Monday
Trump’s cabinet picks have been compared to a “battalion of bozos” (Jimmy Kimmel), “beyond insane” (Rep. Jim McGovern), “feral lunatics” (the American Prospect) and “the bar in Star Wars” (everyone). This week, joining a lineup that, until he dropped out on Thursday, included alleged sex offender Matt Gaetz for attorney general, alleged sex offender RFK Jr for health secretary, and alleged sex offender Pete Hegseth at defence, came two further picks that are unlikely to calm America’s nerves: for education secretary, Linda McMahon, a sometime educator with more years in the saddle as chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment. And the TV doctor and promoter of crank weightloss products Mehmet “Dr” Oz to head up Medicare and Medicaid.
One result of these choices, which have yet to be confirmed by the Senate, is to throw other, more moderate Republicans into a flattering light. The nomination by Trump of a suddenly very reasonable and well-qualified Marco Rubio for secretary of state is one such example, but it goes back further than that. In 2016, Trump nominated Betsy DeVos for education secretary, an appointment considered so flagrantly ill-advised – DeVos, a rightwing billionaire and proponent of redirecting money from public to charter schools under the auspices of choice – that she almost wasn’t confirmed. (Mike Pence, Trump’s then VP, and by current standards, a strikingly normal man, cast the tiebreaker in her favour).
But look at DeVos now! Compared to Linda McMahon, who once received a piledriver as part of a wrestling exhibition, behaviour that even the Daily Mail characterised as “antics,” DeVos is a moral colossus. In 2021, the day after Trump encouraged his supporters to storm the Capitol, DeVos resigned, informing the president, “there is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation.” It’s not a lapse in judgment Trump will make twice.
Tuesday
Not enough attention has been should be paid to the greatest story of the second half of this year, from the US, where insurance claims totalling $140,000 were made after a series of bear attacks on expensive cars. One was a Rolls-Royce. Two were Mercedes-Benzes. All were located in southern California, where, after policyholders submitted a series of videos capturing the ursine vandalism, suspicions were raised by the state police fraud division. On closer inspection, the bears in the videos appeared capable of opening car doors and, put before a bear expert from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, investigators’ suspicions were confirmed: the brown shaggy creature on screen was “clearly a human in a bear suit”.
As ever with this sort of Scooby-Doo caper, the joy of the tale is in the shonkiness of the details, which the cops recently shared for the first time. The three men arrested for impersonating a bear had ripped the cars’ leather interiors using “claws”, which were actually a kitchen device designed for shredding meat. A police spokesperson pointed out that the bear suit appeared to be “ill-fitting”, and you can quite clearly see the fabric wrinkle in the video. There was also a significant lack of material you might expect to find after a wild animal has been trapped in a small space. “A bear leaves behind a big mess,” said the spokesperson delicately. Oh, and – the smoking gun – brown bears haven’t been seen in California for about a century.
Wednesday
If some aspect of Trump’s cabinet picks has been animated by trolling, that spirit was matched and exceeded this week by the progression of the Onion’s bid on Alex Jones’s hateful website, Infowars, through the US courts towards completion.
Jones, a man it is hard to find words adequately bad to describe, has spent the last 10 years lying about the massacre of six and seven-year-olds at Sandy Hook elementary school and encouraging his followers to harass their grieving parents, who he accused of perpetrating a hoax. In 2022, a libel judgment against Jones awarded the Sandy Hook families $1.5bn, sending him into bankruptcy and forcing the sale of Infowars. The satirical news site the Onion, backed by Sandy Hook families, successfully bid for the company with the intention of mocking what is left of the man and his followers into the ground.
This week, however, an 11th hour legal filing from Jones and a rival bidder with whom he is affiliated, halted the sale on the grounds that the success of the Onion’s bid had been “rigged.” A final hearing will take place next Monday, but in the meantime Jones staged a picture of himself removing a sink from the Infowars HQ in apparent reference to Elon Musk’s doing the same when he bought Twitter. Musk, it should be recalled, restored Jones’s account on X after buying the company – a fact someone might put before Richard Dawkins, who last week on X described Musk as someone “who has the welfare of the world at heart”. Indeed.
Thursday
According to a big splashy piece in Vanity Fair, news has come to light that when the late author Cormac McCarthy was 42 he met a 16-year-old “muse” who he took with him to Mexico, and which the magazine described in breathless, home-on-the-range prose and stringent avoidance of words like “child welfare”, “paedophile” and “what is wrong with these men?”
To recap: McCarthy met Augusta Britt – per the magazine “a five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl” – in 1976 when she was a vulnerable teenager living in foster care and paid for her to go to college and get her life on track. Kidding! He started a sexual relationship with her, disguising the fact he had a wife and a son her age, then ripped off her life for his novels.
Side note: the author of the piece has clearly read too much Cormac McCarthy, not a good idea at the best of times and sadly, in this case, resulting in sentences such as, “Upon McCarthy’s death the mystery of his personal life has drawn close enough for us to unravel assumptions into their opposites: Cormac McCarthy did not shirk womenkind in his novels.”
Or, to unravel that assumption into its opposite: get a life.
Friday
Brace yourselves: Mark Zuckerberg has given his wife, Priscilla, another present. You may recall the last present Zuck gave Priscilla, in August, which was a giant green statue of her tethered to a tree with tinfoil. This time, tech’s most uxorious mogul has collaborated with the singer-songwriter and producer T-Pain to produce a comedy version of Get Low by Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz. Posting on Insta, Zuck explained: “Get Low was playing when I first met Priscilla at a college party.” It’s very sweet, and lovely, and since Zuck insists on sharing what should be private moments in public, an ongoing reminder to his 15 million followers of the awesome, frankly unbelievable time he got a girlfriend at college.
