Donald Trump cannot respond to "truth" so on national TV Meet the Press he behaved like a spoiled toddler

Echo editorial board opinion published in the Dallas Texas News:

Our expectations for Donald Trump’s sense of decorum have never been high, but even by his standard, he’s outdone himself  by hitting even a new low in his public persona. 

In an interview with NBC journalist Ms. Kristen Welker on Meet the Press that aired June 7, 2026, the Trump managed to distort the facts of record, sling insults and throw a spectacular temper tantrum unfitting of his office.

Much of the first half of the interview danced as reasonably close to the edge of normal as Trump is likely to get, with Ms. Welker pressing the president on the Iran war. As politicians are likely to do, he dodged around and only sometimes answered questions directly, infusing his responses with his trademark, pugnacious style.

As the interview progressed, though, thinks went thoroughly off rail.

Trump defended his 💲1.8 billion slush fund intended to cover legal costs for people deemed victims of "weaponization of lawfare" and said he wanted to get it approved. 

That led to a conversation about rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and whether Trump thought they should be able to get a tax payer funded payout, which he seemed totally open to.

Trump went on to claim how, "People were destroyed by dirty cops and by weaponization. Many of those people should be compensated". 😡

Trump claimed those who pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers only did so because they were frightened into it.

To pretend that the violence at the Capitol was a figment of the national imagination and that those who perpetrated it were, in fact, the real victims, is as insulting as it is insane. Sadly, it's not an unusual line to take in today's GOP (a.k.a. "Growing Old Party").

Later in the interview, Trump claimed the currently ongoing California elections were "rigged". Ms. Welker then asked Trump if he had proof❓ "All I have to do is to look and listen," Trump responded.

It was shortly after that Trump went into his immature temper  tantrum by railing against the "crooked" press and all the negative treatment he gets from it.

Trump went on to make wild claims accusing Ms. Welker's network knows all about the election rigging and he insulted her straight out.

"You're either crooked or stupid," Trump said. 

He cut the interview off shortly thereafter.  In a sarcastic tone, he said "Thank you darling," and walked off the set.  

In delusional Trump's cult world, everyone is wrong if they do not agree with him and corrupt if they do not coddle him. Facts are irrelevant to him, truth is a profanity in his mind and history is how he tells it.

Somehow, we have reached a point where it is not unreasonable to expect a toddler to behave with more decorum than the leader of the free world.  From the Dallas Morning News Editorial Board

Texas echo - all children deserve protection from abuse: Government alert!

In the past 12 months, despite an executive to end the policy allowing the separation of migrant children from their parents, followed by a judicial order to reunify those families, our government has continued to separate and traumatize children.

This echo opinion was published in the Dallas News

You could be forgiven for thinking both orders would have ended the matter. However, that is not the situation for the 5,700 children in Texas shelters.

There were loopholes in the court's decision: Children could still be separated from parents with criminal histories, or considered dangerous to the child, or if they suffered communicable diseases.

All seemingly reasonable stipulations, except that advocacy groups who are face-to face with these families are reporting that the government is exploiting those loopholes. Examples include children taken away from a parent for violations such as driving with an expired license or experiencing a brief hospitalization. They can also be separated from other relatives such as siblings or grandparents. We would never tolerate such flimsy pretenses for taking away children from U.S. citizens.


The result has been more than 700 immigrant families separated after the policy supposedly ended.

The organization I lead, TexProtects, the Texas chapter of Prevent Child Abuse America, makes no claim to immigration policy expertise. We'll leave the crafting of immigration crisis solutions to those who do.

Our expertise is in how to keep children safe from trauma. And make no mistake — being separated from a parent, regardless of the situation, is itself an extreme trauma.

TexProtects works to make families stronger and more resilient, helping prevent crises that lead to child removal. Putting children in foster care must be the measure of last resort. All options for keeping a child safely with his or her parents must be explored before taking the extreme measure of separation.

We've worked to embed this philosophy within our government, gaining lawmakers' support for prevention programs and strengthening family preservation services.

That's why the current policy is unthinkable. We are witnessing the government, rather than protecting children from harm, actually inflicting trauma upon children as an instrument of policy.

The trauma goes beyond taking children away from their parents. Recent news reports have exposed children, including toddlers, warehoused in dangerously unsanitary conditions.

This will not be a minor event in these children's lives.

During the Texas legislative session, TexProtects educated lawmakers across the state about the consequences of adverse childhood experiences — severe events such as mental illness, violence or substance use within the home, an incarcerated caregiver, or abuse or neglect.

Research has shown that, left untreated, people who suffered multiple adverse childhood experiences had, in adulthood, higher rates of disease, disabilities, social and mental health problems including suicides and suicide attempts, depression, a high number of sexual partners, sexually transmitted diseases, obesity, smoking, substance abuse and early death.

Now, we — through our government — are creating more children who, assuming they survive this ordeal, could grow up with such health consequences.

Even if the policy produced the president's desired result of fewer border crossings (it has not, as detentions and migrant deaths have surged again), hurting children would still be unacceptable.

Americans are outraged when parents abuse or neglect children. 

We must be equally outraged when our government does the same.

Sophie Phillips is chief executive of TexProtects.

Existential commentary about truth - an echo essay from Texas

"....truth is an organic need.....both the most human and divine thing about us"....echo opinion published in the Dallas Morning News*

Truth needs another hero like George Orwell

Truth is a writer's first responsibility, to conquer the lie, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said.

Our need of truth is "more sacred than any other need," Simone Weil wrote. 

A compulsion, Aristotle taught, rooted in human nature, our need to hear and know the truth is ineradicable. 

It's why there are lies, because of our desire for truth.

It's why the loss of the arts and crafts of truth (the decay of literature, the demise of journalism) is a grave social problem, even existential, something more than economic, political or cultural. Because truth is an organic need, both the most human and divine thing about us.

The external threats to truth, of course, are familiar: shifting markets, the short-term logic of profit, aesthetic and moral tastes deadened by pop cultures and politicians, themselves merely instruments of profit. These are the tolls taken on our culture's guardians of truth. 

Newspapers, writers, those with public voices have been changed into something else. Most have been refitted to more lucrative business models or perished; survivors have been made into mere cashiers of influence.

Yet, there are dangers to truth that are equally deadly, and maybe more so, insofar as they go unnoticed. Not bias, but something else: it's the self-inflicted, unspoken temptation to write "sentences that sell," as Mark Thompson of The New York Times put it. 

This desire to be liked, to be hired, to be thought sufficiently "woke," is primevally serpentine, the Luciferian desire to shine. 

At the core of our cultural demise lies narcissism, that so many of us are untruthful for likes, for gigs, for ego.

Which is why we who write need a new hero to exemplify truthfulness. We need a hero who shows us how to resist those forces internal and external bidding us to betray truth. A hero like George Orwell, obscure as that may sound. 

After reading again books like 1984 and Animal Farm, I think him now something like a prophet or patron saint, a writer whom every writer should read.

This summer marks 70 years since the publication of 1984. Dorian Lynskey's fascinating new book, The Ministry of Truth, a "biography" of 1984, makes a similar appeal. He says Orwell's classic is a book "we turn to when truth is mutilated." It's a book, he says, "I urge you to read again," because it "continues to define our nightmares."

He's right. In this fake news, Russian-influenced, strangely over-screened world, and before yet another presidential campaign, we should read 1984 and Orwell's other works, because truth was his theme. Born from his experience of the Spanish Civil War, of seeing firsthand the evils of communism and totalitarianism. He saw, too, his confrères on the Left turn a blind eye as blatantly as those on the Right. It's a novel born of what he called the "nightmare feeling caused by the disappearance of objective truth."

It's the nightmare of 1984. In a world of rewritten history, suspicion and hate, the first, most mortal crime is "thoughtcrime," the crime of free thought unsanctioned by the Party. 

Everyone in the book holds everyone else in suspicion, and everyone acquiesces. "Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe," says the character Julia, explaining her charade as a good member of the Party. This is the moral substance of 1984, and of Orwell generally, and it's why the book's still so relevant and Orwell the sort of hero we still need.

Orwell's work underlines what's at stake. "Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death," wrote Winston, the main character, in a diary he thought private and secure. They're words fit for an epitaph, for ours. They show what we lose when we choose ideology, identity, institution, party or political loyalty over truth, especially in a world in which we're afraid we'll be ridiculed and ratioed.

Tribal civil society, fickle corporate mob morality, politics and politicians of misinformation screaming "fake news," dividing the nation to strengthen their base: This is what we've become. Certainly, it's not yet Oceania. We've not yet come to the gray darkness of Airstrip One nor to the terrors of Room 101. Yet we've come too close. The terrors of Orwell's fiction are not fiction. 

We're in danger again, because truth is in danger. And where are the writers, the reporters, the preachers of truth?

It's why those who work in words should read Orwell again. Before history is erased and common sense becomes the heresy of heresies.


*Joshua J. Whitfield is pastoral administrator for St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas. He is a former Anglican minister. He was ordained a Catholic priest through the Pastoral Provision of Pope John Paul II in 2012. Before he became Catholic, he went to seminary in England at the College of the Resurrection. He holds degrees in theology from the University of Leeds and also Duke University. He is also the author of Pilgrim Holiness: Martyrdom as Descriptive Witness(Cascade, 2009). Whitfield is a frequent contributor to the Dallas Morning News.

Money in Right Wing Politics- Like Geiger Counters in a Uranium Field

While Wisconsin voters were inundated with over $30 million to sustain the term of right wing governor Scott Walker, his colleague Governor Romney was raising even more money to win the White House by attending a fund raiser in Texas at the Belo Mansion, a home where paintings created by Adolf Hitler were among the owner's artifacts.
http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2012/06/churchill-roosevelt-and-hitler-oh-my-welcome-to-texas-mitt-romney.html/

But wait, there's more, writes Dallas News Reporter Wayne Slate. 

"Outside, should Romney get an opportunity to wander the grounds, is a garden of tyrants. Crow has collected busts and statues of famous dictators of the past, which he displays with a certain elan on the lawn. There’s a head of Stalin, a rare statue of Fidel Castro, a towering Lenin and various other bad guys expropriated from their countries of origin."

President's Obama's effigy would be on the chopping block, put there by right wing political zealots, if he were the candidate entertained and funded at an event where Adolf Hitler's heinous legacy was portrayed in art.  Obviously, Republicans and many charmed by their right wing messaging, are enchanted by money and the candidates they bribe with their decadently legal campaign contributions.


Let's be honest, Governor Scott Walker didn't retain his seat because he's a strong or even a good politician.  He was propped up by huge amounts of money, out raising Democrats by $30 million reported, to only $3 million in chump change for the challenger Mayor of Milwaukee.  In the corporate world, Governor Walker would have been fired long ago for lack of leadership, destroying his state's morale and dividing his constituency. But right wing money keeps him his job. He was bought at a high end retail price.


So, where does all this money flow from?  Koch Brothers apparently have a cottage industry making funds available to their selected right wing darlings.  
http://www.followthemoney.org/?gclid=CJ6ilKyqubACFbEBQAod7nD46Q

American voters must understand that campaign finance laws are merely sink holes of opportunity for politicians to legally accept bribes.  Our 2012  fall election will be about who has enough money to win votes- it's worse than strong armed dictatorship at polling stations. There's no need to witness brutal beatings of innocent voting victims, because money talks louder and more seductively than any amount of violence to influence voters.


This fall's election for President and US House of Representatives will be more about the political influence of money in our Democracy than about how the economy impacts middle class voters.


On the hypocrisy meter, wealthy magnates who salivate at their political influence like spectators at a carnival peep show, would rather drown politicians in campaign contributions than share their wealth to improve the human condition.  Their hypocrisy meters are chaotic, like Geiger counters in a uranium field.


Like any natural resource, eventually there will be an end to the amount of money people of wealth can muster to pay for their powerful political whims.  All humans, even the Koch Brothers, are mortals who will eventually meet their retribution, regardless of how long it takes for justice to come around to judging them.  Meanwhile, they and their amazingly rich colleagues (and Hitler art collectors) must feel like the bride groom after ingesting an aphrodisiac as a result of the outcome of the Wisconsin recall election - their influence is now the political equivalent of right wing politics on steroids.