2 January—Many of Warren Buffett’s words of advice are well worth remembering—not because he’s proven himself an exceptionally successful capitalist, but because they’re common sense. Here are five:

“Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”

“You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”

“Who you associate with is enormously important.”

“Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1.”

“Never bet against America.”

From billionaire capitalist Warren Buffett let’s head left to mere millionaire socialist Bernie Sanders. Bernie’s net worth is in the mid-seven figures, estimated to be between three million and seven million dollars, partly from his government salary and benefits, the rest from honest endeavors like co-writing books and (presumably) sharing royalties.

That’s not bad for a socialist, you reckon. But it’s not really that much these days and in all events it’s far less than most U.S. senators are worth. Moneywise, anyway. And, like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Bernie calls himself a democratic socialist.

If Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani weren’t democratic socialists, you may wonder, what kind of socialists would they be? There is in fact a Democratic Socialists of America party, which Zohran belongs to. But Bernie, steadfastly and creditably independent, although he caucuses with Democrats, belongs to no political party at all. Something to be said for that.

Of course, adding “democratic” to just about any political word makes it more palatable to the great unwashed. (Not that the Jefferson-Madison Democratic-Republican Party—America’s first noteworthy opposition party, against the Adams-Hamilton Federalists, and precursor to the modern Democratic Party—was so named for that reason.) Think democratic police, democratic bigotry, democratic dictatorship, democrat retribution, democratic corruption. Democrat Trumpublicans of America.

The warm and fuzzy form of socialism, of course, is the Utopian variety, with societies based on total equality, shared resources, communal living, and other desiderata that humans have never been able to achieve or maintain. That’s why the cold and prickly form of socialism is the only one that’s ever survived.

That, of course, is communism, Marxism, the culmination of what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called scientific socialism—the classless society and other stuff of pipe dreams. While Karl and Fred regarded police as the tool of the capitalist class, it’s turned out that—in simple terms—the fear of police power has proven itself the only way to maintain communist societies. And reality communism is nothing at all like what Marx and Engels envisioned. That’s because of human nature.

To be sure, fear of consequences is the only way to maintain any social order. Because people, unlike so-called lower animals (including insects), simply aren’t naturally disposed to cooperate with one another. That’s precisely why Utopian socialism has never succeeded.

People expect to get something from government in return for the absolute freedom they give up to live in society. So that’s why democratic socialism, while not labeled as such, prevails to some extent in all societies that haven’t succumbed to communism . . .

1 January—To start the new year as usual, it would appear that the notoriously nonfeasant editors at the Hearst RepublicanAmerican are doing their best to emulate sleepy Donald Trump and his conservative-racist lackeys. Monitor readers may recall that late last month we reported an op-ed column by Andrew Fowler that was bylined and illustrated in the HRA with a picture of Christine Flowers, the error being “clarified,” rather than corrected, a couple of days later.

Well, on the “Opinion” page of Monday’s Hearst RepublicanAmerican there’s a column titled “JD Vance gets America’s creed and heritage right.” The gist of the essay is unimportant. As usual. The byline and picture are of a Roz McCarthy, who evidently writes about education in another Hearst rag in a column called Chalk Talk. But we learn at the bottom of the JD Vance column that it was actually the work of a Daniel McCarthy, who is “the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.” (Ever hear of it?) No “clarification” in today’s HRA. Will there be one tomorrow? (Did Carole King write that?)

So on the “Local News” page of yesterday’s Hearst RepublicanAmerican is a story about yet another Waterbury murder. It must be noted, lest you gloss over it, that it was a gun-free murder. The headline and photo are below. It’s the caption to the photo that’s noteworthy. Normally—pretty nearly invariably, in fact—the positions of people in news photographs are stated in captions: Peter Poofter on the left, for instance, and Luigi Finklestone on the right.

But not in this photo. Why did the (ir)responsible editor or writer who slapdashed the caption omit the position in the photo of Kendren Barnes, the accused murderer? Are readers supposed to assume that the prime suspect, as it were, is the casually dressed guy in the middle of the picture who seems the least concerned? Or that the accused perp is the one not wearing a tie and jacket or uniform? Or simply that the felon is the person who’s not White?

The editorial in yesterday’s Hearst RepublicanAmerican is titled “Notable Quotables: Chronicles of Bias XXXVIII.” No idea where the XXXVIII came from. But the lead paragraph explains that the quotations were chosen by the Media Research Center, founded by L. Brent Bozell III and “dedicated to spotlighting bias in the news media.”

Right. No surprise, then, that the several notable quotables in the editorial—including “Worst Quote of the Year,” “Craziest Analysis Award,” and “Trashing Trump Award”—are all lifted from liberal media. It’s the Hearst RepublicanAmerican, after all, and Brent Bozell and his fellow bias-hounds have never but never in their nearly four-decade existence spotlighted any bias at all in conservative media.

Surely that must be because there is no bias in conservative media . . .

31 December—In most of the world that crosses days off the Gregorian calendar it’s New Year’s Eve. In Scotland and parts of England that border Scotland (Cumbria and Northumberland—the Border Country, as the region is imaginatively called) it’s Hogmanay. The Oxford English Dictionary notes the “obscure history” of the word “Hogmanay,” implicitly favoring a French origin over North Germanic (Old Norse or Anglo-Saxon). And there’s no reason to doubt it.

Nor is there reason to deny that 2025 has been, as the late Queen Elizabeth II called 1992, an “annus horriblis,” a horrible year. 1992 saw a major fire at Windsor Castle, the divorce of QEII’s daughter, the formal separation of her two elder sons, and other succulent tabloid fodder.

If you need reminding why 2025 has been an annus horribilis, just think of two words with a total of 20 letters and then think of three words with a total of 20 letters, the two words defining the three words. It’s obvious even though it’s not.

Relax. Tyrannical philistine defines President Donald Trump. To a bloody tee.

The question, then is, will 2026 be an annus melior—a better year—or an annus etiam peius—an even worse year?

Based on all the small but encouraging Democrat electoral victories [Editorial note: I never thought I’d be writing anything like that.] in 2025, including yesterday’s special election that kept Republicans from reclaiming a veto-proof majority in the Iowa state senate, it’s easy—and wishful—to predict that 2026 will see the further decline and fall of the Trump empire.

But even if Democrats should regain a majority in either congressional house and Republicans wean themselves off Trump’s toxic milk, a lot—perhaps more—depends on the Supreme Court conservative justices’ willingness to rein in the absolute power they heedlessly and foolishly gave a president—any president—in 2024 and, with no substantive exceptions, appear to have have reinforced in 2025.

So let’s hope for a happier new year in which the fortunes and powers and abuses of Donald Trump and all of his flunkies decline . . .

30 December—Legend has it that notorious Emperor Nero instigated the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD and fiddled while the city burned. He probably didn’t do either, although throughout his notorious reign he did effectively fiddle with the Roman economy through classic means like imposing high taxes, devaluing currency, and confiscating property—all of which abuses are still in vogue today in democracies as well as dictatorships.

But it’s pretty well established that Nero seized the opportunity and falsely accused the Christians of being the dastardly arsonists who set the fire and had something like a thousand of them punished accordingly, by crucifixion and other classic means that were also meant to entertain spectators. So you can imagine how disgustingly gory and grisly the tortures and executions were. Suffice to say, the hounds didn’t starve.

Keep in mind, too, that Christians were a distinctly unpopular minority in old Rome because, among other things, they rarely communicated in Latin, refused to worship Roman gods, and understandably practiced their religion rather secretively. And of course Christians back then were still considered to be a Jewish sect—even by themselves. That’s why in Rome’s small Christian community, Latin, which everybody knows is God’s language, was less used than Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

And don’t forget about Jewish lightning. It may have been called something else, but the anti-Jewish thought was there.

So scapegoating the Christian Jews (the original Messianic Jews?) made sense socially and politically, especially for a formerly popular tyrant whose mojo was on the wane. Nero’s first few years on the throne had been a golden age because as Rome’s economy throve he cut taxes, encouraged the arts, secured peace, and executively ordered other popular things to win favor with the great unwashed. Or maybe he was just setting them up.

In all events, as power went to his head, Nero became a stereotypical tyrant, indulging in increasing violence, for instance, and murdering his rivals and even his beloved mother. (It must be noted that Momma Agrippina [the Younger], whom Nero done in at 43, wasn’t noticeably better than her miserable son.) He also indulged in increased extravagance, of course, building all manner of what amounted to unneeded monuments to himself.

Nero lost his marbles along with his mojo—or his mojo along with his marbles. In practical terms he lost popular and political support, as well as the loyalty of the Praetorian Guard, his Secret Service. So he was effectively impeached and convicted by the Senate, declared a public enemy, and condemned to death as punishment for his tyranny, erratic behavior, misfeasance, and malfeasance. That led to his forced suicide at 30, after 14 years on the throne.

That’s three-and-a-half presidential terms . . .

29 December—If you didn’t know, the self-checkout terminals that have proliferated in supermarkets and other retailers of any size are called kiosks. That’s rather stretching the meaning of kiosk, which comes from Turkish and means “pavilion”; these days a kiosk has become a small structure like a phone booth, newsstand, or pissoir. A self-checkout terminal would more accurately be called a station, which comes from Latin meaning “to stand,” because that’s what one does at a self-checkout terminal while self-checking out. But if languages didn’t evolve we’d still be speaking proto-Troglodyte. So, like it or not, a self-checkout station is a kiosk.

Anyway, as I was self-checking out at Litchfield’s little Stop & Shop yesterday I witnessed an incredible event. The person self-checking out at the next kiosk—a complete stranger whom I’d never before seen at Stop & Shop or anywhere else—actually picked up a Hearst Sunday Republican with a cover price of $2.50 and scanned it nonchalantly. I kid you not. Likely an out-of-towner, I reckoned, probably a New Yorker. But why then didn’t he—for the stranger was a man—take a Sunday New York Times? True, that’s even more expensive than the Hearst Sunday Republican, but it’s also a hell of a lot bigger and better. But obviously the stranger didn’t worry about value for money.

Because, without getting into the value of the Hearst Sunday Republican as a newspaper or anything else, the stranger at the next kiosk also bought a little package of firewood for $10.99, a 12-pack of Stella Artois beer for $18.99, and assorted overpriced processed junk-food comestibles, all at full, non-promotional prices, for a total $103.22. (That would keep me going for at least a month, but that’s irrelevant.) I know that because the stranger, who used a cell phone rather than a card to self-check out (something I hadn’t thitherto seen, though I had heard about it), neglected to pull the register receipt out of the dispenser and I’m a nosy bastard. Make that a curious bastard. Nah, back to nosy.

Had the self-checkout computer I was using not failed to reflect the advertised promo on so-called baby-cut carrots, I’d have followed the plutocrat who blew $2.50 for a joke of a newspaper and a fortune on other overpriced junk to see what kind of car he drove and where it was registered. (Not that you can tell anyone’s actual residence since Connecticut’s local property tax on motor vehicles encourages scofflaws.) But I summoned the friendly Stop & Shop attendant and got the two pounds of baby-cut carrots for free, per state law, thus saving the two-dollar promo price, which was $1.49 off the egregious regular price . . .

28 December—Rest in peace, Brigitte Bardot, animal-rights advocate and vegan who actively fought for animal welfare.

And we never thought we’d be congratulating—and thanking—Secretary of Health and Human Services Bobby Kennedy Jr., but congratulations and thanks certainly are in order for the new policy he announced a week ago to phase out animal experimentation. Following an internal directive from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to its scientists to end all monkey research by year’s end, the policy had in fact been reported in “Science” a month ago.

So RFK Jr.’s “deep commitment” to ending animal testing, specifically calls for an end to the importation of monkeys for scientific studies (i.e., experimentation and vivisection) and closure of the seven National Primate Research Centers. Better yet, the primate concentration camps are to be converted to sanctuaries.

Federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, have been directed to “prioritize” animal-free testing methods for chemicals and drugs. Kennedy accurately and positively maintains that non-human animal testing is often ineffective and that modern methods are more accurate in predicting human health outcomes.

Evidently the humane ball finally started rolling in 2022 when Joe Biden signed into law the bipartisan FDA Modernization Act 2.0, which removed the mandatory and outdated animal requirement for preclinical safety testing of new drugs, allowing instead more advanced and effective human-relevant alternatives like computer models and so-called organs-on-chips—microfluidic devices that mimic human organ functions using living cells in microengineered chips that simulate the structure and function of human organs.

It’s only a start, mind you, and for now eliminates the torture and saves the lives mostly of primates—and only those whose fate is federally sponsored and/or funded. But at least it’s a step, however small, in the right direction. Of course, it’s encouraging. So we can only hope it will prove a giant leap for animal rights . . .

27 December—In the quarter-millennium of America’s independence, here’s what some presidents are remembered for:

George Washington: Despite impressive wealth, refused to assume dictatorial or monarchical power; was self-controlled, dignified, modest, reasonable, stable; was admired for his humility.

Thomas Jefferson: Was patient, rational, modest, listened to others; endeavored to limit the scope of federal government; set the precedent of two presidential terms in order to ensure the presidency remained a public service rather than an avenue for lifelong power.

Abraham Lincoln: Was self-deprecating and widely known for his modesty and humility; was guided by public opinion; made it a point not to target political enemies or critics,

Theodore Roosevelt: Despite personal wealth, led a simple life even in the White House; didn’t hesitate to give credit to others; was modest in demeanor; went to pains to rein in big business.

Franklin Roosevelt: Despite personal wealth, was genuinely committed to the common people; based decisions and policies on public input; took advice from advisors; was circumspect in public comment.

John Kennedy: Despite personal wealth, was regarded as “humble at heart” and inspired idealism and public duty; stifled innate autocratic tendencies for the benefit of the nation; despite numerous extramarital sexual dalliances, inspired morality.

Ronald Reagan: Was affable, easy-going, popular even with non-Republicans; operated within constitutional checks and balances with significant bipartisan support in Congress and with the public.

Donald Trump: One picture is worth a thousand words . . .

26 December—Responding to Xmas Eve Eve’s “Donald and the Golden Fleet,” El Liberalissimo opines:

“I don’t know whether to be more aghast at the kleptocracy or the bullying, the servile ass-kissing by those around Trump and most Republicans holding office, or the sheer arrogance of Trump & Co. doing things that should outrage any rational person while they are picking our pockets with big beautiful tariffs, crypto scams, and scummy deals.

“Are there any honest brokers yet who can speak widely across the party divide? The real danger may be Vance—very slick.

“I wonder how these divides are resonating in the classrooms of our public high schools. Or are teachers avoiding the issues that currently divide?”

El is right on the mark about everything in this opinion. Regarding his first question, of course there are honest brokers who can—and do—speak widely across the party divide. But with few exceptions they tend to languish on the sidelines and in the shadows because all but the ballsiest of the critics who speak the truth and media that broadcast it—with some justification—fear reprisal from Donald Trump’s pernicious tyrannical juggernaut.

While the bully Trump and his servile ass-kissers may claim otherwise, he and they will do anything for him to get his way. That’s what dictatorship—tyranny—is all about. We saw that when Trump came to power in his first term and we’re suffering it more draconianly in his second term now that the Supreme Court has made him virtually unpunishable and thus invincible and his Congress has meekly ceded most of its constitutional power to him.

The Constitution and law are mere inconveniences to Trump & Co., after all, bumps in the road to unmitigaged totalitarianism. There appears to be some slight movement among Republicans, including those holding office, as well as the conservative majority of the Supreme Court to rein in Trump’s abuses. Let’s not—for the moment, anyway—speculate on the correction. Let’s just hope it continues and grows.

Let’s also hope that JD Vance is a victim of the correction rather than a beneficiary. El opines that Vance “may be” a real danger. But there’s no “may be” about it. Like Trump and all his ass-kissers, Vance is certainly pernicious. But he’s also insidious. (Most of Trump’s ass-kissers are just servile asses themselves. In the anal sense.)

Consider Julius Caesar’s successor, Octavian, who ruled Rome as Augustus after Caesar was assassinated. Caesar was a power-hungry, ruthless, corrupt, charismatic narcissist. So indeed was Augustus. But he also was more calculating in consolidating his authority and enhancing his absolute power by feigning respect and admiration for tradition and hiding his real malignity. Is that JD Vance or is that JD Vance?

As for teachers avoiding the issues, of course they are. And while some of it may be ascribed to the present Trumpian reign of terror, didn’t school teachers—as opposed to college teachers—make it a point to steer clear of controversy even in the good old days when they weren’t afraid of reprisal?

לעבעדיק ניטל צו אַלע און צו אַלע אַ גוטן טאָג

25 December—Today’s subhead is Yiddish for “Merry Christmas to all and to all a good day.” (Transliterated to English it’s “Lebedik nitl tsu ale aun tsu ale a gutn tog.” Of course, you have to read the Hebrew characters (Yiddish is customarily written with the Hebrew alphabet) from right to left; otherwise, from left to right, it would sound more like “Got nawtig a ala ootz nu ala ootz l’teen keedevel.” And that makes no sense at all. Except, perhaps, to spies and Satanists.

Why the slightly amended Christmas greeting from Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in Yiddish? A classicist, Moore taught Greek and Hebrew and in 1809 had compiled the first Hebrew dictionary in the United States, the groundbreaking two-volume “Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language.” But, as far as we know, he wasn’t acquainted with Yiddish. Incidentally, Moore also was a real estate developer and made a fortune subdividing the property he had inherited that’s now Manhattan’s fashionable Chelsea.

So it’s not generally known—nor publicized for obvious reasons—that the original Santa Claus was a contemporary of Clement Moore’s and was actually born into the Chabad Lubavitch communion of ultra-orthodox Jews in the Old World. So here’s the story. Hark back to the early nineteenth century, to the little town of Lyubavichi, which is now in Russia, just a few decades after Chabad Lubavitch had been founded there. (Chasidic sects are generally named after the towns where they originated. Chabad is an acronym for the Hebrew words for wisdom, understanding, and knowledge. Right.)

Shmuel (Shmoyel to his neighbors) Claustein was born into a formerly progressive Jewish family (known to orthodox Jews as goyim) that had recently converted to the new Lubavitcher communion. Frum is the Yiddish word for pious and observant—and Shmuel was what’s known as a frummer’s frummer, the frummest of the frum.

For instance, Shmuel never shaved or trimmed his sidelocks (known as payis or, more fashionably these days, payot) because Leviticus 19:27 told him (in Hebrew, of course, as confirmed by Clement Moore), “Thou shalt not round off the side-growth on thine head, or destroy the side-growth of thy beard.” Moreover, Shmuel was in all ways a good person. He was totally honest, virtuous, incorruptible, upstanding, not a goniff. Nor was he a sanctimonious hypocrite. Yet he was ostracized, excommunicated, and exiled by Chabad Lubavitch. Go figure.

Two centuries ago, believe it or not, Jews weren’t particularly welcome anywhere. So where could poor exiled Shmuel go? He was what Thomas Jefferson (whom Clement Moore didn’t approve of) would have called a Yid without a shtetl, had he known about Shmuel Claustein.

As a condition of his kangaroo excommunication, Shmuel was required by the unrelenting Lyubavichi authorities to change his legal name to Samuel. Naturally casual and informal, he preferred to be called Sammy.

So it happened that the first stagecoach out of Lyubavichi after the excommunication ceremony (essentially a reverse bar mitzvah; luckily for Sammy, it wasn’t an epispasm—reverse circumcision) was going almost due north to Lapland. Quite a shlep. So with the money he was able to squeeze out of his hard-pressed parents (who had so many children to support they could have been Catholics, except that Jews are allowed to enjoy sex), newly minted Samuel—rather, Sammy—Claustein booked a business-class seat on the stagecoach to Lapland. And it turned out to be worth the shlep.

Because when he finally got to Lapland, right around the Arctic Circle, Sammy found that the people living there were called Sámi, so he felt right at home from the get-go. Better yet, the Sámi had nothing against Jews. Doubtless because they didn’t even know that Jews existed.

The Sámi tended to be short of stature, were handy and honest and undemanding, didn’t belong to labor unions, and raised reindeer. So Sammy even had a convenient source of kosher venison. Too bad he was a vegetarian. But what more could a young entrepreneur ask for? So, with minor modifications to his name for PR purposes and a little fiddling with inconsequential facts, Sammy founded the business that still thrives after two centuries. It’s incorporated all over the world as Bupkes (Inc, Ltd, Plc, GmbH, SA, etc., depending on the country) but is popularly known as Santa Claus. Bupkes Inc’s NYSE symbol is SACL, by the way.

As for the white beard, Santa Claus, as Sammy Claustein christened himself in the early days of Bupkes, still faithfully followed Leviticus 19:27 and only strategically trimmed his whiskers and never seriously shaved. (There’s something to be said for never shaving. You can trust The Monitor on that. Too.) In his youth, Shmuel’s hair had been red and you don’t want to know what he was called. But by the time cameras were being used for commercial illustration, Santa Claus was what the Sámi called an alte cocker (senior citizen) with snow-white hair.

Remaining an ultra-frum Chasid at heart (just as Henry VIII remained a theological Catholic), Santa Claus still dressed in a modified Chasidic manner, with fur-trimmed schmatas, as you can see below. His uniform (because it wasn’t a costume) became red only after SC’s long-awaited (by his many children) death at 102, which was about the time Thomas Nast was drawing his political cartoons. And, as attentive Monitor readers know, it’s Nast who gave Santa Claus his red suit. By that time, of course, Santa had immigrated to America and was living in Litchfield, where, like the Sámi, the residents didn’t know he was you know what . . .

24 December—While every day is Christmas for Elon Musk (if not for the people who work for him), does he call the holiday Christmas or Xmas—Exmas?

Despite what some Utopians and saintly souls might tell you or even (want to) believe, Christmas/Xmas is all about one thing: Christmas presents. After all, why should Christmas/Xmas be different from most other religious, pseudo-religious, quasi-religious, and tangentially religious holidays? Materialism is where it’s at.

That’s why people make such a big deal of giving just the right gifts. Receiving gifts—preferably just the right ones—is also a big deal, to be sure, but to keep up appearances people try publicly to minimize its importance to themselves. Given natural human greed, it’s clearly better to receive than to give—but never to admit it.

That’s why capitalism succeeds and socialism invariably fails.

Is it really the thought that counts? If that were so, material gifts wouldn’t need to be exchanged; good wishes would do the job admirably. Of course, most good wishes are exchanged merely as a matter of course and courtesy, with very little actual feeling or even thought behind the de rigueur exchanges. When you “Merry Christmas” someone in passing, do you really think about it?

Although few admit it, everybody knows it’s the gift that counts. Perhaps it’s guilt—deserved or undeserved as the case may be—that motivates gift givers to want gift receivers to know—or believe—the givers put some thought and effort into their largess. That’s why givers don’t like to give cash and checks or gift certificates and cards. It’s one reason, anyway, another being that givers don’t want receivers to know how little the often unwanted and useless gifts actually cost.

Still another rationale for giving material gifts is that exchanging or returning merchandise is a pain in the ass, so if the giftees don’t go to the trouble they’re stuck with the crap to remember the gifters by. Unless, of course, the giftees regift. Who hasn’t done that? And a gift regifted to the gifter really makes a statement.

And Christ’s birth wasn’t migrated to the popular pagan winter-solstice holiday that included gifting until the fourth century, anyway. So Merry Exmas and good luck tomorrow . . .

23 December—The latest sign of Donald Trump’s incipient senile dementia is manifest in what he’s calling the golden fleet of advanced warships. “As commander in chief,” he blathered yesterday at his Florida glitz palace, “it’s my great honor to announce that I have approved a plan for the Navy to begin the construction of two brand-new, very large—largest we’ve ever built—battleships.” Let’s put aside Trump’s auromania—his unhealthy obsession with gold—and focus on his customary hyperbole and battleships.

Hyperbole is a function of Trump’s narcissism and mendacity, to be sure, but it’s also a function of his intransigent ignorance. As the old guy with fading mojo announced, the fabulous new Trump-class battleships will be displacing from 30,000 to 40,000 tons. But have any of his flunkies bothered to tell him that the USS Missouri, which is now a permanently-docked museum ship in Pearl Harbor, displaces 58,000 tons? So there goes the Trump-class superlative for starters.

(Yes, Trump juxtaposed with class is unfathomable as well as offensive. But don’t blame us.)

For the record, the Missouri is the third largest battleship ever built and one of the few not to have been sunk in combat. Japan built the biggest battleships for World War II, the 63,000-ton Musashi and the 65,000-ton Yamato, and both were sunk by American airplanes.

Britain built 47,000-ton HMS Hood (technically a battlecruiser, less heavily armored and armed than a battleship) during the Great War, and it was sunk by the Nazis in May 1941’s Battle of Denmark Strait. 44,000-ton HMS Prince of Wales was sunk by the Japs six months later, three days after they’d attacked Pearl Harbor. 42,000-ton HMS King George V (KGV) made it through World War II and was scrapped in 1957.

Hitler’s 42,000-ton Bismarck was sunk by KGV and the British fleet after doing in HMS Hood but no other ships in the Denmark Strait. Hitler’s 43,000-ton Tirpitz was sunk by Royal Air Force bombers in 1944.

So why does belligerent, bellicose Donald Trump want new battleships when their main advantage is to the enemy—their obvious vulnerability? That’s easy. First and foremost, Trump likes the idea of a class of warships named after him, even if he does it himself. (Couldn’t he get a flunky to do it—at least for public perception? Nah, not Trump.) Of course, if any of these sitting ducks ever get built, it’s to be hoped a Democrat president would rename the class. If Trump can do it, why not? And detrumpify everything else that has been and will be desecrated and disgraced by him while he’s allowed to do it.

Trump wants the first Trump-class battleship to be called the USS Defiance. That’s doubtless to commemorate his flagrant defiance of the law, humanity, common decency, and taste.

Getting past the ego-trip, then, it’s evident Trump has been told that modern battleships are absolutely necessary to prosecute his illegal genocidal war on little boats alleged but never proved to be running drugs and his ludicrous piracy of oil tankers—and likely other pelagic commerce he’ll plunder when it suits his unhinged fancy . . .