I never promised you a rose garden

You could almost hear Lynn Anderson singing in the background, as Trump left reporters stunned by his rambling campaign stump speech in the Rose Garden yesterday. When asked if there is anyone left to question the president in the White House, Jim Acosta said, "no, Anderson, we're down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin."

One of those next of kin was busy earlier this week plugging Goya food products after its CEO gave his full support to her father. Just one of the many brazen acts of promotion the Trump White House has become infamous for.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ben Carson, a once famous neurologist, is telling everyone that we can't shut down the country again over coronavirus, believing it would "completely destroy the financial infrastructure." He gets back up from Pete Navarro, who has now launched a full frontal assault on the authority if Dr. Fauci in the USA Today, claiming the good doctor "has been wrong with everything I have interacted with him on." I leave it to you to figure out what that means.

Then you have his press secretary, who has been dubbed "Covid Barbie" for helping spread Trump's lies and deceits on the coronavirus through press conferences. She's become the new favorite of the right wing in her perceived ability to put down unruly WH correspondents like Jim Acosta.

What we see before us is a White House unraveling at the seams largely because Trump can't hold his rallies at the usual venues because no one wants to come. After his fiasco in Tulsa, he cancelled a Manchester, NH, rally when many high profile Republicans said they wouldn't come. So, Trump resorts to the Rose Garden to hold his rallies, believing he has a captive audience on television.

The problem for Trump is that it isn't helping him. He addresses himself entirely to his base, which by generous estimates only constitutes about one-third of the national electorate. His approval ratings have tanked, with the vast majority of Americans feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction. However, our president wants viewers to believe all those numbers are fake, asking us to look at all those boaters and bikers in South Florida, showing their support for him. He might as well have added golf carts at The Villages.

I almost beginning to wonder if Trump wants to lose. How else to explain this wildly erratic behavior? After four years he has had all he can take of the White House and desperately wants out, especially now that he doesn't have the freedom to travel like he once had. Turning the Rose Garden into his bully pulpit is a new low, but what do you expect from a guy who promotes himself 24/7?

His speeches have become almost as nonsensical as Lynn Anderson's famous lyrics, delivered with the raw emotions of a man who will not give up on the Lost Cause. That may play well in Tuberville Alabama but not very many other states.

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer. Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions. I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters. Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs. Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77. I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not. Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud. -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!

Dispatches from Vilnius

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