30 August—After reading yesterday’s daily disquisition, a reader we’ll call El Conservatissimo (to spare him embarrassment) emailed from his iPhone: “Mordy you are so sick with Trump derangement syndrome that now you call his cabinet members Russian comisars in stead of the Nazis you use to call them. Why can’t you be honest and admit that president Trump is doing a great job to make America great again.”

Well, for starters, he’s not doing anything at all to make America great again. In fact, everything Trump is doing is having just the opposite effect. Notwithstanding Ronald Reagan’s clever 1980 campaign slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again” (merely intended to knock Jimmy Carter’s administration), there’s never been any doubt about America’s overwhelming greatness. Until Donald Trump and his singularly inept, corrupt, dysfunctional administration.

So I’ll ask El Conservatissimo, why can’t he see the light and admit—make that realize—that Donald Trump is the very worst president this nation has ever suffered? In addition to the first totally self-serving autocrat. And I’ll leave it at that. For now, anyway. But I appreciate El’s interest.

In other Trump-related news, yesterday’s Mallard Fillmore comic strip had Mallard commenting: “Marjorie Taylor Greene is so unhappy with Republicans that she’s threatening to leave the party . . . And in related news, the tambourine player in my nephew’s garage band is threatening to go solo.”

Cute. In actual fact, however, according to less comic-stripical sources, Georgia termagant Marj merely told an interviewer that she felt the Republican party had “lost touch with its base” but she had no plans to quit and become an independent or join or form a third party. “No,” she insisted, “I’m urging my own party to support ‘America first.’”

But just what did Marj, a Trump loyalist and mighty MAGA momma, mean by support America and that the GOP had lost touch with its base? Could she possibly have been alluding to the days when the Republicans were the good guys? Nah, not Marj. For now, anyway.

And Marj’s tangential allusion to a third party that she’d never consider brings to mind Elon Musk’s America Party. What could have happened to it? Remember when it was in the headlines just last month? And a hope for the Democrats that it might split the Republicans? Well, evidently the America Party is now a was because Elon needs to get back to his businesses so that he can become the world’s first trillionaire.

Elon has a long way to go (but don’t doubt that he’ll do it), because at the moment his net worth is only something like $420 billion. So it appears that filthy lucre means more to him than his adopted country. Then again, why should he be any different from all the other cryptocrats and oligarchs?