I always thought that the best talent to have was to be able to take a blank canvass, or its equivalent, some paints and brushes, and create a work of art. I recently read that a painting by Klimt sold at auction for more than $240,000,000, and this morning in the New York Times, I see that a self portrait by Frida Kahlo just sold for $55,000,000. If I could just sit down for a few minutes at an easel and create something equivalent, I wouldn’t have to work any more.

Yes, I know, I am not working any more, but you know what I mean. Then, I realized that neither Gustav Klimt or Frida Kahlo are around to enjoy the value of their talent, so I guess I have to think about other ways to make my fortune out of nothing. One way, I guess, is to become a friend of Ari Melber, although I am not sure how this friendship translates into dollars. What it does translate into is the ability to appear regularly on his MSNOW (or is it MS NOW?) show, exhibit no talent or serious intellect whatsoever, and answer his relatively inane questions with your own relatively inane answers. Another, of course is to become Donald Trump. If I were Donald Trump and I wrote a daily blog (obviously at this point we have no proof that Donald Trump can write at all, much less write daily), I could simply say: Give me $10 million, and I will put your name in my next blog post. And I would be inundated with suitors.

You know, this is what Art Buchwald did for his column. But he did it much more altruistically. He did it at charity auctions. I remember this as a rather regular “gift” to the charity, and people would pay hundreds (if not millions) of dollars so that the next Buchwald column would start with: “I glanced at the briefcase of the man sitting next to me. It identified him as A_____ H_____. I watched him get off the bus……”. Easy, no?

Speaking of MS NOW (or MSNOW), I don’t think this is a very good name that they chose, and they probably spent millions of dollars choosing it. After all, Pepsi Cola Company (whatever its original name was) spent millions to convert to Pepsico, and United States Rubber became Uniroyal, and so on, and so on. Do you have any idea how much American Associates, Ben Gurion University of the Negev spent to become Americans for Ben Gurion University of the Negev?

But the MS part of MS NOW sounds like a disease you would just as soon not get. NOW, although it connotes the present (and that may be good) is a very ugly word (not as beautiful as, say, tariffs), and if you put the letters together, without a space between letters two and three, it looks like you are talking about SNOW and if you are not going skiing, that just means annoyance.

To make matters worse, they are putting these little MS tag lines in the lower right hand corner of your screen and one of them, MS WORLD, just looks like they have combined their energies with Donald T’s to sponsor a beauty contest that it would be best to forget about.

I know that so far I have not provided you with much information this morning. Or with much of anything else. There are those days, you know.

It’s just that I can’t compete with the world as it is. The two great populists, Donald Trump, and Zohran Momdani hitting it off. Who would have guessed? Whatever could have been on Trump’s mind? And poor Elise Stefanik! Planning to run a campaign for governor of New York based on her love of Donald Trump and her determination to destroy Zohran Momdani, she now finds herself pledged to destroy her biggest supporter’s best friend. Yes, I feel sorry for these Venezuelans who are nuked out of the water by American drones, but I don’t feel sorry for Elise Stefanik. She deserves to know how much more complicated the world is than she figured it out to be.

And Marjorie Taylor Greene? She only has one life (so far) to give to her benefactor turned enemy. Time for her to go back to northern Georgia, where people are people, it seems. MAGA has turned against both Greene and Stefanik. And that reminds of me of something else I have been thinking about.

What the hell is MAGA anyway, other than complete devotion to Donald Trump? If Trump says “let’s put on tariffs; it won’t cost Americans anything”, MAGA is putting on tariffs. If Trump then says “let’s take off tariffs; they are costing Americans too much”, MAGA is taking off tariffs. It is that simple.

We who are not MAGA know that Trump’s tariff policy is, at best, contradictory, and perhaps even more, is really no policy at all. We have known that for some time. But guess what? It looks like people who self-define as MAGA are beginning to realize that, too.

My own thinking is that MAGA really doesn’t exist, and if Donald Trump disappears from the scene for whatever reason (which he will undoubtedly do), there will no longer be a MAGA for a number of reasons. First, because there is no overall MAGA platform or policy. You can’t tell me what MAGA believes, other than to agree with everything Trump says. This is why the Republican platform, for the past two elections, didn’t really exist. MAGA, and therefore the Republicans, have no platform, have no policies. Sure, there are the things put out by Heritage, Project Twenty Twenty Whatever It Is, but they are only the MAGA policy because Trump adopts them.

The other reason that MAGA will disappear is that there is no apparent successor to Trump. Certainly not negative charisma Vance and, if not Vance, who? There was a chance it could have been Charlie Kirk, I think, if he had grown further into the role and given some positions of responsibility and visibility, but that didn’t happen. And it couldn’t be Stefanik, who shares the negative charisma of our Vice President, and maybe it could have been Marjorie Taylor Greene, had she been a man. But it won’t be any of them and there is no one else.

Barring cataclysm, the Democrats will control the House of Representatives for Trump’s last two years, and in order to salvage anything of his legacy, Trump will have to play nice to the House Democrats. Maybe he realizes that and is testing the waters with Momdani. We will see.

But whatever the reason, Trump clearly surprised his supporters yesterday. Andy Borowitz might have said it best. The headline he posted yesterday was “Totally smitten Trump converts to Islam”.

Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. Remember Shabtai Zvi? I know you don’t, but you can look him up. Borowitz would have had fun with him, too.