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June 7, 2026
"Because it was raining, I got a little bit angry at them. I was not happy with them. But we had a good time."
Said Trump, quoted at the end of "Trump walks out of 'Meet the Press' interview when challenged over false claims/When pressed by host Kristen Welker, the president cited no evidence for claims about Jan. 6 and elections he said were 'rigged'" (WaPo)(gift link).
I was watching that live, but I fell asleep. I heard the loud rain that was adding stress and discontinuity to the interchange, but I'm sorry I missed witnessing the big falling out as it happened. It's easy to catch up:
"He read 'Moby-Dick' at 9. He could devour 400-page books in an hour. He had a photographic memory."
"As an after-dinner party game, he liked to recite 'Paradise Lost,' starting from any line a tipsy guest chose."
"Do you think Bari Weiss needs to be removed?"/"Oh, gosh, yes. Look, she’s a lovely person. And her Free Press organization that she founded has been very successful. But television’s not her thing."
"This is like somebody walking up to me and saying, 'There’s a 747, there are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris.' I’m going to decline because I don’t have a clue. And it would have been so much better if Bari Weiss had been offered this job and said, 'Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that.'"
That's Scott Pelley, answering a question in "The Interview/Scott Pelley on the Bari Weiss Era and His Last Days at '60 Minutes'" (NYT).
That's Scott Pelley, answering a question in "The Interview/Scott Pelley on the Bari Weiss Era and His Last Days at '60 Minutes'" (NYT).
Here's the entire interview (with a transcript at YouTube):
"In the White House, there is a system for dealing with a president who rarely sleeps. The staff take it in shifts so they get a nap..."
"... even if he doesn’t. Donald Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles starts early and stays on until early to mid-evening. Then it’s over to her deputy Dan Scavino, a true Trump old-timer — they met when 16-year-old Scavino was selected to caddie for him — to do the graveyard shift.... [T]he shifts are about being around to help, aid and occasionally advise, rather than blocking. Still, journalists and lobbyists study Trump’s schedule for when best to try to get him alone. A former aide says the best times to call are first thing in the morning or late evening, but he’s such a night owl that some enterprising hacks have got through at 3am. In the morning, his team wakes and checks Truth Social for what Trump has posted — often a mix of AI memes, criticism of his enemies or his latest views on a war — and any likely fallout. His record is 160 posts in one night. Some come via his adviser Natalie Harp, nicknamed the 'Human Printer' for giving the president stacks of positive press cuttings, others from the man himself...."
Writes Katie Balls, in "Donald Trump at 80: is refusing to act his age his secret weapon?/The president is still known to work 12-hour days and post all night as he enters his ninth decade" (London Times).
Genuine Trump quote: "You know, I’m not a big sleeper. I like three hours, four hours. I toss, I turn, I beep-de-beep, I want to find out what’s going on."
Writes Katie Balls, in "Donald Trump at 80: is refusing to act his age his secret weapon?/The president is still known to work 12-hour days and post all night as he enters his ninth decade" (London Times).
I wondered if there are some kind of barracks or hotel-like areas in the White House. I think not. That means Susie and Dan are most likely curling up on a sofa in their office. How old is Susie Wiles? Isn't it dangerous to be this sleep deprived? But Trump sets the tone, and he seems to be all about conquering sleep, the thief of life.
Live feed of the filling of the Reflecting Pool.
AND: I just made a tag for "Reflecting Pool" and added it to old posts in the archive. The oldest post is striking. It dates back to the Obama administration, September 26, 2012:
Why did the bird cross the road? For dark and unknowable reasons?
Yesterday, we were talking about Arthur Miller's aphorism: "Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another."
My reaction: "Birds don't have dark reasons." You might have read that as if I were saying, birds are, in fact, thoroughly virtuous. I should have allowed for darkness, at least, in some birds. What about Poe's "Raven" or the albatross in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"? But it was more a matter of choosing to talk only about the possible dark side of birds, because that's all Miller brought up.
If the Glamour bird's motivations are unknowable, how does Miller know they are dark? Maybe Miller thought of that question and threw "largely" into the sentence as a quick fix. I don't know much about the mind of Miller, but I read it to think: I don't know much about the mind of the bird, but I do know this: The one called Glamour has dark reasons.
In the comments tcrosse said, "Why did the chicken cross the road? For some dark reason?"
We thought that was a very funny line and laughed about it before we went out for the sunrise. Driving home in the sun, we saw an odd bird standing in the road, then 2 birds. The light side of birds was demanding attention. Baby sandhill cranes just had to cross the road.
Why? No reasons at all. Never any reason.
June 6, 2026
"Arthur Miller described the voluptuous yet fragile woman he wed as 'a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.'"
"When Miller left out his journal open to a page saying that she had embarrassed him in front of his intellectual peers and Marilyn read it, she wrote, 'I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.' Like everyone else, Miller was mesmerized by his wife’s power of enchantment. 'Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another,' he once wrote...."
From Maureen Dowd's new column, "Norma Jeane’s Still Got It!" (NYT).
From Maureen Dowd's new column, "Norma Jeane’s Still Got It!" (NYT).
You know what's embarrassing? 1. Writing down that your wife is embarrassing — can't you just remember it and squirm silently in your dark and unknowable mind? — and leaving your journal open to the page where she'll see it, 2. Writing "Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another." Birds don't have dark reasons.
IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd provides this:
"A friggin' bird will swoop down from a bough and peck your eyes out as you lie helpless and half frozen in the snow without ever having felt sorry for you."
— Thought to be an early, rough draft of 'Self-Pity' scribbled in the margin of A Field Guide to the Dark Thoughts of North American Birds found in D.H. Lawrence's library after his death.
BY THE WAY: When I was writing this post, I wanted an illustration and asked Grok to give me an image of "a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch." I didn't say Arthur Miller wrote those words.
Grok gave me an image that was too dull to use, but it also added this ridiculous caption: "A solitary bird, wings half-folded in that decisive instant of landing, perches on a gnarled, ancient branch silhouetted against a brooding twilight sky. The air feels heavy with unspoken intent—shadows pool beneath the feathers like secrets, and the bird’s eye catches a glint of something ancient and unknowable. Dark pines loom in the distance, mist curls low, and the branch itself seems to have been waiting for this exact, inscrutable visitor."
So I was all: "Yeah it's purple prose isn't it? I got it from Arthur Miller."
An intervention.
I'm reading, in the London Times, "Why JD Vance is so critical of Keir Starmer’s Britain/Having intervened on the murder of Henry Nowak, the US vice-president was accused of trying to ‘stir up division’ by the put-out prime minister."
Vance "intervened"? Vance published a statement. He said something. (We talked about it here, yesterday.)
The London Times piece is by David Charter. Excerpt:
The London Times piece is by David Charter. Excerpt:
Dirtbagism.
I'm reading "Graham Platner and the Rise of the ‘Dirtbag’ Democrat/And what the Maine candidate reveals about politics today" in the NYT.
That's long, so let's jump to the place where the word "dirtbag" is thrown into the mix:
Michelle Cottle: And honestly, is it even fair to compare Platner to somebody like Paxton or Trump?
Jamelle Bouie: You know, I don’t think it’s fair. And I say that because, so far, what we’ve learned about Platner is that, for lack of a better term, he’s kind of a dirtbag. Just a dirtbaggy kind of guy.... That’s versus Trump, who isn’t just a reprehensible person, but is actively engaged in harming other people in his private life, right? And I’d say the same for Paxton: not just a slimy guy, but a guy whose modus operandi, as a human being, is to try to dominate the people around him in really ugly ways. And so, I think Platner is more on the John Fetterman continuum than he is on the Trump continuum, which is just, eh, kind of dirtbaggy.
Cottle: OK, so I want to drill down just a little bit more....
The drilling down does not explore the concept of dirtbagism. Cottle was swooping in to take the conversation away from that, even though the headline writer saw the click-bait value of the word. In the conversation, "dirtbag" never reappears.
I asked Grok "how the word 'dirtbag' is being deployed what kind of people use that term and why" and got quickly tracked into the subject of the "dirtbag left." There's this New Yorker article from last October: "What Explains Graham Platner’s Popularity? The U.S. Senate candidate from Maine seems like the embodiment of the dirtbag left. But there’s another way to understand his appeal." Excerpt:
How Jack Scholossberg answered the question, "How did you use your legal education?"
"Well, I understand that content creation is a new profession and that for a lot of people it’s not synonymous with a quote-unquote real job. But I’ve been arguing with evidence supported by facts, very clear arguments made on behalf of the issues that I think are important, and those issues are: corruption of the Trump Administration; his terrible, irresponsible foreign-policy decisions; advocating and arguing for why the Democratic Party—its history and current policies—reflect putting a priority on organized labor and working families. And on social media, it’s not like I was successful just because of my name. You have to make an argument in ninety seconds, with a lot of complicated information. And synthesizing that information, breaking it down into one, two, and three points and having a conclusion—that’s the exercise of law school."
From the interview in The New Yorker, "Jack Schlossberg Makes His Case/The Kennedy scion explains his winding path to electoral politics, his relationship to his family legacy, and why he thinks he should represent New York’s Twelfth Congressional District."
From the interview in The New Yorker, "Jack Schlossberg Makes His Case/The Kennedy scion explains his winding path to electoral politics, his relationship to his family legacy, and why he thinks he should represent New York’s Twelfth Congressional District."
June 5, 2026
At the Friday Night Café...
... you can talk about whatever you want.
We got rained out of the sunrise, but we got out after the rain:
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