When Reason Leaves The Room

Monday, May 18, 2026

A recent “tweet” from wretchardthecat reads, in part, “The real emotional fuel for Trump hatred is only partly fueled by logical disagreement. Most of it comes from his choice of furniture, design of ballroom, the ghastly red caterpillar cap, vulgar speech and most of all ‘bigly’. They might forgive all else, but never ‘bigly’.”  Once reason is jettisoned, all sorts of interesting things begin to happen.

L.A. Mayor and mayoral candidate Karen Bass over the weekend:

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass accused the Republican challenger in her reelection race of using a “general sense of anger” to motivate support for his mayoral bid.

“I think that he is tapping into a general sense of anger that people have, not just in Los Angeles, but in many other places around our country,” Bass told MS NOW on Saturday morning.

Well, no freakin’ DUH Ms. Mayor, but what are they angry about?  And why haven’t you fixed it?  The article talks about what she has done about homelessness, and it has been nine months since I was last in L.A., but the streets looked the same to me.  Mayors are supposed to lead – do things – not provide psychoanalysis.  Save us, but this makes Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech look politically astute.  Anger?  You bet there is anger, you did a Nero act as the city burned and you won’t let anyone rebuild.  Of course people are angry.

People get angry for a reason, fixing that reason for the anger usually takes care of the anger issue.  It is the most California thing ever to tell people that anger is the issue.  Anger is unpleasant and hard to deal with but then so are sanctimonious political figures lecturing the public to calm down when they created the reason for the anger to begin with.

The lack of reason here is immense.  The problem is not the fires or the lack of rebuilding.  The problem is not the homelessness.  The problem is not the astronomical cost of living.  The problem is that people are angry.  How does that make any sense?

But then let’s turn our attention to the gubernatorial race and former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.  Both Mediaite and Fox covered his appearance on MSNOW over the weekend.  Fox summed up the appearance this way:

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat running for California governor, said Saturday that California Democrats cannot blame President Donald Trump for the state’s homelessness and affordability crises.

Villaraigosa said Democrats still need to confront problems created under their own party’s leadership after calling Trump “a threat to our democracy.”

“But we can’t put everything on Donald Trump. We have the highest homelessness in the United States of America, the highest gas prices, the highest utilities, the highest home prices. People can’t afford rent. And those happened under Democratic policies,” Villaraigosa said on MS NOW’s “The Weekend: Primetime.”

OoooooKAY!  Talk about having your cake and eating it too.  This is pure two-faced political positioning.  “Trump is a threat to our democracy” is a Democratic Party touchstone.  If you don’t touch it, you’re not in the party and you are disqualified from serious consideration in the election.  So Villaraigosa has to say it.  But then you get this immediate non-sequitur when he starts in on Democratic mistakes.  Immediately the reasonable mind begins to fill with questions like, “Precisely how is Trump a threat to our democracy?”  “If Trump is such a threat, why isn’t he responsible for this mess?”  I could go on.  The point is Villaraigosa created an irreconcilable, illogical juxtaposition – even if he is right about most of the problems laying in Democratic laps.

The true threat to our democracy is when we are divided into class-warfare and can no longer reason our way to resolution.  And all apparently because people really don’t like a man’s decorating taste.