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Five Quick Things: Habemas Trumpam?

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May 8, 2025
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I could easily make this a Seven Quick Things. Or a 17 Quick Things.

It’s been that kind of week.

But I’ll try to focus on the “quick things” part of the 5QT, which, as you’ll see below, is not so easy to do, and so here’s your carefully curated 5QT.

1. Let’s Hope the Chicago Pope Is Better Than the Chicago President Was

Robert Prevost, born in Chicago but having spent most of his adult life in Peru and Italy rather than stateside, is now Pope Leo XIV. The new pontiff, the first American to hold that title, was announced on Thursday.

This fact is, at minimum, ironic given the peculiar little dust-up earlier this week over a funny AI meme circulating on the internet that had President Trump dressed in full papal regalia.

So much so that Trump was interrogated about the meme, shared as a joke by the White House X account, by a member of the legacy propaganda press…

And almost immediately thereafter, an American becomes the pope.

But is this a good thing?

There are a lot of items which make the new pope out to be an open-borders globalist, and he seems to be a critic of Vice President JD Vance. So there’s that.

The fact that he was elevated to the status of cardinal in 2023 by Pope Francis isn’t the greatest thing if you’re a conservative Catholic seeking a departure from Francis’s brand of moral chaos in the Church’s leadership.

But then there is this…

Simply registering as a Republican isn’t a lot to go on when it comes to this pope’s worldview. That said, it’s better than nothing.

We know some things about Pope Leo XIV at this point. We don’t know enough. It’s entirely possible that he could be someone from the Right who recognized the necessity of following the admonition to make the Long March Through The Institutions, and he might have done and said what he’s done and said in order to continue moving up the line. Now that he’s pope and won’t have to play those games, we’ll find out who he is.

Which could be a disaster, or it could not.

For now, we’ll simply note we’ve finally got an American pope, and it’s about time. All we had to do was put out memes of Trump as the pope, and they decided to meet us halfway.

2. Here’s Hoping Ed Martin Gets to Haunt His Critics

Something not quite so divine as the white smoke at the Vatican also happened Thursday, which was that Trump pulled the nomination of Ed Martin as the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., the #2 prosecutorial job in America. He didn’t want to do it, but he had to because there weren’t enough Republican Senators willing to vote for Martin.

Specifically, the awful Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

This came after the RNC’s National Committeewoman from North Carolina demanded Tillis drop his objections to Martin…

Trump indicated that Martin is getting another job in the Justice Department. My suggestion would be to make him Special Counsel Plenipotentiary, and give him free rein to probe corruption everywhere in government.

Including, perhaps, the U.S. Senate.

There was some talk that the replacement for Martin would be Mike Davis, the outspoken, hard-charging Trump attorney and founder of the “right-wing” Article III Project. That would be absolutely too delicious, and one wonders if Davis wouldn’t have an even tougher road to confirmation through the RINO caucus that Tillis is a member of. But either way, it seems clear Trump is going to appoint someone with solid MAGA credentials to that post.

And Martin is going to be enlisted in the fight.

Again, it sure would be enjoyable to see him given a billet that allows him to haunt the corrupt establishment.

3. Look at These Stupid Grifters

As a member of the media (ugh), I get all kinds of things in my e-mail inbox that our readers do not. This isn’t a particularly good thing, most of the time, and Thursday was no exception.

Namely, that I was subjected to a press release from some group called Free Speech For People, which read, in part…

Compiled by Free Speech For People’s team of constitutional lawyers, the articles of Impeachment include multiple abuses of power President Trump has already committed, including: Illegal kidnapping, detention, and removal of U.S. residents; illegal and unconstitutional removal of U.S. residents, migrants, and asylum-seekers to foreign prisons; unlawfully attempting to deport immigrants for peacefully protesting; unconstitutionally usurping Congress’s powers; defying court orders and unconstitutionally usurping judicial authority; abusing his power to seek retribution against perceived adversaries; co-opting and dismantling independent government oversight; unlawfully imposing tariffs; receiving foreign and domestic emoluments; unconstitutionally usurping local and state authority; abusing the emergency power; abusing the pardon power; corruptly dismissing criminal charges against Eric Adams; depriving citizens of their birthright; blocking efforts to secure U.S. elections; planning the forced removal of Palestinians from Gaza; engaging in unlawful, corrupt practices during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Sixteen Members of Congress are now on the record in support of impeaching President Trump, including Rep. Shri Thanedar (MI-13), who introduced articles of impeachment on April 28th. Rep. Al Green (TX-09) has announced that he plans to introduce articles of impeachment against the president.

Members of Congress on record in support of impeachment include Representatives Mark DeSaulnier (CA-10), Sam Liccardo (CA-16), Maxine Waters (CA-43), Hank Johnson (GA-04), Delia Ramirez (IL-03), Rashida Tlaib (MI-12), Shri Thanedar (MI-13), Ilhan Omar (MN-05), Suzanne Bonamici (OR-01), Maxine Dexter (OR-03), Dwight Evans (PA-03), Al Green (TX-09), Lloyd Doggett (TX-37), Becca Balint (VT-AL), and Kevin Mullin (CA-15). Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia has also made a public statement in support of impeachment.

“Backed by hundreds of thousands of Americans demanding impeachment, Congress must fulfill its constitutional duty and impeach and remove Trump for his multiple high crimes,” says Alexandra Flores-Quilty, Free Speech For People’s Campaign Director.

At The Hayride, I had to offer a substantial “Psh” to this…

Fundraising is all the Left is doing now. It’s the reason why none of their stuff is remotely bipartisan or centrist anymore. They’re just a fundraising racket now — fleecing wealthy, miserable people, most of them unmarried women, for $20 here and $50 there.

And they know Trump Derangement Syndrome is the only thing they really have to sell to them. They used to use abortion for that, and it was good for a while, but the problem was that Trump appointed enough Supreme Court justices to dump Roe v. Wade and return that issue to the states, and he’s resisted the calls from the pro-life hardliners to re-federalize the abortion issue and it’s now more or less inert when it comes to federal politics.

And the immigration issue and the race issue are utter disasters for the Left. Nobody wants to hear their message on those topics.

Or on the transgender stuff.

So it’s just “We Hate Trump And You Should Too.”

When Trump isn’t going to run for office ever again. He’s done after this term. And despite all of the attacks on him it doesn’t much look like the facts have followed. The markets have stabilized after his tariff announcements and now the bilateral trade deals are beginning – Trump is signing a trade deal with Great Britain which will be the first of dozens of better deals for American producers that will almost certainly boost economic confidence and performance.

Then later this month we’ll get the Big Beautiful Bill which will codify Trump policy on a host of topics and further enervate the Left.

Sure, they hate it, but what can they do about it? Come up with better ideas? We’ve seen their ideas. They aren’t sellable. Nor do they have anybody sellable to push them. Look at that list of Democrats signing on to this idiocy of trying to impeach Trump a third time – it’s a pristine collection of unwanted toys who’ve reached the terminal velocity of their political careers.

4. New York’s Chubby-Queen Statue Controversy

You’ve probably seen this new statue that went up in Times Square in New York. It’s of a nameless black woman of no particular accomplishment, notability, or attractiveness.

This irked The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson to no end, mostly because he spotted the ideological psy-op behind it…

The statue, we’re told, “disrupts preconceived ideas of what defines a triumphant figure and challenges who should be rendered immortal through monumentalization.”

These people do not come to build but to destroy, and what they erect in the place of what they have destroyed isn’t just boring and narcissistic, it’s also cultural propaganda that insists on a neo-Marxist paradigm pitting the supposedly marginalized and oppressed against the oppressors. And we all know who the oppressors are.

Recall that in recent years New York City removed a statue of Thomas Jefferson that had stood in city hall for 187 years and took down a statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History that had been there for nearly a century. The monuments to these great Americans were, in the left’s telling, nothing more than celebrations of racism and bigotry, and had to be torn down as part of their cultural revolution.

And what do they offer as a replacement for the likes of Jefferson and Roosevelt in the public square? A celebration of both mediocrity and identity. The official description of the ground-level statute states “the woman 
 cuts a stark contrast to the pedestaled permanent monuments — both white, both men — which bookend Duffy Square, while embodying a quiet gravity and grandeur.”

Davidson nailed it.

You’re supposed to be noteworthy, meaning, having noteworthy accomplishments, if somebody is going to take the time to memorialize you with a public artwork. All those statues of old white guys the Left’s stormtrooper activists insist on pulling down were erected in order to celebrate the achievements of great men. Sure, some of them might not be in the best odor currently, just like most of the people — and particularly the political luminaries the bowdlerizers like to vote for — won’t stand the test of time a century from now.

I would imagine that when technology does for abortion what it did for slavery, namely, making it obsolete, every pro-abortion politician in America is going to begin stinking like last week’s fish.

Which is why presentism is such a fallacious and irritating intellectual pursuit.

Anyway, we’re now going to replace celebrations of great and consequential deeds, not to mention celebrations of the ideal male or female form as understood by the artist, with celebrations of what? Walmartians?

One wonders if the Chubby Queen in Times Square is wearing those flesh-colored leggings, which leave too little to the imagination that a certain segment of the population mistakenly believes are attractive.

Yes, it’s awful. At RVIVR, though, Andy Hogue notes that your outrage should be on a timer, because so is the Chubby Queen…

Yet it’s not a monument at all. It’s a temporary art piece with a permit for one month, where many such proactive pieces have been on display. And get ready: the art group has a contract to take over Times Square’s billboards at midnight and display images of other “marginalized bodies.” All, of course, not designed to inspire or comment, but “disrupt.”

“[The sculpture] disrupts traditional ideas around what defines a triumphant figure and challenges who should be rendered immortal through monumentalization,” the press release stated (emphasis ours on the brand-new word).

Disrupting what remains the question. On the northern triangle of Times Square is an area known as Duffy Square. The square has two statues, which are referenced by the art group in the press release. One is a bronze statue of Chaplain Francis P. Duffy of New York’s “Fighting 69th” Army Infantry Regiment who served in Western France during World War I, for whom the square is named, sculpted by Charles Keck.

The other statue depicts composer, playwright, producer and actor George M. Cohan — the man who basically gave us Broadway — by sculptor Georg J. Lober.

“In other words, the wokes decided it was time for the Times Square white men to give up some of their turf to a big black woman who wants to speak to a manager NOW,” a commentary on Outkick opined. (We also used their photo, by the way.)

We’ll stop there before we get in trouble — which may also be the goal of the temporary installation, come to think of it.

I’ll take Andy’s advice and leave it at that. But I would suggest to the Chubby Queen, in case she’s listening, that keto absolutely works and that she needs to get with the program.

5. Trump’s Foreign-Movie Tariff and Paul Kengor’s Poor Review Of It

I was going to do an entire column on this yesterday, and then it was superseded by those three idiot House Republicans telling House Speaker Mike Johnson they wouldn’t vote to defund Planned Parenthood — and I had to weigh in on that.

You ask why Johnson keeps giving the House days off? Crap like that is why. He keeps running into rogue RINOs in his caucus who refuse to get with the program on very basic things, and what his chosen solution has become is to send everybody home and let the voters back home burn up their phone lines to get them straight on the task at hand.

Which, hopefully, is what’s happening to Mike Lawler, Brian Fitzpatrick, and Jen Kiggens, who apparently aren’t smart enough to know that white-knighting for Planned Parenthood is not what you do as a Republican. (RELATED: These Are Morons If This Story Is True)

Anyway, American Spectator editor Paul Kengor is no fan of Trump’s proposed 100 percent tariff on foreign-made films, which is intended to incentivize film production back home in the USA…

Why in the world does Donald Trump want to protect Hollywood? Does he not realize what kind of bilge Hollywoke has been producing and, hence, why it has been failing? What the left-wingers who have hijacked Hollywood need is more, rather than less, foreign competition. The last thing they deserve is to be bailed out as they continue to generate garbage. Modern Hollywood’s values are antithetical to what has made America great. Its values certainly run contrary to those of Trump supporters.

The reality is that because of the leftist takeover of Tinseltown, conservative filmmakers have been forced to go abroad to make movies independently, having been blacklisted by the Hollywood Left. And here’s something that President Trump particularly needs to know: Another major reason for American filmmakers bolting Hollywood for greener pastures is that the taxes in California are so outrageous that the environment for making films there is cost-prohibitive.

Kengor notes that under a Breitbart story about the proposal, the commenters engaged in a collective raspberry for the ages. There is no sympathy at all for Hollywood among Trump supporters, and rightly so.

I agree with everything Paul said. But I’m going to treat Trump a little more generously, because I think I see what he’s going for. Two thoughts here.

First, there are a number of countries, particulary in Eastern Europe currently (but also in Ireland and Italy, among others), where very generous incentives have been laid down to incentivize film production. If your aim is to revitalize filmmaking in America given those circumstances, you’ve got two general methods available to do that.

The first way is to try to match those incentives, which involves a whole lot of moving parts. The second way is simply to tariff those made-abroad films and therefore wipe out the advantages filmmakers might get from filming in Romania.

I’m not saying that this is what I’d do. I’m just noting that if you’re really serious about resuscitating domestic filmmaking so that spaghetti Westerns and goulash crime dramas aren’t our future, those are the two levers available to you in public policy, and the tariff one is probably easier to pull.

The second thing I’ll say is that while I’m absolutely on board with Paul’s point about Hollywood’s vast deficiencies and I call it social justice if the entire industry collapses as currently constituted, if you see film production as a cultural manifestation of manufacturing, you might also see movies and TV as something akin to the car industry when American manufacturers went into a big slump in the 1970s and 1980s. What happened then was that foreign carmakers came in and lapped up big chunks of the global and domestic market share, and our Big Three have never really remedied that.

Film, as a manifestation of culture, might be every bit as important as carmaking. And America has to dominate global cultural output — because if we don’t, then the alternatives are not good. Especially if instead of us, it’s China. We’ve already seen the deleterious effect that Chinese money and the Chinese movie market have had on American film production.

This isn’t an argument for protecting Hollywood, you understand, but who says Hollywood has to be the American film industry? Most American-made movies are filmed elsewhere in the States because of California’s stupid tax and regulatory policies; rather than allow foreigners to eat away at our cultural content production, the solution might be to promote competing domestic film producers in ways our dumb public policy wouldn’t allow when the Big Three carmakers were faltering in the latter part of the last industry.

If we’d had a host of startup carmakers in the 1980s making interesting new car models, Volkswagen, Toyota, and the rest might never have penetrated this market as they did. Maybe if we try to promote startup film production companies reflecting the values of real Americans rather than whatever it is that Hollywood is trying to push on us, we can avoid a similar fate in showbiz.

Anyway, I tried to make this a quick things post, and I’ve horribly failed again. For that, I say please accept an apology and have yourself a happy weekend!

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

These Are Morons If This Story Is True

Carbon Capture: The Scam Agreed Upon

Five Quick Things: The Utter, Complete, and Glorious Evisceration of the Legacy Propaganda Press

The post Five Quick Things: Habemas Trumpam? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.



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