They're Everywhere

 

In his “all about me” takeover of our national birthday, Trump proved me right yet again. In last week’s column, I predicted that from now till November, Republicans, of whom he is the leader of the pack of lies, will tell you Democrats are communists. “America will never be a communist country,” he vowed. True, uncharacteristically: there’s never been one, anywhere. The only examples of definitional communism have been collective farms in Russia and Israel, and a couple of failed ones in the US. Trump has no clue what communism means.

Same goes for MAGA. Nor, for that matter, do many – if any – of the fringe lefties who label themselves with the word. As national governance, it’s vapor. But when have lies stopped Trump and MAGA Republicans from pushing them?

The irony is that what Trump is actually making of America is what never-communist Russia is under Putin: a dictatorship facilitated by hyper-wealthy oligarchs. As to the Declaration of Independence, signed on the first of 250 American birthdays, who can point to any value enshrined within that Trump protects? Or believes? Or could name?

But enough about me. Graham Platner, the “common man” running against perpetually concerned Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), has been credibly accused of sexual assault. As opposed to Republicans, who voted for Trump after he bragged about committing it (“grab them ...”), and who are all in on Texas Ken Paxton, who’s approximately as amoral and corrupt as Trump, Democrats aren’t excusing Platner. Virtually all are calling for an end to his campaign, even if it threatens Democrats’ chances of retaking the Senate.

It’s a consistent difference between what Republicans have become under Trump, and Democrats. MAGA can’t deny it, so they embrace it. Democrats opted for morality. Before Trump, both parties did. Mostly.

Which provides an excellent lead-in to the latest revelations of Trump’s astounding corruption. For he so loved us that he gave his begotten $400,000 salary. And cashed in on his “presidency” to the tune of $3 billion or so, to thunderous silence from Congressional Republicans, excepting a couple on their way out of office. The comparative corruption surrounding that “gifted” Qatari 747, which cost taxpayers $400 million in upgrades, wouldn’t feed a chicken.

Trump and his family made billions on their cryptocurrency scam, while credulous people who invested in it lost, in total, about the same amount. Stock in his company peaked at $79, when he pocketed the money. It’s now a buck seventy-five. Trump, his family, and his insider goons purchased stock in various corporations before Trump awarded federal contracts to them.

Just last week, Trump stood next to Michael Dell and told everyone to buy his “great” computers, which goosed Dell stock. Guess who’d purchased shares weeks before. And this: Trump is relaxing rules governing online purchase of guns. Need I tell you whose son has a big stake in an online seller? And how about the hundreds of stock trades he made before pausing tariffs? Nor shall we forget the gritfo di toti grifti, the corrupte qua non, his “Board of Peace”?

According to his financial disclosure statement for 2025, Trump absconded with over $2 billion. That included, in addition to his crypto crimes, grift from overpriced sneakers, Bibles, commemorative coins, and foreign-made Trump watches. What’s that saying? “You can fool all MAGAs all the time.”

Then there’s Trump turning the pardon process into a cash pig. “It is general knowledge in our practice that for $2 million, you can have a pardon,” a prominent defense attorney told anti-Trump, former Republican Charlie Sykes. He made $686 million from his eponymous cryptocurrency offering while suckered investors lost a total of $3.6 billion. Looking away, Congressional Republicans and America-loving MAGAs suffer torticollis.

There’s much more, but why bother? Even if Democrats retake the White House and Congress, thanks to the Supreme Court’s hall pass and Democrats’ faintheartedness, he’ll get away with it. That ought to matter to everyone, not just the ones he’s been playing for suckers for a decade as “president” and a lifetime before that. Their acquiescence is the avatar of Congressional Republicans’ hypocrisy. They chased non-existent corruption of President Joe Biden for years and perpetuated outrage over Hunter’s paintings, sold by a gallery, over a few years, for a total of $1.5 million; Trump probably keeps that much in his drawers.

Speaking of non-sequiturs, which nobody was, here’s another prediction: Supreme Court Justi and Constitutional literalists Alito and Thomas, who just ignored the literal wording of the Fourteenth Amendment, will retire before Trump’s term ends so he can replace them with yoots (Cousin Vinny reference) who’ll sit for decades. If Ds improbably take the Senate in November, they’ll do it before January, when the noobs are sworn in.

Finally: It’s a truism that everything Trump touches dies. Had he not meddled in the World Cup, giving Belgium super-incentive, might the US team have done better? We’ll never know. But about Alito and Thomas, we will.

Failure To Learn

 

“It’s déjà vu,” as my personal yogi once said, “all over again.” The ability of Democrats to unclench the jaws of victory and pry defeat out like a rotten molar can’t be overstated. It depends upon how much the recent primary results in New York City harbing national sentiment.

I like its mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Much as Republicans and their mendacious media tell you otherwise, he’s neither a communist nor an antisemite. Those prevaricators couldn’t define communism on their way out of a wet paper bag. He’s a Democratic Socialist (also right-side undefinable.) I have no problem with that any more than I do with Scandinavian countries, all of whom fit the definition and are distinctly capitalistic. What they get for higher taxes is economic security in retirement, free education and healthcare. Saabs. Volvos. Erickson electronics, Fiskars tools, Bang & Olufsen, Ambu bags. The products aren’t free, but they confirm thriving capitalism.

Mayor M speaks out against Israel’s conduct after the horrors of the horrifying, subhuman Hamas slaughter on October 7, 2023. A response was inarguably called for, but not, in the opinion of many, what has come since and continues. Many Jews agree with Mamdani. It’s not antisemitism; it’s antipolicyism. I admire Israel’s many accomplishments, especially in science, technology, and medicine. It’s given the world much and we should hope it always will. Just not this.

The mayor didn’t do Democrats any favors come November, though. His endorsements for NYC’s Democratic primaries all won. Knocked off was Dan Goldman, one of the most effective Representatives and interrogators, when they show up, of Trump’s goons. But he’s a mainstream Democrat. In NYC, that was fatal.

One winner– not the Goldman slayer – was Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32, whose credentials are impressive in many ways, and who’s clearly very smart. But her thoughts? Not so much. She’d eliminate police, prisons, and borders. And she openly prefers communism. For those being told she’s proof of MAGAfoxian claims, her similars among Democrats number in the zeros. But there will be ads. Billions of dark dollars’ worth. And they’ll hurt. From now till November, Republicans will claim communists have taken over the Democratic Party, which is as false as Trumpic authoritarianism taking over the Republican one is true.

As a Constitution-respecting American, I believe in fairness, opportunity, and equally accessible voting by all citizens; even Republicans who, in the era of Trump, are the ones committing voter fraud. I approve of helping those struggling in an increasingly heartless system, thanks mostly to Republicans. I support regulations on pollutants and other poisons, on drugs and automobiles; occupational safety. Child labor laws. Public education. Separation of church and state. And I recognize that immigration is an indispensable part of American progress.

I vote Democratic, and I’m horrified by the attempts of today’s Republican Party, having bent over to Trump, to eliminate every one of those law-, morality-, and empathy-based values. Christian values, one might have said, until Trump.

Until Trump, the central issue separating our political parties, debated honestly, legislated with compromise, was the role of government in our lives. Should it be hands-off other than providing roads, police, and soldiers? Or should it, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, “Promote the general welfare”? Across the philosophical spectrum, disagreeing Americans were once considered Americans.

No longer. For a democracy, what we have now is suicidal: a self-centered, narcissistic, vengeful, know-nothing-but-thinks-he-knows-everything “president” who vilifies the opposition in the most obscene, embarrassing, and childish terms, and, weaponizing his Department of “Justice,” seeks to punish them. Try them for treason. It’s dictatorship, and MAGA loves it.

Which makes it critical that Democrats regain control of Congress in November and the White House in 2028. And which explains my concern over the NYC results. I don’t love the leadership of the Democratic National Committee. They’ve been as uninspiring as they are unable to form a coherent, approachable message to voters. The need for a new generation of leadership is apparent, younger and enthusiastic. But “Throw them all out” is a pathway to loss. So is basing votes solely on one’s view of Israel. America is a big country and, unless Trump and Steven Miller have their way, free. What will happen will happen. But please, Democratic Socialists of America: don’t do a Green Party thing.

Now, a brief return to Trump’s Reflecting Pool fiasco: So committed is he to convincing everyone his failure is due to unseen vandals bearing unseen knives and “criminally made algae” (in commie labs at Harvard?) that he’s fenced it off, added cameras and, as is his wont, troops. So now we’ll see. If it was vandalism, the pool should clear up like outgrown teenage acne.

And finally, a new definition of schadenfreude: Observing the failures and scant turnout for Trump’s “all about me,” puny Great American State Fair; and the number of people bailing out when, substituting himself for self-canceled musicians, he gave a lazy speech recycling his sad lies about turning America into the “hottest” country on Earth. (Climate change reference?)

Happy Birthday, America. Don’t blow it.

Dirty Pool

 

If you’re looking for the perfect metaphor for Trump’s “presidency” – I’m not first to say it – it’s his Reflecting Pool debacle. From start to whatever the finish will be, it has it all: hubris, incompetence, insider graft, lying, blaming. Some things are emblematic enough that they bear repeating; trying, futile as it may be, to bring sight to the unseeing.

Yes, it seems trivial compared to his lie-based, ill-conceived, vanity-motivated Iran war; nor has it, like the war, cost America and the world countless billions, jobs, and security. Unlike the war, it hasn’t left the terrorist nation of Iran in a stronger position than it was before his senseless embarkation. What it has done is provide shorthand for the dark, fibrillating heart of Trumpism.

It began, predictable as sunrise does the day, with Trump bragging that he alone had the know-how to “fix” the Reflecting Pool, adding that Presidents Biden and Obama, of whom his jealousy is boundless, are responsible for everything wrong with the pool; as he has with everything wrong in the world he created. Then, as with climate change and vaccines, he ignored the science of adding a dark, heat-absorbing base beneath a primordial soup. Which rejects evolution and climate change, as well. Because of course.  

It’s US law that government contracts can only be no-bid when there’s an emergency. But he handed one out, to the tune of millions, when no emergency exists. To a donor. Which demands something that’s lately become rare here: a link. Voters should know who the guy is. Gaze upon him. Read of his Trump-approved background.

Trump promised it’d cost less than two million (for what is Trump if not one who keeps promises?) It’s heading toward fifteen. So far. People who know things, a disqualification for anyone in Trump’s employ, predicted the outcome: water coming raw from the Tidal Basin, heated perfectly to brew algae already contained in that water, would produce blooms in amounts, as Trump likes to say, “never seen.”

Then Iranesque damage-control escalation: in this case, teams of workers dumping hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill the organisms (also, it appears, ducks). Which lifted the blue stuff off the surfaces of the pool. Fortunately for Trump, who denies responsibility for each of his lifetime of failures, a 62-year-old former Olympian, having biked 50-some miles before arrival, decided to see the blue floaters. Touch one, even. He was immediately arrested, giving cover for Trump’s election-level lie that bloom and blue proved vandalism, clear as the pool isn’t. Then, adding credence to lies, as is his wont, he sent in the National Guard.

I was once a devoted cyclist. On fifty-plus-mile rides, I carried energy bars and Gatorade. I never considered adding pollutants. Too much weight. We’ve seen how many people adding how many gallons of bleach had how little effect on Trump’s blooming botchery. How many vandals, unnoticed by 24/7 cameras, would it have taken to do what Trump is claiming? Putting how much of whatever into a pool that holds 6.75 million gallons would be required to have an effect? Possible? Maybe. Coming from Trump, though, who, insulated by his true believers, lies about everything, doubt is the proper stance. They cut it with knives, he tells us. Having, weeks earlier, bragged that the surface he’s installing was impenetrable by blades.

I worry for the biker, who’ll probably face trial. Hopefully, he’ll be exonerated for lack of proof. But he’s in for a rough time. As are the people arrested, like “round up the usual suspects” dictators do. Consistent with his election lies, Trump has offered no credible proof of their sabotage. There, hilarity ends. It’s exactly the scapegoat-fueled authoritarianism into which Trump and his enablers are dragging us, cheered on by MAGA and their media, facilitated by silence from millions of uninformed, disengaged voters. Compared to Trump’s manifold and worse botchery, it’s small, but it shows exactly who and what he is. Americans must no longer stand for it.

Or for the pathetic capitulosity touted by Trump as “ending” his Iran debacle. Like this Swiss cheese from J.D. Vance, ace negotiator: “This is probably what we’re most excited about as Americans, the Iranians have agreed to invite IAEA inspectors back into their country. That is a major milestone for the American people.” Lucyfying the peace football yet again, Iran denies it; once more making Trump and Vance look stupidly gullible. Maybe it’s true. If so, it’s just a return to the agreement forged under President Barack Obama and ended by Trump.

Including the other giveaways Trump approved, like ending sanctions, a broken promise to help the Iranian people, praising Iran's leaders, handing over billions of dollars, allowing ballistic missiles, and nuclear power, selling their oil (to America!!), and ceding control of the Strait of Hormuz, it’s worse. Much worse. It’s a rare Trump promise kept: total surrender.

To repeat the undeniable: Trumpism’s incompetence and mendacity end in November, or never.

Not So Cagey

 

In honor of himself, the emperor built an arena festooned with corporate logos and ordered gladiators into it, to bloody each other before his majesty and consort. Perfectly encapsulating the tone and tenor of the event -- indeed, of an entire “presidency” -- one of the hand-picked combatants, an announced favorite of Trump, took to the microphone after his win and shouted, to MAGnafied cheers and, reportedly, a “half-smile” from Trump, “Michele Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

Thus did Trump celebrate his birthday, adding a taxpayer-funded military fly-over. No American president has spent taxpayers’ money in such a paean to self. The desecration also included the Lincoln Memorial, on whose hallowed ground half-naked men posed for their weigh-in, after which they accessed every room of the West Wing. There are no words.

Disgraceful. Insulting. Embarrassing. Humiliating. Desecration. Shameful. Disgusting. Exploitative. Shameless. It’s foolish even to try. Degrading. Egomaniacal. Indecent. Reprehensible. Vile. Contemptible. Self-enriching. Repugnant. Grotesque.

It renders me wordless.

Debasing. Obscene. Vulgar. Tasteless. Self-aggrandizing. Unbecoming. Travesty. Shamelessly corrupt.

MAGA.

Happily, we needn’t dwell further upon this debauchery (wish I’d thought of that one). Other than reverberations through history and lingering stupefaction around the world, it’s over. We may now turn our celebratory attention elsewhere.

Our national artist of the deal has capitulated his way back, for sixty days, anyway, to where things were before his lie-based vanity war. It’s a “Memorandum of Understanding,” not a deal. The Strait of Hormuz will re-open, as before Trump’s folly, except for the fees Iran may still charge. Iran’s nuclear future remains unresolved. The regime stays in place. It can resume selling oil. Bewailed by Republicans when President Obama did it, Iranian assets are unfrozen. In the eyes of the world, Trump’s war has made Iran stronger and America weaker.

At best, our dealer might even art his way back, nuke-wise, to the situation extant before he trumped the Comprehensive Agreement achieved under President Barack Obama, international inspectors and all. If not, algaeic reflections on what we witnessed on the South Lawn may have to suffice.

But Trump’s amaranthine debasement of the White House is trivial compared to his deadly war on democracy’s definitional fundament: free and fair elections, equally available to all citizens. Having hired amoral sycophants helping Trump destroy everything America once stood for, people like Kash Patel and Todd Blanche and Russell Vought, plus overt racists like Stephen Miller, it’s proceeding apace, unchecked by Congressional Republicans, some of whom know better. Two, maybe.

Coming from Trump, to repeat a truism, accusation is confession. Like having lied for a decade about rigged elections for which he’s presented neither proof nor explained how it was accomplished. Aided by repetition of the lie by Foxian media, every cabinet member, and nearly all Republicans in Congress, he’s tilled MAGA’s intracranial soil, implanting unquestioning belief. Every election MAGA loses in November will be called rigged; every MAGA will believe it.

He’s not settling for the big lie. Under his command, the US Postal Service says it won’t deliver ballots in blue states, like ours, that refused his illegal demand to hand over their voter rolls. And he’s declared mail-in ballots illegal. Were the Supreme Court’s ideological, regressive majority not rewriting our Constitution, those efforts would be down-slapped in a Minuteman minute.

In what’s certain to be the first of many, Trump’s Kash-poor FBI raided an Ohio institution dedicated to registering eligible voters. The raid included homes of its leaders and staff, and the intent is obvious: intimidation. Not just of people wanting to register, but people helping them. Just as obvious: Democrats work to protect voting by all citizens, while Trump’s MAGAfied Republican Party wants to scare them away. Otherwise, they can’t win.

The sabotage includes SCOTUS-blessed gerrymandering in Republican-controlled states, where Black-majority districts are being systematically legislated out of existence. Some blue states are trying to counter it, even as Congressional Democrats have, repeatedly, produced legislation to outlaw gerrymandering, predictably voted down by Republican majorities. “Otherwise, we can’t win” should be their official motto. 

To their list of electoral corruption, add accessibility-skewed voter ID laws and purging legal citizens from voter rolls, potentially disenfranchising millions around the country. Their lying about Democrats rigging elections serves to mute allegations of their own obvious malfeasance. Is it time to suggest elections won by Republicans were rigged? What Trump and his party are doing is as obvious as an FBI raid. They hope to bury recognition under a pile of lies.

Oh, but Trump loves America. Just not the one in which laws were followed and court orders obeyed; in which the Department of Justice enforced our laws impartially. He kisses the flag, though, posts pictures of himself doing it on his Truthless Sociopath platform. And he put on a cage fight to delight testiculated Americans, right there on the lawn of the People’s House. Sure, he’s getting richer from investing in the sponsoring corporations and planting his crypto grift’s logo around the octagon. But, hey: what’s love if not that?

Also: nipples.

What About

 

Ken Paxton. Herschel Walker. MTG. Pete Hegseth. Pam Bondi. Lauren Boebert. Matt Goetz. Kari Lake. Tommy Tuberville... DONALD TRUMP!

Graham Platner.

That’s all I have to say about that.

Well, okay. There’s hypocrisy enough to go around. But if democracy is to survive, and, given how many so-called patriots don’t care or would prefer it doesn’t, survival is hardly assured, it’s existentially critical that Democrats retake control of Congress. Also, Susan Collins is very annoying. 

If Dems were to retake the Senate – I mean, seriously, Paxton vs Talarico is a tough call?? – I’d hope they’d find a new majority leader. Which is all I have to say about that.

Speaking of Trump – our querimonious gudgeon-in-chief – it’s hard to say which is more obvious: his continual lies about his equally idiotic and catastrophic war, or that Iran is playing him like a pawn-shop ghaychak.

His only consistent approach is to lie that we won the war, that Iran has no military capability left, even as they continue to strike, and that prices are coming down. Who ya gonna believe? Trump or yer lyin’ gas pumps?

But that’s not his only consistency. Equally consequential and destructive is his penchant (I like people who pronounce it “ponSHAWN”) for hiring the most unqualified people available; people guaranteed to ignore the law and to do his bidding. Bill Pulte is the most recent and among the most glaring examples. Trump wants him to be our next Director of (oxymoron alert!) National Intelligence; a man with zero experience in the field. None. Less than Pentagon Pete had in managing the world’s largest military.

What pulled Pulte into contention is his history, as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, of drumming up fake charges against people Trump hates. For their truth-telling and for using their positions as our Constitution intended. Clever deceiver that he is, Trump posits Pulte as “temporary” director, thus avoiding the need for senate confirmation which, even from this Trump intanked collection of electorally invertebrate Republicans, appears uncertain.

He’ll be there long enough, though, to look for ways to charge Democrats with treason or something. That there’s little else of importance to be done as DNI is confirmed by Trump having him keep that housing job. I won’t mention the dildo thing. Not that kind of guy.

How about this: hiring Elias Irizarry a convicted, then pardoned, J6 rioter for a sensitive anti-terrorism job in the Pentagon? He was only nineteen at the time, and he has apologized for what he did, including, I guess, deleting a week’s worth of texts on his phone, before and after January 6. The job requires top-secret clearance. Some of the flying I did in Vietnam required that, too. They didn’t want to give it to me because my dad once had a law client who was the brother of a member of the Oregon Communist Party. I guess things are looser now, in the current administration.

At least Mr. Irizarry isn’t among the hundreds of pardoned J6 felons who’ve gone on to commit crimes running the gamut from property crimes, fraud, illegal firearm possession, planned assassination, and more. At least fourteen have been charged with sex crimes, including child abuse. Victims of President Biden’s government weaponization, Trump says, deserving of taxpayer money for reparations.

Follow the law? In testimony before Congress last week, Markwayne Mullin, another questionable hire as head of DHS, refused to commit to obeying court orders. For Trump, that’s the opposite of disqualifying.

Another consistency in today’s version of Republican conservatism is, since entering the Trump zone, axiomatic: any election in which a Republican candidate loses is, inarguably and definitionally, rigged. Evidence, consistently lacking in all instances, is unnecessary nor to be sought. All that’s required is saying so. The consistent debunking of every claim, from mules to hacked machines to millions of votes from non-citizens to forged mail-in ballots, only goes to prove it. Never has anyone produced a credible sequence of steps by which the rigging occurred.

California’s ridiculously slow vote-counting is perfect substrate for conspiracists, a group that includes House Speaker Holy Mike Johnson, a man by his own assertion in direct communication with God. “Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove,” he said. “But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.” The fact that it’s impossible to prove is all the proof Ministerial Mike needs. It’s instinct. Like Trump’s gut, as opposed to expert advice, when it comes to policy decisions.

We end today's reality check with something definitely-not cognitively-impaired, gut-following Trump posted on his Truthless Sociopath platform:

“Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL! Great Violence proceeds at levels never seen before, and the entity dissolves into Poverty, Squalor, and Crime. Remember, breathtaking ‘Popularity’ first, and then, guaranteed DEATH AND DESTRUCTION!” 

So sayeth the “Leader of the Free World.”

Fools Give You Reasons...

 

After last week’s column detailing only a fraction of the grotesque corruption Trump and his familiars are getting away with, I heard from a sometime commenter. “The most corrupt administration in US?!!,” he wrote. “Laughable! Thank God for President Trump. No he’s not perfect but the Biden and Obama administrations absolutely corrupt and throw in the mainstream media, including the Herald and the propaganda they push against America and you got corruption, buddy. At least Trump is standing up FOR America which is why the MAJORITY voted for him.” (sic)

I requested examples of Biden or Obama’s “absolute” corruption and for evidence of Trump being “for” America as opposed to only himself. I also pointed out that whereas Trump did win the last election, the majority of votes went to others. On the assumption he can’t differentiate between news and opinion, of which the Herald provides a variety, I didn’t ask for examples of its “propaganda against America,” of which there are none.

I guess he’s still formulating an answer.

His comment helps us understand Texas Republican primary results for US Senate. Longtime senator John Cornyn, a vanilla Trumpist who tried to get a Texas highway named after him but failed to grovel enough, lost to AG Ken Paxton; a man so glaringly corrupt that his own party impeached him and the Republican senatorial campaign committee spent $100 million to defeat 

him.

After a last-minute endorsement from Trump, he crushed poor Mr. Cornyn. After which the Republican campaign committee endorsed him. A serial adulterer and liar, an unethical scammer still under indictment, and first-order election denier. Sound familiar?

Two possibilities: either Texas Republican voters limit their news to Foxoid sources and haven’t heard about Paxton’s and Trump’s transgressions, or they know and consider them reasons to vote for them. Not despite. BECAUSE. The choices are equally damning of people still supporting Trump.

In the case of my commenter, it must be a bit of both. Bombarded for years from Fox with “the Biden crime family,” he swallowed it without chewing, despite, after years of “investigations,” having been shown no evidence of it. Fobbing off Trump’s self-dealing, lying, and illegal billions in family-enrichment as “not perfect,” the only inference is he’s okay with it. Admires it, probably.

To comprehend Trump supporters’ mentation, consider the latest verbal atrocity spewed by Deputy Chief of Staff and co-president, Stephen Miller: “The American people understand the hell that we inherited and the extraordinary paradise that President Trump is building.” That’s “climate change is a hoax” level lying. “Iran was weeks away from a nuclear bomb” b.s. “Nothing less than absolute surrender” narcissistic puffery. It’s the kind of barefaced, transparent lies away with which the Trump administration gets, daily. Not only gets. Has them amplified by rightwing media, hourly.

Here’s Miller’s “inherited hell”: Post-Covid, the lowest inflation and fastest-growing economy of any nation. More job growth than any previous president, most small businesses being created. Infrastructure being rebuilt. Reversed Trump’s Covid incompetence. There’s lots more. (I’ve been urged to dispense with fact-confirming links, but readers can easily find them.)

And Trump’s “paradise”? Soaring debt; an unending, unnecessary war based on a lie; accelerating inflation, especially food and gas; depletion of our military assets; handing world leadership to China; fulfilling Putin’s dream of weakening NATO; creating – deliberately – the most political division in our country since the Civil War, right out of the fascist playbook; and, to beat a moribund horse, wallowing in the most government corruption we’ve ever seen.

I’d have listed spewing hate for anyone who doesn’t support him, punishing dissent, and turning his DOJ into his personal Stasi, but MAGAs see those as positives. Same with his nightly barrage of repetitive grievances, childish name-calling, and pathological lying. It’s unsurprising that Stephen Miller, as loathsome a person as ever slithered the earth, produced the foregoing outrage, or that he assumes people will believe it. Nor, by now, is it surprising that they do. MAGA news sources are built around the concept that if a lie is repeated often enough, it’ll be accepted as truth.

It’s how my respondent can assert, with certainty, despite being unable to produce examples, that Presidents Obama and Biden were more corrupt than Trump. That kind of unquestioning credulity bodes ill for our republic, the survival of which depends on citizens’ ability to think.

But let’s end on a happier note. As Trump systematically destroys America’s efforts to study and mitigate climate change, other countries are filling the void. Australia has become a leader in solar power and, addressing sunshine’s inexplicable absence at night, its homes are increasingly equipped with high-capacity storage batteries. Elsewhere, Türkiye, where I just was, is creating massive solar farms, and, by law, manufacturing equivalent batteries to go with them. Several European countries are approaching 100% clean energy.

As Trump’s America, blind to science and averse to facts, falls behind – and not just in sustainable sources -- enlightened world leaders may yet save the day. Addressing climate change elsewhere, it seems, is easier than regaining sanity here.

It's Blatant

 

Today’s debate topic: “Resolved: Trump and his administration are the most corrupt in US history.”

Argument in favor: Duh.

Argument against: ...

Trump doesn’t hide it. Why should he? After receiving no pushback from his party in Congress, no outrage from his state media, and undying love from MAGAs, he flaunts it. His loathsome lawsuit against himself, asking ten billion taxpayer dollars to be delivered to himself, is corruption unbound. Sue yourself, settle with yourself to the tune of $1.776 billion (get it?), to be distributed to people shielded from disclosure, by appointees to a panel chosen by him, its rules kept secret. People claiming harm from “government weaponization” by President Biden; i.e., appropriately convicted of indisputable crimes by our American system of jurisprudence, following the letter of the law.

That, as opposed to Trump’s undisguised weaponization of his lackeyfied “government” against perceived enemies and truth-tellers. Give the money to Mark Kelly and James Comey, for two. Under Trump, it’s axiomatic: every accusation is an admission.

That’s not the worst of it. As executive head of the IRS and DOJ, sue-er and sooee, he agreed with himself not to investigate or prosecute himself for tax fraud, past and present, erasing potentially $100 million in penalties for cheating. That he sought and granted it to himself answers any question (which Congressional Republicans are too cowed to raise) about the legality of his tax filings and business dealings. Per Jeffrey Toobin in The New York Times, “The United States agrees that it is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” President Trump, his eldest sons or any of their businesses. The agreement covers matters “whether presently known or unknown” and cases that “have been or could have been asserted” by the government.” Other crimes are not excluded.

Knew nothing about it, he lied. Before bragging about it a day later. The art of the self-deal.

Why doesn’t the Constitution preclude a “president” from suing his own government and agreeing to whatever terms he might propose for himself? Probably because our founding fathers, more brilliant than not and skeptical of unbridled executive power, couldn’t imagine the Electoral College selecting a person already known to be as amoral and lawless as Trump or of a petrified Congress doing nothing about it.

There’s more, of course. Months after the State of the Union Address in which he urged Congress to ban insider stock trading by its members, we learned he’s been doing just that. A week before his government approved the sale of Nvidia chips to China, he bought $1 million in stock. He bought $5 million more right before Nvidia made a computing deal with Meta. In January, he bought stock in Palantir. Shortly thereafter, Palantir got a billion-dollar contract with DHS. Then he invested $5 million in Taser-maker Axon, two weeks before ICE announced $220 million in purchases.

Oh, the White House says, he had no hand in those trades. Right. Pure coincidence. Because when has he or his mouthpieces ever lied?

Every American should recoil in disgust from this wanton corruption, rejecting, till he’s gone, any politician remotely supportive of Trump. Proving how unlikely that is was the celebration of America’s alleged Christian roots, held a week ago on the National Mall, promoted by Trump, the fakest of fake Christians; a pander to the antidisestablishmentarians of his party as blatant as the aforementioned corruption; a show of Christian Nationalism as disturbing as it was un-American.

Trump’s faux Christianity was equally unhidden: to the adoring crowd, he beamed in, between rounds of golf in Florida, a recycled, prerecorded reading of a couple of Bible verses, originally aired in May. Imponderably, MAGAs continue to believe he and his corruption were sent by God. If they once had it, what happened to their ability to recognize a swindler? Trump, Fox, and red-state-style miseducation is what.

We’ve just returned from nearly a month in Türkiye. It’s a beautiful, geographically diverse country, a crossroad of cultures, one foot in Europe, the other in Asia, with picturesque mosques and churches, ancient Byzantine, Greek, Roman, and even older ruins. The parallels between its leader, Recep Erdogan, and Trump are obvious. Its constitution declares Türkiye a secular nation, but Erdogan is trying to make it overtly Muslim. Like Trump’s “Christianity,” it’s a naked political move, but, unlike Trump, it seems he’s actually a believer. Like Trump, he builds monuments to himself, jails political opponents (or calls for it), and throttles a formerly free press. Unlike Trump’s, his government actually helps average citizens: free healthcare (even for pets!) and education, good roads and efficient, clean, public transportation. Stuff MAGA Republicans reject as socialism.

While there, I scrolled through and deleted without reading most of my politics-related inbox. I couldn’t completely tune out our homely horrors, but my mind was mostly occupied by such wonders as the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, ancient cities like Ephesus, the Turquoise Coast, and the company of compatible fellow travelers of diverse backgrounds. Producing this column on return was less rewarding. Kebab for thought.

What The H?

Today’s episode is brought to you by the letter H.

Few things in life are as predictable as reactions to gun violence in America. (“In America,” of course, goes almost without saying.) When one of their own is threatened, Republicans will blame the rhetoric of Democrats. They’ll call for repression of speech. Like Gym Jordan, they’ll make connections that don’t exist and lie about them, as when he said, "I don't think it should be lost on anyone that we have a third assassination attempt on President Trump in the same week we learned that the Southern Poverty Law Center has been paying and generating hate."

For the record, like the FBI, with which the SPLC cooperates, it engages paid informants within hate groups, which is not “paying and generating hate.” Jordan knows that. He’s venal but not stupid.

If it’s one of their own who committed the act, they’ll make no mention of Republican rhetoric that preceded it. Like, oh, “Journalists are the enemy of the people.” “Democrats are the party of ‘hate, evil, and Satan.’” “Democrats want to destroy our country.” “I’m glad he’s dead.” “No Kings marchers hate America.” “[Senator Mark Kelly and others] ... should be put to death.” Stuff like that.

You didn’t hear criticism of Trump from the right when he shared the home address of President Barack Obama, following which a man was arrested outside, with a gun.

Until Trump, there was never a president who openly sought to foment that level of hate and violence against an opposing political party. And, before Trump, no president had a party that loved him for it.

What you will hear is that the person was mentally ill and doesn’t represent their party, and that a “president” spewing hate for liberals has nothing to do with it. What you won’t hear are suggestions for making guns less available to people with a history of violence or mental illness. Nor will you hear calls for funding treatment of mental illness.

You will hear conspiracy theories from both sides. Staged. False flag. Crisis actors. Ear cartilage. Groomed. In that, there is political equity. However, those theories generally emerge from higher up the right-wing chain than ones from the left, both media personalities and elected officials.

Still, people pushing those theories, from whatever direction, demean us all, just as political violence endangers us all. As do calls to punish those who speak the truth. Or tell jokes on TV. As Donald Rumsfeld famously told us, “Democracy is messy.”

Something original did come from the correspondents’ dinner episode: Trump demanded, his words received throughout right-wing media like tablets from Sinai and put on loop, that his ridiculous ballroom be built immediately, lest he be in “grave danger.” Lindsey Graham wants taxpayers to pay for it. Let's keep the secret hidey-hole underneath. Rebuild the East Wing.

More sponsorship from the letter H:

Trump just re-indicted James Comey. Remember when Rs investigated President Biden for “weaponizing” government and came up empty? Trump’s is as obvious as it is copious.

Republicans rejoiced when Texas initiated the mid-term gerrymandering that gave them five newly red districts. Trusting Democrats to cling to their tradition of clinging to their tradition, other red states followed suit. Then, OMG! Virginia Democrats did the same dang thing. Backlash from the right is set to eleven. The Washington Bezos, which previously editorialized that the Texas ploy was no big deal, called Virginia’s move a danger to democracy. N.B.: House Democrats teed up a bill outlawing gerrymandering months ago. Republicans refuse.

Trump just fired all members of the National Science Board, which sets scientific standards “for how rigorous, intellectual, scientific decisions should be made.” Like education, rigorous science, whether applied to healthcare, climate change, pollution, and more, is a greater threat to Trumpism than Democratic gerrymandering. Right up there with free speech.

Some have praised Trump for dropping his suit against Fed Chair Jerome Powell. No, it wasn’t because it was petty and unfounded. It was to get Senator Tom Tillis to drop his hold on the nomination of Kevin Warsh until the suit was dropped. It was and he did. As with every Trump nominee, Warsh is expected to do Trump’s bidding, for his sake, not ours.

We’ve just learned Trump’s State Department, headed by born-again yes-man Marco Rubio, will be putting Trump’s image on US passports, in honor of America’s 250th anniversary. It’s always and only about Trump. He’ll be on our money next.

Never has any American leader displayed such malignant narcissism. It’s reflected in everything he does. In foreign “policy,” the results have been disastrous. Can anyone imagine the reaction from the right, the apoplexy on Trump-state media, if Presidents Barack Obama or Joe Biden had demanded such a thing? Or added their name to the Kennedy Center, torn down the East Wing for a ballroom, proposed a garish memorial arch? Or launched a war, expecting surrender in two days, after ignoring warnings of the inevitable consequences?

In fact, everyone can imagine it. It’s filed under “H.”

Funny Not Funny

 

Analogy: Lucy Van Pelt is Iran. The football is the Strait of Hormuz. And Trump is, well, Trump.

As he decompensates while his stupid war spins out of control like a buzz-bomb firecracker, it’s obvious that Iranian leaders have figured him out. It’s the B-side of what other world leaders have recognized and used to their advantage: praise him like a child who used a potty, flatter him with participation trophies, and get what they want. Iran’s insight is to lie to him like he lies to everyone, get him to announce the latest “agreement,” deny it exists, induce him to make ridiculous, madman threats, announce more agreements, threaten more war crimes, back off, produce deadlines, rescind them, while they enjoy the result as he looks more out of touch, less and less powerful, and definitely not in control of anything; least of all, himself. Watch as the world backs away from him in dismay.

This is what Trump has done to America’s once-admirable standing in the world. Unconditional surrender was the goal. Or ending their nuclear program, “two weeks away from a bomb” every two weeks for ten years. Or opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was closed only because of his war. Since Trump spends most of his time on social media and watching toady TV, he must have seen Iran’s hilarious trolling videos, of which this is but one example. He’s become so dislodged from reality and unstable that aides kept him out of the room where it happened when planning the rescues of those downed pilots, lest he start issuing damaging orders.

This is the “president” we have, thanks to MAGA. It should frighten everyone. It's the patriotic duty of every American to vote only for Democrats until every MAGA Republican has been replaced in Congress.

The mullahs must be having a constant laugh as they make Trump look ridiculous to the world, including, of late, even former Trump-fluffer Tucker Carlson, who stopped licking and started looking. Though it was obvious before he descended that golden escalator, deniers can no longer deny: everything Trump says is a lie. About Iran, about elections, about climate change. About anything and everything. In a “president,” it’s an undesirable quality. Recent example: Iran’s “totally obliterated” navy just commandeered two commercial ships.

Trump’s calamitous, unnecessary, undeclared war/not-war has strengthened China and Russia, and convinced Iran that it doesn’t need nuclear arms. In its control of the Strait of Hormuz, it has a far more powerful weapon. No rational world leader other than Trump, who isn’t, would use nukes. Thanks to Trump, Iran now understands they don’t need them to disrupt the entire world and get whatever it wants. 

Foxotrumpic media insists he’s playing 4-D chess. He’s playing checkers. And, because he thinks the pieces are Oreos, he’s eating them. The best we can hope for from this debacle is a return to the parameters of the nuclear agreement President Barack Obama negotiated with Iran years ago, by which they were abiding, and which Trump, because his only constant is a need to punish those who don’t debase themselves for him, ended.

His unfitness is also manifested in the incompetence, criminality, and danger of the people he chose for his Cabinet. Three have been dismissed in the last few weeks, all women, despite the tendentious testicular travesties, the fulminating phallic failings of his male maladies. Atop the list is Pentagon Pete, who treats war like a game, a platform for self-promotion, strutting and puffing before his hand-culled press, embarrassing us before the world. Not content with firing minority generals and admirals, trying, apparently, to out-crazy Junior Arfkay, he just ended mandatory flu shots for troops. He must assume Trump will get his 1.5 trillion-dollar defense budget, in which case the expense of caring for unnecessarily sick soldiers won’t matter.

Tied for worst appointment, ever, is Kash Patel. Trump : judgment = strychnine : food.

For humor’s sake, recalling his promise to end Russia’s illegal war against Ukraine on day one, part deux, Trump predicted he’d have ended the Vietnam War “very quickly,” in five months. Why five? One for every deferment he got to keep him out of it.

Finally, this: Trump’s ill-planned, unjustified war, his undeniable decompensation over it, the worldwide effects of it all, are driving from memory the litany of his previous failures, the number of ways he’s endangered America, civilization, and the planet. But maybe that’s the point. If his war/not-war is over by November, Trump hopes, voters will be relieved enough to overlook the horrible and, in many cases, irreversible damage he’s caused in a mere six years.

Against that possibility, here’s a gift link to a New York Times article by Thomas B. Edsall. It’s a fact-supported recounting of all that Trump has wrought, and should be required reading for every voter, better written and more comprehensive than anything I could do. 

Holy Crap

 

Since I graduated from medical school fifty-six years ago, I’ve hung around with hundreds of doctors. I’ve even been one myself, based on which I can say categorically that I’ve seen none of them, including me, wearing biblical robes; nor have any held mysteriously glowing orbs in their hands (other than smartphones). From none of them has emanated holy light when laying hands upon patients, not even in Catholic hospitals. Scrubs, sure. White coats, of course. Stethoscopes, name tags dangling. Never robes, though, nor – let’s assume – sandals. Not once. Not half of once. If a doctor showed up at your bedside cosplaying like that, would you assume you were about to die?

Doctors who act Godlike aren’t revered for it, nor would they depict themselves as such on their websites. None – Ben Carson excepted – hang portraits of themselves collaborating with Jesus. So, no. Trump posted his blasphemy fully embracing the representation. Consistent with his numerous pathologies, it’s how he sees himself. In fact, he just did it again. Why anyone not similarly afflicted sees him as Jesus incarnate is mystifying.

Even in bluish Snohomish County, it’s probable there’s a dozen or so people who do. Some might accept his laughable lie that he thought the picture of himself he posted on Truthless Sociopath, Christlike, appearing to heal someone while holy and unholy alike looked on, presented him as a doctor. That kind of bottomless credulity is expected from red-state MAGAs.

Nor is it just that the picture shows a four-fingered supplicant, un-airworthy fighter jets, and a fivesome of video game-like characters, one of whom is headless and four-armed. Trump can post and expunge whatever revelation of mental affliction he chooses. The real significance of this one is that he not only sees himself that way but assumes his voters do, too. Gratifyingly, enough of them didn’t, and said so, that he disappeared it.

Even for some MAGAs, whose threshold for outrage against anything other than liberalism is higher than RFK, Jr. formerly on heroin, and who claim Jesus as exclusively theirs while ignoring everything He preached, there are limits to glorification of a boastful, constant, and amoral liar. If only that harbinged the electoral revolution here that just occurred in Hungary.

Viktor Orban was Hungary’s prime minister for sixteen years, during which time his autocratic style made him a Republican hero, their anti-constitutional leadership ideal. Which explains why he was actively supported by similarly disposed Vladimir Putin and Trump. And Tucker Carlson. And all of CPAC, which, his successor revealed, he funded. Right before the election he lost in the landslide that Trump continues to claim for himself, as big a lie as stolen elections. In another of his high-profile failures, J.D. Vance flew there in support. Maybe the huge turnout, at least in part, was a repudiation of Trumpism, too. Maybe it’s infectious.

Orban became the strongman of Trump’s dreams: controlling Hungary’s legislature, judiciary, press, and, to a lesser extent than he’d hoped, its elections. His anti-LGBT actions were, for MAGA, frosting on the cake. In times lost to dim memory, the Republican Party would have shunned him. That he’d become its hero is, for America, a warning.

To Vik’s credit, he immediately conceded and congratulated his opponent, things Trump has never done; anathema to him like a medium-rare burger. Maybe, seeing similar diminution of democracy here, unlike MAGAs, who love it, enough unblinded citizens will turn out in November to overwhelm Trump’s attempts to disallow their votes.

Maybe people of all faiths will find his and recent-convert in more ways than one, J.D. Vance’s attacks on the Pope disturbing. For Trump, it must be maddening that whereas he’s revered only by a few million Americans, Papa Leo is by a billion or so Earthlings. In a can’t-be-true-but-is statement, Vance warned that the Pope should “... be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Which smacks more gobs than his attempt to characterize Trump’s Jesus-posting as our jolly funnyman “president,” joking.

Perhaps I’m making too much of it. The posting was, after all, just another example of Trump’s damaged id’s constant need for adoration and, when challenged, lying wantonly, confident, as always, that it’ll be amplified by Foxian state media and received as Gospel by his cult. But, seen in the context of his increasingly desperate, contradictory, and ineffective attempts to turn his calamitous Iran war failures into success, it exemplifies what happens when a malignant narcissist is given nearly unlimited power and finds it falling apart around him.

It’s not just tasteless monuments to himself. His pretentious ballroom, that vulgar, inglorious arch, gilding the Oval Office like a bordello – all of those are merely repulsive. But his wars, his promise to preemptively pardon all the lawbreakers in his White House, his unprecedented corruption, and the increasingly obvious disintegration of his mind endanger us and the world. It’s not too late for patriotic Americans to organize. And Orbanize.

Our Stone Age "President"

With hinge screws flying off like sweat from an overweight “president” on an unstoppable treadmill, Trump, on Easter Sunday no less, posted the following NSFW screed on his North Korea-emulating propaganda outlet, Truthless Sociopath:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

How very presidential. How honorably he presents America to the world. Our breasts should balloon with pride like... 

Nope, not going there.

No matter that he backed down, as usual. Every American who considers the presidency a position from which wisdom and humanity ought to emanate should find that rant unspeakably disgusting, demeaning the office and America.

MAGA doesn’t, of course, proving yet again how irreparably divided our country has become under Trump; how the regressive world-view of a belligerent minority has come to dominate American governance, despite representing not even a plurality of opinions. This isn’t “Art of the Deal.” It’s a madman, raving.

That Iran didn’t blink and Trump did makes it no less disturbing. Iran gets full control of the Strait of Hormuz, extracting millions in tolls, sanctions lifted, no constraints on building weapons, and declares victory. If it holds, Trump moves on, taking no responsibility for his economy-imperiling, America-diminishing war that empowered China and Russia. And, yes, Iran. But we’re to sing the praises of an arsonist who stopped setting fires. For now.

“Let those who have weapons lay them down. Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace,” was the Easter message from the first American pope, Leo XIV. Contrarily, Trump whisperer Laura Loomer wrote, “This is what I voted for. Bomb jihadis back to the Stone Age, where their mentality permanently lives. Trump said he’s going to bomb their infrastructure in Iran, and then he said ‘Praise be to Allah.’ On Easter. Amazing. Just amazing. Strategic bombing wins wars.”

Of which homily would Jesus approve? It’s a question the “Christian” Nationalists marionetting Trump stopped asking years ago. In Jesus’s name, they chose death and destruction. It’s confounding that people see the same thing and draw radically different conclusions.

Among the rotating stock of justifications for Trump’s war/not-war/but-really-war was liberating the Iranian people. “Rise up,” he exhorted. “We’ll have your backs.” Not exactly “bomb them back to the Stone Age, where they belong,” as Trump later put it, more cruel than Lovely Laura. No running water, no electricity, no hospitals. No fuel. No food storage, mass starvation. To Trump, to whom empathy is another obscenity, that’s “where they belong” – all of them, women, children, the brave souls who protested their government; students, teachers, healthcare workers.

Such inhumanity, even the threat of which is a war crime, is the wettest of MAGA dreams. They love it like they love a man who lies with every exhalation, who validates their hatreds, who hires people like Hegseth, not despite incompetence but because of it. Competence and sycophancy are incompatible.

As ill-considered as Trump’s war was, as obvious that he ignored warnings of its predictable, global consequences, he’s now ensuring that he’ll encounter no such pushback against his next war of choice, predicated on a draft-dodger’s need to appear tough. Firing General Randy George, Army Chief of Staff, was a warning to all senior officers to shut up and salute. When military leadership is left only to the most compliant, who’ll be there to refuse his next war crime, or, as General Mark Milley was, to resist another call to shoot protestors “in the legs or something”?

Trump unmasked the weakness of a Constitution predicated on goodwill, a commodity lacking among MAGA Republicans. His mental instability hasn’t triggered the 25th Amendment, nor impeachment and removal. When Congress is majoritized by people whose feck fits in a pixie’s hipflask, checks and balances become as outdated as the muskets behind the Second Amendment. A return to the respect for law and humankind presumed by the founders would require MAGAs to rediscover their humanity, currently Trumpofoxified out of existence.

When church and state become one, as the founders feared, we get stupid wars of arrogance, managed by people claiming God’s approval. People like Pentagon Pete, second only to Holy Mike Johnson in flashing faux righteousness like opening a trenchcoat in a city park. Maybe Trump’s handlers have convinced him that he, too, is doing God’s work. As a lifelong apostate, it’s unlikely he believes it, but he’s made billions by convincing MAGA he does. A miasmic, flattery-demanding “president“ and a Bible-banging Secretary of Defense, unchecked by spineless Congressional Republicans, makes a poisonous witches’ brew. It’s boiling over.

Footnote: Having taken a break to address health issues, I’ve been reassessing. Writing exercises an aging brain and offloads some stress, but its nugatory nature is undeniable. Further assessment to follow.

If The Shoe Fits...

🎵If you wanna know how he screws up so, it’s in the shoes.🎵  

Everything about Trump, his hires, and the chaotic misrule that followed, his failures, his cabinet’s incompetence, is manifested in Little Marco clomping around in oversize shoes. 

Wise readers who spend less time than I obsessively following the news and olds of Trump, might be unaware of this seemingly trivial but encapsulating fact: Trump, whose tastes run to grandiose gold and titular temples, is fond of cheap, shiny, wingtip shoes. So, either drawing on the billions he’s made during his “presidency” from unconstitutional grifts or, perhaps, from donations by gullible MAGAs, he bought some for his cabinet-makers. It’s reported he first asked their sizes, in which case the ill-fitting was a test of how much scaturient groveling he could elicit.

So there’s the Secretary of State of exceptional America wearing shoes three sizes too big, afraid to have said anything, submissively gluteosculating. Did he feel humiliated or, as it piled up, has he become inured? Either way, it explains how Trump got his war-not-war. No one pushed back, even those who undoubtedly apprehended the consequences. Trump chose lackeys, not people of competence and spine. Like Clark Clifford. 

So he got his war, about which he and perhaps his most unqualified appointee, Pete Hegseth, haven’t stopped bragging in the most vainglorious, tough-guy terms; war as video game, deaths as trophies. Who could observe the infantile, stupid preening of that tumescent pair and conclude they were ever capable of thinking past their emission of rockets and bombs? How stupid? Minesweeper stupid.

Trump expressed surprise at Iran’s response. No one told me, he claimed. Which, as usual, is a lie; in terms of repercussions, maybe his biggest. The Commander-in-Chief -- except for stupidity, Earth’s “most powerful” person -- didn’t expect attacks on other countries. Didn’t expect the Strait of Hormuz to be closed. Now that it happened, Trump is begging other nations for help. The same nations to whom he’s been giving the middle finger for years. As of this writing, other nations have gestured in kind. The grovelee became the groveler.

If this were a movie script, it’d have been hidden like the Epstein files. (Remember them?) While Iran blocks ours, Trump is letting their oil tankers through. Ukraine, abandoned by Trump, fighting for its life against Russia, is nevertheless helping the US and other countries with drone technology. Worried about the electoral impact of oil prices, Trump removed sanctions on Putin’s oil, gifting him billions of petrodollars to finance his war against Ukraine. While Ukraine helps us. And while Putin helps Iran target US resources. It’s inexplicable.

Or is it?

Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) recently gave a speech in the well of the Senate. It’s long, so only the pathologically obsessed, like me, will watch it. So here’s the TL;DR: He detailed connections between Jeffrey Epstein, Vladimir Putin, and Trump. Epstein, he said, installed hidden cameras in every room of his home, where he provided powerful men with underage girls and young women. The infusions of money he obtained from Russian sources, the senator implied, were in exchange for supplying videos of those encounters to Putin.

As the E-files make clear, Trump was a frequent visitor. Unsaid, but a defensible conclusion regarding why Trump, a bully to everyone else while obsequiing himself to Putin: It ain’t “pee tapes.” We may never know, because Epstein hung himself. He did, right?

As much as Trump would like to declare victory, Iran keeps getting in the way, by continuing to strike neighboring countries and turning ships in or near the Strait into fireballs. People who understand these things, which doesn’t include Trump and Hegseth but probably does the admirals and generals they fired and some of those who remain but are silent or ignored, say the only way to prevent those attacks is by controlling Iran’s shoreline on the Gulf. Which can’t be done from the air. So “no boots on the ground” Trump is sending a Marine Expeditionary Force to the region, complete with landing craft and 2,500 Marines. So far.

Trump’s bones will tell him when to quit. That’s what he said: he’ll end the war when he feels it in his bones. If that doesn’t give you confidence in his Chiefly Commanderness, this will: Bragging about destroying Iran’s main oil facility, he said he might do more “for the fun of it.” While people suffer everywhere, and while Iran might hand the world to China, Trump is having fun.

To our infinite shame, America elected a shallow, thoughtless man whose deplorable choices for cabinet secretaries were approved by cowardly Republican senators, some of whom surely knew better. Whatever in Trump’s impoverished mind justified leading us into his illegal war-not-war, his conduct proves his dangerous incompetence. And Congressional Republicans continue to three-monkey our path to doom.

And now, this: Due to non-political circumstances, my focus will be elsewhere for the foreseeable future.

Clowns In Charge

 

Five-star General Omar Bradley, hero of WWII, first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote, “Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them, must share the guilt for the dead.”

When it was learned that 168 Iranian schoolgirls and 14 teachers were killed in the initial bombing attacks in Iran, Trump and Hegseth lied. They kept lying until video revealed a Tomahawk missile, used there only by the US, hitting adjacent buildings, pieces of it found in the schoolyard. “I didn’t know enough about it,” explained the Commander-in-Chief. John Kennedy, MAGA senator from Louisiana whose questioning of Kristi Noem may have led to her firing, didn’t lie, saying “We made a mistake.” Good for him. He’s self-importantly smug, but “blind squirrels” and all that.

Trump and Hegseth don’t guilt. They gloat. Said Hegseth: “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” And: “The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re going to live.” When Trump finished announcing his war, unpresidential in a white “USA” baseball cap, he went golfing. Since then he’s made manly remarks like, “It’s fun to sink ships.” And, about casualties, “Before it ends, that’s the way it is.”

The human costs of war mean nothing to them; it’s all about flaunting power. As proof, Trump ended a Pentagon program studying ways to prevent civilian casualties. His wars don’t accept accountability. Nothing in his administration does.

He wore that disrespectful hat again at Dover AFB when receiving coffins of his war dead. That was too much even for Fox “news,” which showed footage not of that event but of one where he wasn’t standing under the hat. It’s me, it’s me, he’d said. Not this time, they said, later apologizing for their deception.

I spent a year in a combat zone, dodging rockets (all but one), caring for troops injured physically and mentally. War is horrible, righteous or not. It reveals humankind’s most damnable imperfections, its worst failures. Innocents die, survivors are ruined, combatants, too. In a democracy, we should demand that leaders who take our country to war reflect that seriousness and care about the consequences. For Trump and Hegseth to do so, they’d have to lie. If Congressional Republicans feel it, they conceal it convincingly.

Instead, having handed control to a lifelong liar, a psychically-wounded malignant narcissist who makes everything only about himself, who craves praise and manufactures it when he doesn’t get it, who made leader of our Department of Don’t-Say-War a third-string propagandist talk show host, we must watch their unseemly braggadocio, embarrassed and worried. Plus their despicable posting on social media of video promoting their war with scenes from macho movies and martial video games. Titled “Justice The American Way.” This is their thinking, sending America to war.

When Bush the Second invaded Iraq, a brother-in-law, a Marine and fellow Vietnam veteran who’d been in it much deeper than me, called to share feelings about war. Anyone who’s been there in person would think about Trump’s, even if supporting it, sad for everyone involved, remembering. Five-time-deferred, bone-spur-fabricating Trump can’t even fake it. He’s besotted with power. “People are loving what’s happening,” he said. “Cuba’s going to fall, too.” And “Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy in Venezuela.” King of the world. In response, Iran chose Khamenei’s son.

Ever-changing reasons for the war Trump and his henchfolk have offered might also include the riches his sons will collect from their investments in a drone-making company, to which their daddy just awarded a multi-million dollar contract. (But, but, Hunter Biden!!) At the very least, Americans who support the war for any reason ought to want more from their leaders than their frat-boy, chest-bumping, high-fivin’ white-guy (historic reference) behavior. The financial and security effects are worse, but those displays are loathsome.

It’s increasingly obvious how poorly the Trump administration thought through the aftermath of their initial strike. They expected immediate capitulation by the Iranians, and made no plans – hadn’t even considered the need – for evacuating Americans from the region. (Jody Allen sent the Seahawks plane.) Had they imagined – which would have required thinking beyond Trump’s signature shallowness – that Iran might respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz, they would have taken steps to prevent it and its subsequent worldwide havoc. That’s the price of electing a walking psych textbook who chooses advisers based not on qualification but on unquestioning genuflection.

Finally, a housekeeping note. Many readers find my tinyurls annoying. Their use derives from my blogging, where I can hot-link words to sources, non-disruptively. So, fighting temptation, I’ve provided none here. If asked for verification, I’ll happily comply. I don’t make stuff up. Except for the occasional word. 

Also finally: I’ll miss Jon Bauer, the Herald’s moving-on editorial page editor. The community will, too. He’s been great to work with. Happy trails to him. And to the Herald.