Someone suggested I think about starting a Substack newsletter in my, ahem, retirement. I have thought about it, and I’m troubled by a few things:

1) Many days, I have very little to say, and would feel terrible charging anyone for it.

2) Even if I did the free thing, what if Substack goes toes-up? Another migration of content I don’t need.

3) It’s my goal to have the last surviving blog in the world.

Seriously, though, while I have no doubt at least some of you suckers lovely people might be generous enough to give me $20, $30 or $40 a year to read what I have to say, I don’t know that I could accept it, even though I firmly believe writing is work that is worth paying for. I have subscriptions to several paid Substacks (fave: Roy Edroso Breaks It Down), and several more to unpaid Substacks – a common setup is one freebie a week, and one or more bonus editions for the paying guests – and already it’s starting to annoy me; as a sales tactic, either the platform or the individual writers will send out teaser editions, with five grafs of writing, then a “want more? you gotta subscribe” pitch. There’s no easy way to know if the email you’re about to open is the complete freebie or the incomplete teaser.

I think, at least for now, this will remain a free-to-all space. I feel no pressure to produce if I’m feeling down or empty (although I usually do, unfortunately). I have a friend who uses Substack to write short fiction, with the gimmick that he does it every single day. A short story a day, going on more than two years now. Every so often he pitches for more subscribers, and he sounds almost angry that more people aren’t signing up. Writing fiction is hard work for sure, but it should also have something to say, or be entertaining, or be something other than a gimmick, which it inevitably becomes when you’ve pledged to produce it every single day.

I don’t want or need another job like that. There’s an argument to be made for taking it easy. I will write as long as I’m able, but having just finished 40 years of deadlines, I won’t take on any more right now. Now that we’re in our (gasp) third decade here, I’ll stick with dumb ol’ WordPress a little longer.

I was an early adopter of blogging, and now I’m a dead-ender of blogging. Me and Neil Steinberg, hangin’ in there. In a Laura Lippman line I’ve certainly quoted here before: She never met a rut she couldn’t love.

If a crisis hits and I have to beg for money, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

I’ll tell you this: One of my goals for post-work is to raise my game here. Won’t be so busy, will have more time to think things through. Fingers crossed.

Bloggage: I don’t think this story is paywalled. It is instructive, however, about some of the candidates invited to a “Call to Action” conference hosted by Church Militant, which is a far-far-far-right Catholic outfit here. Here’s our Republican candidate for Michigan Secretary of State:

“We see the authoritarians that have taken over the Democratic Party, the traitors that exist in our own party. We understand that we the people have got to rise up, get involved,” Karamo said, sharing a couch with Arizona Republican secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem.

The two are part of the America First Secretary of State Coalition, a group of election deniers vying to serve as their states’ top election administrators that includes those campaigning on a blend of stolen election claims and evangelism. Their campaigns appear to be part of a larger Christian nationalist movement marked by radical religious and political views, according to experts.

…”Part of my passion is to get more Christians involved in government,” she said during the panel. “We’re not trying to establish a theocracy,” she emphasized later. The “justice and the truth that we are fighting for” is for everyone, not just Christians, she said. “We just hope at the end of the day, they come to Christ.”

Ai-yi-yi. She doesn’t have much of a chance, but still.

Meanwhile, the two mopes who plotted to kidnap the governor were convicted today. Good news for midweek. See you all later. Tip your waitress, but not me.

I back up my phone to Google Photos, and it’s starting to freak me out. The first thing it does when you upload your library is, it starts to look for matching faces, then asks you if you want to ID that face and make an album. I did this for my family members and close friends; it makes searching for pictures much easier.

It was a little unnerving that it could tell 4-year-old Kate was the same as 24-year-old Kate (although it couldn’t tell Wendy from Kevin, and they share only modest similarities). But then today, it flagged this photo, a throwaway from Kate’s high-school graduation in 2015. Who’s this guy, it asked:

That’s Kate’s friend Will. I ID’d him as such, and pretty soon it put this pic, from March 2020, in that album:

Man, I’d be hard-pressed to say that was the same kid; his appearance is pretty different there. Like Kate, Will is a musician. His band is the Stools (and they’re great). And Google stuffed these pics, from last summer’s Labor Day festival in Hamtramck, in there:

At least in that one, he looks close to his high-school self. And as for this, I can only assume it figured that since we know he’s White T-Shirt Guy in the pictures taken close to one another at the same location, that’s probably the back of White T-Shirt Guy’s head, too:

I realize this is just an AI thing, but it’s a bit unsettling. Will’s a good kid, but I hate to think we’re all out there somewhere, and Google Knows All.

But that horse has left the barn.

Meanwhile, here’s a picture of Kate from Friday night, when her other band, GiGi, played at a local punk/garage fest at a bar nearby. Someone was setting off fireworks nearby, and it made for some nice shots:

Well, it happened: I no sooner announce my exit from journalism than my swim coach pitched me on being a lifeguard at the Grosse Pointe Shores (or any other GP pool) next summer. Not sure if I want to do it, but it could be fun. My career, it takes a turn!

In bloggage, I have only this, which many of you have already seen, but on the tiny chance someone hasn’t, it’s so, so worth a click: A withering takedown of Jared Kushner’s White House memoir:

Every political cliché gets a fresh shampooing. “Even in a starkly divided country, there are always opportunities to build bridges,” Kushner writes. And, quoting the former White House deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell: “Every day here is sand through an hourglass, and we have to make it count.” So true, for these are the days of our lives.

Kushner, poignantly, repeatedly beats his own drum. He recalls every drop of praise he’s ever received; he brings these home and he leaves them on the doorstep. You turn the pages and find, almost at random, colleagues, some of them famous, trying to be kind, uttering things like:

It’s really not fair how the press is beating you up. You made a very positive contribution.

I don’t know how you do this every day on so many topics. That was really hard! You deserve an award for all you’ve done.

I’ve said before, and I’ll say again. This agreement would not have happened if it wasn’t for Jared.

Jared did an amazing job working with Bob Lighthizer on the incredible USMCA trade deal we signed yesterday.

Jared’s a genius. People complain about nepotism — I’m the one who got the steal here.

I’ve been in Washington a long time, and I must say, Jared is one of the best lobbyists I’ve ever seen.

A therapist might call these cries for help.

And then there’s the eye-goo line. But you’ve already seen that in a million places.

OK, time to take on my second-to-last week in journalism. Short-timer! What a feeling.

I was going to post something last night, but saw my editor had this column ready to go, so I held off. To save you a click, Deadline Detroit is closing up shop on Labor Day, which means the Summer of Nance will end with a bang: Retirement, more or less.

I say “more or less” because I expect I’ll work again, somewhere. One thing about losing your job: It opens a lot of doors you might not have considered walking through. Maybe I’ll re-activate my lifeguard certification and become one of those old bags with a whistle. This sounds appealing – working part-time for an airline to cop the free-flights benefit. I always thought it might be fun to work in one of Michigan’s weed dispensaries; there has to be a book in it. There’s a labor shortage in this country. I won’t starve.

But before any of that happens, we’ll be doing more traveling – Spain, this time, mid-September to mid-October – and I’ll spend that time thinking about what I want to do next. Something election-related might be cool in the short term, because democracy ain’t gonna save itself.

Don’t worry about me. We saved our money, our house is almost paid off, I’ll be on Medicare November 1 and I still have my health, as they say. I told Allan (boss Allan, not husband Alan) that I’d stick it out until Deadline ran out of money, and I thought it would happen well before this. Truth be told, I have a spring in my step. It’s…interesting to not know what you’ll be doing January 1.

Mostly, I’m grateful that, in the last years of my career, I was able to have fun at work again, something that’s been missing since roughly the turn of the century. The News-Sentinel was like being aboard a sinking ship. Bridge was fine but Stress City. The Research Council was fine but so quiet and cloistered it could have been an insurance office. I didn’t make a lot of money at Deadline, but the stress was low and we had some good times. So I’m at peace with that.

I’ll hear your suggestions for how I should play out my string.

Speaking of democracy not saving itself, I have one piece of bloggage, and I beg you to read it: Jane Mayer’s deep dive on how state legislatures are, in the headline’s word, torching it. It concentrates on Ohio, but the same thing could be said about Michigan (although it’s looking up here), Florida and many other states. I read it and was chilled to the bone. Please do so yourself.

Now I’m going to finish one of my last DD newsletters and maybe make some calls for one more story. Later, guys.

It’s been quite a crazy few days, eh? Salman Rushdie nearly killed, a nutjob trying to get into an FBI field office, and what am I watching on TV right now? The Princess Diana thing on HBO. There are advantages to not having cable, I guess.

The most impressive part of the Di movie? A short clip of Queen Elizabeth riding sidesaddle at one of her trooping-the-color events. Never tried it, but it looks hard. I’d never do it without a bombproof horse under me, but I guess she has plenty of those in her stables.

That is, of course, the entire theme of “The Crown,” the only reason to subscribe to Netflix these days (one of these days they’ll drop another season, I guess) – that it’s the queen holding the whole works together.

This year is the 25th anniversary of Diana’s death. A tragedy, of course, but the whole thing was: This unprepared girl, recruited as a broodmare, utterly unprepared for what she was getting herself into. She could have been just another member of the British upper class, smoking cigarettes and soaking up gin-and-tonics starting at lunch. She chose not to be. Alas.

Twenty-five years later, here we are, with a former president who sinks lower and lower, and an insane public – some of them, anyway – that still loves him, defends him, would kill FBI agents for him. God, it’s repulsive, isn’t it? I rather wish I lived in an England having a hysterical breakdown.

Thank all of you for your comments about the nature of document security at the federal level in the previous post. I learn so much from you.

Meanwhile, I introduced Alan to the wonderful world of the Petfinder Names Twitter account:

Let’s not forget this one:

And my personal favorite, for a three-legged Chihuahua:

Meanwhile, this strikes me as the real outrage of the weekend:

The Norwegian authorities killed a 1,300-pound walrus named Freya on Sunday who had spent the past weeks off the coast of Oslo climbing onto boats and lounging on piers, saying that moving her was “too high risk.”

“In the end, we couldn’t see any other options,” said Olav Lekver, a spokesman for the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries. “She was in an area that wasn’t natural for her.”

The hell you say.

Happy Monday. I’m opting for Something over Something Better tonight. Sorry.

I said I was going to let the universe decide whether I’d be taking the Badger home, and the universe said: No. The ship was sold out for cars, although I could have hopped aboard as a plain old human being. Unwilling to tow my Subaru across Lake Michigan in a dinghy, however, I had to drive home, but that is fine. It meant two hours or so of WXRT on the radio, and I defied Google’s suggestion that I take I-294 through the west suburbs, opting instead for I-94 through the city. It meant some delays, but nothing head-hurting. The Chicago skyline is my very favorite, and definitely worth a few minutes sitting in sludge.

Then a stop at Redamak’s in New Buffalo for a greasy-burger lunch, and another in west Michigan for fruit, and it was a very tolerable 6.5 hours behind the wheel.

It was great to see old friends; we’ve been separated too long. I only wish it hadn’t been so dang humid.

And now I’m back home, living in chaos, as we wait for the floor-refinishers to get here. In the interim Alan has been doing work in the room, so it’s not like we’re sitting here like lumps. But Alan hates the guest-room bed and I hate the fact that some of my clothes are here and some are there and some are god-knows-where. The dressers are crammed into my office room, and everything behind them is unreachable. I have two pairs of earrings to wear — a tragedy, I know — but one of the consolations of being, um, older is that you know where all your shit is, and you generally have it together. Not now.

OK, so while I consider how I want to spend the rest of the day, have some bloggage:

Say what you will about Beto, but he knows how to seize the moment.

I imagine the Trump inner circle these days being something like the last third of “The Departed,” where Leo DiCaprio is essentially shitting himself from stress over being a rat.

I read little nonfiction in book form, because I spend all day in a firehose of nonfiction in my work life, but this book sounds like it might be worth a visit to the library, whenever it arrives:

“Thank You for Your Servitude” concentrates less on the MAGA true believers — the likes of Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene — than on the twisted and tormented souls in the Republican establishment who could have prevented Trump’s hostile takeover of the party but didn’t. Such Republicans, in Leibovich’s assessment, “made Trump possible” and they “refused to stop him even after the U.S. Capitol fell under the control of some madman in a Viking hat. It was always rationalization followed by capitulation and then full surrender. The routine was always numbingly the same, and so was the sad truth at the heart of it: They all knew better.”

So why did they go along? The usual Washington factors of greed, ambition and opportunism, for starters. Kevin McCarthy, who unwisely spoke to Leibovich at length and with considerable candor, made clear he would endure any humiliation at Trump’s hands and sacrifice any principle in pursuit of becoming House speaker. “Once McCarthy wins,” in Leibovich’s view, “nothing else matters: He will have made it.” Senator Lindsey Graham turned from Trump critic to lapdog out of a desire “to try to be relevant,” he told Leibovich, as well as a pragmatic understanding that his re-election depended upon Trump’s blessing and his base. Others submitted out of both fear and fascination; Leibovich notes the mystique that Trump, as “a pure and feral rascal,” held for rule-bound, easily shamed politicians.

Oy, these people.

OK, half of Thursday, Friday and the weekend await. Enjoy yours, and I’ll be back Sunday-ish.

Does it ever stop with houses? Ever? I’ll give you an example:

Our central air-conditioning unit is…old. When we moved in 17 years ago, the house inspector said he couldn’t give us an opinion on the A/C because a) it was the dead of winter; and b) the unit appeared old enough that it was nearing the end of its useful life. OK, fine, noted.

So every summer since, I’ve crossed my fingers as the weather heats up, hoping it will turn on and work. We had it inspected a few years ago; the guy took a couple of big mouse nests out of it and said it was down a…pound? I think that’s the unit?…of freon, but he wouldn’t add any because “it’s so old, it’s not worth it.”

It kept working. Finally, this year, I said maybe we should look into replacing it. I googled “life span of a central air conditioning unit” and learned the average one lasts about 12-15 years. And we’ve been here 17 years. And it was old when we moved in. So we called some companies and the parade of estimates is starting. In preparation, Alan went out to trim the shrubs around the unit and found the installation date on it: 1988. It’s 34 years old.

But it still works! It’s a goddamn miracle.

So the first guy shows up, goes downstairs to look at the furnace and says nope, won’t fit. The newer, high-efficiency A/C units are taller, and our furnace is too tall for it to sit on top, and so that means that to replace the A/C, we also need to replace the furnace (installed in 1998). So what started as a roughly $4,000 expense is now a $8,300 expense.

So, pfft. I’m thinking I’ll just wait until it finally goes kaput, knowing it will do so on a beastly hot day and who knows, maybe it’ll cost more.

Although three more quotes are coming our way, so maybe we’ll get a miracle. Let’s hope so.

Houses. It never stops.

Personal whining notwithstanding, it wasn’t a terrible weekend. Got some work done, got some socializing done, got some cooking done. But let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about Ivana Trump’s grave:

I don’t think enough attention has been paid to the incredible weirdness of this — to be buried on your second ex-husband’s golf course? At the time — a whole week ago — the discussion was about how the Catholic church had to consecrate the land so “strict Catholic” Ivana (who was married four times) could be buried there. And now it turns out there may have been an ulterior motive? You don’t say!

Looks like Melania did the landscaping there. Seriously, they didn’t even have some sod laid down? Good lord, these people.

Oh well, the week ahead looks good. Hope it does for you. Election Tuesday.

A new house project commenced this weekend. It should be the last one for a while, but it’ll be a big one – restoration of the hardwood floors, plus painting, new baseboards, all that crap. On Sunday we moved everything out of our bedroom, and we’re sleeping in Kate’s old room. Since we intend to replace our mattress, it went to the curb, along with the rolled-up old carpet from our bedroom. By Monday at noon, it had been taken away as part of our regular trash pickup.

I thought the same thing I did after a storm a couple of years ago toppled trees and tore off branches all over the neighborhood: Thank you, civilization. Thanks, tax dollars at work. Thanks for everything. The branches were all gone, chipped into mulch, within days. But for the still-ragged broken edges high up on a few trunks, you’d never have known what happened.

Trash, of course, never really goes away, it just goes someplace else. And I do my part to minimize ours. But I’m glad I don’t live on a farm, where there’s a pile of Mystery Junk behind every barn, or shoved into a long-vacant livestock stall. I recall those scenes in “Contagion,” deep into a deadly pandemic, when trash piles lined the streets of San Francisco. Rats were no doubt waiting off-camera.

An archaeologist friend (Sammy, John’s wife) introduced me to the concept of the “toss zone,” the area around early human settlements where early humans threw their trash – out the window, basically. (You wonder why so many pots ended up as shards?) There’s a group of grad students doing a “dig,” of sorts, outside a small house once lived in by Malcolm X in Inkster. Malcolm lived there for a year in the early ’50s, well after municipal garbage pickup, so I’m not sure what they’re looking for, other than period stuff, like the junk we’ve dug up around our house – coins, a couple of milk bottles with 3-cent deposit, a forgotten statue of St. Joseph, buried to make the house sell.

The milk bottles kinda touched me, as they likely came from the original workers who built our house in 1947. Today, those guys would drink Red Bull, or Mountain Dew, or some other swill.

Anyway, not much to say today. The Justice Department is finally doing its job, maybe:

The Justice Department is investigating President Donald Trump’s actions as part of its criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Prosecutors who are questioning witnesses before a grand jury — including two top aides to Vice President Mike Pence — have asked in recent days about conversations with Trump, his lawyers, and others in his inner circle who sought to substitute Trump allies for certified electors from some states Joe Biden won, according to two people familiar with the matter. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

The prosecutors have asked hours of detailed questions about meetings Trump led in December 2020 and January 2021; his pressure campaign on Pence to overturn the election; and what instructions Trump gave his lawyers and advisers about fake electors and sending electors back to the states, the people said. Some of the questions focused directly on the extent of Trump’s involvement in the fake-elector effort led by his outside lawyers, including John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, these people said.

We shall see, I’d say.

As for the rest of the week, let’s get through it. It’s Wednesday.

Everybody likes to think of themselves as brave. Right? I mean, some of us (raises hand) would fold quickly under torture; I don’t even like to watch it depicted in movies and TV, but my ego compels me to believe I’d do the right thing in a clutch situation, or even a non-clutch one.

Of course, I’ve never really been in one, so it’s all theoretical at this point.

Cowardice is the topic of the day. Let’s kick off with this great read on what happened when a man afraid of a black president prepared for the civil war he believed was coming. (Gift NYT link there. Let me know if anyone has trouble reading it.) It seems C. Wesley Morgan of Richmond, Ky. spent millions building his house, equipped with a literal bunker:

He had built the house in the Obama years, when he was convinced society was on the verge of collapse. Here his family could live in secluded comfort, and if the social fabric truly tore apart, as he expected it would, they could wait out the chaos in an abundantly stocked underground bunker. Now he couldn’t wait to be rid of it.

…On 200 acres of Kentucky meadow just outside of Richmond, his vision became a 14,300-square-foot reality. Nine bedrooms, three kitchens, a six-car garage, a steam room, a saltwater pool — the front entryway alone cost $75,000.

“My feelings were that we were going to have civil unrest because there was so much going on with Obama,” Mr. Morgan said. He believed that people were going to rise up against the attempts to overhaul health care and restrict guns, and that societal collapse would soon follow. He envisioned “roving bands of gangs” hunting for food and necessities in the aftermath. He bought riot gear, bulletproof vests and a small arsenal of firearms, so that “if you had to engage a band of marauders, you would have a chance to save your family.”

The roving bands of gangs didn’t show up, but one night a gunman did. What was he looking for? Dangerously mentally ill himself, he was looking for, well, a bunker:

(Morgan’s daughter), Jordan, 32, told her father she had come to feel unsafe at the house. In February of this year, she was hired by a law firm in Lexington and planned to move as soon as possible to an apartment in the city. “She must have sensed that she was being watched,” he said.

Someone had been watching, marking the house’s entry points and taking detailed notes on the family’s movements. Early on the morning of Feb. 22, prosecutors say, the watcher, Shannon V. Gilday, a 23-year-old former soldier who lived in the Cincinnati suburbs, climbed up to a second-floor balcony and began his attack.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, and I promise you it’s worth your time. One spoiler: This good guy with a gun grabbed one during the attack and emptied a 12-shot clip at the intruder. Missed every time.

After that, some comic relief, maybe? Here’s Haulin’ Josh Hawley, coward without peer, running away from danger, set to various theme music. Ha ha ha.

On to the Washington Post, who today published a piece on GOP candidates on the trail this campaign season, spreading dire portents to the faithful:

In both swing states and safe seats, many Republicans say that liberals hate them personally and may turn rioters or a police state on people who disobey them.

Referring to the coronavirus and 2020 protests over police brutality, Cox told supporters at a rally last month, “We were told 14 days to bend the curve, and yet antifa was allowed to burn our police cars in the streets.” He continued: “Do you really think, with what we’re seeing — with the riots that have happened — that we should not have something to defend our families with? This is why we have the Second Amendment.”

One example of a typical ad, from close to (my) home:

In northwest Ohio, a campaign video for Republican congressional nominee J.R. Majewski shows him walking through a dilapidated factory, holding a semiautomatic weapon, warning that Democrats will “destroy our economy” with purposefully bad policies.

I’m pretty sure I heard a radio ad for that guy when I was traveling last winter. He mentioned Trump about a million times in 30 seconds, and signed off with, “Let’s go Brandon!” I don’t know where he found that factory. Maybe it was Ohio Art in Bryan, where Alan worked for about a week during college; they sent Etch-a-Sketch production to China years ago. Democrats had nothing to do with it. Note the lead-in to that story: “The University of California Berkley uses Etch A Sketch as an exampleof the devastating effect of outsourcing and the New York Times ran a 2003 expose on the inhumane conditions at the factory where the Etch A Sketches were made near Shenzhen.” It so happens inhumane conditions were exactly why Alan lasted only a week; the tolulene fumes in that place made him dizzy and his dad told him it wasn’t worth it.

One more snippet from that Post story:

Rick Shaftan, a conservative strategist working with Republican challengers this cycle, said that the party’s voters were nervously watching crime rates in the cities, asking whether public safety was being degraded on purpose. He also pointed to government responses to the pandemic as a reason that those voters, and their candidates, were nervous.

Urban crime. Good lord. While it is absolutely true that violent crime has risen lately, it’s equally true that with rare exceptions, crime is still a matter of who you associate with and where you live. Whereas conservatives’ favorite violent crime, mass shootings, can find you anywhere. Church, school, the grocery store.

Paul Krugman had some thoughts on this, via Twitter. (J.C. said Twitter embeds may have been the cause of the loading problems some of you had a couple weeks ago, so just a link, sorry.) But this is, to my mind, the best of the thread:

I’ve believed this for years, that rural and small-town residents are the ones most out of touch. The people I know in cities travel whenever they can, read books not written by Sarah Palin and know way more about the farm economy than their counterparts in the boondocks know about how cities work. But never mind that.

So that’s how we start our (blessedly cooler) week ahead, then: Thinking about cowards. Hope yours is great. (Your week, not the nearest coward.)

So Ivana Trump is dead. Huh. Seventy-three seems a young age to have your heart just give out, but then, we don’t know much about the first Mrs. T, no matter how much of her life she “shared” with the rest of us. I use quotes because, to me, sharing implies a certain desire or gratitude on the part of the person being shared with: “Want half my sandwich?” “Sure.” And I don’t recall asking to learn anything about Ivana, even though she and her loathsome ex-husband were seemingly in my grill for most of the ’80s.

I recommend the Personal Life section of her Wikipedia page:

Trump married four times. Her first marriage, to Alfred Winklmayr, was for the goal of securing Austrian nationality, according to a biographer. She was married to Donald Trump from 1977 to 1992, and had three children with him: Donald Jr. in 1977, Ivanka in 1981, and Eric in 1984.

Trump married Italian entrepreneur and international businessman Riccardo Mazzucchelli in November 1995. They divorced in 1997. That same year, she filed a $15 million breach of contract suit against Mazzucchelli for violating the confidentiality clause in their prenuptial agreement, while Mazzucchelli sued Ivana and Donald Trump in a British court for libel. The suit was later settled under undisclosed terms.

In the summer of 1997, she began dating Italian aristocrat Count Roffredo Gaetani dell’Aquila d’Aragona Lovatelli. The relationship continued until his death in 2005.

Trump dated Italian actor and model Rossano Rubicondi for six years before they married on April 12, 2008. The marriage to Rubicondi, 36, was the fourth for Ivana, then 59. The couple’s $3 million wedding for 400 guests was hosted by ex-husband Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago with daughter Ivanka as her maid of honor. The wedding was officiated by Donald’s sister Judge Maryanne Trump Barry. Although Ivana and Rubicondi divorced less than a year later, their on-again, off-again relationship continued until 2019, when Ivana announced they had once again “called it quits”. Rubicondi died on October 29, 2021, at the age of 49.

Trump had ten grandchildren. In the late 2010s, she reportedly split her time between New York City, Miami, and Saint-Tropez. She stated she was fluent in German, French, Czech, and Russian. She became a naturalized United States citizen in 1988.

So many shudder-y lines in that, but my favorite passage is the entirety of paragraph four, and my head can’t help but imagine that ghastly wedding, of an Italian “actor and model” marrying a woman more than 20 years his senior, as the guests of her ex-husband, with her monstrous children in attendance, all officiated by her former sister-in-law. Then the topper: “Although Ivana and Rubicondi divorced less than a year later…”

Rubicondi died young, at 49 (melanoma). I went a-Googling for news about him, and was vastly unsurprised to read this:

When Rossano Rubicondi married Ivana Trump at Mar-A-Lago — the luxury Palm Beach club and resort owned by her second spouse, Donald Trump — in 2008, the Italian left made it clear he viewed himself as a champion-grade husband.

“Rossano trotted down the big spiral staircase and onto the outside terrace, where around 400 guests” — and a 12-foot-tall wedding cake — “were in attendance. He was fist pumping to the ‘Rocky’ theme,” R. Couri Hay, the press agent who was a guest, told The Post. “Usually the bride enters from there and gets all the attention. But Rossano was such a proud peacock that he couldn’t help himself. Some of guests were appalled.”

Another priceless line: “Some of the guests were appalled.” Really? I’d have thought the entire company would be up and applauding. The appalled ones must have ended up in the Trump administration.

I’m sure people will say nice things about her, because that’s what we do when people die, but let me add some shadow here: What Ivana Trump was, was a woman who fucked her way out of a Soviet satellite, found her equally mercenary match in the man she had three children with – somehow this is another instance where “sharing” doesn’t quite fit – got dumped/dumped him depending on who you talk to, then found a fondness for Italians. They must have found her quite the rare bird, with that brassy bouffant and a face that suffered from repeat plastic surgeries. She was never the “top model” her second husband claimed she was, although she had some fine features to pass on to her daughter, mainly the height and long legs and Slavic cheekbones (improved with implants, yes, obviously). And I guess we can appreciate what she is reported to have said when her old man packed his mistress along on one of the family vacations to Vail or some other ski venue out west: Confronting Marla Maples on the slopes, she said something like, “Are you Moola?” Which is funny.

She divided her time between New York, St. Tropez and Miami, all rich-people slums. A silly woman who lived a silly life and replicated her silly DNA three times.

No one ever said life was fair.

This will be it for me, then. Let’s keep the Trumps in our thoughts and prayers, and if we’re lucky and pray hard enough, maybe the next obit we read will be you-know-who’s.

Since so much of the news has been terrible of late, I feel like I have to point out some definite glimmers of light, both in Michigan:

Two ballot initiatives advancing progressive causes — reproductive freedom and voting rights — have turned in signatures far, far, farrrrr in excess of those needed to get on the November ballot. Both are constitutional amendments, which means if they pass, they’ll be difficult to roll back in the future. Michigan has these direct-democracy features baked into its constitution, which was last revised in 1963, so some very New Frontier details. Sometimes good ideas get in there, sometimes bad ones (term limits, ahem). But it’s the system we’ve been given, and some people are working it.

Anyway, the reproductive-freedom initiative would give women the right to make that choice at any point in their pregnancy, so of course the pushback has already started: This will allow 12-year-olds to undergo hysterectomies! Women will have abortions in the eighth month! And so on. But they turned in a record number of signatures: 753,000, well over the 425,000 required.

Promote the Vote, the other one, came in with something like 663,000, and would make voting easier, more convenient, and — this is the big one — provide for nine days of early in-person voting, which we don’t currently have. (On the other hand, I believe some of the union contracts make Election Day a holiday, in the interest of participatory democracy. That might go in the next negotiation, huh?)

That both of these breezed across the finish line with such a margin — all petition drives over-deliver, because all the signatures have to be verified, and inevitably some are tossed — suggests all is not lost.

And today was another J6 hearing, ai-yi-yi. This is getting so ridiculous, this giant pile of evidence, something more better come of it than a bunch of embarrassment. Meanwhile, dozens of Republicans are running for office on the STOLEN ELECTION. It’s revolting. Maybe November will sort a few things out; I certainly hope so.

Another perfect day today, and I smashed it — up early, worked out, walked the dog, showered, worked, cleaned the goddamn coffeemaker. Remembered to have something for dinner, prepped it in plenty of time, drank lots of water. It’s amazing what a good night’s sleep can yield.

Now let’s see what Wednesday brings. You never know.