If we wish to keep a grip on our sanity, do we switch off anything and everything said by the new/old American president? After all, most of what issues from Donald Trump’s pouty mouth constitutes angry noise and stray atoms of verbal crud.

The trouble is, once you say you don’t want to think or talk about whatever stupid thing Trump has said, he splutters something so especially awful you can’t help yourself.

So it is with his presidential statement following the worst US air disaster in a decade, when an American Airlines jet collided with a US army helicopter near Washington DC, killing all 67 passengers.

At such moments, the role of the president is to console and offer condolences on behalf of the state. Trump did that for a while yesterday, before swinging right back to combative mode, speculating, without evidence, that diversity rules under his predecessors may be to blame for the disaster.

When asked by a reporter how he knew this as the investigation had only just begun, Trump said: “Because I have common sense.”

At that moment the bodies were still being fished out of the Potomac River. Many people had lost loved ones. And all Trump wanted to do was make a cheap political point, still ranting at a rally rather than leading a moment of sombre reflection.

It is hard to imagine other presidents dragging grieving relatives through the political mud like that.

Appalling, but it fits with Trump’s habit of flooding the public arena with so much shit that nobody knows where to look or where to stand.

Is it healthy to worry about these things? In the latest episode of Strong Message Here, an engaging BBC podcast about political language, journalist Helen Lewis and comedy writer Armando Iannucci investigate the symptoms of what is known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.

This psychological condition denotes a person who is obsessed with hating to an unreasonable level everything Trump says and does. There are sound reasons for being thus afflicted, as I know from endlessly worrying away at his first presidency, but it can bring you low without offering a way out. And it means we end up talking about the dreadful man all the time.

Perhaps we need a Trump settings button, a bit like with your phone. My phone is now in downtime mode from 7pm to 7am. This is to stop me scrolling X/Twitter and so on, along with the ceaseless torrent of news headlines, while also watching television and or reading the newspaper.

A division of attention that is not good for what I am attempting to watch or read, or probably for my general mental stability.

This strategy seems to be working. You can override the block, but mostly I only do this to stream music.

Everything else has to wait, and this is fine and good.

I need to find that settings button in my mind.

Incidentally, I always like a word that is new to me.

Thanks then to the website Zeteo for pointing me towards its latest episode of America Unhinged on YouTube, where Francesca Fiorentini and Wajahat Ali discuss how Trump blames the DC plane crash on everyone except himself.

That new word, contained in an email from Zeteo, is kakistocratic. This comes from kakistocracy, meaning “government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state”.

Wow, what a discovery. I intend to drop that one into this blog whenever possible. Saying that, I don’t wish to write about Trump too often as it gives me a headache.

If you seek a bright side to all this, like Eric Idle singing as he hangs from the cross, perhaps Trump’s end lies in his bad reaction to that awful plane disaster – alongside other deeply questionable decisions, such as pardoning the 1500 law-breaking rioters of Capitol Hill.

In Trump’s behaviour lie the seeds of his undoing.

Well, that’s my hopeful theory, but I hereby pledge to shut up about him for a while.

But not before this footnote, courtesy of Newsweek.

Trump condemned a Federal Aviation Administration initiative to hire people with disabilities in the wake of the Washington, D.C., plane collision, despite a similar initiative having been launched during his first term in office…

People often brandish opinions about TV programmes or films they have not seen. It’s a terrible habit, but one that is to be reproduced here.

I didn’t watch Donald Trump’s inauguration, lacking the willingness or inclination, but I read the ‘reviews’ and sifted the snippets with one wary eye.

Trump the Redux: Racist Grandpa’s Revenge is clearly going to be a difficult watch.

I am not going to list all the disreputable credits.

Here are a few slipping by: the drilling for oil and ignoring the climate crisis, the threatened mass deportations, the tax cuts for the very wealthy, the proposed ending of the right to citizenship to the children of migrants either in the US illegally or on temporary visas, and so on, wearily, scarily, until this mafioso film finally ends.

Oh, and not forgetting the pointless and petulant renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

As with many films nowadays, it is difficult to concentrate with the volume up so loud.

Let’s ignore the shouting and instead look at Trump and media money, old and new.

After the inauguration was moved indoors because of the cold, Trump’s possible worries about crowd size, and/or the integrity of his ‘hair’, there wasn’t much room for ordinary people.

Instead assorted tech leaders crammed into the front row, including Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Jess Bezos of Amazon, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Sam Altman of OpenAI.

Not forgetting (if only we could) Elon Musk, owner of X/Twitter and much else besides.

Musk spent $277m supporting Trump at the election – and now the world’s richest man has an unelected seat in the White House, where he decides who gets money from the government, while himself earning a fortune from the government.

Whether that cosy arrangement fits the definition of corruption is entirely up to you.

Oh, and not forgetting (part two), that Trump has launched his own bitcoin named $TRUMP – an unfitting wheeze, but those magic digital beans could make him a fortune.

As for the tech bros, they all bustled over to Trump once they saw where the wind was blowing, donating to his inauguration fund as they snuffled after a good return and hoped-for protection for their already bloated industry.

But there is another interesting strand here, to be found by following what the Trumpian venture capitalist Peter Thiel insists on calling the DISC (the “distributed idea suppression complex”, aka the media).

I never knew that’s what my industry was called. Thanks to Lady Liberty in Private Eye for that corker. Thanks, also, to editor Ian Hislop for the spot-on cover to the new edition. Do try to enlarge this picture. Or, better still, buy a copy.

Rupert Murdoch is an old, nay ancient, hand at this game. Just yesterday, Murdoch spent a reported £10m to settle his legal dispute with the Duke of Sussex, delivering a “full and unequivocal apology” to Harry.

News Group Newspapers, publisher of the Sun and the Times, has spent a reported £1bn over 15 years to settle 1,300 complaints alleging phone hacking and other unlawful activities.

In settling, Murdoch will hope to have silenced further revelations that could have arisen in a full court case.

But here’s another old ink stain.

Thanks to Zeto News for the reminder that Murdoch spent a fortune in the US setting up the propaganda factory known as Fox News. Trump was obsessed with Fox during his first presidency. And now he has handed out a reported 18 roles in his administration to current or former Fox employees.

As Zeto puts it, Trump is using Fox “as a staffing agency”. As for Murdoch, he used Fox to misshape the news to a form he found pleasing, much as he has done for decades with our newspapers here.

It’s not far-fetched to suggest that if Murdoch hadn’t founded Fox News, Trump would never have been president once, never mind twice.

Sharper minds than mine will dwell in detail on the cause of Trump’s victory. But I think it mostly came down to storytelling. Trump had a story to tell. It was filled with holes, lies, conspiracy theories, rage, fury, nastiness, and mad exaggeration. But it was a story with a shape.

The Democrats lacked a matching narrative of their own, even if Joe Biden did much good in the US (if not internationally).

Trump listened to what people were saying, what they were worrying about. Now that he’s elected, he almost certainly won’t feel any loyalty towards the ordinary voters who backed him, being too busy in his billionaire boys’ club.

You hear a lot about free speech from people who want other people to shut up.

Liz Truss, who was prime minister for about three blinks, is said to have sent the present incumbent (six rather long months, plus three or four blinks) a legal letter demanding he stop saying she crashed the economy.

These are “false and defamatory” claims, apparently. She also said Sir Keir Starmer harmed her reputation by helping her to lose her seat in the general election.

Oh, I think we can agree she did those things all by herself.

Funnily enough, this just reminds everyone that Truss did crash the economy, thus resuscitating the sin she wants forgotten.

When a misfiring attempt to censor information instead increases awareness of that information, it is sometimes known as the Streisand effect. This dates to 2003, when Barbra Streisand tried to suppress publication of photographs of her cliff-top residence in Malibu, California. And doing so she reminded everyone of where she lived all over again.

As for Truss, if she had any sense she would keep her head down. Instead, she stubbornly sticks her neck out and reminds us what a disaster she was.

Now she wants people to stop saying she did what we all know she did. Next thing you know that decaying lettuce she was compared to will be sending a cease and desist letter against her; or a Caesar salad and desist letter.

Plenty of very wealthy people love to burble about free speech. UK Reform leader Nigel Farage is always banging on about how Elon Musk has been great for free speech on X/Twitter.

Well, yes – but only if you want to feel free to spout batshit crazy far-right conspiracy theories. Musk has certainly thrown open the doors to that rotten casino, freeing up inflammatory speech of the variety he himself favours.

Should you wish to express anti-Trump or other left-wing views, your opinion may well be lost in the algorithm maze.

With his official role in the upcoming Trump II presidency, Musk has plenty of political power but not one cold ounce of responsibility. And, yes, he can do or say what he likes, but sending endless crazy hate tweets in the middle of the night is not the sign of a well mind.

We don’t have to listen. Yet Musk makes headlines over here with whatever damn stupid or inaccurate thing he mutters past midnight.

Alongside his cynical calls for a new public inquiry into historic child sexual exploitation in Oldham, Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere, he swears he is going to get rid of Starmer, tweeting to his 212 million followers: “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.”

That’s a member of the incoming US administration trying to undermine a supposed ally. Whatever party you support, this should be a worry.

And have you noticed how those who drone on endlessly about sovereignty suddenly come over all gooey when this right-ring billionaire threatens to depose our elected prime minister.

Of course, Musk is Farage’s great pal. Well, I say pal, but after he dangled the promise of a $100m donation to Reform UK, Musk then declared that Farage was not the right man to lead the party. Not right-wing enough, apparently, which is a head-scratcher.

For far too long we have listened only to the shouters and the bores, the bullies and the bellowers. We have succumbed to their barroom barracking – it’s how we ended up with the still ticking disaster of Brexit, after all. Their day will surely end, although not for a while as Trump blusters back to the White House.

Mark Zuckerburg, another man of fathomless wealth and too much influence, has suddenly decided he favours free speech again. By which he means that he is bowing and scraping towards Trump by removing fact-checkers on Facebook in the US (or Meta or whatever stupid thing we’re meant to call it nowadays).

What a blatant bit of craven crawling. Trump needs fact checking as much as the next bloviating megalomaniac, but he hates being held to account, treating facts as mere dust. And now it looks like he will get away with whatever he wishes on Facebook.

Let’s hope there are a few remaining true journalists in the US who will do their job. Mind you, many of those on the Washington Post are reported to be fleeing because owner Jeff Bezos – the billionaire founder of Amazon (there are too many billionaires in this story, and in this world) – forced the paper to drop its planned support for Kamala Harris before the election.

These billionaires, they all want something from Trump. It’s an unholy moneyed club, if you ask me.

Idle curiosity reveals that in 2024 this ledge amassed 28,000 words across 39 blogs. A search of last year’s text file also uncovers certain obsessions. Politics was mentioned 23 times, the long dead Margaret Thatcher, four times

Nigel Farage 20 times, Donald Trump 73 times. Yet my granddaughter only appeared four times, and she is properly lovely. What sort of priority does this suggest?

My heart attack raised 31 results, and, yes, I have banged on about that a bit. I even composed on piece late in the year about what I’d learned about having a heart attack, and what I’d learned about banging on about it.

Prime minister Keir Starmer earned 20 mentions. Rishi Sunak, now rubbed from the blackboard of public life, warranted ten. Boris Johnson earned 10, more than Liz Truss at six (she’ll blame my counting system, saying it’s a deep-state fix or something).

Kemi Badenoch, the new loon the Tories chose as leader, was worthy of a solitary mention from her time as “the reliably mad business secretary” (my words, not hers).

The general election that now seems so distant was mentioned seven times.

Twitter/X owner and Trump fanboy Elon Musk warranted 10 mentions. The BBC was referred to 47 times… sometimes in a praiseworthy manner, at others being complained about for all the free publicity it gives to Nigel Farage.

Squash was mentioned 14 times (no word of a win).

Cheese was mentioned 46 times, approximately the number of times I would eat cheese on toast in a week, if left to my own devices. Cheese also earned a bonus check or two in those heart attack columns.

Novels have been alluded to six times, to remind myself to start another. God was cited on 12 occasions, largely in the context of having ‘saved’ Donald Trump from an assassin’s bullet; a God responsible for such a ‘miracle’ turns out not to be for me.

Sourdough bread appeared only once. Remarkable, considering how often I wang on about baking the stuff.

GB News was mentioned nine times, eight more times than I have ever watched it.

The Daily Mail won six mentions, the Telegraph 18. This is odd as I don’t care what those newspapers think about anything; all I do is look at the front pages to warm up my left-over anger.

Take yesterday morning. The knighthood for London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan got both newspapers in a spiteful lather, leaving the astute political commentator Steve Richards to tweet: “It’s impossible to have any understanding of British politics without constantly referencing how right wing and hypocritical the media is here.”

Here are those grubby pages…

The Tories knighted and ennobled all sorts of unworthy characters (Sir Gavin Williamson, anyone?) and the attack on Khan seems to be only a sidestep from straight racism.

Mind you, I do wish politicians would stop giving each other honours.

But does worrying about all this stuff do any good, solve anything, make the world better? Is carping from the sidelines with a degree of wit a worthy pastime? It’s certainly fun, but sometimes I wonder about all the politics on this ledge, gathered like the dead sweepings of autumn. To swear off politics all together would be a regret, though, as politics remains my go-to cause of inspiration. The push and shove of it is engaging, even if often what we are shown is a distraction from what’s really going on.

One old friend said after reading my latest heart attack reflection that I was wasted on politics. A kind thought, but I might be lost without it.

Anywhere, here is the actor Kieran Culkin speaking in a recent Guardian interview with Charlotte Edwardes, complaining that “all the big stuff like Trump, or climate, or war, or phones, it’s too much… it’s overwhelming”.

Culkin will switch on the news, “Watch for 10 minutes and go, ‘Oh, we’re all fucked. Got it.’ Like, that’s the narrative. I try not to dwell on it too much…”

‘Oh, we’re all fucked. Got it.’

Not a cheerful motto, but a good one.

As it’s the first day of a fresh one, Happy New Year. Let’s say hello to 2025 and shut the door on 2024 (not my favourite year of all the years).