Today is Friday, September 15, 2023, Rosh Hashanah eve. As of now, special counsel Jack Smith who has spearheaded the classified documents case against the former president and the January 6th case relating to the attack on the U.S. Capitol is seeking a gag order against “Big Mouth” Frump to limit what he says in the run-up to his trial on charges that he participated in a plot to overturn the 2020 election.

This new development in the ongoing litigation between the U.S. and one smarmy defendant, Donald J. Dumpf, is covered in an article for The New Republic by Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani entitled “Whoa: Jack Smith Just Threw Down at Donald Trump in Big Way.”

Smith has asked a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to impose a “narrowly tailored” order limiting Frump from making public statements that could “present a serious and substantial danger of prejudicing” the trial.

A copy of the government filing was released today – and it is unsparing in its criticism of the former insurrectionist.

Smith’s office is accusing Diarrhea Mouth of engaging in a “disinformation” campaign and of intimidating witnesses, prosecutors, and the court itself.

“If the gag order is granted, this would be another major setback for Trump – though his tendency to overshare in public settings have added more to his pile of legal woes than they have solved, so it could be that Smith is doing the former president a major favor.” Also the American public will be spared the unhinged rantings of the former president as well. Who wants to hear him after all of this time? I’m sure most of us are disgusted with having to listen to this madman constantly.

Aren’t you just so tired of hearing how old Joe Biden is and why he shouldn’t run for president again? I certainly am, so when scanning my smartphone today, I found a great retort in a New Republic article that buries the issue once and for all. The article is entitled “So Biden’s Old. But Did He Try to Destroy American Democracy?” and it’s by Michael Tomasky.

Tomasky recognizes how everyone is talking and talking about the current president’s age and how it “dampens enthusiasm for his reelection.” He acknowledges there has been a large volume of reporting that suggests that many voters, including many Democrats, aren’t especially enthused about his vice president, Kamala Harris.

Then Tomasky mentions a very insane poll where most respondents say they favor Dumpf over Biden in 2024. He then imagines a series of questions we can pose for Biden in which his opponent has prominently been featured, as, for instance, Is Joe Biden too old:

• to insist that his inaugural crowds were the biggest of all time, sending his new press secretary out there to tell an obvious and totally unnecessary and pointless lie on his very first day in office?
• to have an adviser, trying to spin her way out of that lie, speak in all seriousness of “alternative facts” that he believed in and adhered to?
• to demand personal loyalty from his FBI director at a private dinner, at a time when it was known that his own campaign might be under FBI investigation?
• to fire the aforementioned FBI director and admit on national television that he did so because he was investigating him?
• to doctor a hurricane forecast with a Sharpie to make it seem like an obvious lie he told was correct, potentially frightening millions of people in one state into worrying that their homes might be destroyed or they might have to flee when they were never under any threat?
• to assert that a crowd of white nationalists carrying torches and chanting “You will never replace us” included “very fine people”?
• to try to buy Greenland?
• to try to find a way to bomb Mexico?
• to want to use a nuclear weapon on North Korea?
• to say that he believed in a murderous autocrat over his own country’s intelligence agencies?
• to constantly mock the United States military and its generals, forever claiming that he knew better than all of them when his own “military experience” ended in boarding school and, later, included a bone-spur deferment that got him out of being drafted into the armed services during the Vietnam War while so many young men less connected than he went over and died in battle?
• to watch a dangerous virus spring to life across the globe and be warned universally by experts that his government had better be buying ventilators and masks – and resolutely refuse to do so because his image would suffer?
• to say, just as that virus was reaching American shores, that “when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done”?
• to suggest seriously that people should inject chloride as a cure for that virus?
• to wallow in such inaction that such inactions were responsible, according to a highly respected medical journal, for 461,000 excess U.S. deaths?
• to order the tear-gassing of peaceful protesters so that he could walk to a church and stand in front of it, holding a Bible upside down?
• to threaten to withhold crucial aid to a foreign head of state unless said head of state agreed to announce an investigation into his top political opponent?
• to openly encourage an assault on the U.S. Capitol, marking the first time the Capitol was stormed by an armed mob since the War of 1812, and the first time it was ever stormed by Americans?
• to make attempt after attempt to steal an election, telling lie after lie after lie on social media, eventually losing 61 of 63 court cases?
• to make himself, day after exhausting day, hour after ceaseless hour, the center of attention, demanding that we focus our thoughts on him, as authoritarian leaders do?
• to play golf day after day as countless Americans died of coronavirus?

After reading this less-than-exhaustive list as to why Frump can never be reinstated in the White House ever again, just say to yourself that Joe Biden would never, ever do, those things that Herr Dumpf did during his one cataclysmic term in office because there is an abundance of proof that Biden respects the Constitution, tradition, and our governing institutions.

As the writer of this remarkable article concludes, if voters are still repulsed by Biden’s age rather than by Frump’s actual misdeeds, would they seriously want to live through all this again? Is their memory that short when it comes to recalling all that went wrong during Dumpf’s administration?

I hope that, as the time nears, the Democratic Party will begin to inspire voters to recall what those four years of chaos, corruption, and misrule were like: the constant tension and drama, living through the 30,753 lies, the horrors of those early days of COVID that could have been much better (as they were in other countries), and the rest of the nonsense that peppered the tenure of the also-advanced-in-age Dumpf, when he had his chance to do it right seven years ago and failed.

So I hope this ends the controversy over deciding whether to choose a not-so-young commander in chief for reelection over a miscreant.

To commemorate the eve of Rosh Hashanah, we had our cross-country companion, “Patricia,” over for dinner. Elliot cooked a delicious meal of vegetable soup (with Patricia’s own matzoh balls added for robustness), Persian pot roast, rice pilaf, and a simple dessert consisting of raspberries, cream, vanilla ice cream, and ginger cookies.

Tomorrow we are driving to Cherry Hill to spend the holiday with “Harold” and his family. I will be going to synagogue on Sunday for the first time in a long time. I will be back here Monday evening.

So for those who celebrate, L’Shana Tovah tikatevu!

Stay safe and be well.