This is what it must be like to live in North Korea

Everything is spectacle.

MAGA loves it.

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Somehow, we haven't been told who or how or when , but someone in the White House talked Trump into struggling up the stairs into his big 747 Air Force One that he doesn't like anymore, and going someplace other than the Persian Gulf or Palm Beach Florida. Where did they send him? To Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, about 45 miles south of where I sit writing this, to make a big speech about the economy.

Tracy and I thought, this is curious. I wonder why they're sending him to Mount Pocono? Well, there's a big casino there called Mount Airy Casino Resort, and it's in a part of Pennsylvania that he carried by only one point in the election last year, so you could call it a battleground part of a battleground state, I guess, and I thought, that's the reason. He's going to take his message, whatever it is, out there to the wilds of the Poconos and try it out on the regular people.

But then I saw this photograph, and I knew why he was there. Do you see that big blue curtain behind him? Now look up at the ceiling. He's in an immense hotel ballroom, and they used the curtain to screen off part of it. You can see the lights and ceiling beams going back into the part of the ballroom that he and his crowd aren't using. The curtain hides the part of the ballroom they couldn't find a big enough crowd to fill.

Suzi Wiles, his chief of staff, was reportedly behind the strategy to send him to the Poconos. She didn't want the evil media showing a half-empty basketball arena somewhere in Michigan or Georgia or one of the other battleground states, so they probably looked around for a venue close to Washington - he's been so notoriously reluctant to travel inside the country that it's become a thing that has been reported on - and they wanted a big ballroom they could screen off, so presto! Mount Airy Casino Resort!

We could talk about the speech itself, and we will. But the White House has said that his appearance in Mount Pocono is the first stop on what is being billed as a tour of speeches on the economy, so stage-managing this appearance was especially important. They needed to show an energetic, focused, on-the-ball President Trump, because the last couple of weeks have been filled with photos of him falling asleep during his own cabinet meeting, videos of him dragging his right foot as Melania steered him to his Marine One helicopter as they left to go to Thanksgiving at Mar a Lago, even more photos of him falling asleep, and then a big New York Times story on what we might as well call the Bidenization of Donald Trump: "Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Reality of Aging in Office."

That one stung. Trump went on Truth Social and posted a 500-word unhinged screed filled with ALL CAPS mania in which he called the Times "seditious, perhaps even treasonous," claimed they are "the enemies of the people" (for maybe the 20th time) and said the paper should "cease publication" because of all its crimes against…well, against him, Donald Trump.

That's not all he, or someone who knows his syntax, wrote on Truth Social. "There has never been a President that has worked as hard as me!," Trump claimed right at the top. "My hours are the longest, and my results are among the best!" This from the guy who has spent fully one quarter of his time in office playing golf, who is reported to arrive for work in the White House around noon and only occasionally stay past 5 p.m., and who has spent more and more time planning his big ballroom and redecorating the White House with marble bathrooms and gold gimcrackery on every wall you can see, not to mention the portraits of himself he has ordered hung in every White House room and hallway.

Let's get to his speech in Mount Pocono, shall we? We need to at least give a listen to what he's saying about the economy.

It won't surprise you that Trump told his crowd that it's not his economy. It's Joe Biden's, because 10 months plus after he took the oath of office, after he slapped so much gold on the Oval Office it looks like one of Saddam Hussein's palaces, Joe Biden is still President In His Mind. Listen to this:

"Prices are all coming down. It's been ten months. Absolutely amazing. I go to a big arena, we have 20,000 people, I say, which you like, sleepy Joe or crooked Joe? And I learned, I saved millions of dollars. I don't have to do any polling. Okay. Typically, crooked Joe wins. I'm surprised, because to me he's a sleepy son of a bitch, you know, who destroyed our country—if we didn't come along—and it's not me, it's all of us. If we didn't come along, this country was destroyed."

Stay with me. He's just getting started.

"Democrats in Congress want to take us straight back to the Bidenomics. You know, they don't change and I don't really talk about it because, for instance, I watched a congressman the other day on a television show. They were interviewing a Democrat. He was fighting like hell for men to play in women's sports. Okay? And I was going to put something out. I was going to make a—he's a well-known congressman and I said, you know, let's save it about two weeks before the election, right, David? We don't want to do it now. But what the hell good does it do now? Let's save it for about two weeks because we don't want them to change. Just let them keep going. I think transgender for all is a great, great thing for the Democrats to be talking about. Transgender for every member in your family. If they're not feeling well that night, let's just change their sex. No, let's not talk about it. Let them go and let them fight, fight, fight to get these things. I think open borders are great. You know, where prisons are emptied into our country, right, where we have people from all over the world being dumped into our country, the people that aren't wanted in their countries, by the way. I think that's a great—like Somalia, welcome. Do we have any individuals from Somalia in the group? Please raise your hand. That's from Minnesota. You know? That's called the Great Big Minnesota scam with one of the dumbest governors ever in history. I love this Ilhan Omar, whatever the hell her name is, with the little Ching, the little turban. I love her. She comes in, does nothing but bitch. She's always complaining. She comes from her country where—I mean, it's considered about the worst country in the world, right? They have no military. They have—have no nothing—they have no parliament, they don't know what the hell the word parliament means. They have nothing, they have no police. They police themselves; they kill each other all the time."

"I love it. She comes to our country and she's always complaining about the Constitution allows me to do this. The Constitution—we ought to get her the hell out, she married her brother in order to get in, right? She married her brother. Can you imagine if Donald Trump married his sister? Beautiful, she's a beautiful person. If I married my sister to get my citizenship, do you think I'd last for about two hours, or would it be something less than that? She married her brother to get in, therefore she's here illegally. She should get the hell out, throw her the hell out. She does nothing but complain."

I know he's throwing out red meat for the base, but you can hear it in his voice and see it in his words that he loves saying this stuff. It's who he really is.

Here, for some reason known only to the Man In the Red Tie Down to His Knees, he starts talking about Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury, who is, he tells his audience in the Poconos...

"A very handsome man—that man—by the way, if you're picking the secretary of the treasury, is he like the perfect guy for a movie? He's made for a movie. Stand up, Scott. Look at him. No, he's Central Casting, he's Central Casting. But you don't—under that beautiful exterior is a killer."

Then…he's in the midst of what he calls "The Weave"…he goes back to talking about Ilhan Omar and AOC and telling the crowd how much they hate our country, and they should be "sent back" and "get them the hell out of here," and then…

"And we have a new candidate in the great state of Texas where I won Texas by more votes than anybody. But UK has to—if they don't go back to oil, I think—a lot of bad things are happening to Europe. You know that their immigration policies are so bad. It's so bad, destroying our beautiful Europe. I love Europe. They're destroying Europe, and they better do something. I'll give them just some free advice. I'm more—I'm focused here, but I give them free advice. They better be careful because immigration and energy are going to destroy Europe. But we have Washington, D.C., the safest it's been in 52 years. Think of that. And a year ago, you couldn't walk down a street in Washington, our nation's capital."

And off he goes again, talking about women, and how…

"They're getting just eaten alive. And they're getting beat up by some of the bad people. Women are being raped. Remember, when I started, I said we're going to stop the raping…"

Recent polls have his support for his handling of the economy at 31 percent. You remember the economy, don't you? It was the subject of his speech, before he was talking about how the British have to "go back to oil" and way back when he told them he was going to "stop the raping."

Think about it for a moment. This man is our president. Seventy-seven million of our fellow Americans voted for him. Unless he falls to his knees clutching his chest from some kind of aneurism they're staving off with infusions of whateverthehell into the backs of his hands, we're going to be listening to this verbal disassociation for the next three years.

We're expected to treat this inane insanity like he's making sense. Like it's normal.

He's already got portraits of himself on every vertical surface in the White House. How long until we get in the car and drive down the street headed for the 7-ll in the mini-mall on the corner, and he's staring down at us from a billboard or the side of a building, or God help us, some kind of AI hologram chasing us down the street?

He's building a ballroom bigger than the entire White House. He's got drones over the Caribbean and Pacific firing rockets at wooden boats that have murdered 90 people that we know of. He's got masked men in the streets of American cities American citizens without warrants and throwing them in jails without charges or proof of any wrongdoing until they can get someone to come bail them out with their passports or Real ID driver's licenses.

This is what it must be like to live in North Korea, but the flag out there is the Stars and Stripes.