RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/donald-trump-show-cassidy-hutchinson/

Since it debuted in 2016, The Donald Trump Show — the televised meta-commentary from hell we’ve all been living in — has been through many reinventions. Its first season was a tautly plotted election thriller that managed to make the impossible seem possible; its middling stretches were a darkly comic take on The West Wing. It even proved later on that it could continue without its main character, introducing a new president, Joe Biden, who ushered in elements of slapstick humor and cringe comedy.

Now, with last night’s episode, The Donald Trump Show has veered into Kiefer Sutherland territory.

The testimony of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson before Congress was one of the program’s most dramatic moments yet. Just when you thought Trump had finally been written out of the script, there he was again, chewing the scenery and possibly drenching it in ketchup. The writers, via Hutchinson, introduced a side of Trump that we’d never seen before, not just chaotic but violent and even dangerous. Per Hutchinson, Trump once slung his lunch at the wall in a fit of rage and tried to choke his own Secret Service agent.

Or did he? This is the great thing about The Donald Trump Show going all the way back to the James Comey arc: it never lets you get too comfortable. No sooner had Hutchinson testified than — plot twist! — a source told reporters that the Secret Service had denied the allegations. The writers have thus put two very different and sympathetic characters on a collision course: the twenty-five-year-old civil servant and the head of the former president’s security detail. One of them has to be lying…or both? With plotting this devilish, who can be sure?

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/hillary-clinton-trashes-clarence-thomas-sotomayor-disagrees/

A few mornings ago, Cockburn caught Hillary Clinton on one of the CBS morning shows. As it turned out, she was on to discuss the recent Dobbs decision, and she had some choice words for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“I went to law school with him,” she said. “He’s been a person of grievance for as long as I’ve known him. Resentment, grievance, anger…women are going to die, Gayle. Women will die.”

Clinton is entitled to her opinion (though who is she to call anyone else resentful?) but her sentiment on Thomas’s statements has been contradicted by none other than Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Thomas’s ideological opposite on the Supreme Court. Here’s what Sotomayor said two weeks ago in a speech to the American Constitution Society:

I suspect I have probably disagreed with him more than with any other justice; that we have not joined each other’s opinion more than anybody else. And yet, Justice Thomas is the one justice in the building that literally knows every employee’s name… He is the first one who will go up to someone when you’re walking with him and say, “is your son okay?” …He is the first one that when my stepfather died, sent me flowers in Florida. He is a man who cares deeply about the court as an institution, about the people who work there, about the people.

The point is that while Sotomayor disagrees with Thomas, she still sees him as a good man doing what he sees as right. And while Thomas has become the mainstream media’s biggest target since his controversial Dobbs opinion, her comments seem far more informed than those of her fellow birthing person.

The question should be asked: who knows Thomas better? Someone who might crossed paths with him at law school decades ago? Or someone who currently works with him every day? Cockburn can only suppose the latter.