A classmate shared on his Facebook page something from a fellow traveler about how just the act of leaving the comfortable United States and going somewhere else. He begins his post with…

To the People Who Have Never Left Their Zip Code:

You Need to Come to Thailand. Not for a Holiday, but for an Intervention.

I look at my friends back in the West. Their lives are perfect. They have sub-floor heating. They have lanes for everything. Their biggest stress is if the Amazon package arrives late. And they are bored out of their minds.

You need to visit Thailand at least once before you die, just to remember you are alive.

His post is about getting Out Of Your Comfort Zone from time to time, and seeing that there is a world beyond our own borders, and that world is different in many ways.

I’ve only done it once in my life, and most likely never will again. But yes, definitely yes, and my beyond the borders awakening happened in Puerto Vallarta. I offered this comment to my classmate’s post…

This is sorta-kinda like what I experienced when some people I once knew took me to Puerto Vallarta some years ago. It was the first, and so far only time I’ve been outside the country.

We stayed at a bed and breakfast in the old cobblestone part of town. It was a lovely residence that was probably once a very well to do family’s hacienda with many nice rooms and a large open courtyard with flowering plants, fountains and a swimming pool. Powerlines hung within a foot or two from the second floor balconies and the landlord told us not to reach out and touch them or we’d be going back home in a wooden box. It had its own water filtration system but we were warned to use only the bottled water for things like brushing our teeth.

Outside on one of my walks I saw men working on repairing a set of steps leading to a back door. They had taken the electric meter off the side of a building across the street, stuck two metal tangs into its base and from those ran jumper cables across the street over to a power drill’s cord that only bare wire at the end, instead of a plug. Everywhere I looked in that old part of town I saw stunningly beautiful examples of old Mexican architecture that were lovingly well maintained, alongside of places that looked a little iffy. I eventually found myself always looking around to make sure I wasn’t getting too close to any live power lines.

The landlord told us the general rule on the streets was if a pedestrian gets hit it’s their fault. It wasn’t just a matter of paying attention to the traffic signs and lights. I saw one four way intersection that only had one approach controlled by a light, the other three were place your bets and take your chances.

The people were wonderful, friendly, and appreciated tourists who made an effort to communicate in their language. Arranging purchases and asking for directions turned out to be very easy. I quickly mastered several important language items such as “Please”, “Thank you”, “Which way to the bathroom”, and “No thank you I am not interested in buying a timeshare.”

On one of my walks I noticed I was getting a blister on my right heel, and started looking around for a place to buy a bandage. I wasn’t sure what they called a drug store in Mexico but I looked around, and eventually saw a very Very small storefront tucked in between much two larger ones with the word “farmacia” on the overhead sign and thought, close enough. When I got inside it was obviously what I was looking for, and I said simply “bandage?” to the man at the front counter, hoping to be understood. He just nodded and pointed, and what needed was there. Paying for things was easy since the ATMs dispensed local currency and accepted my American Express card, and calculating dollars to pesos just then simply meant moving the decimal point one over.

I would love to go back, but I have no one to travel with alas, and getting too old for it now anyway. But I have a lot of lovely memories of that place. Wish I’d done more of it now.

Yeah. I reckon I should have done more of that before I got so old. So it goes, so it went…

What better way to spend an 11 degree morning here in Charm City, than building a Linux machine on top of a Windows 11 machine. And doing it in such a way as I can use both operating systems without messing with a dual boot loader.

Last year I bought an LG Gram 17” laptop at Costco, when I saw one there at a good price. I was a few months into my part time return to the Institute, and while I liked the Macbook Pro they gave me to use (very nice, very powerful, Very Expensive), I felt I also needed a Windows machine too so I could use some of the Microsoft development tools I’d used there before. Before I retired I had both Windows and Mac laptops on my desk, side by side and used them both. Being that the Gram was my personal machine I could only connect it to the Guest network at the office, but that was okay for my purposes.

Over time I came to really like that LG Gram. It is thin, lightweight, has a very impressive battery life, and a really Really nice display. I came to despise Windows 11.

So I started wondering about making the Gram a Linux machine instead. Initial reports I saw were that it was difficult to impossible to do on a Gram because it had secure boot software in the bios that had to be worked around. (and why would you need to use anything besides Microsoft’s excellent operating system citizen?) But more recent posts had step by step instructions, and users who said the Gram was a pure delight to run Linux on, once you got it working.

Problem was, I occasionally needed a Windows machine at home and I didn’t want to have to buy another laptop just for that one purpose. An older Dell I had that was once a Windows 10 box began having hardware failures, fan won’t run, won’t charge its battery anymore, and I just need to take it to recycling. The Gram is the only Windows machine I have left. I ruled out dual booting Windows and Linux on the same machine from previous bad experiences with dual boot managers, plus all the work arounds I saw were needed to get dual boot to run on the Gram around secure boot. But I kept thinking about it. Digging into it more I saw that I could possibly create a bootable Linux drive on a USB stick, then when I wanted Linux I could plug that stick in, boot the Gram, hit F10 and select the stick as the boot drive, or just leave the drive unplugged and boot when I needed Windows.

I went about it badly at first. I ordered a 125 gig USB stick and wrote the SuSE Leap 15.6 Linux installer onto it, thinking that I could just tell it to partition the rest of the stick as the bootable Linux drive. But no. When the installer tried to write the boot partition information it could not, because the installer media had that partition locked down. So the first try failed.

I had another, smaller USB stick I’d brought back with all my files from my California adventure. I offloaded those to my NAS and then wrote the SuSE Leap installer to that stick. Now the plan was to boot from the smaller stick and tell the installer to put Linux on the bigger one, theoretically overwriting the SuSE installation media I had on it during partitioning. But both sticks came from the same vendor, Lexar, so when I hit F10 during boot they both displayed on the boot menu with the same drive name and I couldn’t tell which from which.

I took out the big stick, booted from the smaller stick, and when its installer was coming up put the big stick back in, hoping it would still detect it. It did. So now I put the plan into motion. I told the installer to use sdc and ignore sda and sdb. The Gram came partitioned with two 1tb logical drives on the SSD. I could see in the partition manager that came up that sdc was the large stick. I didn’t bother trying to partition sdc because I thought the installer would do that and get rid of everything that was there previously. That was a mistake.

The installation went along until it came to the point of writing out the boot manager, at which point it failed again. When it tried to write into it I saw an out of disk space error, that was probably just no I’m not letting you write a new boot entry here.

So I had to repartition the other stick to get the SuSE installer off it. I made that entire stick one big empty partition formatted as a Linux file system. Then I tried again.

This time it worked. The installer ran to completion without a problem, and the Gram rebooted into SuSE Leap 15.6. I was able to log in and poke around for a bit, shut down, remove the stick, start up and the Gram booted into Windows 11 as usual.

I haven’t set it up fully yet, but now I can boot into SuSE Leap 15.6 on the Gram with no trouble, just by plugging in that USB stick, hitting F10 when the Gram boots, and selecting that stick to boot into. When I need Windows I can just leave the stick out and let the Gram boot as usual.

This is good. The Gram will make an Excellent Linux travel machine. It is lightweight, has a lot of battery time, and a very nice large screen.

I have a Disney World vacation coming up first week in March that I’d hoped to make into a road trip, because the California train rides just made me long for the open road again, even if it was just I-95.

But the weather made me rethink it. My car is practically embedded in what they’re calling around here “snowcrete”. No kidding, it’s hard as concrete and not likely to get any easier to shovel until we get some warmer temperatures.

Then there is the mess the weather has been making of the roads in the Carolinas.

I can’t count on any of this getting any better by the time I have to leave for Florida. And I can’t just cancel that reservation and put it some other place on the calendar because it’s a DVC points reservation and they are nearly impossible to reschedule when you’re close to your DVC year end. I have a nice one bedroom villa reserved which gives me a full size complete kitchen and walking access to Disney Springs and I’m going. Plus, that first week in March has many special Disney memories for me.

And I am practically swimming an Amtrak points after that last set of trips to California and back. So I reserved a roomette on the Silver Meteor there and back on points alone. The only expense this incrues is I will need a rental car and and a rideshare to and from the car rental place, both of which will cost me less than the road trip there and back would have.

This gives me some peace of mind about being able to actually make it to Orlando. Be nice after the deep freeze we’re in here to spend at least a little time in that lovely warm Florida sunshine…

Oh…wait…

Official updates
From National Weather Service · Last updated 3 hours ago
EXTREME COLD WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 7 PM THIS EVENING TO 10 AM EST MONDAY… …FREEZE WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 7 PM THIS EVENING TO 10 AM EST MONDAY

* WHAT…For the Extreme Cold Warning, dangerously cold wind chills as low as 14 to 20 degrees expected. For the Freeze Warning, hard freezing temperatures as low as 22 to 27 degrees expected.

* WHERE…All counties in east central Florida, including Volusia,
Lake, Seminole, Orange, Brevard, Osceola, Indian River,
Okeechobee, Saint Lucie, and Martin.

My new conspiracy theory is Lyndon LaRouche actually did finally become president of the United States after all, having gone into hiding disguised as a New York City real estate developer. Very clever Mr. LaRouche!

All I know is…if you dig a hole deep enough, Everyone will want to jump in.

And remember…there’s a seeker born every minute!

How it started…

“Today, the National Rifle Association’s Political Victory Fund (NRA-PVF) is honored to announce its full endorsement of President Donald J. Trump for re-election to a second term as President of the United States of America. NRA-PVF Chairman Randy Kozuch announced the endorsement at the 2024 NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits in Dallas, TX.”

-NRA Institute for Legislative Action, May 18, 2024.

How it’s going…

I’m sure there’s a subset of the membership that will happily ignore what he’s saying there, because ultimately the culture war matters more to them then their right to keep and bear arms, or more specifically, the right of their neighbors to keep and bear arms. But the ones I’ve met are fanatical 2nd amendment absolutists and this has got to be making those very uncomfortable if not outright PO’d. And it’s got to be adding up in their reckoning.

The NRA came out decisively against a Trump Justice Department proposal to ban transgender Americans from owning firearms. In the case of Alex Pretti they put out a statement hours ago calling the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for central California’s statement dangerous and wrong and warned against making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens. Now this.

I can appreciate where these might be feeling a bit now like liberals have when the democratic establishment throws them under the bus. Maybe these are thinking to themselves that the republican party cannot afford to alienate them because they are the single most reliable voting block the republicans have. True enough, but that assumes there will be more elections.

I am anxiously awaiting the NRAs take on ICE shooting and killing a citizen who had a carry permit after they disarmed him.

[Update…] They did it.

Not actually surprised, but was unsure if they would push back on this, given their part in the culture war. My working hypothesis all this time is they just exist to get right wing republicans elected. But then they really impressed me when they came out against a Trump Justice Department push to ban transgender Americans from owning firearms.

They’re calling for more investigation, which is fine on its face, but stay tuned. I want to see if the other shoe drops. Of course there must be an investigation. But look at who is doing the investigation. The same people who have been throwing out one blatant power lie after another after another about the protests and the people ICE arrests?

We will need better investigators. Also impartial judges and juries.

This, via Keith Olbermann on Blue Sky…

You just wonder about the people Miller is talking to. After all we’ve seen and heard, who is still believing any of this? Nobody of course. Radley Balko was right, these are power lies…lies told blatantly to demonstrate power. The remaining hard core base eats it up because they think through him they are powerful too. But they’re weak. They have always been the lowest moral runts among us, and now they think Trump and his gang have made them glorious. But they can’t shine, it isn’t in them. They can only stink.

That Oscar Wilde quote about how we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars…He got it wrong I think. Douglas really did a number on him and it’s tragic. We are not all of us in the gutter, he was not in the gutter, and those who are looking at the stars hate that the darkness can’t put the light out.

This is the last, the very last year I skip stocking up my house, pantry and freezer for the winter!

I did the buy when I began to take the forecasts seriously, but even by Wednesday the shelves were beginning to go bare and the crowds were getting horrible. This morning while I was out on another errand I tried to get a couple items I missed and had to stop at several stores before I could find what I was looking for and even then I felt lucky. The lines to the checkouts were the longest I’d ever seen.

That was what my stocking up every late October to mid November was meant to avoid, but that had been instilled into me at a very young age and it surprises me in retrospect that I let myself skip it this year. Mom grew up in the Pennsylvania mountains during the Great Depression and stocking up for the winter was just a routine thing I grew up with. But the winters lately have been so mild these past few years I thought I’d spare the big end of year expense and just buy as needed through the winter. I’m guessing now a lot of other people made that same calculation and that’s why the snow forecast dogpile was much worse than I’d ever seen.

It’s not really so expensive because it evens out over the winter if you plan it right. You’ve bought what you would have anyway, just all at once. So no wasted money or time because you will use it anyway and now you don’t have to go to the store to get it, and nothing goes to waste. You pay attention to the sell by or use by dates when you buy, feed on what expires first, and replace perishables you can’t freeze as needed until April. You can do that between snow forecast dog piles. Come spring and summer, the canned goods you bought that look like they’ll expire before you get around to eating them you can donate to a food bank. Things that don’t expire like paper towels, soap and detergent you don’t have to worry about. They’re cheaper when you buy in bulk anyway.

I’m good now. If we don’t get the large snowfall/sleet/ice amounts I’ve been hearing that’s okay. I know I’ll hear complaining if it doesn’t happen or it’s not as bad. Those people are idiots.

This came across my Facebook news feed a moment ago…

At a guess their algorithm has figured out I’m gay and is just throwing things at me to see what sticks. Now I’ve seen some very beautiful and attractive ladyboys and drag queens, but I’m a Kinsey 6 (6.8 since I’ve kept up with the updates). I am not about lady.

If you’ve read my previous blog post about my switch back from K-Cups to the drip coffee maker, then you know I’m using whole beans that I grind in a Krups burr grinder right before I make a pot. I get my beans from Baltimore Coffee and Tea, which has a store in Timonium next to the light rail stop.

They roast their own beans and that store is in front of their roasting facility, so what you buy there has come directly from that. The bean I’ve settled on is one they call Brazilian Fancy Santos. It brews a very low acid, smooth and light coffee that is surprisingly (to me anyway) loaded with caffeine for how nice it tastes. This much better taste is something I’m rediscovering.

When you make coffee this way you are a lot more in control of the process than when you simply pop a K-Cup into a Keurig and press the button. There’s the matter of your grinder settings and how much water you add for how much coffee grinds. The drip machine I use that I bought on the recommendation of Consumer Reports controls its own water temperature and gets it exactly right to my taste, but there are others that let you adjust the brewing temperature. Over time I’ve hit my sweet spot on the grinder setting and amount of water I use. But it’s still more coffee grind than is packed in a K-Cup I’m sure. It also has to be a Lot fresher, which may have something to do with the caffeine effects I’m suddenly feeling now.

I definitely have to limit my intake of this coffee, and when, if I want to get any sleep at night, whereas I could have several mugs made from K-Cups of Kirkland Summit Roast, or Peet’s Major Dickenson’s Blend, and as long as I stopped by 3PM I had no trouble sleeping. I’m finding out I can only have one mug of Brazilian Fancy Santos a morning, and just pour out what I haven’t finished by noon if I want to sleep at night. It’s surprising me because that coffee is so smooth and sweet and lovely compared to any other coffee I’ve had.

I guess all the early years I drank coffee from a percolator made me think that if it isn’t bitter it isn’t strong. Maybe the kick is coming from the fact that the way I’m doing it now (again), with freshly ground beans, so that it’s got to be a lot fresher than anything in a K-Cup, and possibly a lot more potent.

That Keurig machine really lured me in with its shear convenience. But this isn’t really all that much more work for something that’s a lot more enjoyable.

Greg Sargent on BlueSky has a killer thread about how public reaction to the Trump/Miller campaign of terror is unnerving some of their advisors that is a Must Read…

Trump is privately worried about the “optics” of ICE raids and his advisers are looking for ways to soften them, Axios reports. I’m calling bullshit: The terror and violence cannot be hived off from the broader policy agenda. They are 100% intrinsic to it.

There is no recalibrated or sanitized way to conduct the war that Trump and Stephen Miller are waging on American cities right now. That’s because it’s a campaign of deliberate terror.

The policy *is* the terror, and the terror *is* the policy.

The dream of sanitized, popular mass deportations rests on the idea that they can be carried out without mass disruptions. But that is not doable. The Trump-Miller agenda by definition requires prioritizing high removals over all else to achieve ethnic cleansing:

Terror is essential to Miller’s project. It’s designed to dissuade us from showing solidarity with the immigrants getting removed. Stand in the way of ethnic cleansing and you risk violence yourself.

Sargent’s BlueSky thread includes screen captures of his article in The New Republic. It’s well worth reading both!

This is Costco’s doing. Somewhat.

I went to the Costco in Reisterstown to buy another box of Kirkland Summit Roast K-Cups and forgot I needed to either pack a Visa card, of which I only have one, or my ATM card which I don’t keep in my wallet all the time for obvious reasons. I got to the self checkout and suddenly realized I didn’t have the correct plastic with me. Now I’m thinking do I have enough cash in my wallet? Yes I Do! So then I’m thinking I can just hand over some cash and I stay in line…wait in the Costco line…wait in the Costco line…wait in the Costco line…wait in the Costco line…, only to finally get to the self checkout and discover their self checkouts don’t take cash. So I had to just walk away from the purchase.

Why does Costco make it so difficult to pay for your purchases? It wasn’t a problem for me when they were taking American Express because I had one of their charge cards in my wallet all the time. That was my grocery and miscellaneous purchases card which, unlike a revolving credit card, you pay it off every month. Taking out a loan to pay for food seems kinda bad. But then Costco switched to Visa and only Visa or your ATM card and I’m still fuzzy about why, if they went to Visa, they couldn’t also go to Master Card too since my understanding is both charge stores the same percentage on purchases. But no…

So there was a BJ’s nearby, and they take all the cards including American Express. I would really rather buy things from Costco because they treat their staff right, but they could treat their customers a little better at the register. So I went over to the BJ’s and bought some of their Wellsley Farms coffee, and it was okay but not okay enough. I’d previously found that I like Peet’s Major Dickenson’s Blend, so I bought a box of their K-Cups to tide me over until the next time I was at a Costco and the wallet is loaded with the correct plastic.

The whole thing made me start rethinking how I was making my morning mug of coffee (I’m well beyond just a cup now).

There’s a New Yorker cartoon about how people make their coffee that is peak New Yorker (I’m a subscriber)…

So why was I using K-Cups? Nobody hurt me, I just got snookered into the convenience of it. 

Back when I was a teenager my morning jolt of energy was built-in and I was all bright eyed and bushy tailed the instant I got out of bed. How I wish it was still that. Back then grocery stores had coffee bean grinding machines with bags of whole beans stacked around it. You would empty one of the bags into the top of the grinder, select the grind you wanted, place the now empty bag under the chute (the bag had the price on it), and the machine would give you back freshly ground coffee you could take home. 

Years later I started drinking coffee in the mornings when I had my own apartment, a job writing computer software, and all the stress that comes with it. This was also when I started smoking cigars in the evenings. Grocery stores still had those grinder machines and I may have tried that a time or two, but soon I’d moved on to getting it in cans pre-ground. I gravitated somehow to Chock full o’ Nuts which I drank for years out of a percolator I inherited from mom that I never saw her use. I was reaching back to a childhood TV memory…

I will go to my grave still remembering some of those old TV ad jingles. So I’m told, this one was created by a gentleman named Wilbur England, who would tell the story of how he was asked to come up with musical jingle for Maxwell House coffee, and on a marimba he came up with the percolator theme. It sticks in your mind, which is what those jingles are supposed to do. I don’t think there’s a 50s/60s kid that doesn’t instantly know this tune the moment they hear it.

But the problem with percolators, as coffee purists will tell you, is it runs the brewed coffee back over the grind over and over again, and that makes it bitter. I can tell you for a fact it does but that was how I thought coffee was supposed to taste. Then in an issue of Consumer Reports I saw a review of drip coffee makers and there was a 15 dollar Black and Decker one that rose to the top over a bunch of way more expensive models. I bought one, and tried it out and was an instant convert. For 15 bucks I bought a second one I took to my office at Space Telescope, where by then I was working, and a can of Chock full o’ Nuts and some filters to keep by my desk.

I kept buying Chock full o’ Nuts, but I was also buying loose tea at Baltimore Coffee and Tea, which greeted me every time I went inside with a lovely scent of coffee beans from around the world. They roast their own beans and sell them from burlap sacks placed around the counter on one side of the store. I decided to give grinding my own beans a try, and sniffed around until I found some beans I liked the smell of. Which was a trick since my nose doesn’t work very well. I settled on a Mexican bean, and then later on a Brazilian one. I bought a Krups burr grinder and some whole beans. I ground some beans, put the grind in a filter, brewed it in the drip machine, took a taste, and decided that was The Way.

That worked for me for almost a decade. Then some years ago on a visit to California I saw that my brother was using one of those Keurig K-Cup coffee makers (he uses a press now), and I gave it a try. He had a K-Cup carousel with some Starbucks Pike Place Roast in it and I tried one. It was seductively easy to make coffee with it. You just popped in a K-Cup, set the machine for how big your cup or mug is, and presto…a cup or a mug of fresh coffee. And it tasted pretty good. Not as good as my freshly ground coffee at home, but a tad more than good enough.

The efficiency of it was attractive. You never used more coffee than you needed, whereas I was pretty sure my little drip coffee maker process was using a lot of beans for not so much coffee. What I maybe did not appreciate was you end up spending a Lot more per unit coffee when it’s in a K-cup. But once I figured out how to work the device I came to like using it. When I got back home I bought one exactly like his.

For a while the Keurig and my Black and Decker coffee maker sat side by side in my kitchen. I would use the drip machine when I wanted to make a pot for the day, and the Keurig for when I only wanted just a mug for my morning walk. Eventually it was exclusively the Keurig because it was just so damn easy to use. One of my co-workers at the Institute had a Keurig machine out in a common area we could all use, so I started bringing in some K-Cups. Eventually I cleaned and stored my two Black and Deckers. 

I never really thought about what I was missing for so long. I got used to the taste of what came out of the Keurig and forgot how lovely the coffee I made from freshly ground beans I bought at Baltimore Coffee and Tea was.

Costco’s policy of making it hard to pay for your purchases made me start rethinking it. I’d come to like the taste of their Kirkland Summit Roast which I could only buy at Costco, and since they switched to Visa Or Debit Only I had to make sure I had one or the other in my wallet before I got the idea to swing by Costco. BJ’s had the Starbucks Pike Place Roast but I don’t buy from them anymore since I learned how badly they treat their staff. What to do what to do…?

I still had my Black and Decker coffee makers, some filters and the Krups grinder. Baltimore Coffee and Tea is still where it always was. So bought some more whole beans from them and got out my coffee makers and the bean grinder, and gave the old process another try. I brewed up a pot this morning. Which is why I’m writing this blog post.

Wow… 

I don’t think I’m ever going back to the K-Cups. At least not at Casa del Garrett.

Now I have to figure out what I’m going to do when I’m road tripping and need my morning cup of coffee. Once upon a time hotels put drip machines in the rooms and I could brings some filters and a small tupperware container of beans I’d ground myself and make some coffee. Now it’s either a small K-cup machine or some weird device that only takes the hotel’s proprietary expensive coffee cartridge. I’d actually bought a small Keurig machine because of this to take with me on the road for my morning mug of coffee, and one to keep at my brother’s house. But Pilot/Flying J truck stop Columbian coffee is actually pretty good, so maybe I just stick with that on the road.

Via Crooks and Liars…

Trump Admits He’s Itching To Cancel Midterm Elections

Finally, under a heading Reuters euphemistically called, “MANAGING MIDTERM EXPECTATIONS, there was this explicit confession that Trump thinks there should not be a midterm election: “The president expressed frustration” that Republicans could lose power after the midterms, Reuters wrote. Then this: “’It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,’ Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that ‘when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.'”

That was the end of the article.

None of this is normal…a president of the United States saying openly that he thinks there shouldn’t be another election. This should be a headline everywhere, even in the local shopper saver. But our legacy news media keeps treating it like it’s normal. And so they sell their country, and everyone in it, out.

If stone could shed tears of grief every tombstone in Arlington Cemetery would be crying now.

This from Lawyers, Guns and Money…

Reuters did a 30-minute interview with Donald Trump. Here’s the LAST paragraph of their write-up of it:

The president expressed frustration that his Republican Party could lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate in this year’s midterm elections, citing historical trends that have seen the party in power lose seats in the second year of a presidency. “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

He’s laying the groundwork for cancelling the 2026 election, or at minimum cancelling it in democrat majority states.