George Bailey calls Mr. Potter a “warped, frustrated old man” who sees people as cattle, not as humans. Dickens describes Scrooge as a "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner." In movies or real life, such men are always villains, never heroes.

From masked agents rounding up humans with no due process, to sending some of those humans to foreign torture prisons, to refusing release of child sex crime info, to the coverup of illegalities, all under the guise of making America great, it’s hard to know which crime to cover.

The more Trump contorts the truth, the more his devotees must contort themselves to support the contortions.

Whenever Trump’s alternate reality is debunked by actual reality, he simply issues spittle-flecked denouncements of the debunkers. The more truth invades his alternate-reality space, the more he’ll beat back the invader with a false story that he knows many will accept as truth.

Trump exploited the Reiners’ murder to trash them and brag about himself. No warmth, no sympathy, just self-aggrandizement. The hill Trump devotees climb to tout Trump as making America great and restoring Christian values to our country just got even steeper.

Trump is not just the sadly insecure guy who brags about his accomplishments; he makes up things he hasn’t accomplished and brags about them. Sadder still, his devotees then praise him for his lied-about accomplishments, knowing he’ll unmercifully trash them if they don’t.

Trump tonight in PA: "I said, why is it we only take people from sxxt hole countries, right? Why can't we have some people from Norway, Sweden, Denmark… But we always take people from Somalia… places that are a filthy, dirty, disgusting..." Brings back memories of Jim Crow MS.

Two words seem disturbingly descriptive of 2025 America: rationalized cruelty.

Today, some are doing better in the stock market while everyone’s doing worse at the supermarket.

America is becoming less humble & more arrogant, less reflective of traditional morality & more reflective of empire cruelty, less free & more oppressive, less governed by law & more governed by a tyrant’s whims, less committed to truth & more committed to convenient falsehoods.

The MAGA MO: Truth is not important. It’s our ability to propagate a story that sounds like truth that’s important, along with convincing ourselves the story is true.

Trump has no willingness to own a fault, admit an error or acknowledge wrongness about anything. When errors are pointed out, he simply doubles down on his rightness and denigrates the accuser. Like a trapped animal, he’s becoming increasingly vengeful, deranged and vicious.

If Trump were to experience an episode of florid psychosis characterized by paranoid delusions, disorganized thought and speech, and an inability to distinguish between reality and perception, how would we know?

The Trumpian Way: If actual reality is not the one you like, just speak the one you do like into existence, pretend it’s true, never let it go, and trash anyone who questions it.

The surest way to reduce Christianity’s influence is to demand that non-followers follow its principles. The percentage of those identifying as Christian in America has dropped from 78% in 2007 to 62% in 2024. Perhaps Christians should model their faith more and coerce less.

For Trump, the color of the sky is whatever he says it is…today. If you say it’s blue on the day he says it’s green, he’ll unmercifully trash you as a colorblind liar. And he’ll do the same thing the next day when he says it’s orange.

Here's my latest podcast interview with Matt Lewis where we discuss my new book, Ties That Blind. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U2B...

Which is worse? The liar who lies or those choosing to believe whatever he says. I’d say it’s the latter group because the more outrageous the lies, the more his believers must contort themselves to keep on believing.

Those in Trump’s orbit are obligated pretend, not only that he is normal, but that he is America’s greatest president ever, accomplishing what none thought possible. All who refuse to do so are cast as lying, far-left radicals who hate America. Such pretending rots one’s soul.

Effective liars know that since 85% of communication is facial expression and tone of voice with only 15% being attributable to words, they can convince people of their falsehoods while looking and sounding like they’re telling the truth.

Here is the YouTube version of my appearance on Melvin E. Edwards' excellent podcast, Stories from Real Life, that aired earlier this week. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lglm...

My new book has now been released and is available on Amazon! www.amazon.com/Ties-That-Bl...

The best liars sound confident and dogmatic while lying. And the more they believe their own lies, the more confident they sound.

Lying with confident gusto seems to be all the rage these days.

Today, evil masquerades as righteousness & millions believe the ruse. But then, such masquerades are as old as the Bible.

It’s a dangerous thing to convince yourself the lies you tell are true so you’ll feel no shame when you lie.