#TrumpDerangementSyndrome: the left and the media go nuts over bruising on President Trump’s hands

Searching Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — for Trump bruised hand brings up scads of tweets, mostly from our good friends on the left, searching for something, anything! to somehow trash our 47th President. Shredder Girl wrote, “CNN ignored every concern about Joe Biden’s health but they’re all over Trump’s bruised hand”.

Bruising on Trump’s left hand sparks renewed questions about his health

By Adam Cancryn | New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2025

New bruising on Donald Trump’s left hand is reviving questions about his health nearly one year after he became the oldest president to take the oath of office.

Across a series of events last week, the 79-year-old Trump appeared with discoloration or light bruising on the back of his left hand, in addition to the more persistent bruise on his right hand that has been visible for months.

The new bruise appears to complicate the White House’s explanation that the right-handed Trump developed the bruising through constant handshaking along with a regular regimen of aspirin that can make such discoloration more common.

And while medical experts told CNN there is no fresh cause for concern, calling it a likely benign condition common in older people, they warned that Trump’s reluctance to be more transparent about his health only threatens to intensify the scrutiny that he’s struggled all year to escape.

“They’re just feeding the curiosity cycle,” said Dr. Jeffrey Linder, chief of general internal medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “He’s in the public eye, he has a certain image he wants to portray, and even these minor things detract from that image.”

Donald Trump is President of the United States, and the President’s health is always something of a public concern, but somehow, some way, our credentialed media managed to ignore every concern about the health of our 46th President, even as he was tripping on stairs, losing his train of thought, and just plain zoning out in public, right up until they couldn’t hide things any more.

Didn’t President Joe Biden look handsome and strong and healthy there? That’s the image the Democrats and the Biden campaign tried to project, and you were supposed to believe it. The tweet screen captured to the right is time-stamped at 10:53 PM, after the debate.

Jennifer Rubin is the former ‘neoconservative’ columnist and warmonger for The Washington Post, always agitating for more money and weapons to keep the Russo-Ukrainian War going, and completely infected by #TrumpDerangementSyndrome. On May 19, 2024, she wrote:

President Biden took the media and political world by surprise in challenging Donald Trump to two debates — and then swiftly accepting offers from CNN and ABC. Trump accepted the debates, on June 27 and Sept. 10, but whether he will show up is another matter.

Yup, Mr Trump showed up! Oops! Then the whole nation saw what the credentialed media, the ones who tell us All the News That’s Fit to Print, the ones who say that Democracy Dies in Darkness, didn’t previously print, didn’t want to life the darkness.

It’s hardly the first time that the credentialed media stifled any criticisms of a presidential candidate’s health: they covered up for Hillary Clinton as well, her several falls and then her brief lapse into catatonia, minimizing what they couldn’t completely hide.

But, alas! it seems that the media being reticent only applies to Democratic candidates.

Is Mr Trump’s health in question? He is, after all, 79 years old, he’s obese, and he loves his junk food. He has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a common condition among older adults, something which can explain his frequently swollen ankles. But somehow, some way, I don’t see that stuff as being disqualifying for Mr Trump to continue as President. Franklin Roosevelt managed to lead us through World War II when he was mostly dependent upon a wheelchair, and could only walk with heavy metal braces on his legs.

The Democrats thought that Joe Biden could run again, even though he was clearly sinking into dementia, all because they hate Republicans in general, and Mr Trump very, very specifically.

But now the left are fixated on our current President’s ankles and bruised hands.

Nevertheless, at his advanced age, it’s always possible that Mr Trump could fall too ill to do his job, or even die. But that’s where we are fortunate, in that the insipid Mike Pence is not Vice President, and J D Vance is. I suppose it would then be his turn to be ‘literally Hitler.’

Reality bites San Fran Nan!

When Representative Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House of Representatives, she delighted in trying to impeach President Donald Trump, and forced through Articles of Impeachment not once, but twice, including one after he had been defeated for re-election in 2020 and was leaving office, hoping to attaint him from being eligible to run for President again in 2024.

Pelosi suggests Trump has no ‘reason’ to be impeached third time if Democrats retake House

The former House speaker presided over both previous Trump impeachments during his first term

By Lindsay Kornick, Fox News | Tuesday, December 16, 2025 | 6:30 AM EST

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., suggested that there was currently not enough cause to impeach President Donald Trump for a third time.

During an interview with USA Today’s Susan Page released on Saturday, Pelosi was asked whether the Democratic Party should consider impeaching Trump again if they retake the House in 2026.

“The person most responsible for impeaching President Trump when I was speaker was President Trump,” Pelosi began. “He gave us no choice. He crossed the line in his telephone call with President Zelenskyy as one manifestation of his disrespect for the Constitution, his jeopardizing the sanctity of our own elections in our country, and the rest.”

LOL! A telephone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy?

The two impeachments showed how much the lovely Mrs Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats were infected with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome, because they knew the math was against them. And the math is against them now.

There are 33 Senate seats up for election in 2026, 20 of which are held by Republicans; the Democrats currently control 47 seats, including two held by (ostensibly) independents who caucus with the Democrats. An impeachment requires 67 votes to convict and remove from office, meaning that the Democrats would have to win every single Senate race in 2026 to have the votes to remove President Trump. And, even if they did, J D Vance, who they’ll hate just as much, becomes President.

San Fran Nan, who we all thank for becoming a private citizen at the end of this year, called Mr Trump a “rogue President,” and blamed the failed impeachments on a “rogue Senate”. It did not, and never would, occur to her that the impeachments were just the Democrats being stupid.

This time? The left could try to impeach over the President ordering the sinking of Venezuelan drug smugglers boats, but maybe she has figured out that championing drug cartels and smugglers isn’t a winning move. The Democrats could try to impeach based on the President’s aggressive enforcement of our immigration laws, but it wasn’t that long ago that they were telling us that “no one is above the law,” and “no one” would include illegal immigrants. The left could try to impeach him for sending the National Guard to try to reduce crime in some of our waste-case cities, but perhaps she has realized that trying to unseat the President to defend street criminals might not be the look the Democrats want.

But the real reason? For all of the Democrats efforts to trash and take down President Trump, efforts which have extended for nine years now, the American people still chose him to become President again in 2024, in an election in which he carried every seriously contested state, and in which he defeated the Democratic candidate in the popular vote as well as the electoral college. Perhaps, just perhaps, Mrs Pelosi is realizing that President Trump is just stronger than the Democrats!

Democrisy: There’s nothing the Democrats hate more than President Trump actually enforcing the laws

On Wednesday, The Philadelphia Inquirer published a decent article on a wound care clinic in Kensington, the center of the drug trade in the City of Brotherly Love, and how they’ve been struggling with injuries caused by “tranq,” the veterinary tranquilizer xylazine, which was never approved for use in humans, which dealers have been using to ‘cut’ opioids, to give them a longer effect.

Inside a Kensington wound care clinic

Xylazine, which was never approved for human use, has wreaked havoc in Kensington. Amputations among opioid users have more than doubled.

by Aubrey Whelan | Wednesday, November 26, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

In a small clinic room at Mother of Mercy House on Allegheny Avenue in Kensington, Emma Anderson unwrapped a bandage from a man’s swollen hand.

“It hurts really bad in the cold,” the man said, wincing at the inflamed wound that covered most of a right-hand finger.

Cleaning it with saline solution proved so painful that Anderson, an EMT and St. Joseph’s University student, let the patient take the lead, wiping carefully at the yellowish-white tissue at the center of the wound.

It was his second time attending the wound care clinic at Mother of Mercy, the Catholic nonprofit that twice a week opens its doors to people with addiction dealing with the serious skin lesions, caused by the animal tranquilizer xylazine, that can develop into wounds so severe the only treatment is amputation.

There follows a long section telling readers about the work the Mother of Mercy House does, which is not necessary for this article, but I recommend readers to follow the embedded link to read it.

Much further down:

This year, medetomidine, another animal tranquilizer that causes severe withdrawal, has supplanted xylazine’s dominance in the Philadelphia area drug supply. Fewer patients addicted to opioids are visiting emergency rooms with soft-tissue damage, according to city data.

But it’s unknown how medetomidine affects those wounds, and there are still enough people suffering from them in Kensington, the epicenter of the city’s opioid crisis, that the clinic felt it necessary to increase its hours.

One doubts that the move away from xylazine by the drug dealers was meant for altruistic reasons. If medetomidine causes severe drug withdrawals, it would seem to be something to ‘encourage’ junkies to keep buying the junk.

But then there was Friday morning’s lead editorial:

It’s Trump — not service members — who could benefit from a reminder about following the law | Editorial

There’s nothing seditious about Democrats reminding military members not to follow unlawful orders.

by The Editorial Board | Friday, November 28, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

Six lawmakers, including two from Pennsylvania, had good reason to remind military members not to follow unlawful orders, given Donald Trump’s illicit history and recent actions, such as sending federal troops into cities and boat strikes that violate international law.

The six Democrats, who either served in the military or the intelligence community, posted a short video telling their former counterparts that “no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

As William Teach noted, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), one of the six Democrats who made that short video, admitted:

To my knowledge, I am not aware of things that are illegal — but certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes, and everything related to Venezuela.

And even the Editorial Board backtracked somewhat:

For example, the legality of Trump’s boat strikes — which have killed more than 80 people — is dubious.

A secret U.S. Department of Justice memo reportedly blessed the strikes by claiming the U.S. is in an armed conflict with drug cartels. But members of Congress from both parties argue it is illegal to target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat. The United Nations’ human rights chief said the strikes violated international law.

It isn’t sedition for the six Democrats to make a video stating that American servicemen do not have to obey illegal orders, but their intent is clear: they wanted to cause some servicemembers to question orders that Senator Slotkin herself were not illegal. The Editorial Board certainly want you to believe that the strikes are illegal.

So, here we have the very same editors, who have read or should have read the previously cited article about the tremendous damage to which drug smuggling from Venezuela has done to our country. Those editors absolutely know about the devastation in Kensington, yet they are appalled, aghast, and outraged that President Trump is actually trying to do something to halt drug trafficking, just as they have waxed wroth about his efforts to reduce crime and stop illegal immigration and deport the illegals already here.

That President Trump sure is an evil genius! He’s managed to get the left to defend previously deported and returned again illegal immigrants accused of domestic violence, crime in our major cities, illegal immigration, and drug traffickers, all by the same people who told us that “No one is above the law” when the Democrats were trying to throw Mr Trump in jail.

These fine people were demonstrating in support of a government which forced them to flee their home country!

That Donald Trump sure is a malevolent, four-dimensional chess master evil genius. Who would ever have thought that he could get the American left out on the streets, protesting in favor of street crime, of criminal illegal immigrants, and drug dealers? But here we are. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

‘Hands Off Venezuela’ protesters in Philly call for a stop to U.S. aggression amid attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats

The U.S. has been conducting military strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean since September.

by Michelle Myers | Saturday, November 15, 2025 | 4:59 PM EST

More than 60 people gathered on the north side of Philadelphia City Hall Saturday afternoon and then marched through city streets to protest what they called the U.S. war on Venezuela.

“Long live Venezuela, long live the Venezuelan people, enough Yankees, enough, Venezuela will live on,” the protesters chanted.

Well, of course they did!

In response to the newspaper’s advertising of the article on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — George Tausell commented, “Philadelphia doesn’t want any disruption of drugs coming into their city.” The good people of the city, having just re-elected the George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney, Larry Krasner, it seems to me that Mr Tausell’s comment is right on target. We previously reported on Mr Krasner’s displeasure with Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins’ plans to try to clean up Kensington, the infamous Philly neighborhood that’s been destroyed with homeless junkies sleeping in the streets and SEPTA’s Allegheny Station.

The “Hands off Venezuela” demonstration comes two days after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth put a name to the military strikes against suspected drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean that the U.S. has been conducting since September: Operation Southern Spear.

“This mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” Hegseth announced on X. “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood — and we will protect it.”

So, the protesters are appalled that the Trump Administration is trying to reduce the flow of narcotics into our country. Skipping down a couple of paragraphs:

Calling for a diplomatic solution and the respect of Venezuela’s right to self-determination, a coalition of local peace organizations marched in Center City Saturday afternoon to protest the Trump administration’s escalation of military aggression.

“CodePink Greater Philadelphia proudly adds our voice to the call to end the U.S. government’s attempt to meddle in the affairs of yet another sovereign nation, militarily or otherwise,” CodePink Philadelphia organizer Steve Malloy said in a statement.

What “self-determination” by Venezuela does Mr Malloy support? What “affairs of yet another sovereign nation” does he want left alone? The ‘right’ of Venezuelan gangs to ship illegal narcotics to the United States?

A few decades ago, Venezuela was the most prosperous country in South America. Then the ‘Bolivarian Socialist’ Hugo Chavez was elected President, and started destroying everything. Who knows? Perhaps Señor Chavez really believed that socialist bovine feces he spewed, but he, and later his successor — President Chavez died in 2013 following a years-long battle with cancer — Nicolas Maduro have transformed Venezuela from a prosperous, capitalist nation into a militarily-backed authoritarian dictatorship, wracked with poverty. The United States should stay out of Venezuelan affairs to the extent possible, but we do need to defend ourselves from drug shipments, and I have yet to figure out why anyone enjoying the fruits of American freedom and society would be defending the authoritarian dictatorship that Venezuela has become, unless it’s just a reflexive response generated by #TrumpDerangementSyndrome.

Even the Inquirer couldn’t ignore it:

Some of the protesters expressed support for the Venezuelan militia, the very forces that have prompted many Venezuelans to flee the country over the years, and were critical of U.S. capitalism.

These idiots fine people were supporting a regime that forced them to flee their own country! Can someone make sense of that?

Well, fine! ICE should arrest any of the demonstrators who are here illegally, and ship them right back to Venezuela, since they love it so much. Venezuela would doubtlessly refuse to take any of them back, so the US should simply put them on a boat, beach it, and just push them ashore.

Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right

My good friend and occasional blog pinch hitter William Teach noted that Luke Broadwater of The New York Times was apoplectic over the hardball that President Donald Trump played during the Government shutdown:

The government shutdown is already the longest in American history. But it’s also perhaps the most punishing, in part because President Trump has taken actions no previous administration ever took during a shutdown.

Over the past six weeks, the Trump administration cut food stamps for millions of low-income Americans. It tried to fire thousands of government workers and withhold back pay from others, while freezing or canceling money for projects in Democratic-led states. . . . .

But for now, the tactics appear to have worked, after a group of Democrats agreed to support a bill to end the shutdown and drop the concessions their party had demanded.

“Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work,” Senator Angus King, independent of Maine who caucuses with the Democrats, said on MSNBC Monday. “It actually gave him more power.”

We previously reported on how columnist Will Bunch and the liberal denizens of Bluesky were just spittle-flecking mad that the Democrats in the Senate finally caved agreed to end the filibuster, and allow the continuing resolution to fund the government come to a vote.

Well, it wasn’t just Mr Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer, but their Editorial Board as well:

Democrats caved on shutdown as Trump’s indifference to Americans suffering proved stronger | Editorial

The shutdown underscored clear policy differences between the two political parties: Trump and the Republicans do not care about everyday Americans.

by The Editorial Board | Veterans’ Day, November 11, 2025 | 5:01 AM EST

It is easy to say the Democrats blinked and got nothing in return for agreeing to end the historic government shutdown.

On its face, that is true. But Sen. John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat who was one of the eight senators who caved, is wrong to claim the shutdown was a failure.

It’s a bit disingenuous to say that Senator Fetterman “caved,” given that he was a vote to end the filibuster the entire time. However, to my friends at the Inky, any Democrat who does not hate President Trump with a plasma-hot passion is a filthy traitor and despicable human being.

The Democrats were right to make a stand to preserve the Affordable Care Act subsidies to stave off steep increases in health insurance premiums. By refusing to negotiate, President Donald Trump and the Republicans under his thumb showed they do not care about average Americans.

Would it not be just as true that the filibustering Democrats were showing that they do not care about average Americans? Yes, they eventually gave up, but only after forty days and forty nights.

Trump remained unengaged throughout the longest government shutdown ever. Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) abdicated any leadership as he sent the Republican House members home.

LOL! The editorial writer assumes that it was abdication, but it was a smart move. The Speaker largely kept the Representatives out of it, having already done their part by passing and sending the continuing resolution to the Senate. President Trump “remained unengaged,” which gave strength to Senate Republicans to hold firm, and, of course, the President had other jobs to do at the time.

For more than 40 days, Americans were largely left on their own as the government remained closed. The pain rippled across the country, as more than 600,000 federal workers were furloughed, 42 million low-income Americans lost food assistance, and chaos ensued at airports.

The last link notes flight cancellations, but hardly describes “chaos.” As for 600,000+ federal workers being furloughed, that’s a good thing, because we have a roster of 600,000+ federal workers whose positions were not considered essential enough to require them to work on an emergency basis. If they were not essential to work for the past forty days, then their positions are not essential enough to retain at all. With hundreds of thousands, and perhaps two million illegal immigrants having left the country, and their jobs, there ought to be plenty of jobs available for the non-essential federal workers.

There’s a lot more at the original, and almost every paragraph is worthy of challenge, but the reader is supposed to believe that President Trump is an [insert slang term for the anus here], because he doesn’t want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more on welfare. For those of us not on welfare, Mr Trump and the Republicans want to spend less of our taxpayer dollars on the less productive and the welfare malingerers. People who have worked hard all of their lives really do not like being taxed to support people who will not work.

Those of us who voted for Mr Trump knew he is an [insert slang term for the anus here], and, more importantly, we wanted him to be an [insert slang term for the anus here], because being all kind and sweetness and light is a very large part of what has gotten us into this mess in the first place.

I check Bluesky so you don’t have to! Will Bunch waxes wroth that the Democrats have (supposedly) agreed to allow a Senate vote to reopen the government.

The leadership of Hamas kept the futile, and worse than futile, war they started going for two long years, when they had clearly lost in the first few months. They played their only point of leverage, the hostages, for two years, until only twenty were left alive, and multiple thousands of the ‘Palestinians’ they claimed to want to liberate were killed. They lost and lost and lost, and now, with somewhere around a hundred or so Hamas terrorists huddling in one of their reinforced tunnels, with no way out, and no way to get supplies in, they face the choice of starvation or surrender, yet are bravely and boldly resisting emerging and surrendering their weapons.

And so we come to The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard-left columnist Will Bunch, who hates President Trump with a white-hot passion, and is thoroughly consumed by #TrumpDerangementSyndrome, essentially doing the same thing. Oh, nobody is in danger of starving to death like the Hamas rats in the tunnel, due to the government shutdown, but our good friends on the left keep telling us that they will. Now, with an agreement in which the filibustering Senate Democrats finally allow the continuing resolution to come to a vote, and reopen the government, the columnist waxed wroth on Bluesky, skeeting:

Instead of No Kings, I hope the next protest is No Caves that gets 7 million people to surround their offices

Primary every one. No $$$ for them or any committee that funds them. Boo them in airports. Make their existence hell on earth

Hey, I sort of agree: keep SNAP shut down, do not fund Obaminablecare, do everything possible to reduce welfare as much as possible. I’d like to see TSA back to work fully, because my wife and daughters have a pre-Christmas trip to London planned, and I’d hate to see that be a problem, but better that our family ‘suffer’ in that way than we pay out more in welfare and food stamps.

At least as of this writing. 8:30 PM EST, Mr Bunch has not included the same thing on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — but he’s mostly abandoned his Twitter account, preferring the mostly liberal echo chamber to a site where more people will challenge him. I did challenge him on Bluesky, but I’m sure I’ll be one of only few who will.

I will admit to picturing the distinguished columnist typing away in anger at his spittle-flecked keyboard. 🙂

Of course, it’s easy for Mr Bunch to want to continue the shutdown. A long-time columnist for the newspaper, he is doubtlessly paid enough that he doesn’t rely on SNAP to put food on the table, and he was able to help his son Jesse Bunch get a coveted job at the Inquirer. His health care coverage is surely not through Obysmalcare, but the newspaper by which he is employed. If the shutdown continues, Mr Bunch and his son won’t be among those feeling the pain. The most vocal leftists are like that.

Democrisy: the left said that no one is above the law, right up until the law impacted the people they favored.

Our good friends on the left spent much of the Biden Administration years telling us what Senator Dick Durbin did in a tweet pictured to the right, telling us that no one is above the law. Letitia James said the same thing, many times, in her witch hunt against then-former President Trump, yet, today, she’s denying that she has any responsibility as far as her clearly fraudulent mortgage applications are concerned. And one of my favorite columnists, Will Bunch, was appalled, aghast, everything rolled into one that Mr Trump wasn’t thrown in prison and that, upon returning to office, pardoned the January 6th Capitol kerfufflers as well as some police officers, even though the vast majority of them had been punished, having already served their sentences.

Yet somehow, some way, our good friends on the left believe that illegal immigrants are above the law!

How an ICE shake-up will bring Chicago-level terror to Philly

The brutal arrest tactics and stepped-up immigration raids that have roiled Chicago are coming to Philadelphia after an ICE shake-up.

by Will Bunch | Thursday, October 30, 2024 | 1:33 PM EDT

There was sheer terror and panic in the voice of the sobbing woman who dialed 911 in Chicago on the afternoon of Oct. 4. It was a day of utter chaos along Kedzie Street in a heavily Latino neighborhood on the city’s South Side, as federal agents led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brutally arrested brown-skinned residents and clashed with a growing group of protesters.

The woman told the 911 dispatcher that the federal agents swarming her block had just slammed a man to the ground in front of her, according to a recording from the city’s emergency dispatch center obtained by the Talking Points Memo site.

“The agents started beating him up,” the unidentified caller said. “They have rifles and they’re pointing it at people.” She added that the man who was getting pummeled was unarmed, then said, “We have rights, we’re citizens here, please help us.”

If you’ve been following the news out of Chicago this fall, you know this 911 call wasn’t an isolated incident. It’s been about two months since Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced “Operation Midway Blitz” in the nation’s third-largest city, boosted by a Trump-posted meme promising a hellish “Chipocalypse Now.”

We reported, in September, how the columnist lamented that President Trump wasn’t giving Venezuelan drug smugglers a fair chance to escape and deliver their cargoes to our shores. We noted last June that he was cheering on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, even while admitting that he did “find quite troubling the allegations of domestic abuse that caused Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, to briefly seek a protective order.”

Why then is the distinguished Mr Bunch so upset that President Trump is enforcing our immigration laws? Why isn’t he telling us that no one is above the law, including illegal immigrants?

Mr Bunch’s own newspaper reported, last inauguration day, that there were roughly 47,000 “undocumented immigrants,” to use the left’s mealy-mouth whitewashing of the more correct term, illegal immigrants. We did the math, and calculated that slightly over 3% of the city’s population were there illegally. If 47,000 illegals living in the City of Brotherly Love were sent back to their home countries, of left voluntarily, wouldn’t that help alleviate one of the city’s other problems, a lack of affordable housing, with tens of thousands of housing units becoming vacant?

If Mr Bunch specifically, and the newspaper in general, truly believed that no one is above the law, shouldn’t the Inquirer be advocating that the illegal immigrants take advantage of programs to help them return home, or, if being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, comply peacefully?

No one likes being arrested, and criminals frequently resist or try to get away, but most people have little sympathy for an accused thief or rapist or murderer winds up being rather forcibly arrested if he doesn’t simply surrender. Yet Mr Bunch complains that resisting arrest by ICE doesn’t usually work and has sympathy for those roughed up or even injured while resisting arrest.

And America has watched with shock and awe as ICE and Border Patrol agents have racially profiled and body-slammed Latinos, fired tear gas and painful pepper balls at pastors, journalists, and peaceful protesters, and indicted anyone who stands in their way, even a candidate for Congress.

Yeah, that kind of happens when people are trying to obstruct law enforcement agents in the performance of their duty. Violation of Title 18 USC §372, Conspiracy to impede or injure officer, is a federal offense, a felony which carries a sentence of up to six years in prison.

We get it: the curmudgeonly columnist absotively, posilutely hates President Trump, hates him with a white-hot passion, but should that get in the way of Mr Trump doing the right thing and enforcing our laws? Remember: no one is above the law, as our friends on the left have told us time and again, or at least they did so before November 5, 2024.

Shouldn’t a journalist be aware of basic facts?

Did you know that the United States Army, in fact all branches of our Armed Services, has standards for grooming and physical fitness? I knew, but apparently Will Bunch, the far-left columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, does not.

The distinguished Mr Bunch wrote:

Hegseth also declared an end to “fat” generals and overweight troops (apparently the Texas National Guard didn’t get the memo), and, OK, maybe that’s required for certain types of combat soldiers. But the broader message from the Pentagon is clear: that the new regime wants a sea of troops who look alike. Beardless, slimmed down, and, evidently — given the ouster of so many women and Black top commanders — as white and male as possible in 2025 America.

Mr Bunch just doesn’t get it. “(M)aybe that’s required for certain types of combat soldiers”? A clue: every soldier is trained to be a rifleman, and every soldier, male and female alike, is required to perform as a rifleman in combat if the situation arises. My older daughter, a Staff Sergeant in the United States Army Reserve, is still required to pass her Physical Fitness Test and her weapons qualifications, even though her MOS — Military Occupational Specialty — is 12T, Technical Engineer, basically a surveyor. She is required to make weight, as is every soldier, though those soldiers who are more heavily muscled can “make tape,” rather than weight, to prove that they are in good physical shape.

The military also have personal grooming standards. It was only in May of 2021 that the Army authorized females to wear their hair in neat ponytails rather than the older tight buns.

The Army has also long required that soldiers on duty be clean-shaven, though this was sometimes relaxed during combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the necessity of blending in amongst a bearded male population. The Navy allowed well-trimmed beards while Admiral Elmo Zumwalt was Chief of Naval Operations, but that didn’t last much beyond his retirement.

Does the Army want “a sea of troops who look alike”? Yes, of course, because that is part of military good order and discipline. The military have always striven for that, though the poorly informed columnist doesn’t seem to understand that. The US is hardly the only country which does that.

Naturally, he blames President Trump, as he does with all things; the President could walk on water and Mr Bunch would complain that he stomped on the poor little fishies! But it’s also true that Mr Trump selected J D Vance to be his running mate, and shock! Mr Vance wears a beard. Mr Bunch declares that the President wants an America that is lily-white, but Usha Vance, the Vice President’s wife is, yet another shocker, ethnically Indian, what some people would call “brown,” though she’s no darker complected than I get in the summer.

Sadly, when a (purported) journalist is afflicted with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome as badly as Mr Bunch is, checking the facts is not really part of the process.

I check Bluesky so you don’t have to!

Will Bunch, the “national opinion columnist” for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is as thoroughly eaten up with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome as anyone on earth, and his rant this morning on Bluesky — he’s mostly abandoned Twitter — is thoroughly amusing. Mr Bunch is bemoaning “the media’s anemic (or non-) coverage of the massive No Kings movement,” which led me to check his own newspaper’s website. As of 8:11 AM EDT this morning, there were no stories showing up on the website that mentioned or even hinted as coverage of the #NoKings protests.

Even the Inquirer’s Editorial Board had to give President Trump (grudging) credit for the ceasefire and return of the hostages, so perhaps, just perhaps, the No Kings protests, scheduled for this coming Saturday, are not proving to be particularly well-timed. That he’s scheduled to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday to discuss ways to end the 3½-years-long Russo-Ukrainian War means that, despite his earlier failure to get an agreement there — something the left widely mocked — President Trump is still trying to work on a peace agreement there as well.

Can you imagine the apoplexy on the left if he did manage to get such an agreement? Imagine that: the “literally Hitler” demon to the left forging agreements to end two major wars?  🙂

Of course, the No Kings protests last summer were mostly a dud, despite the hype the left gave them, but at least they mostly avoided turning into riots. Perhaps that’s what the organizers think they need to become, to get much attention. William Teach noted that the global warming climate change protesters who have moved beyond peaceable assembly into destroying art and gluing themselves to the road to block traffic are now facing real punishment, so there’s that issue.

3gunGorilla tweeted an exchange from the Dave Ramsey Show:

“So you’re having protests all over the country next weekend?”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re calling them ‘No Kings’ protests?”
“Yes, Dave.”
“But the person who you claim is trying to act like a King isn’t stopping the protests?”
+“Well …”
“And you don’t see the irony?”

‘Nuff said!