In which the pond again refuses to go there with the lizard Oz ... but does find a distraction in tales from a Washington court ...

 

This is the reason the pond has steered clear of the recent tragedy ...

Such a stupid man, and the pond decided not to link to Miss Lindsey or in any other way help or encourage his attention seeking.

People get hold of something appalling, and somehow contrive to make it worse, just as King Donald did with the death of the Reiners.

Stupid people or stupid bots also contrive to make the worst somehow even worse ...

The pond doesn't need to be there. Better some quiet time, some time away, as people grieve for their losses ...

That's why the pond decided it would take a step back from the reptiles, who were hard at it again today ...

Out of all that, the pond found just one diversion away from the relentless politicisation of a tragedy, as if the original fanaticism of the mass murderers wasn't enough already.

Even more amazingly, the pond happened to agree with the lizard Oz editorialist ...

It's as if Gaza, Ukraine, the planet, had disappeared entirely in a miasma, a fog of war... and note even there how the lizard Oz editorialist elides over the way that King Donald refuses to actually tackle dictator Xi.

But that mention of King Donald, and his minions and their reluctance to criticise Xi did provide an opening for other distractions, helped by Wilcox...

And while it's seasonally too late that gave the pond an excuse to run one of the more bizarre images discovered in the recent Epstein releases...

And in turn that sets the scene for the pond's suggestion for alternative reading ...

It comes as a two parter, courtesy Vanity Fair ...

The first part is here, (*archive link, just in case); the second part is here ... (*archive link)

The posed snap for the second part was as good as the first snap ...

Right from the get go there were juicy bits ...

Most senior White House officials parse their words and speak only on background. But over many on-the-record conversations, Wiles answered almost every question I put to her.
We often spoke on Sundays after church. Wiles, an Episcopalian, calls herself “Catholic lite.” One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington, DC, rental. Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn't have first-hand knowledge.

Surely that will get King Donald agitated, what with him proudly boasting he doesn't drink, but still somehow ending up with an alcoholic's personality.

And there was much talk out of school ...

DAY 74
April 3, 2025
“Long-threatened tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump have plunged the country into trade wars abroad….” —PBS News

The president declared April 2 “Liberation Day,” bragging about billions of dollars that would flow into US coffers from tariffs, refusing to acknowledge that the levies were a tax on consumers.
The question around Wiles’s tenure under Trump has been whether she will do anything to restrain him. A better question: Does she want to?
“So much thinking out loud is what I would call it,” said Wiles of Trump’s chaotic tariff rollout. “There was a huge disagreement over whether [tariffs were] a good idea.” Trump’s advisers were sharply divided, some believing tariffs were a panacea and others predicting disaster. Wiles told them to get with Trump’s program. “I said, ‘This is where we’re going to end up. So figure out how you can work into what he’s already thinking.’ Well, they couldn’t get there.”
Wiles recruited Vance to help tap the brakes. “We told Donald Trump, ‘Hey, let’s not talk about tariffs today. Let’s wait until we have the team in complete unity and then we’ll do it,’ ” she said. But Trump barreled ahead, announcing sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, from 10 to 100 percent—which triggered panic in the bond market and a sell-off of stocks. Trump paused his policy for 90 days, but by that time the president’s helter-skelter levies had given rise to the TACO chant: “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
Wiles believed a middle ground on tariffs would ultimately succeed, she said, “but it’s been more painful than I expected.”
At the time this article went to press, shortly before the December holidays, a Harvard poll showed 56 percent of voters think Trump’s tariff policies have harmed the economy.

And so on, and every so often there were breakouts, with whimsical names ...

That last one is sure to get King Donald going, what with the couch lover being called the "hair apparent", while the couch lover himself might be a tad exercised by Wiles calling him "a conspiracy theorist for a decade."

No wonder the Daily Beast went for the only angle left to it, as it tried to make do with crumbs and fall out ...Moment Trump Goons Realized Vanity Fair Shoot Was Career Suicide (*archive link):

A Trump administration official knew that Vanity Fair’s bombshell profile was unlikely to land well the moment the magazine’s photographer assembled the top brass for the glossy cover shoot.
“We’re all going to get fired for this,” said one of the officials in the group, which included Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Deputy Chiefs of Staff James Blair and Dan Scavino, and Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller.
“Except for me,” replied Vice President JD Vance. “I have 100 percent job security.”
The formal photo, taken by Vanity Fair photographer Christopher Anderson, shows Leavitt, Vance, Rubio, Wiles, Blair, Scavino, and Miller, posed stoically around a table in the Roosevelt Room.
In a piece on how Vanity Fair’s cover photo came together, Global Editorial Director Mark Guiducci detailed how Vance, 41, fired off nervous jokes and insults at the publication and his fellow administration officials throughout the proceedings.
“Is this the part where you say we’re all evil?” he grilled the publication as the officials posed together.
Earlier in the shoot, he joked, “I’ll give you $100 for every person you make look really s---ty compared to me. And $1,000 if it’s Marco.”
The administration’s apparent misgivings about Vanity Fair’s profile proved to be well-founded.
President Donald Trump, accompanied by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (R), speaks in the Oval Office of the White House on February 04, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Wiles said that Trump has "an alcoholic's personality" and was shockingly candid about other administration officials in her interview.
While Vance, Leavitt, Rubio, Blair and Miller made it through the profile without sparking much controversy, Wiles gave shockingly candid interviews about the chaos within the administration.
Wiles, whom Rubio said has an “earned trust” with Trump, said the president has “an alcoholic’s personality," called Vance a “conspiracy theorist,” accused former DOGE head Elon Musk of being an “avowed ketamine [user],” and called Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought a “right-wing zealot.”
Wiles' stunning quotes made her the subject of rumors she's on her way out of the White House.
Wiles, 68, immediately attempted to distance herself from the piece, saying, “The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.”
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team,” she added.
Leavitt stood behind Wiles, saying to the Daily Beast, “President Trump has no greater or more loyal adviser than Susie. The entire administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.”
The piece suddenly made Wiles the center of rumors that she’s on her way out of the White House. Such speculation has also dogged FBI Director Kash Patel, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

That piece by Mark Guiducci, in the form of an "editor's letter", Vanity Fair Goes to the White House: Trump Edition,  is an amusing side piece to the main event (*archive link)"

...Stephen Miller’s gaze is like a laser beam, and his calculated manner of speaking made me think of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. We photographed him in front of a painting of Native Americans: Crossing the River Platte, by Worthington Whittredge.
When it came time for the group portraits, the last-minute inclusion of Dan Scavino brought the team—selected for the photos by Wiles herself—to seven in total. Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried for a little charm: “Double-breasted, peak lapel,” he said, inspecting my suit. “I ­haven’t seen anything like that here.” The others filed in, a bit like nervous schoolchildren. ­Miller balked at the idea of sitting on the end of the table—“not natural,” he declared. There was giggling. A “Blue Steel” joke was made. “We’re all going to get fired for this,” someone cracked. “Except for me,” the vice president said. “I have 100 percent job security.” These people who run the nation—who together are something like Trump’s prefrontal cortex—are, in the end, also just office coworkers.
Christopher started shooting. “Is this the part where you say we’re all evil?” the vice president asked.
Eventually, Wiles’s executive assistant informed us that we would not be allowed to photograph either the “Presidential Walk of Fame” or the Rose Garden, as we’d asked. “Those are very special to the president,” she said. “They’re his spaces.” Actually, I wanted to remind her, they’re not.

The pond likes to imagine the yarn as coming from someone inside the Sun King's palace, or perhaps inside Adolf Hitler's entourage, at the time when the scheming for the Führer's attention was at its peak.

Everybody dined out on it. 

The Graudian madly cherry picked and threw in bonus tidbits in its rolling news coverage...

But surely the King will brood at the attention-seeking ways of his minions and courtiers?

What else?

Well John Dickerson made a note on that other matter in The Atlantic, Trump Widens the Breach, The country mourned a beloved filmmaker. Trump's first instinct was to desecrate. (*archive link)

...When the country confronts something as horrible as the Reiners’ killing, it is destabilizing. When the victim is someone we feel we knew or whose work helped us know ourselves, the moment may be more so. These breaches present leaders with an opportunity to stay quiet. Let the poets and the priests and rabbis take over. Leave room for the fan whose perfect tribute captures the nation. If the leader can’t help but comment, the best they can offer is containment. In crisis psychology, people calm when they sense boundaries around chaos. In today’s world, what that looks like is a leader who acknowledges grief even if it’s not their own, or who affirms that all is not chaos when a major rupture happens.
During a weekend that also included a deadly shooting at Brown University and a massacre at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, the country was already shaken. Containment was needed more than ever.
What was not called for—in the moment, in the psychology handbook, or in the traditions of the American presidency—was Donald Trump’s response.
On Truth Social today, the president mocked Reiner, suggesting that his death was the result of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—a “mind-crippling disease,” he called it, suggesting, obviously without evidence, that Reiner’s criticism of Trump had invited his death. Trump did something worse than mock. He blamed a murdered man for his own murder, while the Reiners’ own son sits in custody on suspicion of killing them. Trump used a family tragedy against a dead man. This was not merely irresponsible, nor simply another example of norm-breaking rhetoric. It actively widened the breach. He didn’t affirm human boundaries; he punctured them to display dominance. Grief became a plaything. Shock became his permission.

Well yes, and over at The New Yorker, David Remnick offered Donald Trump’s Remarks on the Death of Rob Reiner Are Next-Level Degradation; On a weekend of terrible violent events, you would not expect a President of the United States to make matters even worse. But, of course, he did. (*archive link).

In part:

...After a decade of constant presence on the political stage, Trump no longer seems capable of shocking anyone with the brutality of his language or the heedlessness of his behavior. His supporters continue to excuse his insouciant cruelty as “Trump being Trump,” proof of his authenticity. (The antisemitism of Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and a gaggle of group-chatting young Republican leaders is, similarly, included in the “big tent” of MAGA rhetoric.) Now, when a friend begins a conversation with “Did you hear what Trump said today?,” you do your best to dodge the subject. What’s the point? And yet the President really did seem to break through to a new level of degradation this week.
This past weekend brought a terrible and rapid succession of violent events. On Saturday afternoon, in Providence, an unidentified gunman on the Brown University campus shot and killed two students and wounded nine others in the midst of exam period. The killer has yet to be found. On Sunday, in Archer Park, near Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, a father-and-son team, both dressed in black and heavily armed, reportedly took aim at a crowd of Jewish men, women, and children who were celebrating the first night of Hanukkah. At least fifteen people were killed, including an eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor and a ten-year-old girl. The massacre was the latest in a long series of antisemitic incidents in Australia—and beyond.
Finally, on Sunday night, came the news that the actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, had been found dead in their home. Their bodies were discovered by their daughter Romy. Los Angeles police arrested their son, the thirty-two-year-old Nick Reiner. According to press reports, the investigation had focussed on him immediately not only because of his history of drug abuse but also because he had been behaving erratically the night before, in his parents’ presence, at a holiday party at the home of Conan O’Brien. Nick Reiner is being held, without bail, in Los Angeles County jail.
There was something about these three events that came in such rapid succession that it savaged the spirit—the yet-again regularity of American mass shootings, this time in Providence; the stark Jew hatred behind the slaughter in Australia; the sheer sadness of losing such a beloved and decent figure in the popular culture, and his wife, purportedly at the hands of their troubled son. It would be naïve to think that any leader, any clergy, could ease all that pain with a gesture or a speech. Barack Obama speaking and singing “Amazing Grace” from the pulpit in Charleston, South Carolina, or Robert F. Kennedy speaking in Indianapolis on the night of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.—that kind of moral eloquence is somehow beyond our contemporary imaginations and expectations. What you would not expect is for a President of the United States to make matters even worse than they were. But, of course, he did. A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood,” Trump wrote, on Truth Social, on Monday. He went on:

Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.
He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!

There is a lot to unpack here, from the shaky grammar to the decorous use of “passed away” to the all-caps diagnosis to the hideously gleeful sign-off: “rest in peace!” Future Trump scholars will sort through the details with the necessary deliberation. But it requires no deep thinking to assess Trump’s meaning. As if to assure the country that this was no passing case of morning dyspepsia, he declared, at a press conference, later in the day (using the kingly third-person approach) that Reiner “was a deranged person, as far as Trump is concerned.”

And that's where the disunited states have landed ...

Back to Remnick for the closer:

...In the wake of the shocking death of Charlie Kirk, in September, there were many in the President’s circle who were quick to insist on the proper language of tragedy and mourning, and to ostracize those who failed to use it. As a citizen and an ardent liberal, Reiner was a harsh critic of the President; nor did his politics even remotely align with those of Charlie Kirk. Yet, when Reiner was asked about Kirk’s murder, he called it “an absolute horror,” and told Piers Morgan, “That should never happen to anybody. I don’t care what your political beliefs are.” And, when Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, delivered a speech of forgiveness at her husband’s memorial service in Arizona, Reiner was moved. “What she said, to me, was beautiful,” he said. “She forgave his assassin, and I think that is admirable.”
Remember what the President said by way of reply to Erika Kirk’s gesture of Christian love? “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.” And he said this in a eulogy. And so it is worth asking, do you know anyone quite as malevolent? At your place of work? On your campus? A colleague? A teacher? Much less someone whose impulses and furies in no small measure dictate the direction, fate, and temper of the country? Have you ever in your life encountered a character as wretched as Donald Trump? 

And if all that's way too much King Donald and his court, there's always the cracking Crace doing over the Reform mob for The Graudian with Penitent Tice tussles with The Unbearable Lightness of His Being:

Call it a Christmas miracle. For this was the day when Richard Tice sent in his application to become a fully paid-up member of Woke. The day the Reform deputy leader tried to break free from his role as the perennial sidekick. An insignificant blot on the Nigel Farage landscape. When he tried to show he was able to think his own thoughts. Be his own man. Release the closet liberal inside. No longer have to apologise for his existence at the posh dinners he enjoys so much.
Yet Dicky will always be Dicky. Unable to escape The Unbearable Lightness of His Being. When he looks in the mirror, even he has to agree there is less than meets the eye. So it was inevitable he crashed and burned as usual. There are just too many contradictions that he can’t reconcile. A lifetime of trying to be loved has left him unsure of who he really is. A neurotic narcissist with a large ego and next to no self-worth.

And so on, and so to turn to the 'toons for the wrap up, with the infallible Pope suggesting practical ways to help ...

... and the immortal Rowe featuring the heroes that emerges on that insane day ...

There's a little local knowledge in that piece, because the immortal Rowe is tipping the hat to a hero and to Diana Webber's piece outside the Pavilion ...

As for the war on Xmas? The pond might as whistle in the dark, or even more desperate, turn to Seth Myers, mugging in his usual shameless way ...