Gordon Bannerman

@WhiteHouse Your Supreme Leader obviously hasn’t read 1984 as it’s a book but someone is using it as a playbook. Forever wars to distract from the Epstein files? 🤔

PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH.

Let me explain the sinister nature of what Trump actually does to people. He asks: are you loyal to me? Yes. Good. No forever wars. Are you with me? Yes. No forever wars. Then he starts the wars. And now he needs you to be with him on the wars too. And then the Epstein files come out. Allegations involving children. And he needs you to look the other way on that too. That’s the mechanism. That’s how it works. He moves the goalposts incrementally. Each ask is slightly more compromising than the last. And by the time you realize how far you’ve traveled from your own principles you are so deep in that you can’t find your way back. Loyalty to Trump doesn’t mean loyalty to an idea or a policy or a vision for the country. It means asymmetric, unconditional, no-questions-asked loyalty to whatever he decides is true today. You have to understand the sinister nature of that to understand what is really happening in Washington right now. This isn’t politics. This is a loyalty trap.

Have you visited the Scottish Highlands for golf? We’re supporting a student dissertation into golf tourism and would appreciate your input. Takes just a few minutes 👇 forms.office.com/pages/response… Thank you 👍

When some loons online celebrated and mocked the murder of Charlie Kirk, there was a huge outrage on the right, and rightfully so. Some people even lost their jobs over it. Today, the President of the United States took to social media to celebrate the death of a decorated Vietnam veteran and former FBI director, a Republican, and we all know virtually every Republican member of Congress will refuse to condemn it This is where we are now.

The President of the United States learned that Robert Mueller had died. And he picked up his phone and typed: “Good. I’m glad he’s dead.” I need you to stop. Put down whatever you’re doing and feel the full weight of those words. Good. I’m glad he’s dead. Said by the man who holds the most powerful office in the history of human civilization. The office of Washington. Of Lincoln. Of Roosevelt standing in the rubble of Pearl Harbor promising a nation trembling in the dark that we would rise. That office. Those words. Now let me tell you who Robert Mueller was. He did not have to go to Vietnam. He had every reason not to. A Princeton degree. A blown-out knee. A future waiting for him in the comfort of civilian life. He waited a full year for that knee to heal, just so he could serve. Let that sink in. He walked into hell when other men were running from it. He came home with a Bronze Star for heroism and a Purple Heart soaked in the blood of his sacrifice. He spent the next four decades standing in the breach, as a prosecutor, as FBI Director, as the man who held this nation together in the smoldering ash of September 12th, 2001, when we were all afraid and we needed someone steady, someone serious, someone who loved this country more than he loved himself. He was all of those things. He was a Republican. He was, by every honest measure, an American hero. And the President danced on his grave.

As a Marine platoon leader in Vietnam, Mueller was shot and later returned to lead his platoon after his recovery. He received a Bronze Star for valor, a Purple Heart, 2 Navy/Marine Commendation medals, Republic of Vietnam Cross of Valor, and numerous other medals.

@RealJamesWoods Vile

When someone tries to destroy your career, your reputation, and your life, while participating in a corrupt hoax, that person’s death might understandably be a cause for celebration to some people. .

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

My column on the spectacle of Nigel Farage trying to consciously uncouple from Donald Trump theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

@PressSec The Pope could enlighten you

...and what's wrong with that, Margaret?

No one deserves this award more. Congratulations Willie Hook 👏

Jimmy Kimmel: “The only war Trump had an exit plan for was Vietnam.”

“Although President Donald Trump says he has ‘destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military Capability’, the 0% that remains is playing havoc with the global economy.” -The Economist

@TIME The stable genius is just warming up

Since the President’s inauguration last year, national debt has climbed by around $2.8 trillion. time.com/article/2026/0…

@kaitlancollins He needs treatment. Urgently

"No, I'm not putting troops anywhere, and if I were, I certainly wouldn't tell you," President Trump tells reporters in the Oval. "But I'm not putting troops."

‘Judeo-Christian values’ is such a tell. Who, in Britain, has ever casually dropped ‘Judeo-Christian values’ into any conversation *ever*? This is Farage channeling Bannon. It’s MAGA. Dressing it up as English nationalism is pure pantomime. They’ll have Mother Goose next

@EricTrump And you guys now want others to get you out of this mess? Hmmm

🤣🤣 One of the great responses to a reporter in history! JAPANESE REPORTER: Why didn't you tell Japan before the Iran war? PRESIDENT TRUMP: "Why didn't you tell ME about PEARL HARBOR?!" "You believe in surprise much more-so than US!"

This guy . . .

He was certainly afraid of Vietnam-style combat in Vietnam.

spot-on, from @anneapplebaum Money quote: "Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places." "He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before." theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/…