Words Matter: The New Acronym to Remember the Great Lakes is S-H-A-M-E

sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other, undisclosed locations across America and around the world.

“Hello and welcome to Words Matter, I am David Ralkoff and I am here as every week with”

Norm Ornstein, a Washington institution himself, one so beloved that it's only a matter of time before Donald Trump decides to rename Norm after himself, Norm Trump's steed. Are you ready?

I could never be ready for any of that.

No. Well, there's another redaming going on today, Norm, and as someone who hails from a great like state, it probably resonates with you and I love your point of view because the president is always reaching new lows of stupidity, immacility, acidity, pick your word. And this, of course, is a reference to his decision today, his executive order, to rename

one of the great lakes, like Ontario, with Ontario, by the way, which means in the indigenous original translation, means great lake. He wants to rename it Lake America, but Norm, I had a brain storm and here's my brain

storm, happened instantly, because my brain is like super fast, because when you were a kid

“in school in elementary school, they said, well, how are you going to remember all these”

lakes? There's so many of them, and they said, oh, there's an acronym, homes here on Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior, but now Ontario is gone, so I immediately thought, well, what's the new acronym? And you know what it is, Norm?

Superior, Superior, Huron, America, Michigan, Erie, SAA, it's same. That's brilliant. I will tell you what else is brilliant, David, which is my friend Debbie Dingle. Oh, yeah. Normally is pretty, pretty dry.

Pretty dry. This fifth one. That's a useful. Getting on fire, and her idea that we should rename it Lake Natalie, so that the great lakes will be taken care of, I thought, fit so well, but shame may even be a little bit

better.

“It could catch on, you know, and frankly, I think, you know, the Canadians have got to find”

a way to retaliate. This is all obviously about the most idiotic trade war in history, which is saying something since Trump has launched a trade war against everybody, but against our beloved friends and key trading partners in Canada, but as, you know, many of us, I used to be a trade official in the US government, so I know some of these things.

And one of the things I know about is that Canada basically has cornered the market for the kind of wood pulp that we used to produce toilet paper. And so if they want to shut us down without toilet paper, and as we face Trump diarrhea, they have an opportunity to do something brilliant and uncomfortable for all of us. Now, explosive diarrhea with toilet paper shortages, brilliant, you know, that's almost

as brilliant as what's happened with Iran, really, it's an amazing confluence of policies

here. You know, I glue, it's confluence isn't the word I use there, but I don't like it's true. I would like to see, even though the prime minister of Mark Karnick can't do executive orders to do an executive order saying that he's renaming the Gulf of America, the Gulf of Canada, or the Gulf of Ontario.

Pick one, just to show how shamelessly stupid, or shamefully stupid since it's now shame, Donald Trump is, of course, we have other things besides toilet paper, poor Susan Collins, I mean, thoughts and prayers to poor Susan Collins, because the lobster industry, which is

It's not that just that main lobster and Nova Scotia lobster are competitors.

It is that the lion share of the processing of main lobsters occurs in Canada, so with all of the elements of trade that Canada does with main directly, the timing of this is just exquisite for Susan Collins, and I'm afraid that her level of concern has reached defcon one, and of course, she's up to reelection in just a short while.

“I have no idea, but you know, here's the thing, almost every state that's really heavily”

contested, particularly in the Northern United States, depends heavily on Canada for something. We get a ton of electricity from Canada, we get a ton of energy, supplies gas from Canada,

steel from Canada, aluminum from Canada, cars are going to cost more.

People are going to lose jobs at auto factories, and I'm not even, I haven't even gotten into LeBot's beer and Tim Horton's donuts. You know, there are a lot of things that come out of Canada that have an impact on the economies of states, where it's not, it wouldn't have been clear one way or another, where Trump has done well in the past, but it's just going to push the needle further, I think.

And yet, on top of all of this norm, you mentioned Iran clearly Trump is doing this to distract from a big fact, which nobody has acknowledged yet, and that is he's given up on Iran.

He is walking away from it, he is going to announce we're drawing down troops, we don't

have the weapons anymore, he can't threaten to attack. And so, you know, he's got best in saying we're going to squeeze the mechanically, but that's not going to work because the Chinese have already said fuck off.

“So he has just desperate, desperate, desperate to change the subject, and that's why we're”

doing what we're doing today with Lake America. So let's use I only bring that up in the hopes that you will respond to. Turn your house down, yes, yes, you're burning your house down and you want to distract from the fact that you have set your own house on fire. So what do you do?

You set your garage on fire, and that's in effect what he's doing here. We should also note that with Iran, I mean, we could spend several shows just doing all of the collateral damage that has emerged out of this. But I do want to mention a couple of things while we're on that subject. One is that we know not only did Pete Heggseth cover up for five months, the fact that

“our key base in the region, which is the one that's used for all of our aircraft carriers”

and other ships to refuel, to use as their destination while they're out on duty, which is why the Lincoln was stuck out there on these horrific circumstances. But we also know that his generals, the firewoods, pleaded with him to maintain if not beef up the organ within the Pentagon to try to make sure there was no civilian damage, civilian casualties as a result of a military action.

Instead of beefing it up, he eliminated it, and we know that well over 100 young children were killed at a school in Iran as a direct consequence, not a big mistake. But because they had maps that weren't adequate that would have been flagged if this outfit existed. So we're seeing kids killed.

We are seeing our allies retreat from us. We are seeing a country in the region that thought they could pay off Donald Trump with a $400 million plane. Now discovering that you can pay Donald Trump off, but that doesn't mean he will do anything for you other than betray you, and that signals going out to every erstwhile ally we have

in that region and around the world.

already cost us, the fact that fertilizer prices have skyrocketed, not just what's happened

“with oil and gas, driving through Delaware, where I now am, the price of diesel fuel is”

between 575 and 595 a gallon. Food prices are going to go up even more because they have not yet factored in the additional costs of the fertilizer. Americans have been killed, some of them they tried to whitewash by saying it was not a result of the war because they said we had a pause a ceasefire.

We've seen huge numbers of American military wounded grievously through all of this. We have drawn down our stocks.

I mean we've talked about this before, but you can't stop talking about what is among

the biggest, if not the biggest horrific disaster in modern warfare caused directly by Trump after he was told by even Tulsi Gabbard, what the consequences of this would be, and he still went ahead with it.

“And now the trade war with Canada, which is going to expand to other countries, is going”

to be devastating in the timing of it, of course, it could not be worse for Republicans running for office, thoughts and prayers to all of them. If you're enjoying this episode and want to get even more out of the DSR network, you need to check out our sub-stack. The DSR network sub-stack is the absolute best way to follow deep state radio, the DSR

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“of David's need to know sub-stack, and more.”

To get your 20% off, go to DSR network.substack.com/awgist26, that's DSR network.substack.com/awgist 26. Yeah, and they seem content to escalate all of this. Peter Navarro said that Canada is now a subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party and noted that Vancouver was taken over by the Chinese, which is just racist.

But they really see, you know, all the Trump-licters, including your friend, not like, seem really, really committed to outdoing themselves with Trump with a, you know, crazy attacks on Canada, like we're at war with them, or there are enemy, or, you know, their bad country, their bad people. And it really, you know, to me, it's the Nadir from a foreign policy perspective.

If you were teaching foreign policy, training people for foreign policy, I've done this for most of my life, if you were doing that, and you were going to say, okay, for the entry level course, we're going to try to help you devise a relationship with another country. But because you're just entry level, and you don't really know anything, we're going to make it as easy as possible.

The first country you would try to establish relations with this Canada, because they're

our friend, we share so much in common, they're very nice. We don't fight with them, you know, it's like, it's the one that couldn't screw up. So you give it to the kids so that they could learn, you know, a little bit from it, which means that if we're at the point where that relationship is dysfunctional, we've run through the rest of the list.

We've gone through the list of countries out there, and Trump is really, not just burning down our garage, he's burning down every bridge that we've got in the world. So we have Sean Duffy, the reality TV guy who is acting as Secretary of Transportation, who is dismantling the air traffic control system, whose major accomplishment is getting companies he regulates to give him a ton of money so he could go off for months instead

of doing his job doing a reality TV tour of America saying falsely lying that Canada has no military. Of course, they sent tens of thousands of Canadians in support of us to Iraq and many

But let's add to other pieces of stupidity of the Trump administration through all of this. One is they have now, and I'm sure that Natalie is the one, Natalie Harpis, the one who controls the social media. They put out one with a picture of George W. Bush, where underneath it, said, mission accomplished.

“We all remember the first of the mission accomplished before we got even more deep into”

the money in Iraq. And next to that, a picture of Donald Trump saying mission accomplished Iran. So he's equating now Iran with the Quagmire we had in Iraq, which cost us huge sums of money and more and lots of injuries and debts. The second is they put out a picture from a video that showed an American eagle on top

of a Canadian goose. What they didn't show was if you watched the video, the goose wins. So this is the level of stupidity that we have along with the level of destructiveness that the policies represent. The goose beats the eagle?

Yes. I can't just can hardly believe that. I got to see that video.

Have you never had a goose?

“Well, I actually was bitten by a goose, not too long ago.”

We went to a farm that takes in injured animals. My wife was donating some stuff to them. It was very nice of her. And so I get out of the car to walk with her over to like the blind donkey of three-legged sheep and all this other kind of stuff.

And I'm just like, no, seriously, I'm not trying to like connect and commute with nature. And a goose walks up to me and bites me on the leg. No reason. I didn't do anything anti-Semitic goose presumably. That's what it was, you know, no doubt.

Now, you know, we can all have, you know, our fun with this. And you know, the Canadians, by the way, have handled it magnificently. Mark Carney, Mike God, if he were running for president right now, I'd change the Constitution. And what has been superb. But and thus Ford, the idea that you get the lunatic Doug Ford, who in the past has been

favorably compared to his brother. But right now, not so much, you know, basically said, okay, you want to push this too far. All of this electricity that we have, going down to red states. Maybe we'll stop it.

And so the weapons that they have are amazing.

And they haven't even talked about the Ontario teachers retirement funder. Any of the other big tools that they've got. But yeah, it's all a distraction. What is a distraction problem? It's a distraction from the fact that Donald Trump, according to his own staff, looks

on the verge of entering the 20s in approval, the lowest that he has ever had, the lowest

“of any president that we can remember in modern memory, 60 odd days before an election.”

And that's as it should be, right? That's as it should be. In fact, that there are 20 some odd percent of Americans who could still support this guy is something for psycho historians to study for decades to come. But here's the serious part of it, norm.

Right now, the government of the United States, which is incompetent to do anything in the way of governing, is systematically running multiple attacks on our electoral system. And we heard today, the Secretary of Homeland Security saying that they're going to claim the ability to seize voting machines that have foreign parts in them because they represent a national security threat.

We have the post office floating bizarre, contorted rules that make it harder to, yet mail and ballots out there. We've got the Department of Justice and other parts of the government going after states that will not give their voter rolls to the federal government and saying they're going to deny them aid as they have done in many other places.

You've got multiple people, including governors, saying that maybe what they should do is send in the military, send in ice into voting places. And this is still 60 days out and they're holding some of their car cards close to their

press, but it seems to me, norm, that we have never in the history of the United States

we have never seen such a concerted attack on our democracy.

“And that's hard to make fun of because it could work.”

Unfortunately, you're right, and I've been engaged in dialogue with a number of people I served with on a task force on the elections about what ice might do. And one who said, you know, look, it would be against the law for them to pull anybody out of line because they're citizens. And my response that was apparently you haven't seen any of the videos of them arresting

citizens illegally, racially profiling people and demanding their papers, which they are not allowed to do.

And we are very likely to see ice agents, border patrol agents going to vulnerable polling

“places with long lines, especially if they succeed in this bizarre effort with the post office,”

which I want to get to in a minute. And yanking a citizen out of line, beating them up, throwing them in the unmarked van, and carding them off. And either dropping them 10 miles away from the polling place without any ID, you know, seizing phones and the like, which they've done now multiple times with some people dying

of hypothermia and other causes, but all to intimidate people standing in line.

And my response to that is, in blue states, in blue cities, in red states, we need governors

in the one instance mayors in both to get local police and state police out there with the

“orders that if any ice or border patrol agent tries to violate the law and the constitutional”

rights of people by seizing somebody with no cause and demanding papers and pulling them out of line, they will be stopped and they will be arrested. We have to take whatever actions we can. It's not going to work in red states that don't have those blue areas, but then we need citizens to stand up and try and provide some protective cover.

And at the same time, it would be utterly illegal and unconstitutional for a homeland security and/or the FBI to go in and seize voting machines and/or ballots. And we need to have state police and others protecting the polling sites, all of the things that they're trying to do. Now let me circle back to this disgraceful Supreme Court.

We have an executive order with the postal service completely in the pocket of Donald Trump saying that they have issued an order that it's not just about denying the ability to have your mail and ballot actually delivered. It's that if states do not provide their sensitive voting information to the federal government, to then go through their error written and biased algorithm, which will spit out who is eligible

to vote except with large numbers of people who are eligible being left off that list, that they will go forward with this. This is an executive branch that has no constitutional role in elections. Acting unconstitutionally and using that role for the clear explicit purpose of voter suppression. The Supreme Court did not say this is unconstitutional. In fact, all that they did was to

try and use some phony rationale that it was not right for decision at this point because when they issued their shadowed docket in effect opinion, no name attached. It's it's we don't have a final order, this is just a rule, it's a proposed rule. But they issued it after the final rule had been promulgated by the postal service. So it was phony, they clearly wrote it before that happened.

They forced a judge who did not want to let this go forward for all the right reasons to go along and now the greatest fear we have is something called the Purcell Principle,

Potentially perverted for them to say, well, it's quite possible that this is illegal and unconstitutional, but the rules out there and it's too close to an election to reverse it.

And if that's the case, then we basically have a huge problem on our hands.

We put out there by a rogue partisan Supreme Court and we cannot let John Roberts and

“his other partisan hack flunkies get away with it if that's what they do.”

And if it is what they do, then we not only need to double down and triple down on everything that we can do to make sure that people still vote and then whatever it takes with a democratic Congress and at some point when there is a democratic president to completely alter the power of a rogue Supreme Court. You know, you make a lot of sense to me, I would vote for you for president, we know that.

I would campaign for you, I would go door to door, campaigning for you, but having said

that, you're not running and I look at the Democrats out there and I know that there's some lawyers out there who are fighting hard and I'm glad to see it. And there are some rising stars in the party who are fighting hard. But there are some people in the Democratic Party who just don't seem to understand the urgency of the moment.

And so, story broke a few days ago that Jared Kushner reached out to a team Jeffries. The leader of the Democrats in the House, Jared Kushner, not official in the government, Jared Kushner who's in the midst of 15 different kinds of corruption, Jared Kushner, who, you

know, is kind of Trump's emissary and all things and really never looking for anything

other than what's in it for Trump. And Jeffries not only had the meeting, but he didn't talk about the meeting until later when it broke as a story. And then he said, "Well, this is how we have to find common ground." There is still common ground with fascists, right?

I'm just wondering, when I see that kind of stuff, I just wonder, well, you know, people of our generation guys, particularly always make God, Father, references.

“The God, Father, reference, I think of here is, is he a wartime counselor here?”

You know, if we had an election, and the Democrats took the House, and after that, during the interim period from November to January before we actually had the change in power, the Democratic leader who was going to become speaker agreed to meet with some emissary of the Trump White House just to talk about where they might be able to, you know, do something to help the country?

I'd be okay with that. To do it in the middle of the election campaign, the kindest thing you can say is that it's tone deaf. But it also is going to further anger a democratic base that understands that we need to fight back against fascism, it gives some greater legitimacy to the utterly illegitimate

Jared Kushner, who is one of the prime grifters in the Trump, the Trump crime family. So it was a big mistake on Jeffrey's part, and only after he got an enormous amount of pushback, did he come out with a statement saying, this doesn't mean anything, we are going to hold them accountable every single one of them, and, you know, that's just a true as it is, or maybe it was a gap, it was a big gap.

“And it's a reflection, I think, as well, of, and we've talked about this before, and we'll”

talk about it again, why there is such an anti-establishment view that we're seeing reflected in so many primaries, where we're seeing candidates rejected because they're seen as too close to the establishment, it's less about specific policies than about a template of whether you are demonstrating that you are not going to do what politicians normally do, which

And you don't want to do anything.

If you are a leader that plays into that, and that's just what Hakeem Jeffrey's did. He is, I, you know, I know him some, he's got a lot of talent, but the level of tone deafness to do this at this point. And it's clear, you know, we know part of the rationale is that he's had a long standing relationship of sorts with Kushner, they know each other, it's got nothing to do with

whether you as a leader of the party do the right thing now, or do something stupid. This was stupid. And, you know, there are some people who have defended him and said, well, Kushner reached out for it, and this was a sign of weakness on the Republicans' part and the Republicans are freaking out, because it's a sign that they don't believe that Mike Johnson would

be in charge after that.

Mike Johnson was freaking out, but you know, the reality is, you know, Jeffrey's could

just as easily said, you know, I was just approached by Jared Kushner. Yeah.

“And I don't think it's the appropriate time to meet with him, but I think it's interesting”

that he reached out. And he could have fucked Mike Johnson and he could have, right? Exactly. Exactly. That's the way to deal with it.

Yeah. Well, he didn't deal with it. Okay.

I'm going to end on one note, not a lighter note, but a slightly different note.

Just as we're doing this, Donald Trump has appeared on the Glenn Beck show. I didn't, you may not have known this, but Glenn Beck has still live, and apparently he's doing a show. And then we're talking about Dolly Parton and Donald Trump said, well, you know, I don't know about where she was politically, but she loved me.

“And I was like, oh my God, this is so Trump, right?”

It's just all about him. And he immediately, you know, I was wondering why did he immediately put the flags that aftermath. But undoubtedly, he remembers some exchange with her where she was nice fan. But I just thought it was an interesting moment, because the Dolly Parton, the death

of Dolly Parton, the reaction of the death of Dolly Parton, to me, was unlike anything I've seen in American politics in 10 years, which was everybody agreed, everybody was positive. Republicans, Democrats, magas, progressives, there was no, there was no division anywhere in the United States on the People's Reaction at Dolly Parton. And I mean, Jimmy Carter, you know, it was a saint at 100-year-old man and there was division.

Lots of things have happened, there's division, but not on this case. And I just thought it was an interesting moment, and I thought a good place to end would be for you to comment on it. So Dolly Parton, loved everybody, which is partly why we've had this reaction. I, you know, I did a tweet saying that she was the best of humanity, and, you know, I

given some money for some of these imagination library ventures in different cities, which is one of the most remarkable and brilliant and important things done, and that it was done only because of Dolly Parton. But after that tweet, just to cut back a little bit on the unity that we have, I got a response from a woman whose Twitter account is "Proud Christian March with Christ," saying,

"She will be up in heaven." But what about you scumbag? You'll be burning in the deepest levels of hell. Well, so maybe they're two things that bring America together. The view and Dolly Parton and the view of you, I saw you had some other controversy earlier in the week, and I didn't want to join in because it was out of my death, but I saw somebody

attacked you for publishing your wordle results, Norm. Yeah, you know, well, this happens periodically, a long time ago, just for fun. I began to put out what I had done in Wordle every day, but gathered a very substantial

“group of people, both on Blue Sky and on Twitter, who do the same thing?”

And the whole point of this was to get a community doing something that takes you for a few minutes a day away from the trauma that we face. And find a community that has nothing to do with politics, but it's people comparing their results and, you know, trying to figure out why and, and, you know, a lotting people who get it in two or who get it in three and trying to figure out why it didn't work for you this particular day.

And every once in a while, somebody's going to say, "I'm tired of this," and, you know, the response from many in this community is, "Okay, all you have to do is Google, or is

"I don't know who," who said, "You know, I like Norm, but, you know, what's the point

“of bragging about his Wordle results?" And my response was, "I'm not bragging about anything,”

they're not better than others because I also put it up when I flame out, but it's all about this community." And you realize that there are a lot of different views of different things

going on. Well, yeah, but you're a Minnesota nice. I'm from New Jersey. If somebody did that,

to me, I would have said, "Fuck you, blocked." I wouldn't, I wouldn't even have the conversation.

“So, I thought you handled it gracefully, but that's befitting your position as a national treasure.”

Yeah, and, you know, and, and, you know, I, I just, I feel bad because next week is our annual

one week of off, the last week of the summer, where we go to the best of, and there'll be the

best of words made or out there in the best of, and there's a lot of that. And, and so you guys won't be hearing here from Norm, but he's on a thousand platforms. Maybe you'll hear from someplace else until after Labor Day, when we all get back, and then at 60 days to the election, it's the home stretch, like a vault, and, you know, it's going to be very, very high sex and intense for those two months. And then the day after the election norm, and I know you're

very excited about this, campaign 2028 starts. So, the day after the election, we then get into the deep deep water. So, enjoy the week, enjoy having a little bit of a break, enjoy the word, I can see you're still at the beach, enjoy the beach, and, and, I look forward to seeing you after Labor Day. And what are your plans for this week? Are you going away? Are you,

“I'm going to be like, are you just immersing yourself from the goose wound that you take?”

No, well, I've recovered pretty well from that, but, no, no, I'm just going to be here doing work and writing and those kind of things. No, good. No, no, no escape here, but I kind of like it here. I like, you know, we live sort of on the edge of farm country here in Maryland, and it's kind of pleasant. So, I got, I got no, I got no complete. Anyway, have a good week, and everybody have a good week, and of course, we have one more show this week, which is our Friday Live Substack,

where we're being joined by my friend, Media Superstar Jen Welch of the I've had it podcast, so that will be a lot of fun. And we'll see you all then. Until then, bye, bye, everybody.