. And he can’t find any company willing to issue that bond. Many legally can’t issue a bond that big. Others won’t accept real estate as collateral. By telling the court that getting such a bond is “not possible” is humiliating for a supposed billionaire.

What's clear, though, is that no one appears willing to risk losing a half billion dollars for the sake of propping up Donald Trump. It's not just that Trump's countless lies about his supposed assets make it risky to do business with him; Trump's currently running for president again, and this time around he and his subordinates are making it clear that they intend a far more radical, fascist, and authoritarian-minded Trump administration this time around. If Trump does retake the presidency, what are the odds that both his administration and a compliant Republican Congress will simply void all his debts and tell his creditors to pound sand? Not small. And certainly not small enough that anyone is willing to take the risk.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos added:

As The New Republic's Timothy Noah told Greg Sargent on his new Daily Blast podcast, "Trump is broke, on the verge of bankruptcy, and he's running for president. It's a situation just ripe for corruption." The presidency, should Trump win it, is effectively up for sale to the highest bidder. But Trump's personal financial issues are just the tip of the iceberg for the man who just last week secured enough delegates to be the 2024 Republican nominee for president.

Eleveld explained the financial issues: Small donors to his campaign are donating much less. The big Republican donors switched from supporting Haley to supporting Republican candidates for Congress. Though the nasty guy has taken over the Republican National Committee, it is also essentially broke (that takeover is why big donors are supporting candidates directly). And Liz Cheney tweeted “Donors better beware.” Topping it off is the Republican party feud between the establishment members and the Freedom Caucus. Eleveld reported on the news that’s getting a lot of airtime. In a rally the nasty guy said, “Now if I don’t get elected, ... it's going to be a bloodbath for the country.” The rest of Eleveld’s post is a variety of ways, most of them good, various media are reporting on those words. There is some room for interpretation because the nasty guy said them as he was discussing the auto industry. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a couple good quotes on that statement. First, a tweet from Brian Schatz:

Headline writers: Don’t outsmart yourself. Just do “Trump Promises Bloodbath if he Doesn’t Win Election.”

And from a thread by George Conway:

I’m willing to assume for the sake of argument that he was referring to cars. And it makes no difference to his malicious intent or to the danger he and his rhetoric poses. What matters is that he consistently uses apocalyptic and violent language in an indiscriminate fashion as a result of his psychopathy and correlative authoritarian tendencies, and because he’s just plain evil. It’s a classic trait and technique of authoritarian demagogues. He catastrophizes *everything* to rile up his cultish supporters, and to bind them to him, and to make them willing to do his bidding

In another pundit roundup Chitown Kev quoted Renée Graham of the Boston Globe:

There are few among us who don’t know how it feels to be the butt of a joke. At some point in our lives, we’ve probably been the person being laughed at instead of being someone in on the joke and chuckling with the crowd. That includes Trump’s supporters. But with their always aggrieved state of mind, they have anointed Trump as a strongman who allows them to belittle those they see as their lessers. To paraphrase the great Toni Morrison, they can only feel tall when someone else has been knocked to their knees. For them, Trump’s enemies are their enemies and those people deserve nothing but public derision. Of course like all bullies who are, in fact, weak and insecure, Trump can’t take what he so readily dishes out.

Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed the nasty guy’s vow to release the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and why that is bad.

Dictatorships tend to consolidate their power very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that a population may not fully comprehend the magnitude of what has happened to their society. This “shock and awe” is employed to underscore—as immediately as possible—the dictator’s power and to intimidate opposition by convincing people to believe that opposition is futile. In the United States, Donald Trump has freely acknowledged his intent to become a dictator on “Day One” if he is reelected.

Unlike the nasty guy’s other indictments, the on on inciting the Capitol attack is a “shocking, visual, public record of the actual, real-world consequences of his behavior.” That’s why Republicans are trying to recharacterize the attack. And a pardon would demonstrate the nasty guy’s power and rebuke the justice system that has indicted him. But the abuse of that pardon has big implications. A pardon would repudiate the prosecutors, judges, and juries that convicted the attackers and that said what they did deserved punishment. That’s a massive slap in the face of the American criminal justice system. The nasty guy would appoint himself judge and jury. It would legitimize political violence because attackers know those in power will protect them, leading to increased domestic terrorism. It would also be a slap in the face of the police who were protecting the Capitol that day. A third slap is directed at citizens who expect the law to be carried out fairly. Finally, the insurrection leadership, the guys that got the longest sentences, would be eager to resume their roles, now emboldened by the nasty guy.