WASHINGTON—Hoping his upcoming meeting in Anchorage with Russian President Vladimir Putin will bring a much-needed change of pace, an exhausted President Donald Trump told reporters Thursday that a fun getaway with a murderous dictator is just what he’s been needing. “It’s been a pretty busy year, so it’ll be great to take a little summer trip where I can kick back and relax with a fellow killer,” said Trump, who added that he’s looking forward to enjoying Alaska’s majestic scenery and wildlife alongside another leader with an incalculable quantity of blood on his hands. “We can just be ourselves and have a nice talk, homicidal tyrant to homicidal tyrant. Bukele couldn’t make it because he’s too busy installing himself as dictator for life, but I bet we could get Bibi on the phone. Erdoğan and Orbán too. Oh, and maybe that guy in Cambodia. These are people who get it, you know? We can hang out and shoot the shit about killing with total impunity. It’s a beautiful thing.” Trump ended the press briefing by showing off the matching “Boys Trip 2025” T-shirts made for him and Putin to wear when they meet up.
The former president has brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics.By Anne Applebaum
Jon Cherry / Getty
OCTOBER 18, 2024 (TheAtlantic.com)
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Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”
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This language isn’t merely ugly or repellent: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”
Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.”
This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.”
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In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.
Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal part of American presidential politics. Even George Wallace’s notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963 speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided such language. Wallace called for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But he did not speak of his political opponents as “vermin” or talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps following the outbreak of World War II, spoke of “alien enemies” but not parasites.
In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
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In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”
His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.
These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: mass deportation now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: trump was right about everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: mussolini is always right.
The Atlantic Daily: The atmosphere of a Trump rally
These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.
But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics. Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not.
Mediaite Aug 13, 2025 Anne Applebaum, staff writer for The Atlantic, has covered dictators for decades. In an interview from before the 2024 election with Mediaite’s Press Club, she told host Aidan McLaughlin that Donald Trump’s language mirrored rhetoric from Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. She described a disturbing trend in his authoritarian language — and how it foreshadowed his consolidation of “absolute power” in a second term as president.
Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract” comparing and contrasting what seems to be truth with what you can syllogistically, axiomatically and mathematically (using word equations) prove is the truth. It is not an effort to change, alter or heal anything.
The claims in a Translation may seem outrageous, but they are always (or should always be) based on self-evident syllogistic reasoning. Here is one Translation from this week.
1) Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. Therefore truth is all that is. Truth being all is therefore total, therefore whole, therefore whole, therefore complete, therefore otherless, therefore one. I think therefore I am. Since I am and since Truth is all that is, therefore I, being, am Truth. Since I, being, am Truth, therefore I, being, have all the attributes of Truth. Therefore I, being, am total, whole, complete, otherless, one. Since I am mind (self-evident) and since I (being) am Truth, therefore Truth is Mind. (Two things being equal to a third thing are equal to each other.) Since Truth is Mind, therefore Mind has all the attributes of Truth. Therefore Mind is total, whole, complete, otherless, one.
2) Cataracts can cause cloudy vision since light cannot reach the retina and therefore the brain.
Word-tracking: retina: light-sensitive membrane which receives an image from the lens and sends it on the brain cloudy: opacification, opaque, not transparent cataract: an easing of, film over lens, a heavy downpour of rain or a great flood image: imitation
3) Truth being Mind and Truth being all, therefore there is nothing that can get in the way of Mind. therefore Mind is thoroughly transparent. A retina is a light-sensitive membrane which receives images from the lens and sends them on to the brain. Truth being all that is is therefore all we can see, all we can imagine, all we can see images of, see imitations of. So what we see is not the real thing, it’s an imitation. Therefore what we are seeing is an imitation, a lie. Seeing implies an outside world which can be imaged to an inside world, i.e., seeing through a glass darkly (through imitation). Since Truth is one, the duality of inner and outer must be a lie about the singularity of Truth. Therefore Truth is one Mind knowing without imitation or images OR the eye of Truth is single and the whole body of Truth is full of light.
4) Mind is thoroughly transparent. Truth is all we can see, all we can imagine, all we can see images of, see imitations of. What we are seeing is an imitation, a lie. Truth is one Mind knowing without imitation or images The eye of Truth is single and the whole body of Truth is full of light.
5) The eye of Truth is single and the whole body of Truth is full of light.
Weekly Invitational Translation Group invites your participation. If you would like to submit a Translation on any subject, feel free to send your weekly Translation to zonta1111@aol.com and we will anonymously post it on the Bathtub Bulletin on Friday.
“Those who aspired to a role on the council of Tlaxcala, far from being expected to demonstrate personal charisma or the ability to outdo rivals, did so in a spirit of self-deprecation – even shame. They were required to subordinate themselves to the people of the city. To ensure that this subordination was no mere show, each was subject to trials, starting with mandatory exposure to public abuse, regarded as the proper reward of ambition, and then – with one’s ego in tatters – a long period of seclusion, in which the aspiring politician suffered ordeals of fasting, sleep deprivation, bloodletting and a strict regime of moral instruction. The initiation ended with a ‘coming out’ of the newly constituted public servant, amid feasting and celebration.”
“Clearly, taking up office in this indigenous democracy required personality traits very different to those we take for granted in modern electoral politics. On this latter point, it is worth recalling that ancient Greek writers were well aware of the tendency for elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. This is why they considered elections an aristocratic mode of political appointment, quite at odds with democratic principles; and why for much of European history the truly democratic way of filling offices was assumed to be by lottery.”
Describing the diversity of early human societies, the book critiques traditional narratives of history’s linear development from primitivism to civilization. Instead, The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia.
A ceramic tile – probably painted many years after his death – shows a likeness of the poet Hafiz (Credit: De Agostini/Getty Images)
“Why Not Be Polite? Everyone Is God speaking. Why not be polite and Listen to Him?”
~ Hafiz
Khājeh Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī, known by his pen name Hafez or Hafiz (1325–1390), also known by his nickname lesān-al-ḡayb, was a Persian lyric poet whose collected works are regarded by many Iranians as one of the highest pinnacles of Persian literature. Wikipedia
John Birdsall’s “What Is Queer Food?” and Erik Piepenburg’s “Dining Out” both seek to define the place of cuisine in queer culture, history and expression.
The late, lamented Chelsea diner Florent was a mainstay of the gay dining scene for more than 20 years.Credit…Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
By Lukas Volger
Lukas Volger is the author of six cookbooks, and the former editor of the queer food journal Jarry.
June 14, 2025 (NYTimes.com)
WHAT IS QUEER FOOD? How We Served a Revolution, by John Birdsall
DINING OUT: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants, by Erik Piepenburg
What’s queer about food? Over the past decade, momentum has gathered around this conversation. By nature, the intersection resists fixed rules and embraces abstraction, but the benefits of asking seem clear: As two new books demonstrate, food can reveal a richness of queer culture, expression, possibility and survival.
Building on a 2021 New York Times article, Erik Piepenburg’s “Dining Out” looks at 150 years of queer American food establishments, from cafeterias to diners to bathhouses. He argues that gay (his chosen modifier, meant to encompass all queer and L.G.B.T.Q. people) restaurants — defined simply as places where gay people eat — have been every bit as essential to connection, activism and queer history as have bars.
Early gay restaurants were often those that attracted artists and other bohemians, who invariably numbered gays and lesbians among their ranks. The storied Pfaff’s Saloon opened in Greenwich Village in 1856 and was a known gay meeting place, counting Walt Whitman as a regular. Other restaurants became gay more serendipitously — such as Automat cafeterias, whose rapid turnover, communal seating and atmosphere of anonymity created inconspicuous venues to meet and cruise.
Like bars, gay restaurants were frequent sites of pre-Stonewall uprisings and sit-ins, as well as a backdrop to history. Annie’s Paramount Steak House in Washington, D.C., opened in 1948 and served gays and lesbians through the Lavender Scare of the McCarthy era, the gains in sexual liberation of the 1960s and ’70s, the devastation and aftermath of AIDS. It continues today.
When restaurants became a target of hysteria at the height of the AIDS epidemic, thanks to the dining public’s ignorance and panic about the virus’s transmission, gay restaurants were one of the few spaces that provided respite for queer patrons. Florent, which opened in Manhattan’s meatpacking district in 1985 and epitomized downtown cool for 23 years, helped to destigmatize AIDS, with its H.I.V.-positive proprietor, Florent Morellet, listing his latest T-cell count prominently on the day’s menu board.
The diversity of queer people has always meant a diversity of queer restaurants. Bloodroot, in Bridgeport, Conn., was one of several lesbian feminist restaurants that opened in the 1970s, leading with progressive ideals like non-hierarchical staff, and vegan and vegetarian fare. Places like La Rondalla in San Francisco attracted Latino diners, and Pink Tea Cup and Horn of Plenty in New York catered to Black gays and lesbians. Trans-specific restaurants are rarer, but Napalese Lounge and Grille in Green Bay, Wis., has long hosted a monthly “Cross Dressing/Transgender Social Gathering,” and HAGS in New York City infuses its fine dining experience with the proprietors’ queer ethos.
Piepenburg is most animated when fueled by nostalgia, such as in his chapters on 24-hour diners and the “golden age” of gay restaurants — a period he identifies as stretching from the late 1960s to the aughts — and when he ponders how to feel about dining at establishments not expressly meant for him. This invites an inevitable further question: How might lesbians or trans people capture the pleasure of their own establishments? Any topical survey will wrestle with the subjective nature of queer belonging, but in “Dining Out,” Piepenburg’s rigorous research and sensitive reporting are vital to the book’s impact.
Piepenburg is upfront about drag brunch never having been about the food, and it must be said that the menus at many of these restaurants don’t stir much excitement. So what to make of food’s claim to queerness? John Birdsall, the author of a 2020 biography of James Beard, makes immensely satisfying strides in answering the question in his book’s title — “What Is Queer Food?” — and in the process shares an approach for future writers, cooks and scholars.
Consider the case of Harry Baker’s chiffon cake, a sensation among Hollywood’s A-listers in the 1930s. In 1923, Baker fled Ohio after being caught having gay sex in a public restroom. Established in Los Angeles, he baked his renowned cakes in a makeshift kitchen in a bedroom. This closet becomes a “site of magic” for Birdsall, and Baker’s recipe, later scrubbed clean of its queer origins after General Mills bought it, represents for him “the expansion of pleasure that is possible in the defiance of limits.”
Or take paper chicken, a signature dish at Esther Eng, the Manhattan restaurant that was owned by the eponymous male-presenting lesbian (and pioneering Chinese-language film director). A fitting metaphor for Eng’s known, but rarely acknowledged, queerness, it “masks and reveals,” Birdsall writes. “It transforms base poultry into something pink and transcendentally perfumed.”
The Paris expats James Baldwin and Richard Olney, who shared meals at the recurring Left Bank “Saturday Night Function” starting in 1956, mark a diverging sensibility. For Baldwin, food functioned as a source of nourishment and catalyst for connection. But for Olney, it was a medium for expression. In his work over the subsequent decades, living in the Provençal countryside, Olney would manifest a fertile culinary space for queer excavation, fusing gay and culinary performance.
Who could ignore quiche, a dish that is, today, “embodied” with queerness? In 1948, it was just another recipe in the women’s pages of newspapers. But by the second half of the century quiche had became such a fixture of gay brunching that matters reached a tipping point. The widespread homophobic backlash was neatly captured by the 1982 publication of Bruce Fierstein’s tongue-in-cheek look at masculinity, “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche.”
If “queer” itself may resist easy definition, food can help clarify its central conviction: that we deserve pleasure. “What Is Queer Food?” puts the sensual and the sensory at the fore, and it pulsates with hunger for what’s possible when queer life and expression is examined through food.
And at a moment when queer and trans people are increasingly under attack, the subject of quiche again becomes a poignant call to action: “Hedonism,” Birdsall writes, “can pull us deeper into our own humanity, and quiche — food of queer resilience and queer power — is fuel for the journey.”
WHAT IS QUEER FOOD?: How We Served a Revolution | By John Birdsall | Norton | 292 pp. | $29.99
DINING OUT: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants | By Erik Piepenburg | Grand Central | 321 pp. | $30
A version of this article appears in print on July 20, 2025, Page 8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Taste the Rainbow. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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ARIES (March 21-April 19): Rama is the star of the ancient Hindu epic story, the “Ramayana.” I love him! He’s one of my favorite legends! His heroic journey isn’t fueled by a greed for power or personal glory. Unlike ninety percent of modern action heroes, he’s not pumped up with anger or a lust for vengeance. Instead, he is animated by a sense of sacred duty. Against all odds, and in the face of bad behavior by weird adversaries, he acts with exemplary integrity and calm clarity. During your upcoming exploits, Aries, I invite you to be inspired by his exalted and unwavering determination. As you proceed, ask yourself, “Is this in rigorous service to my beautiful ideals? Are my decisions and words in alignment with my deepest truths?” Be motivated by devotion as much as by hunger. Aim not just for novelty and excitement, but for generosity of spirit.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In the Mexican festival of La Noche de Rábanos—Night of the Radishes—giant radishes are carved into elaborate altars and scenes. Humble roots become fancy art. I think you’re engaged in a metaphorically similar process, Taurus: sculpting with uncommon materials. Something you’ve regarded as modest—a small breakthrough or overlooked strength—is revealing unexpected value. Or perhaps a previously latent or indiscernible asset is showing you its neglected magic. Celebrate your subtle but very tangible luck. Take full advantage of half-disguised treasures.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In Zen archery, the aim is not simply to hit the target. Instead, it’s to align one’s body, breath, mind and bow so fully that the arrow releases itself naturally and effortlessly. It shoots itself! I would love for you to adopt this breezy attitude in the weeks ahead, Gemini. See if you can allow an evolving project, relationship or vision to reach a new maturity, but not through pushy effort. Rather, trust life to bring you the precise guidance exactly when you need it.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): In ancient Rome, the priestesses known as the Vestal Virgins tended an eternal flame. They never let it be extinguished, not even for a moment. Their devoted focus on nurturing the fire was both a religious practice and a symbol regarded as essential for the well-being, prosperity and survival of the Roman state. I propose, Cancerian, that you engage in your own version of Vestal Virgin-like watchfulness. Assign yourself the role of being the keeper of a sacred promise or resource. What is it, exactly? Identify this repository of spiritual wealth and dedicate yourself to its sustenance.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In medieval Europe, pilgrims traveling to the shrine of Saint James in Spain often wore scallop shells. These were badges to signify they were on a sacred path in quest of divinely inspired transformation. The shell also had practical uses. It was a scoop for food and water, underscoring the humility and simplicity embraced by wayfarers on the road. I invite you to acquire and wear your own equivalent of this talisman, Leo. You have begun a new chapter in your self-perception, and life is asking you to proceed without pretense. You don’t need definite answers. You don’t have to rush to the end of the journey. The becoming is the point. I hope you seek out inspirational symbolism and generous companions to help nurture your brave transformations. (PS: Your best conversations may be with people who will lovingly witness your evolution.)
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): In ancient Greek drama, the peripeteia was a term for the moment when everything turns. The pivot doesn’t happen through force, but through the revelation of what was always true. I see the coming weeks as your peripeteia, Virgo. There may be no fireworks or grand announcements. Just a soft spiraling crackle that signifies a realignment of the system, a cathartic shift of emphases. Confusion resolves. Mysteries solve themselves. You might say, “Oh, yes, now I see: That’s what it all meant.” Then you can glide into the future with a refined and more well-informed set of intentions.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In coastal Portugal, there’s a lighthouse called Farol do Cabo da Roca. Built on a cliff where land ends and the Atlantic Ocean begins, it marks the westernmost edge of continental Europe. We might say it’s a threshold between the known and unknown. I believe you will soon be poised at a metaphorically similar place, Libra. An ending is at hand. It’s not catastrophic, but it is conclusive. And just beyond it are shimmers, questions and a horizon that’s not fully visible. Your job is to finish your good work, even as you periodically gaze into the distance to see what’s looming.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): I Invite you to channel the spirit of Kali—not in her form as the destroyer, but as the fierce liberator. She has the power to burn away stagnation, neutralize the poison of old lies, and slice through illusion with a sword of compassion—and so do you. I believe you are ready to sever a bond that has secretly (or maybe not-so-secretly) limited you. Don’t be afraid of the emptiness that results. It may appear to be a void, but it will quickly evolve into a fresh sanctuary. Into this newly cleared room, you can pour your strongest longings and most rebellious love. What are the wildest versions of your truths?
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): In some early maps of the cosmos, Sagittarius wasn’t just an archer. Your sign was symbolized by a centaur with wings: part horse, part bird, part god. I bring this to your attention because I suspect your own hybrid nature is extra wild and strong these days. A part of you wants to roam, and a part wants to ruminate. A part wants to teach, and a part needs to learn. How should you respond to the glorious paradox? I say, don’t force harmony. Let contradiction become choreography. Maybe liberating joy can arise through a dance between apparent opposites.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In Sardinia, there are tombs carved into rock called Domus de Janas—“houses of the fairies.” People once left offerings there to court the help of beings they couldn’t see. They truly believed that fairies are real and can exert effects in this world. In modern times, fewer Capricorns actively consort with invisible presences than any other zodiac sign. But I hope you will take a short break from your usual stance. Mysterious and mythic influences are gathering in your vicinity. You’re being nudged by forces that defy explanation. What do you have to lose? Why not have fun making room to be delighted and surprised by miracles and wonders?
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Thou shalt embrace the confounding contradictions, Aquarius. That’s the first commandment. Here’s the second commandment: Thou shalt caress the tricky incongruities. Third: Thou shalt whisper endearments to the mysterious ambiguities and invite the mysterious ambiguities to whisper endearments to you. Fourth: Thou shalt rumble and cavort with the slippery paradoxes. Commandment number five: Thou shalt chant spicy prayers of gratitude to the incongruities, paradoxes, contradictions and ambiguities that are making you deeper and wiser and cuter.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In early medieval gardens, there was sometimes a space called the hortus conclusus. It was a walled sanctuary that protected plants and herbs from harsh weather and predation by animals. It comprised a microclimate and provided a private, peaceful space for contemplation, prayer and study. Sometime soon, Pisces, I would love for you to create your personal equivalent of a hortus conclusus—even if it’s metaphorical. You will harvest maximum benefits from surrounding yourself with extra nurturing. The insights that would come your way as you tend to your inner garden would be gently and sweetly spectacular.
