An Ēostre holydays placeholder...

 

By the time this airs, the pond will be well on the road, and the reptiles at the lizard Oz just a fading memory.

So this is by way of a placeholder, with serious herpetology studies only resuming after the holydays, assuming all goes well on the road ...though to be fair, a visit to the bush is less hazardous than a trip to space, what with the strong chance of Marina Hyde sending spaceniks up shitless in What’s more vacuous than an endless vacuum? It’s Lauren Sánchez and Katy Perry’s party in space or Moira Donegan berating the bubbleheaded boobies in The Blue Origin flight showcased the utter defeat of American feminism. What's a few early morning 'roos up against that pain?

The pond realises that this is a peak time for students of white nationalists. No doubt the bromancer will produce a rapturous account of the rising and the rock rolling and all that stuff (though perhaps without a full explanation of transubstantiation and his devotion to actual physical cannibalism and a vampire-like addiction to blood). Other reptiles will also be in full devotional mode.

Them's the breaks, that's the pond's loss, and in their place all the pond can do is offer a fully radicalised reptile placeholder.

By way of introduction, the pond happened to be catching up on Reckless Effrontery, Barbara Newman's piece in the LRB, a review of a book by Helen Castor, The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (archive link).

Those days being troubled times, much like these in terms of vexatious monarchs of the King Donald kind, it began with an interesting question:

What makes​ a ruler a tyrant? Is it justifiable to depose or even kill one? Medieval political theorists devoted anguished thought to these questions. In the 12th century, John of Salisbury urged tyrannicide as a political duty. ‘Whoever does not prosecute’ a tyrant, he wrote in his Policraticus, ‘transgresses against himself and against the whole body’ of the republic. In 1407 his theory was put to the test when John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, ordered the assassination of his rival Louis of Orléans. He justified the murder as lawful tyrannicide and found a sympathetic theologian, Jean Petit, to support his position. But Petit’s defence infuriated Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, who had his book condemned and publicly burned...

It turned out that caution was needed, because there were worse things in store than book burning ... like banishing, beheading and bloody murder ...

Among the Lords Appellant were Thomas of Woodstock, the earls of Arundel and Warwick, and two younger men, Thomas Mowbray and Henry (then earl of Derby). Their chief targets were Nicholas Brembre, the volatile mayor of London, who had lent money to the king; Robert Tresilian, a biddable judge who had bent the law on Richard’s orders; Alexander Neville, the archbishop of York; Michael de la Pole, the chancellor; and de Vere, whom Richard had recently named marquess of Dublin and duke of Ireland. All five, along with a widening circle of associates, were convicted of treason by Parliament. Brembre, the only one who dared to appear in court and defend himself, was hanged. Tresilian, captured in hiding, suffered the same fate. Neville lost his see but not his life because he was a priest, while de la Pole and de Vere escaped into exile – de Vere after a furtive late-night parting from the king.
Beyond these convictions and executions, the Merciless Parliament required the king to grant all his subjects a general pardon ‘for every kind of treason, insurrection, felony, trespass, conspiracy [and] confederacy’ they had ever committed. Richard complied, with no intention of keeping his word. The Lords and Commons had done everything possible to render their acts irrevocable, while making it clear that they didn’t intend to set a precedent. In the short term, reform had been achieved. But Richard was aggrieved and biding his time. His vengeance came in 1397, when he arranged to have Warwick, Arundel and Woodstock arrested. In his carefully stage-managed Parliament, it was their turn to be convicted as traitors, though without specific charges. Mowbray had by now changed sides, while Henry remained as neutral as he could. Thousands of men-at-arms and archers were recruited for security, or rather intimidation. Arundel was beheaded, Warwick banished to the Isle of Man after a pitiful plea for his life, and Woodstock murdered in prison by Mowbray. The estates of all three were forfeit. The jubilant Richard, who was angling to become Holy Roman Emperor, wrote to the duke of Bavaria in triumph: ‘Future generations ... must learn what it is to offend the royal majesty. For he is a child of death, who offends the king.’

And so on and so it goes and so forth and etc., and the pond isn't sure what fate awaits Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. but he's an early example of railing against the current king and in the WSJ of all places ...

Trump Wants to Be Impeached Again, It’s already in the cards thanks to his ill-founded trade war, no matter how that war plays out. (archive link)

A word of introduction for this wannabe John of Salisbury. 

He's no wild-eyed radical, he's in good standing as a member of the Murdochian flock ...

Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. He writes the twice-weekly “Business World” column that appears on the paper's op-ed page on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
Mr. Jenkins joined the Journal in May 1992 as a writer for the editorial page in New York. In February 1994, he moved to Hong Kong as editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal's editorial page. He returned to the domestic Journal in December 1995 as a member of the paper's editorial board and was based in San Francisco. Mr. Jenkins won a 1997 Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and financial coverage.
Born in Philadelphia, Mr. Jenkins received a bachelor's degree from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University. He was a 1991 journalism fellow at the University of Michigan.

Back in October last year, he was sounding sanguine when assessing the vote in Conservatives Can Be Optimists, Either candidate can be a waystop to policies that will reverse the rot. (archive link)

...The undecideds range from low-participation, low-information voters who find their own lives and pursuits satisfying enough, or challenging enough, not to spare mental resources for politics.

Many (I also find) are highly engaged conservatives agonizing over having to choose. But they don’t have to choose. In perhaps seven states, a voter might conceivably feel an obligation to vote because the outcome is in doubt. To the rest, I say: relax. We’ve been bludgeoned unconscionably but the election isn’t existential. To conservatives, it’s a pretty good year. Kamala Harris is their best possible Democrat—no apparent leadership gene, elevated by accident, dependent on reflexive and droning support from progressives whom 95% of America don’t identify with.
There are many paths to a revived conservative agenda, including tying up President Harris in knots while getting the next GOP generation ready. And if Mr. Trump wins instead, at least the exotically feckless proceedings of the Democrats will have gotten the pasting they deserve.
The big problem for Mr. Trump’s opponents: The electorate didn’t find his four years so bad. Their only rebuttal is the counterfactual. Mr. Trump will be “unbound”—as if political realities, lame-duckness and constitutional limits will stop applying. His aides and department heads will be unwilling to restrain him—as if they fail to notice how six months’ service in his previous administration landed many participants a lifetime of legal bills and social hounding.
But Mr. Trump promises to deport 20 million illegals and the New York Times says this is impractical and unaffordable!
Yes, so you know it won’t happen.
But, says a National Public Radio “investigation,” Mr. Trump “more than 100 times” publicly talked of punishing his enemies!
Saying and doing are antonyms in politics. Joe Biden, except for one carefully deniable leak to the New York Times, never publicly called for prosecutions of Donald Trump—and prosecutions flowed in abundance.
The Biden leak, moreover, has gone missing in all subsequent news accounts, including in the Times itself, which uniformly portray the Trump prosecutions as apolitical and uninfluenced by Mr. Biden.
Mr. Trump can figure out what’s going on here. Why can’t NPR?

It was all so easy then, so easy to figure out what was going on. As a bonus, mock the NY Times. Mock sleepy Joe. Mock Kamallah. Mock NPR ...

Who knows about NPR? 

More to the point, who knows the arcane windmills grinding away in Mr. Jenkins, Jr.'s mind, because fast forward, and here he is wanting to mount a prosecution ...

This week the system worked. Donald Trump blinked. The unwinding is still just beginning. It will be painful and tumultuous. A grief-filled fight lies ahead over whether his trade actions have even been legal and constitutional.
Many slips between cup and lip are to be expected. China and the U.S. are rushing toward an unplanned total stoppage of trade. The bond market is signaling a potentially dangerous combustion with America’s unaddressed fiscal-sustainability challenge.
The courts will come into play, albeit cautiously if judges and justices believe U.S.-China negotiations by then are pointing toward an exit ramp, justifying a bit of presidential leeway for national-security reasons.
A future Trump impeachment seemed all but guaranteed by last Wednesday morning. It seems only slightly less likely now. It may even be desirable to restore America’s standing with creditors and trade partners.
As sacrilegious as the comparison will seem, Mr. Trump faced a problem Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt solved by dying once their greatest achievements were in the bag. Mr. Trump’s great achievement was his 2024 re-election, a rebuke to the injustices and insults meted out to him and his fans since 2016, some of which were even real. However, no consensus or even significant coalition exists for trying to force into existence a new American “golden age” with tariffs, which anyway is like asking a chicken to give birth to a lioness. He invented this mission out of his own confused intuition.
Of the outcomes still in the cards, the least-bad now may be the Trump proposal on which I bestowed a lefthanded Kewpie doll last year: a universal, nondiscriminatory 10% import tax. It faintly resembles a consumption tax (or a carbon tax). If Mr. Trump can then pivot away from his trade-war dysphoria to domestic tax and regulatory reform, his presidency may yet be saved.

The pond sensed that Mr. Jenkins Jr. might be experiencing a touch of the immortal Rowes, and might even be thinking about horse heads ... (well it was a horse head in the film, a real one according to legend, with Coppola allegedly switching out the fake one at the last minute, but here it seems to have grown horns)

Mr Jenkins Jr. did his best to smite and smote others, but still couldn't find a magical efficacy in that bloody head ... 

With floods devastating his northern counties, Kentucky’s Gov. Andy Beshear has been making TV rounds lately. Americans see an attractive and sane Democrat who might have sought and won his party’s nomination in the completely different 2024 election we could have had.
November’s outcome, remember, tells us only how voters reacted to a binary choice. In fact, polls show most voters thought it was a lousy choice. Hence history’s most risible irony: Nobody stands to benefit more now than Joe Biden if the Trump presidency can avoid complete disaster. At least posterity would then have less incentive to dwell on how Joe and Jill threw America under a bus with their craving for a second term.
Historian and author Niall Ferguson this week chose the adjective “full retard” for Trump trade policy. I go with “neurotic” for the word’s wider applicability to any leader who, lacking a clear bead on his times, fabricates a gratuitously ambitious mission to meet his misguided sense of importance.
The phenomenon is more intrinsic to politics than we might think. Vladimir Putin is a current example. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s first-term grand healthcare scheme nearly broke his presidency. What if Roosevelt had been gifted with 83 rather than 63 years? So many elites were subsisting on his coattails practically from birth, the systemic pressure to invent an agenda to justify a fifth, sixth, seventh term would have been immense. Notice how even the desultory Biden crowd still shapes our country’s trajectory with their clinging to office.
Nobody in Mr. Trump’s orbit actually shares his belief in the magical efficacy of tariffs because it makes sense only in a world that doesn’t exist, where other countries don’t retaliate. That’s why you can expect his aides soon to be hinting sotto voce that his China tariffs are really about negotiating “leverage” to pressure Beijing to help out on Ukraine.

The founders never anticipated today’s instantly responsive trillion-dollar financial markets. And yet these markets neatly adumbrate the founders’ scheme of checks and balances, also known as feedback. Mr. Trump, still sane enough to appreciate what’s good for Mr. Trump, listened this week to their feedback. May he continue to do so.
The left’s picture of a proto-dictator never really meshed with his nature as a flighty glutton for attention. Mr. Trump’s politics aren’t poll-based or policy-based. They aren’t strategic. They are ratings-based. From the moment he appeared in 2015, he was a democratic accident waiting to happen for exactly this reason. The wild card that couldn’t be foreseen was the lying, cowardice and self-discrediting of his opponents, especially the press, which afforded him an improbable legitimacy he never would have obtained otherwise.
Might something valuable yet come from this accident? As Zhou Enlai was misunderstood to say about the French Revolution, it’s too soon to tell. Ask me in 150 years.

Cut through all the dissembling and the bulldust devised to produce a fog, and there you have it, from the WSJ no less ...

A future Trump impeachment seemed all but guaranteed by last Wednesday morning. It seems only slightly less likely now. It may even be desirable to restore America’s standing with creditors and trade partners.

Apparently the clueless Mr Jenkins Jr. took a long time to see through the fog ...

The wild card that couldn’t be foreseen was the lying, cowardice and self-discrediting of his opponents, especially the press, which afforded him an improbable legitimacy he never would have obtained otherwise.

According to the credit, this profound insight, that prosecutorial proposal, even made it into the tree killer edition, Appeared in the April 12, 2025, print edition as 'Trump Wants to Be Impeached Again'.

Will it make any difference? Will gormless GOPers suddenly discover a spine? The pond has a useless snowcone, one it recently acquired in Southgate, to sell you, and at a very modest stipend.

Was it just a coincidence that Tom Tomorrow was this week talking of throwing people into the White House Dungeon, or at least getting a dungeon ready?

Sure, they were proposing to lock up the wrong dude, but any talk of locking someone up is surely a good prelude to more specific talk of locking him (King Donald I) up. 

It's surely in the spirit of the possibly desirable impeachment proposed by Mr Jenkins ...