Today's News: Poilievre loses the media and Trump loses his mind

Poilievre did a couple of big media interviews this weekend, displaying the incisive rhetoric, perceptive analysis and nuanced review of his own performance as leader that we've all come to expect:

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Re. Rosemary Barton interview "I think Pierre Poilievre could use some media training, the comportment, the body language, the all of it, was 15° off centre in terms of what you want to be doing." -Conservative Kory Teneycke on @airquotesmedia.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESWd...

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— Doug Johnson 🇨🇦🇺🇦🌦️🏞 (@smikooman.bsky.social) December 15, 2025 at 7:00 PM

Poilievre is getting pointed questions by Rosemary Barton and it isn’t going well for him. Good grief he is no statesman.

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— cashmerecoco.bsky.social (@cashmerecoco.bsky.social) December 14, 2025 at 10:07 AM

Prime Minister Carney needs just one more seat to have a majority government. The Conservatives need to accept that Poilievre is toxic and replace him at their upcoming leadership review in January. globalnews.ca/news/1157918...

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— Bon Hanson (@bonhanson.bsky.social) December 15, 2025 at 9:33 PM

What an absolutely disastrous interview for Poilievre on CBC this morning. Just when we think he can’t possibly look any less capable of managing his own caucus - let alone a nation - he succeeds in looking like a file boy with some big opinions. I just want an effective opposition, FFS.

— Kikki Planet (@kikkiplanet.bsky.social) December 14, 2025 at 5:19 PM

Yeah, I wondered about this myself.

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Moving on, after the horrible news this weekend about the Brown University killings, the Bondi Beach killings and the Reiner killings, this awful Trump post was just absolutely nuts:

this is one of the most psychotic things Trump has ever posted

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) December 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM

Trump’s post about Rob Reiner is something I won’t post here. It’s not a mean tweet; it’s a genuine expression of profound mental illness mixed with delusional grandiosity and a callousness and narcissism beyond the capacity of anyone but true sociopaths. Enough of your excuses, dismissals, whataboutisms and avoidance. He’s a deranged monster. He disgraces us all. All the time. The damage he is doing to the civic and moral core of this country is profound and irrevocable.

- Andrew Sullivan

Read on Substack

Even MAGA has had enough:

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here. Trump mocked the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner, and the backlash didn’t come from Democrats. It came from his own MAGA allies, openly condemning the post as cruel and unhinged. That’s the story: not partisan spin, but a moment where Trump crossed a line so obvious that even his base said no. When cruelty costs you your own supporters, it’s not optics. It’s character.

- Dannie D

Read on Substack

This description of Trump's speech to the White House Christmas Party shows a man losing his mind. and its probably the creepiest thing I have ever read on Substack:
Mary Geddry / Geddry’s Newsletter

The Serpent That Slipped Its Cage
Trump’s unraveling jungle hallucination reveals a mind losing the boundaries between performance and reality. ....Then the speech veered off the cliff and into a strange, cinematic realm that bore none of the familiar hallmarks of political spin and all the fingerprints of memory breakdown. Trump launched into a sprawling jungle epic involving a White House doctor, the Obama daughters, a Peruvian viper, and a miracle recovery that allegedly took two years and three sets of last rites. And he delivered it with the earnestness of a man who believed every word he was saying.
Even by Trump’s standards, it was bizarre. The story sprawled across minutes of uninterrupted monologue, growing stranger with each beat. There was a trip to Peru, a deadly jungle viper that supposedly kills “28,000 a year,” a bite that knocked the doctor unconscious “immediately,” a frantic call to Ronny Jackson (because of course), the reading of last rites not once but three separate times, and a miraculous recovery that took “two years.” Trump added the flourish that the doctor wrote a book about the ordeal, one that “sold two copies” until Trump posted about it on Truth Social, instantly transforming it into “the number one bestselling book” with “100,000 copies sold in one day.” He repeated that number with the conviction of a man who believes he can manifest reality by insisting on it loudly enough.
Not a single element of this tale exists in the real world. The doctor is untraceable. The viper’s annual kill count would exceed many small wars. There is no record of Malia or Sasha Obama bushwhacking through a Peruvian jungle under Secret Service protection. And if a book about a near-fatal presidential medical incident had suddenly sold 100,000 copies in a day, the publishing industry would have noticed. Reddit threads have formed around fact-checking the story.
What makes this moment more than just another Trump exaggeration is how he told it, and why it felt so unnervingly familiar. Because we’ve heard this story before, just not as nonfiction. It is, beat for beat, the skeleton of the poem he used to recite at rallies: “The Snake.” In that fable, a trusting woman takes in a wounded serpent that ultimately bites her, prompting its sneering confession: “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.” A simple parable, delivered with the sing-song cadence he slides into.
But this time, the parable wasn’t framed as a parable. It was reframed as autobiographical history. He took the metaphor and recast it as an event. He inserted himself into the narrative as both witness and savior. He collapsed the distinction between performance and memory, turning an old stump-speech bit into something he now “remembers” as having happened within his administration. The boundaries dissolved. And it’s that dissolution, not the snake, not the jungle, that should alarm us.
This type of conflation, the collapse of metaphor into memory, is not a quirk. It is a recognizable cognitive pattern, one often documented in frontotemporal dementia, where patients begin blending stories they’ve told with events they’ve lived, losing the ability to separate performed narratives from personal experience. They draw on familiar scripts because the scripts are easier to retrieve than actual memories. And the more emotionally charged the script, the more likely it is to be repurposed as truth.
Trump has always lied, but he used to lie intentionally. He lied to dominate, to distract, to humiliate, to win. Dare I say, he lied with strategy. This was different because there was no political purpose to an imaginary viper in Peru. No strategic benefit to placing the Obama daughters in a National Geographic episode. No reason to spend precious podium time recounting fangs, venom, unconsciousness, resurrection, and book sales. This was the kind of story that emerges not because it’s useful, but because the storyteller’s internal filing system has lost its tabs.
He looked pale, unsteady, gripping the podium with both hands, drifting through a hallucinated adventure as though it were briefing-room fact. The people around him watched politely because what else can they do? They can’t tell him it didn’t happen, they have to wait for the moment to pass and hope the next improvised myth isn’t worse.
Trump’s snake poem once served as his warning about other people’s treachery. Now, in its mutated form, it reads like a warning about his own mind. The snake he should fear isn’t coiled in the jungles of Peru; it’s coiled somewhere much closer, winding through the spaces where memory, fantasy, grievance, and mythology have begun to fuse, quietly, steadily, and now, unmistakably, in public view. If he ever revisits that MRI he bragged about “acing,” he may find the serpent sitting right there on the scan, coiled up patiently, waiting for the next story he can no longer tell apart from reality.

Wow. 

I think Stonekettle says it:

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