The Trumpster Fire:As the anti-fascist group Antifa faced off against Nazis and white supremacists yesterday in Portland, Oregon, President Trump said on Twitter that maybe the counter group is the real problem. He wrote, “Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an ‘ORGANIZATION OF TERROR.’ Portland is being watched very closely.”

  Trump wrote in the passive voice — “consideration is being given” — but what that means is that he’s the one considering it. Antifa is not a group of saints. Both they and the right-wingers have engaged in violence to push their agenda, but

Trump did not condemn the right-wingers. The White House offered no explanation for Trump’s one-sided condemnation.

  Flag-waving members of the right-wing Proud Boys, the Three Percenters militia group and others had gathered, some of them wearing body armor and helmets. Police said they seized weapons and shields from several groups.

  Despite Trump’s declaration, there’s no mechanism for the US government to  declare a domestic group a terrorist organization. Just another example of how  Trump doesn’t know how anything works.

  Trump also makes things up for his own convenience. Thursday night at a rally in New Hampshire he repeated the fiction that he would have won the state in 2016 had it not been for election fraud, something for which there is no evidence. It didn’t happen.

  Ellen Weintraub, the chair of the Federal Election commission, wrote to Trump that, “Our democracy depends on the American people’s faith in or elections. Your voter-fraud allegations run the risk of undermining that faith.”

  Former CIA Director John Brennan tweeted, “The stain Donald Trump leaves on our Nation’s soul should be a constant reminder that we cannot assume candidates for public office have the competence, integrity, & decency Americans deserve. In 2020, we need to elect someone to safeguard & strengthen democracy, not trample it.”

The News Roundup:An explosion last night ripped through  a wedding hall in Kabul, Afghanistan, killing 63 people and wounding 182. A suicide bomber is believed to have been responsible. — President Trump always brags about the size of his rally crowds, but contract workers at the Royal Dutch Shell plant in Monaca, Pennsylvania were forced to choose Tuesday between attending the President’s rally or passing up overtime pay earned by their co-workers who stayed. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that workers also were ordered not to yell, protest, or do “anything viewed as resistance” to Trump’s speech.

The Big Melt:Icelanders gathered today to dedicate a plaque memorializing the Okjokull glacier, the first in the country to lose its status as a glacier The glacier was officially declared dead in 2014 when it was no longer thick enough to move. It’s now just a patch of ice on a volcano.

The plaque carries a letter to the future saying, “In the next 200 years all our main glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.

Only you know if we did it.”

Legal Eagle:The difference a law degree makes is that you can be authoritatively stupid instead of just plain stupid. Celebrity lawyer Alan  Dershowitz theorized about child-molester and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that “I think he killed himself because he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison.” We were so naïve. We thought it was because Epstein couldn’t get Netflix in his cell.

Headlines:One of the most famous headlines in the newspaper business came when President Gerald Ford refused to bail New York City out of its financial crisis. The “wood” on the NY Daily Newssaid, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

Yesterday in response to President Trump’s musings about buying Greenland, the News went with the headline, “Fjord to Trump: Drop Dead.”

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