F**king Mondays: Trump's Special Gas Prices, Tucker and Russell's Bromance, and Australia Rejects MAGA

How much is gasoline? However much Trump says it is.

Welcome to another edition of “F**king Mondays!” — the newsletter roundup that reads the news so you don’t have to (and probably shouldn’t). In the roundup today:

Gas prices are whatever Trump says they are

One of the most depressing aspects of Donald Trump’s presidency is the constant assault on one’s sense of reality. Trump uses social media and his public appearances to spout an endless firehose of lies about anything and everything. It is unclear whether he understands he is lying, but it is a pathological and incurable condition that defines his presidency. Take this insane post from Truth/Social last Friday:

According to AAA, the national average for gasoline is $3.165. It is lowest in Mississippi where gasoline costs an average of $2.65. Trump has advisors feeding him constant data about the economy, so on some level he must understand that gasoline is not $1.98/gallon. The data is publicly available, so everyone around him knows gasoline isn’t $1.98/gallon, including the millions of citizens going to the pump each week.

So why does Trump lie about something so obvious?

My guess is that Trump wants gasoline to be $1.98/gallon in the same way that he wants to be a “self-made” billionaire. It doesn’t matter that Trump inherited his wealth and has severely mismanaged most of his businesses. It doesn’t matter that Trump would have done better by investing the half a billion dollars he got from his father into the stock market, because in Trump’s mind, whatever he says becomes reality. And if enough people buy into it, it doesn’t matter whether it is true. So if Trump wants the price of gasoline to be $1.98, then in his mind, it really is.

Now that he has total control over the GOP and conservative media, who is going to argue with him?

At this point, I continue calling out Trump’s lies as a matter of personal hygiene. I refuse to be desensitized to them and will not live in his backwards reality. That’s how authoritarianism works—not through blunt force, but through repetition, submission, and the slow erosion of reality.

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Tucker Carlson defends Russell Brand

Tucker Carlson’s role in the rise of MAGA will be studied intently by future historians. The former MSNBC and Fox personality morphed from serious conservative to malevolent fascist propagandist in a matter of years. Carlson has profited from this transformation immensely, raking in tens of millions of dollars as the MAGA movement’s court jester.

Key to Carlson’s “evolution” has been the savvy adoption of Deep State conspiracy theories made popular during Covid. Carlson never went full Q-Anon, but he cynically dabbled in far right conspiracies on his show under the guise of “just asking questions”. Was the Great Replacement theory true? Did Joe Biden really steal the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6th a false flag, and was Covid-19 a intentionally leaked Chinese bioweapon? Tucker didn’t know the answers of course — he was just a free speech advocate asking the questions “the media” wouldn’t.

Along his journey into Trump-bizzarro world, Carlson has made friends with others cashing in on America’s slide towards fascism, notably grifters like Russell Brand. Brand, once a UK based left wing activist, is now a fully Americanized conspiracy theorist mining YouTube’s algorithm for immense amounts of money. Brand and Carlson developed an unlikely bromance based on Deep State conspiracy theories, a hatred for Democrats, and pretending to be Christian.

The bromance runs so deep that Carlson has now come out to defend Brand against rape charges that he says are part of a Deep State plot to suppress him. Here’s what Carlson posted on X over the weekend:

Russell Brand was once a famous leftwing actor, celebrated by the British establishment. Then he criticized the government for using Covid to turn the UK into a totalitarian state. The accolades abruptly stopped. A government TV station accused Brand of committing sex crimes against anonymous women they refused to name. Government officials called for his opinions to be scrubbed from the internet. Last month, British prosecutors charged Brand with rape and sexual assault. None of the charges are backed by hard evidence. All of them supposedly took place more than 20 years ago, one of them in the 1990s. The entire case is transparently political and absurd, a near-identical replay of the fake rape charges authorities brought against Julian Assange 15 years ago. Russell Brand, whose youngest child is barely a year old, now faces life in prison. He has no shot at a fair trial, because Britain is no longer a free country. Over the last few years, millions of foreigners have applied for asylum in the United States. Russell Brand actually deserves it. Say a prayer that the Trump administration comes to his rescue.

First of all, the accusations against Brand were not made by the government or a “government TV station.” They came from a joint investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches (independent broadcaster) and The Sunday Times and The Times — both privately owned media outlets. The alleged victims were identified to journalists, but some remained anonymous in public reporting for their protection, which is standard in sexual assault cases.

Secondly, there is considerable evidence against Brand, who has been formally charged by the Crown Prosecution Service in the UK. Prosecutors only bring charges when they believe there is a realistic prospect of conviction — which typically includes highly credible evidence (even if not disclosed publicly yet).

It is public record that multiple women have accused Russell Brand of rape, and there are corroborating witness statements.

So is this a Deep State plot to keep a brave political activist quiet, or did a conspiratorial comedian with long history of drug abuse and womanizing rape multiple women?

Carlson wants you to believe it’s the former, but the far more plausible truth is that Brand, like so many powerful men shielded by fame and wealth, is finally facing consequences for his repellent behavior.

The global Trump backlash continues

In yet another example of the extraordinary global backlash to Trump’s bullying, look what just happened in Australia. From the Guardian:

Australia’s centre-left prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has won a second term with a crushing victory over the opposition, whose rightwing leader, Peter Dutton, failed to brush off comparisons with Donald Trump and ended up losing his own seat.

Albanese’s Labor party scored an unexpectedly comfortable win on Saturday, after a five-week election campaign dominated by the cost of living and global economic uncertainty.

At the turn of the year, Labor was struggling in the polls, but Dutton ran a campaign derided by commentators as one of the worst in Australian political history, and the former police detective struggled to clearly dissociate himself from some Trump-like rhetoric and policies.

Albanese, 62, had pitched himself as a steady hand to guide Australia through a period of global turbulence turbocharged by Trump’s tariff war. He becomes the first Australian prime minister to serve consecutive terms since 2004.

Western democracies are watching America’s experiment with far right populism and are now definitively rejecting it. Given Trump’s cratering poll numbers, it won’t be long before Americans follow suit. The midterms are exactly 18 months away, and if the Democrats can get their act together, the power dynamic in Washington could change dramatically for the better.

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