Greetings! Let’s start the week off on a fun note. For fans of “White Lotus,” season 3,  here’s White Potus, “Saturday Night Live’s”  brilliant sendup of the hit HBO show featuring The Donald and family.…Embarrassing! Ex-pro wrestling honcho and Trump-nominated Secretary of Education Linda McMahon beclowned herself with a flub for the ages. Speaking at an April 8  forum about educational innovation, she repeatedly confused AI, the universally accepted abbreviation for artificial intelligence  – with A1, the bestselling steak sauce. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow gave McMahon a well-deserved skewering on her show Friday night…Readers of TheRighting know I’m a big fan of Bill Maher’s against-the-grain commentaries. Still, I found Friday night’s 13-minute monologue about his White House supper  with the MAGA-in-Chief,  an off-key, defensive apologia. To Maher, the private Trump came off as a self-effacing guy with a sense of humor.  To me, that’s like describing a fire-breathing dragon by looking only at its cute, wagging tail. Maher’s simplistic, post-meal conclusion:  “A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House.”  That is certainly up for spirited debate.  However, he is an authoritarian doing everything he can in his power to dismantle our democracy. Worth noting: the far right Victory Girls blog supports Maher’s post-1600 Pennsylvania visit commentary…Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac: The NY Post reports that Trump is adding “Mar-a-Lago-inspired renovation plans for the White House.” One word popped into my head when I read that story: tacky…If you keep reading, I’ll keep Righting. Howard

Greetings! As a tumultuous week closes, one constant is that the Wall Street Journal continues to hammer the country’s hapless president. Today’s lead op-ed quite rightly asks whether Donald Trump actually has a China policy. The editorial  forcefully states that Trump is “making it up as he goes.” Looks that way to me too…Michelle Obama refuted rumors of marital discord with her hubby on the “Work in Progress” podcast, reports The Daily Beast.  Still,  don’t expect the interview to quash the catty chatter.  I hope the rumors are just that. I’ve been a big fan of the former first lady since her “Tonight Show” dancing routine with Jimmy Fallon more than a decade ago (YouTube)…I'm 100% in agreement with this headline from staunchly conservative PJ Media: “Can we please stop talking about 2028 already?”…Weekend watch: Hulu's documentary series Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror, pegged to the April 19 30^th anniversary of the attack which killed hundreds. It’s a compelling boots-on-the-ground examination of one of the deadliest homegrown acts of violence in our nation’s history and well worth watching, especially in the current climate where ultra-right extremism is so often normalized. In a related note, I  interviewed JeffreyToobin two years ago about his excellent book on the same subject, “Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism.”  Toobin makes the case that McVeigh’s transformation into a right-wing radical was shaped by the some of the same forces that brought America’s democracy to the brink of disaster on January 6, 2021…If you keep reading, I’ll keep Righting. Howard