Time To Take A Stand

 

As it is axiomatic that there can be no followers of Jesus’ teachings who support Trump, so it is that there are no conservatives. And whereas there are plenty of Trumpists claiming to be one or the other or both, it’s no more true than if they professed to live on Mars.

Americans of every background and belief – excepting those who have no beliefs other than self-pity and selfishness and the certainty that they’re safe forever from Trump’s tidal wave of tyranny – ought to be sickened by what we’re witnessing from him and his cadre of sycophantic, Constitution-ignoring oppressors. Not just sickened: Taking to the streets. Figuratively, if not literally. Writing a column into the wind, even.

What Christian who accepts what Jesus actually said can countenance the spectacle we just saw in the Oval Office, where two despots congratulated each other for their lawless cruelty? Laughed and joked over the fate of an illegally deported man, incarcerated in a Salvadorian torture chamber. Only an unreachable Foxophile would believe that, had Trump told Bekele to bring the man back, he wouldn’t.

What conservative can accept scooping up people by masked goons and, ignoring due process, the most foundational American law, sending them to a brutal, foreign prison, forever? Or enjoy seeing the gloating pictures of the cruelty the White House produces? 

What law-respecting American, anywhere, would not be outraged by Trump’s plans to send “homegrown” – i.e., American citizens -- to the gulag, without (or despite) adjudication? With only Trump’s or Bondi’s or Patel’s or Rubio’s attestation to their criminality, all of whom lie prolifically in the face of all evidence to the contrary. 

It’s deliberate state-sponsored terror, meant to frighten potential critics into silence. In the US. By the US. It should be unconscionable to every American. For unrepentant MAGAs, it’s an existential disconnect.

If Trump and his confederates can decide who’s a criminal and who isn’t, no American should feel safe. Not Chris Krebs, who, for the crime of telling the truth about a non-stolen election, is subjected to Trump’s weaponized order for a DOJ “investigation.” Under Trump, truth is treason. About another retributive target, he said exactly that. To literal deathly silence from the wrong right.

Remember when “weaponization” was House Republicans’ favorite word? Evidently, it no longer applies, even as Trump attacks Democrats in Congress who’ve stood for justice? Suddenly, as Trump peels away Constitutional protections from us all, House Republicans are three-monkeyed. 

Nor can we yet ignore Trump’s idiotic tariffs. The ones, you know, based on the brilliance of King Arthur of the Deal; permanent not permanent, economy-growing destroying, paused by a genius chess-master as planned all along because people got “yippy” which was planned all along.

Remember the old saw of someone peeing on your leg and claiming it’s raining? It’s what Trump and his excusers have been doing since day zero. Not just about the price of eggs or shower-flow. Or “beautiful, clean coal.” For anthropomoistened lower extremities, nothing beats Marco Rubio, once considered within a standard deviation of reasonable, who offloaded this: “The alliance between POTUS and President Bukele has become an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere.” Then he stood and removed his knee pads.

Trump’s abrogation of the First Amendment, facing no resistance from Republican leaders and their enabling media, makes those tariffs seem almost trivial. They’re only about money and food and livelihoods and the ability to retire. Trump’s flouting of the Constitution threatens the persistence of America as the Land of the Free. It hasn’t been the Home of the Brave for a decade: Cowardice has become the unifying characteristic of Congressional Republicans. Among Trump’s voters, though, it’s less about cowardice than the inability to process information in a way that leads to wisdom. Which is the nicest way it can be put.

“Big Law continues to bend the knee to President Trump because they know they were wrong,” announced Trump’s pressbot Karoline Leavitt. About what? Providing constitutionally-protected counsel to people resisting a lawless government? What’s wrong is that, like several media organizations, those lawyers agreed to government bribery, which Pam Bondi will never prosecute.

Addressing Trump’s tariffs, but equally applicable to the mindset of relentless Trumpists, conservative writer David Brooks wrote, “... Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence...” 

Here, it doesn’t much matter how MAGAs vote. But they might have friends or relatives where it does. Or children or grandchildren who, as they seek to survive the wreckage of what once was, will wonder why their progenitors did nothing. They should internalize Sun Tzu’s warning, presaging Trump, "An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes." Then, recognizing their complicity in this evil and remembering what it means to be American, do something.

Not So Tariffic

 

For those paying attention, it’s old news: Trump’s devastating tariffs, like everything else he’s ever said or done, are based on lies. That they were allowed reflects the cowering fecklessness of Congressional Republicans, who, as in all things Trump, kneel before him (or is it behind?)

Our constitution gives tariffs to Congress, except, per a fairly recent law, in cases of national economic emergency. Which Trump declared. When the US was outpacing all other countries in a period of steady economic growth beginning when Joe Biden ran him out of office. The biggest lie, of course, is that tariffed countries pay.

His calculations for the amount of tariff applied have been greeted with laughter. Touting a formula leaving heads scratched and jaws dropped, later festooning it with symbols that changed nothing, he equated trade deficits to tariffs. But, whereas some countries have tariffs on American imports (Switzerland’s is about two percent, e.g.), that’s not the whole story.

Trade deficits exist because other countries make products Americans want at prices they like, while America makes fewer, reciprocally. Deficit is a misnomer. It’s commerce. Nor is it, as Trump says, a rip-off. They give us goods, we give them dollars. Should we not avail ourselves of better TVs?

Trump’s Commerce Secretary foresees tariffs allowing Americans to be the ones screwing tiny screws into iPhones. What other tiny delights await?  

There was no emergency. Trump has been fixated on deficits and tariffs since he was bankrupting casinos and scamming suckers. It’s his bumper-sticker understanding of economics and his desire to abuse power for its own sake. “Look what I did,” he must be saying, surveying the detritus of the world’s economies. “Trump. I did that!”

One thing he got right: White House toadies and Congressional weaklings immediately fell in line, even though most had previously decried tariffs, rightly, as dangerous and inflationary, causing expensive trade wars. Which, Trump hallucinated, are “easy to win.” Now, it’s “We need to suffer to make things right.” Well, not so much “we” as “you.” Millionaires and billionaires all, are they suffering? Perhaps we’ll learn, someday, how many sold their stocks before “Liberation Day.” 

Trump’s economic slaughter of the western world is exactly the quid to their quo that Russia expected from him, making well-spent their investments in his two elections. On Russian TV, they’re giddy. 

Back in the USSA, senseless, vindictive cutting continues. The National Weather Service will end its translations of weather warnings. Because who cares if “those” people are harmed? Not MAGAs. Trump (because, theoretically, Musk works for him, as opposed to reality) even fired the doctor at NIH who provided the unreleased Covid-19 treatment that saved his life when he was deathly ill. Gone, too, are cancer researchers, vaccine experts, and other medical leaders.

Trump’s impeachment backstop, J.D. Vance is lying Trumpically about their next target, Social Security. He's a liar among equals.

Announcing the end of American greatness, The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last ended with this: “We have a deeply stupid government . . . But also, we have the government we deserve. The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it.” 

Is he wrong? Maybe. Though far too few, half a million Americans gathered in cities across America to protest his trumpling of the Constitution, the cruelty, the flagitious destruction amok in Kingdom Trump. When big enough, protests still matter in what’s left of our democracy. After it was revealed that Trump’s vindictive, bicep-flexing DEI purge included removing Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad from the Parks Service website, the outrage led to reinstatement. But much of our important and teachable history remains gone. The not-white parts.

Outrage? How about the DOJ no longer investigating cryptocurrency fraud, now that Trump et ux have their own brand. Coincidence or contemptible corruption? Same with cuts to the IRS and the DOJ tax division. Live free and donate, prosperous tax-cheats.

Trump has expressed his shoot-‘em dislike of protestors, but, like all dictators, he loves military parades in his honor. Reportedly, he’s planning one for his birthday. A friend and I exchange topical limericks. Here’s mine on that subject:

 

“It’ll stretch out for over a mile, 

Some in bunches and some single file. 

The question they'll ask 

While marching on past 

Is “When’s the required Sieg Heil”?

First, The Lawyers

 

“The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It’s safe to assume Trump is as unfamiliar with Shakespeare as he is with the Bible, but he’s taken that proposition to heart. His Mafia-style extortion of protection money from some of America’s largest and, until a few days ago, most respected law firms has been of a single purpose: to rob people who oppose him of legal representation. It’s working.

And it’s part of a larger plan to block all avenues of escape from his authoritarian takeover of America. Nor is it just lawyers: It’s the entire justice system. Through Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, he already controls the DOJ. Panegyric Pam refuses to investigate the perpetrators of that security breach by Trump’s unqualified and incompetent clowns at the DOD. And she just ended an ongoing lawsuit filed under President Biden that sought to overturn a Georgia voting restriction deemed specifically targeting Black voters. She called the lawsuit, not the law, “an attempt to divide us.” And Trump just fired career prosecutors who’d been looking into his or his friends’ crimes.

It doesn’t stop there, of course. Trump wants to be rid of all judges who rule against him; true to form, Holy Mike Johnson, who loves everything about America except for everything about it, proposed getting rid of courts altogether – the ones who stand for the law. JD Vance and Elon Musk have been calling for judicial impeachments since before Vance embarrassed his way to Greenland and Tesla stock tanked.

As to that Hegseth-inspired security breach, well, according to Trump’s congressional henchfolk, it wasn’t a breach at all. Trump’s MAGA-speak communication director, Steven Cheung, combined spin, gaslighting, and outright lying in his defense of it.

We’re witnessing not just the word-for-word implementation of every regressive goal of Christian nationalists’ Project 2025 – that thing that Trump has never heard of, the goal of which is to blow up government and keep the leftovers for themselves – but total rejection of the rule of law, domestic and international. KKKristi Noem’s photo-op in front of Venezuelan alleged criminals violated standards dictated by the Geneva Conventions, to which the US is (so far) party: “Prisoners may not be publicly exploited for purposes of propaganda.” But seeing those people, most of whom were already imprisoned here, shackled and sent off to a horrifying El Salvadorean gulag is too much enjoyed by MAGAmericans to ignore. So the White House produces videos of it.

Describing the asymmetric advantage held by authoritarians, Bill Kristol, former Republican operative and Chief of Staff for Dan Quayle (I know; but still...) wrote: “The authoritarians break the rules, and the liberals restore the rules. The authoritarians cheat, and the liberals try to play fair. The authoritarians enjoy their ill-gotten gains, and the liberals try to restore a level playing field for all.” As should be obvious to anyone not Foxomagafied, that’s what’s happening. (Lest conservatives take offense, Kristol’s use of “liberals” refers to the “ism,” not the party. People who oppose authoritarianism. Americans of old, which used to include Republicans.)

Among my “conservative” friends who love what’s going on, one is a professor at a prominent East Coast university who feels his career has been held back because he’s a white male. He’s glad that people he considers unfairly privileged whiners get their due from Trump, especially trans people, for some reason. Another is a retired Marine with whom I get along well as long as we don’t discuss politics. He loves seeing stuck-to libs, and, like Trump, who “couldn’t care less,” he finds the economy-crushing effects of Trump’s tariffs and tax cuts a reasonable price to pay for the pleasure.

For phony Christians like Holy Mike, it’s about ideology and a hall pass to Heaven. For Trump, who has no values, it’s about power for its own sake. And revenge against critics. Because he neither understands nor cares about American history, forcing the Smithsonian to rid itself of “anti-American ideology” (i.e., our history) is the perfect example. (tinyurl.com/by2smith)

Same with threats to universities for what he claims are weak protections against antisemitism, about which he cares even less. It’s power over “elitists” who never accepted him. For the same reason, he allowed President Musk to fire the FDA’s top vaccine scientist and to make drastic cuts to the Mine Safety and Health Administration. To Trump, the hurt he causes is irrelevant. Only his narcissistic psychopathology is.

In Trump’s America, people whose only crimes are expressing opinions, or who are falsely accused, are abducted off streets by masked government men, jailed or disappeared, without the due process our laws require, against judicial orders, and lied about. A government that does that, without resistance, will feel free to do it to anyone it chooses. People unafraid to speak out are accused of defending terrorists. It’s North Korea. It’s Tiananmen Square. If any Republicans care, they’re keeping it to themselves.

Government, MAGA Style

 

Away for most of the week, I managed only a column with disconnected slices of MAGA. Pardon my pejorism:

Trump is great at bullying the weak. For example, making Social Security applicants apply in person now, instead of online or by mail, as before. Other than Trump’s needy ego, who benefits? Other than cruelty for its own sake, what explains it? 

But when it's Vladimir Putin, it’s clear who’s the top. After that “great” phone call, for which Putin made him wait an hour, laughing it off when reminded of the time, Trump announced various promises Putin had made. Putin denied making them and proceeded to break them all.

Trump hates to be humiliated; he strikes back at lawyers and journalists and politicians who fail to tow to his cows. But when Putin did that, Trump obsequiesced. MAGAs don’t care. They loves them some Putin.

Trump turned the Rose Garden into a Tesla showroom. His commerce secretary urged Americans to buy Tesla stock. Both are illegal under the Hatch Act. With Pam Bondi in charge of the Department of Justice-For-Some, they know their lawbreaking, past, present, and future, will go unpunished. Lauded, more like.

Preferring to spend his non-golfing hours threatening all who challenge him, Trump’s governance consists mostly of turning it over to Elon Musk. The morally weak, like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, news media, and some universities, caved fast. So has a previously respected law firm, agreeing to “donate” $40 million worth of fees to avoid facing his corrupt Justice Department in court. He wants judges who aren’t like Aileen Cannon impeached. Americans who believe in our Constitution should be appalled and worried. This does not include MAGAs.

He’s withholding federal funds from Maine until its governor offers a “full-throated apology” for her public challenge to him. Cutting off funds, threatening suits; previous presidents were more mature and less thin-skinned.

RFK, Jr, the science-illiterate, conspiracy-promoting head-case in charge of the public health thanks to Trump, said the flu pandemic of 1918 was caused by the flu vaccine. Which wasn’t invented till 1948. He’s hardly the most unqualified person now in high places. But MAGAs don’t mind. Nor, we suppose, since they didn’t object to ending cancer research, do they care about his ending research into the health effects of climate change. You know: the hoax.

To justify deporting Venezuelans without the due process our laws demand, Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. Then, after law-abiding outcry, he said he doesn’t know who signed the order. This, after pretending that Biden’s pardons wouldn’t count if they were signed with an autopen. But Trump’s communication director said Trump personally signed it, and his signature is on the document in the National Archives. Is Trump lying as usual, or so demented that he doesn’t remember? Was it an autopen? In any case, it demonstrates how untrustworthy and not in charge he is. The prison to which he’s sending the Venezuelans is notoriously cruel and fatal. Or, as Secretary of Statements Marco Rubio called it, “excellent.” 

Then there’s the shocking security breach, when top Trump officials included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic in a top-secret, illegal meeting about war plans. Never heard of it, said Trump, still not in charge. Just doing their job, said Holy Mike Johnson. Lies, said Pete Hegseth. Then The Atlantic published the entire thread, proving it. Truth? Accountability? Prosecution? Not in Trumpworld. “But her emails!!” 

Social Security: When is a cut not a cut? 

DEI is anathema to dictators. Diversity? Not if it means including non-sycophants. Equality? Threatening to the wealthy. Inclusion? Trump considers liberalism and a free press his enemies, to be banished, not included. DEI has become, like CRT before it, an intentionally triggering term aimed at MAGullibles, cooked up with digestible disinformation. Anyone having a job who’s not straight, white, male, and Christian is a “DEI” hire. Trump’s drunks and conspiracists excepted.

Ridding us of the DEI scourge demands expunging minority heroes from DOD records. Disappearing the atom-bomber Enola Gay. Removing a Native American from the story of Iwo Jima. Mentioning slavery only as job training. It’s as cowardly as it is dictatorial. 

The prescient words of Edmund Burke, 1770, apply: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

Taking Dictation

 

Two months in, Donald Trump is not acting like a dictator. He’s become one. He’s assumed every trait he’s admired in the world’s worst: capricious, insulting, boastful, striking at enemies perceived and real, threatening, suppressing art, banning words, hiding history, bullying, raving like a lunatic. Fulfilling dreams born of a life of failures masquerading, he knows, as success. Hurting the weak, to feel strong. Punishing people and places that show concern for racial and religious minorities, unwinding protections for Americans of different sexual orientation, gutting departments that serve people about whom he couldn’t care less, including his enstupened MAGAs – people and things he considers useful only as ways to flash see-me power.

NOAA and the National Weather Service? Cancer research? Promising more “clean” coal (which doesn’t exist) plants to stick it to “lunatic” environmentalists. Is it all retribution for when, as a shady businessman and social pretender in NYC, his peers ridiculed him? For which he made up by sexual predation?

But why such an ugly start to this column? Maybe because I’ve just returned from NYC, where my brother, intubated in an ICU and unresponsive, faces uncertain recovery. While there, news didn’t stop. Each day, already emotionally taut, brought a new outrage from Trump and his coven of unqualified but willingly subservient people. Plans to undo climate-related and pollution-preventing regulations, hurting everyone but his grateful bankrollers, who slather him with flattery. Attorney General Pam Bondi promising, enthusiastically, to weaponize her department for Trump. 

Trump calling non-slavish news organizations criminal. Overt attacks on free speech, ho-hummed by the “patriotic” right. Ten Senate Democrats caving to Republican budget blackmail; House Democrats stood firm against it, a plan that cut social spending, increased it for the Pentagon, and granted more power to Trump and Musk to do their worst. That’s what ugly is.

We picked a good time to be with my brother. As a physician, I could provide context and translation of his situation to my sister-in-law, whose strength has been stretched to its limits. Always an optimist, she imagines him returning home. I can’t, but it’s too soon to say.

The chance of America returning home, however, is less than my brother’s. Because of the unhealthy mind of one man (not counting supra-president Musk) in a position and disposition to destroy everything that makes America what it is, we’re in real trouble. It’s governance by intimidation. Trump must imagine himself alongside Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, Stalin, Kim Jong Un, Viktor Orban, Saddam Hussain; arm in arm, grinning his signature, plasticized thumbs-up. 

To whom can we turn to undo the madness? Cowardly and avaricious elected Republicans, whose party once eschewed authoritarianism, have forsaken America’s foundational principle of separation of powers. Once outraged by President Barack Obama’s executive orders, they’re now mum as the word at Trump’s, who, in his first four years, issued as many as President Obama did in eight. The pace, now, is furious. In both meanings. Including helping to curtail free speech around the world.

Every day, there’s something worse. Even as their rights disappear along with those of the people they hate, MAGA voters revel in it. Their sources of what passes for news blind them to the implications if Trump achieves the total control he desires, facilitated by surrender of those who could stop him. Right-side submission is already complete. From the left, podcasters and YouTubers are issuing fighting words; but words (like these here ones) aren’t action.

Courts? Trump’s control of them, personified by Aileen Cannon, isn’t yet total, but he’s filled them enough to make them unlikely rescuers. One brave judge just took a stand against Trump’s ominous use of an antique act for extralegal deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members. Forcing the ultimate showdown, he ordered planes carrying them to turn around. They didn’t. Trump continues deportations, ignoring judicial injunctions, attacking judges personally after being ordered to follow the law. Time was, Republicans would denounce such dictatorial lawlessness. Not MAGAs. They wished for a mad king and got one.

Until he retired, my brother was a nationally recognized lawyer. Despite Trump’s vindictive, okay-by-Republicans attacks on lawyers who dared to defy him, he’d have stood up, too. My dad was an appellate judge who scrupulously followed the law even when he disagreed with it, leaving legislating to legislators, unlike Trump’s Cannonade. Ironically, when my dad was in a similar medical situation to my brother’s, I was our family’s physician-guide for painful decisions. For my brother, it’ll be his wife’s and daughter’s role, for which I’m grateful.

Bereft of feck, Democratic leadership is useless. The Republican party has thrown in with global enemies and, worse, home-grown ones, the ones rising to Trump’s occasion, willingly, anti-constitutionally, turning every strand of government into a bullwhip in his hand. Unable to tell Reich from wrong, nearly half of Americans appear glad for Trump’s corrupt goose-step to despotism.

Once, I believed America could protect itself from that, and would.

DOGE Ball

 

When I was a surgical intern, we had a patient, a young girl, maybe eight years old, who’d had a severe infection in her leg, necessitating removing much of the skin of her thigh. Her bandages required regular changing; because of the pain and her young age, it was being done in the OR, under general anesthesia.

A new drug had just been approved, considered safe to use outside the OR, because it provided analgesia and anesthesia without suppressing breathing. We tried it, in her room. The dressing change proceeded without evident awareness or pain by the girl.

That was half a century ago, and I still can hear her fearful howl as she awoke, an unearthly wail, as if she’d been forced to look through open gates of Hell. It was horrifying. If she didn’t remember, it had to remain in her somewhere.

The drug was ketamine.

Elon Musk admits – brags of – using ketamine recreationally, frequently. The man supervising a post-adolescent team of tech nerds is canceling people and programs without applying anything close to cost/benefit analysis, firing thousands of government workers via boilerplate emails. The man claiming he’s uncovered massive fraud, without producing a single example, shows all the signs of ketamine abuse.

Quoting: “Frequent, heavy recreational use—say, several times a week—has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance...” Like barging into world politics, planning to colonize Mars, taking a chainsaw to US government. And calling Senator Mark Kelly, R-AZ, a traitor for supporting Ukraine. If, in his chemically-addled brain, Musk thinks he’s finding “waste, fraud, and abuse,” he’s not. It’s irrational, wholesale firings followed by serial re-hirings when the essential nature of the employees is realized.

Waste, fraud, and abuse exist in the federal government. In Trump’s administration, it’s everywhere. His golfing weekends waste millions of taxpayer dollars each time he takes one. DOGE itself is a fraud; so is his bitcoin scam. Abuse is the operating premise of Trump’s and Bondi’s DOJ. No one except Trump, who’s dismantling the means to investigate his own corruption, is against finding and weeding it out. But it wouldn’t be Musk’s version, which lacks meaningful scrutiny of targeted departments or the importance of their work.

Case in point: firing National Park and Forest Service workers. National parks add billions of dollars to the US economy. Maybe Elon doesn’t like trees or bison; but they more than pay for themselves. The daughter of a friend had her dream job as a park ranger, for which her education made her highly qualified. Her performance had received laudatory accolades. Yet she was fired via one of those impersonal, cruel emails, accusing her, without specifics, of poor performance and lack of qualifications. Clearly no one had bothered to look. Like most of the touted firings, it was seemingly only to impress impressionable MAGAs.

If Musk’s narcissistic grandiosity and lack of empathy (he considers it a weakness) might be drug-induced, Trump came by his honestly. Which is the only context in which that word can be applied to him. Nature or nurture, it’s who he’s always been. But, even notwithstanding his multiple business failures and scams, his current disastrous behavior beggars understanding.

Since re-assuming office, his domestic actions seem to have in common only “because I can.” After his empty praise of veterans, gutting the Veterans’ Administration is an unexpected example. Killing cancer research; censoring science; destroying the EPA and the Department of Education: those were expected, but no less disastrous and irrational. Promises to the contrary, it appears Medicaid is also on the block. Social Security, too? 

As to his on-again, off-again tariffs, the effects of which he’s never understood, were his “advisers” afraid to contradict him? Vengeful authoritarians have a way of throttling dissent. Example: The oft-professed holiness of Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House and God, would, you’d think, render him reluctant to lie as blatantly as he does. As the stock market continued its freefall, as prices rise and jobs disappear, Holy Mike shifted blame by saying it will take time to repair the damage caused by President Biden’s terrible economy. As if Trump’s bizarre bungling has nothing to do with it. As if historic job creation, unprecedented corporate profits, taming the pandemic, enormous stock market gains, and rebuilding rotting infrastructure equate to “terrible.” “Envy of the world,” people said. Because it was.

Gaslighting enough for a million hot-air balloons, Fox “news” is referring to the upcoming “Biden recession.”

When MAGA voters are convinced by Foxotrumpic disinformation that Trump is playing four-dimensional chess with our economy, when they prefer authoritarianism over democracy and are okay with weakening the US to the benefit of Russia, it’s hard to foresee a way out. If there were an obvious, brilliant plan behind all of this, stock markets would be rising, not tanking. Mismanagement does the opposite. 

Betrayal

 

From my never-ending reach for common ground comes a fact so incontrovertible that we'll all agree: under Trump, America has sided with Russia and others of our adversaries. Supporting facts: The Oval Office encounter with Volodymir Zelensky, in which both Trump and Vance attacked him aggressively and angrily. (That the ambush was pre-planned seems obvious; admittedly, that invites disagreement.) Also: the UN resolution that Russia was the aggressor when it invaded Ukraine. In voting "no," America joined Russia, China, Hungary, and fifteen other retro nations. Despite US opposition, the resolution passed overwhelmingly. Such is the respect for the US that Trump has engendered.

Those events occurred; on that much we agree. We can also agree, because it's true, that Russia was delighted with the Trump/Vance vituperation of the man leading a country bravely defending itself, under relentless, deadly siege. Reflecting the exhausting disconnect that now characterizes American politics, some see those events as disturbing, depressing, embarrassing, and indicative of the end of America standing for good in the world; for democracy, for morality, for generosity. They recall that, in getting Ukraine to relinquish its prodigious arsenal of nuclear weapons several years ago, America agreed to protect it thenceforth. They dislike seeing their country renege on such a critical commitment.

Others see it as peachy.

What happened is on record. The question is, is it good or bad? Putin is a ruthless dictator. He imprisons his political enemies, except when he has them killed. His unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is cruel and immoral, bombing shopping malls and hospitals, deliberately. Children's hospitals. Kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children, removed to Russia for who-knows-what purpose? Either you revile Putin for those horrors or, like Trump, you admire him. Either you see him as a continuing threat to cyber security and election meddling, for another example, or, like Trump, you're fine with turning him loose.

Your choice: It's a free country. For how long it remains so depends, at least in part, on whether a voting majority of Americans finds siding with Russia good for our country and morally superior to helping Ukraine in its fight to maintain democracy and independence.

In response to a statement that we're witnessing the collapse of the American ideal, Garry Kasparov, Russian world chess champion and courageous critic of Russia, replied (paraphrasing), "We're not seeing the collapse of the American ideal; we're seeing its betrayal." It's a significant, if subtle, difference.

"Collapse" suggests it was inevitable; that our democratic republic was impermanent from its founding. "Betrayal" accurately implies it's been forsaken; in this case, by a man who never understood or valued American ideals. Though it depends on reasonably well-informed voters, democracy isn't intrinsically flawed. With its election lies and so much more, Trumpism is making it so. As rapidly as it's happening, it ought to be reversible, which is why Trump and his destructors are trying so hard to prevent its resurrection. By lies, dishonest media, vote suppression, and a weaponized DOJ. Plus a blatantly dishonest SOTU speech. During which, it must be said, the Democrats' response was stupid.

Trump sees the world not in terms of right and wrong, but whether transactions enrich himself: material; land; aggregation of wealth. Hotels in Gaza. Kingly tributes. Bitcoin. "You hold no cards," Trump bloated to President Zelensky. There's no clearer confirmation of who Trump is. For him, "cards" are tangible items of value. Such ephemera as being right, heroically defending against a brutal aggressor, undergoing horrendous sacrifices to save their country? To Trump, not playable cards.

Until a few weeks ago, the American ideal had meaning; was, at least in part, central to our international presence. It was reasonable to believe it had staying power. Instead, Republican leaders of all pronouns are praising Trump's and Vance's crude attack as courageous, great for America. Manly. They disparage President Zelensky as ungrateful, greedy, incompetent; lie that he's never thanked America, which he has, many times. But, unlike the adulators with whom Trump surrounds himself, the Ukrainian president refused to grovel.

Mirroring the counterfactual Trumpian claim that Ukraine started the war, Marco Rubio intoned, as his soul departed his body centripetally, that President Zelensky owed an apology for "antagonizing" Trump. Are there no MAGAs who find that outrageous, who recognize in that reality-reversing statement the disdain with which Trump and his osculators see their voters? "America First" is their second-biggest deception: For Trump, it means "Trump first, America last."

Here's another proposal on which we should agree. Let's judge Trump's and Musk's and their cabinet members' actions thus: Are they helping average Americans? Have they fortified America's standing and influence in the world? Conversely, to what extent are they benefitting Trump, Musk, polluters, and/or Putin but not the rest of us?

My answers: in no way; the opposite; a whole lot. Convincing arguments to the contrary welcomed. This might help. Or this. And this.

Conning The Conned

Notwithstanding its faults - slavery, native American genocide, Japanese internment, misogyny, persisting racism, favoring the wealthy, the Electoral College - I've always believed America was a respected and trustworthy force for good in the world. By votes of its people, it made efforts to correct those faults, showing the world that, unlike dictatorships, democracy's ills can be self-healing.

Trump's first election challenged those beliefs, but he'd lost the popular vote and, four years later, was rejected and ejected: beliefs restored. Then, despite January 6 and his election lies, threats, mishandling Covid-19, and promises to punish anyone who'd challenged him, he was elected again, though more votes were cast against than for him. Now, only weeks into his second term, Trump's America is, observably, no longer a force for good. Predictable from how he campaigned, America is siding with enemies, forsaking friends and the health of our planet. Once-true beliefs have become untenable. It's hard to take.

Amidst a brave war for democracy in a land murderously invaded by a dictator whose political opponents tend to become dead, America has switched sides. If it still existed, Trump would have us join the Warsaw Pact; his kind of people.

Knowing it can no longer count on us to stand for and protect freedom, the free world recoils. Trump's besotted party, which once condemned Russia's criminal dictator, now praises him. For reasons about which there's speculation but -- not yet -- no revelation, Trump has always done Putin's will. Confirming the obvious, Russian state television's Vladimir Soloviev just said it's "no coincidence" that, after his conversation with Putin, "the phrases [Trump] is saying are so deep and so correct. They are in total alignment with the way we see things."

MAGA is Trump's most dangerous con job. Pretending to make America "great," he's blinded millions of gulliblized voters from seeing that he's eliminating every aspect of its greatness, including standing for freedom around the world. People who've never understood or accepted the value of America's founding principles see what's happening and love it; trying to descale those eyes is wasted effort. But we're approaching the point at which the machinery to bring the world's greatest democracy back into being will have been dismantled forever. More people need to join those speaking out. The need isn't subtle.

Dictators have in common controlling all centers of power: first, the military and law enforcement, to make good on threats. Then the press, legislators, investigators, and judges. With no resistance from Republicans and willing capitulation by others, Trump is remaking all of those entities, purging people who've stood for the Constitution, replacing them with his most loyal sycophants, guaranteed to do his bidding. Which they already are. The latest example: selecting as FBI deputy director former Foxer and current right-wing screamer Dan Bongino, who describes himself as "all about owning the libs." For MAGAs, that's all a resumé needs.

Thanks to America's most hypocritical senator, Trump has our Supreme Court mostly in hand, too. And he's been removing from office everyone whose job it is to keep the government from illegal overreach. JAGs, there to keep the military within legal constraints; inspectors general, ethics overseers, and US Attorneys who'd been investigating him. Moving us further toward autocracy comes his delusional executive order granting interpretation of laws only to himself and his Attorney Genuflector. In their silence, Republicans, other than Alaska's Senator Murkowski, have purged themselves. 

MAGAs hear Trump refer to himself as "the King," see the White House officially picturing him wearing a crown and rejoice. "Command us, Your Majesty. We believe your promises, even as they go unfulfilled. Attack those we fear or hate and we'll ignore the harm you're doing, including to ourselves." (Sick, but not sic.)

Ironically, the victim of the biggest con of all is Trump. The Project 2025 creators he's hired have convinced him he's in charge, encouraging his monarchical madness. Meanwhile, they're getting him to implement their true agenda: erasing the vision of America's founders, in which they've never believed, that individual freedom, defended by the law and by separation of powers, should be paramount in a democratic republic; that ultimate power resides with the people.

It's starting to feel like this: Following Project 2025 page by page, the Projectors are securing their anti-American dream of a Christian Nationalist theocracy, by and for only straight, white, native-born, wealthy males; limiting the vote, if they could, only to them. So certain they were of Trump's malleability, they published their plan pre-election. With no pushback from them, free to use the presidency as an ego-fondling, tribute-providing ATM, Trump ceded to them the real power. Especially Elon Musk: boastfully, recklessly ruining lives, barely denting the federal budget, lying about reasons and results; convincing MAGAs they're seeing patriotism at work. 

Time is short. Watch this speech by Illinois Governor Pritzker. Its truths are self-evident, its warnings a cri du couer. Stay for what begins at 4.00.

King Me

 

If I were to discover that any thought I had or any demand I were to make would be actualized, I wouldn’t use that power to rename bodies of water. Because I’m not a psychopathic narcissist, I wouldn’t decide to take over a national artistic institution and declare, like “Soviet Realism” back in the day, what art is and is not acceptable. Or threaten to shut down news agencies; not even Fox.

I wouldn’t stop sending food to starving people around the world or issue edicts intended to harm LGBT people. Or, for that matter, anyone. Nor would I ban words. I wouldn’t demand that critical information about diseases and science be removed from circulation. Because my grandchildren’s future concerns me above all, I wouldn’t denude the Environmental Protection Agency or push for more pollution or end support for renewable energy. No one who’s not a walking ICD-10 would do any of those things.

In the wake of a sudden spate of airplane disasters, firing hundreds of people at the FAA responsible for maintaining air traffic control infrastructure wouldn’t happen. Same with nuclear safety workers, meat inspectors, forest rangers, federal inspectors general, and ethics watchdogs. Given the rapid rise of influenza, bird flu, RSV, and who knows the next one, I wouldn’t gut the CDC. Only a lunatic would.

Because consumers benefit from protection from usurious banks, I wouldn’t defenestrate the CFPB. I wouldn’t threaten to end FEMA or dismember the IRS as a favor to my rich, tax-avoiding friends if I had any, which I don’t. Close to last on my list would be imposing inflationary, economy-killing tariffs and lying about how they work. None of those things would make me feel good about myself.

I wouldn’t prevent people from using whatever pronouns they like. Arresting migrants, documented or not, who’ve been here for decades, working, paying taxes, raising American children, wouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t pretend I could rewrite the US Constitution by declaration; or claim to be for free speech while shutting it down, coming from people who disagreed with me.

There’s no way I’d hire an unimaginably wealthy megalomaniac, paranoid, nasty, and conspiratorial pusher of blatant lies, to bring disarray to every agency, like a can in a kidney store, firing people willy-nilly, for show, often mistakenly and without justification, with no evident plan for the aftermath. Nor would I turn my office into an ATM. 

For a day or two, I might relish knowing that no matter what I did, no one in my house or in power at the other end of the street would raise alarms; instead, they’d toss their integrity like a used Kleenex, heaping praise on me like the Second Coming. Propose my birthday as a national holiday, want my head on Mount Rushmore, when, if I did those things, the proper place would be on a plate. But it wouldn’t last. It’d be embarrassing. If people compared me to Jesus I’d demand they pray for forgiveness and never blaspheme again.

Like any decent American given that power, I’d seek ways to improve lives rather than shatter them; bring together people of all backgrounds, establish gatherings in every city to air differences and find paths to common ground. Having appointed competent, dedicated department heads, I’d insist that their purpose is to serve all Americans, not themselves. Rather than cutting funds for education, Head Start, healthcare, food, and research, I’d increase them, because, directly and indirectly, we all count on them. To pay for it, I’d end subsidies to oil companies and several corporate tax breaks, and return rates to where they were during President Obama’s booming economy. Or Clinton’s, when they produced a surplus. And I'd do the same as Trump

with the Pentagon's budget. Imagine that.

So here we are. In Earth's greatest putative democracy, a pathological, vengeful liar, having spent a lifetime bullying the powerless, was again handed the world’s most powerful office when there was no mistaking his lust for unbridled power. Given, in effect, unlimited wishes by a genie, having the opportunity to do enormous good, he chose unchecked harm, and not just at home. Via VPJD, he insulted NATO, all but cutting it loose; praised European fascists; sold out Ukraine to secure Vladimir Putin’s territorial aims, handing the “most powerful” title to him and China's Xi.

Knowing Trump as we did, even those who voted for him because they relished “sticking it” to people they dislike, it was obvious that giving him that kind of power would be sending a shark to swimmers wearing chum suits. Cruelty isn’t unintended: it’s the point and purpose. Making life so miserable for so many people, I couldn’t live with myself. No moral human could. For Trump and Musk, though, and Stephen Miller and Russell Vought and Kash Patel, et awful, it’s their raison d’etre.

RFK, Jr is too delusional to be doing it on purpose, but the suffering he’ll inflict could be even worse.

Is Enough Enough?

 

If a dictatorophilic “president” refuses to obey the law, and when his party in Congress doesn’t care, who’ll stop him? The Constitution is but a piece of parchment. What can believers in democracy do? Roll it up and smack him with it? The weakness of constitutional democracy is “Consent of the Governed.” It works only when citizens and their leaders willingly submit to its laws.

When our government, established by men who escaped tyranny and sought to prevent it here, ignores it, who’s there to enforce it? The Supreme Court? The body that granted Trump nearly unlimited immunity, gutted the Voting Rights Act, and grafted words onto the parchment saying that unlimited, unaccountable political donations are free speech? That decided corporations are people? Ignores Justices Thomas and Alito’s corruption?

If the Court were to declare any of Trump’s or President Musk’s actions unconstitutional, Musk, Vance, and Holy Mike Johnson have been clear: they don’t care. SCOTUS can direct US Marshals to arrest people who ignore its rulings, but they’re under the aegis of Attorney General Bondi, whose first actions were to do Trump’s bidding in going after prosecutors who lawfully targeted his crimes. We’ll find out soon enough whether Trump will uphold the Constitution. And whether Trump’s foresight-deficient voters will rejoice if he doesn’t. 

Until Republicans restrict it to Republicans, the ultimate restraint on leaderly lawlessness is the vote. But, following successful, long-term efforts by rightwing media, that’s failed, too. Which leaves only the slimmest of hopes that the taken-in will take back out; something toward which the Foxified have shown no inclination. They need to understand how democracy protects them, which they don’t. They need to realize and care what’s happening to it, which they can’t. They need to seek sources of accurate information, which they won’t. If Trump, who just opined that CBS and 60 Minutes should be abolished, deplatforms all but Foxoid media, they never will. Free speech, which Rs once claimed Ds were against, is in the eyes of the office-holder.

I’ve mentioned The Bulwark previously, a group of former Republicans boldly calling out Trump’s unfitness and the dangers he represents. Among them is Bill Kristol, founder of the conservative Weekly Standard, former Fox “news” contributor. Presumably to silence him, Elon lied that he’s on USAID’s payroll, using that as a reason to take it down. Swallowing the lies like seals do salmon, mixing and neologizing metaphors, Muskovites jumped on the slandwagon. 

To complaints about Musk’s illegal neutering of USAID, Trump has assured us that Elon gets nothing out of it. Well, except that he happened to be under investigation by USAID’s inspector general. And that, by diminishing its benefits to America’s image abroad, he enhances China’s. Which might have something to do with the fact that Elon does billions of dollars of business there and hopes to keep doing so.

Yale Law School grad Veep Vance’s response to a judge enjoining Musk’s illegal incursions was that it should be ignored. Musk called for the judge’s impeachment. The response of Congressional Republicans to this anti-constitutionalism can be summarized in no words. MAGA voters? Even fewer. “Ominous” would be mine.

MAGA was founded on xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-diversity. Because Trump is making good on it, his supporters find damage anywhere else irrelevant, if, jubilant about deportations and anti-trans actions, they notice or care.

They may soon, though, if any of them experiences credit card or banking fraud. Immediately after confirmation, Russ Vought, Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget and Project 2025 mainliner, disbanded the Consumer Fraud and Protection Bureau. Of the four million people to whom it has refunded over $1.8 billion fraudulently taken, surely many are Trumpic. Who benefits from killing it? Banks. Republican donors.

Nothing is more confirmatory that Project 2025, whose playbook Trump (“I never heard of it”) and his appointees are following page by page, is about enriching the rich and ignoring or intentionally hurting everyone else. Likewise, defunding the National Institutes of Health. Even people who reject science and distrust allopathic healthcare will be hurt. Losing access to its publications harms physicians and their patients. Research funding is being limited, threatening progress in cancer treatments, among others. It’s inexplicable and malicious. For countless Americans, including Trump’s idolizers, it could be fatal. 

So what is it, MAGAs? Are you okay with Trump’s march toward plutocratic autocracy because you think you’ll be fine? You know the aphorism, right?

If not, you should.

Let Me Count The Ways

 

The US Agency for International Development is a “criminal organization,” says President Musk, so, illegally bypassing Congress, he’s ending it. Cowed Republican members say nothing.

USAID represents about one percent of the federal budget. It’s the world’s largest provider of food to the hungry. It distributes schoolbooks and vaccines, promotes democracy and good will toward America. In ending it, Trump, ceder of the free world, passes leadership to our adversaries.

It’s what happens when a “president” who knows little and cares less, hands our government to the world’s richest man, unelected, given no powers by Congress. A man who, like Trump, loves dictators and seems to enjoy hurting the powerless.

It’s not only Musk whom Trump loosed upon us. He’s putting in charge, if Republican Senators forsake their duty, people who should never run important agencies, who’ll weaponize them for Trump, as opposed to President Biden’s non-weaponization about which Trump’s cadre of liars lied endlessly instead of legislating.

It’s not as bad as predicted, though. It’s worse. And, like the cliché about drinking from a firehose, it’s impossible to take it all in. Intentional, most likely. Having limited space, we’ll mention only a few transgressions with which we’re being hosed.

Most consequential is what’s happening at the DOJ and FBI. At Trump’s bidding, those critical law enforcement agencies are being turned into Soviet-style tools of repression; agents and prosecutors who did their Constitutional duty are being replaced with ones who won’t. They’ll destroy the lives of innocent citizens while lessening America’s ability to confront terrorism, home-grown and foreign, endangering us all. It’s rule by threat and intimidation.

When federal crimes are suspected, the FBI investigates. If suspects lie or refuse to cooperate, this may include obtaining search warrants. When evidence of crime is uncovered, the DOJ prosecutes; if they make their case, a jury of citizens, chosen by both sides, convicts. It’s how American jurisprudence, till now, has worked. For Trump’s multiple crimes, those steps were followed. People who did their sworn duty are being fired; many will be “investigated.” It’s conceivable that Trump’s minions threaten jurors, too.

If approved, his disingenuous testimony to the contrary, Kashyap Patel will recast the FBI as KGB. (Maybe not the juror thing.) Nothing coming from Republican members of The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body suggests he’ll be rejected, so thorough is their surrender of integrity and respect for the law.

As Florida’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi’s refusal to prosecute Trump’s pre-presidential crimes, after which her campaign received a generous donation from him, means it’s naive to believe she won’t do the same with the DOJ. In fact, hot off the presses, she already is.

While the FBI and DOJ focus on serving Trump’s pathologies, what will happen to their central mission of protecting America from threats within and without, and prosecuting actual criminals? From the once and former “party of law and order,” their silence is profound. But expected.

A sampling of other transgressions deserving mention, for none of which is there space to do justice:  

Like the abortive rollout of curtailing practically all government spending, which lasted about one day before Trump was made aware of the predictable consequences, his tariffs on Mexico and Canada went on hold before they happened. Trumpists, of course, assign it to Trump’s cosmic superpowers. Or was it that the markets crashed, his pals lost lots of money, and his benefactors screamed about the negative effects on their businesses? Whatever the reason, Trump’s justifications changed approximately hourly. Which is uncharacteristic of well-reasoned, purposeful plans.

No concession, the 10,000 touted troops Mexico will send to the border are fewer than it sent in previous years. For the interested, here’s an expert’s discussion of the tariffic dangers.

Trump’s heartless, fact-free accusation and purely political response to the air tragedy over D.C. has been hashed aplenty. Was it intended to forestall mention of his scrapping the Aviation Safety Committee? In any case, his lack of empathy for the victims was the opposite of presidential. But pure Trump.

Whatever one thinks of gender pronoun use, Trump’s banning them from government communications seems to violate the First Amendment. Same with LGBT-related words. As opposed to, say, Facebook banning Trump, about which Trumpists continually connipted.

If briefly and clumsily, Trump banned distribution of life-saving HIV drugs. This harbings life (or death) under RFK, Jr, who’s one step away from confirmation.

Removing security details from Milley, Bolton, and other intended targets of assassination by Iran, is just short of doing it himself. But they weren’t nice to him.

Banning public communication from the CDC will harm all Americans, even MAGAs. Same with shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Samer with purging helpful information from other government sites.

His “turning on the water” in California accomplished only badness.

When his hotels are built in Gaza, will the Mediterranean become "The Sea of Trump"?

Though incomplete, this list makes clear: Trump’s ego and donors are top priorities. Lawfulness is at the bottom. The public weal has no ranking at all.

Bought any eggs lately?

Brick By Brick

 

             Image source: anntelnaes.com

After an exhausting week of stamping out human decency in his government, Trump spent the weekend taking the Miami golf cure. I spent it getting over not being confirmed as Secretary of Defense. I thought I had a shot; my resumé is on a par with Pete Hegseth’s, if not greater. We both served in the military in war zones, but, unlike me, he didn’t receive a Purple Heart. We both provide weekend opination via public media; and whereas mine is mine only, he shares his platform as a mere co-host. In managing huge bureaucracies, we’re identical. What put me out of the running, I think, is that I’m not a problem drinker or a sexual miscreant, both of which are touchstones in the upper echelons of today’s Republican Party.

Choosing Hegseth over me made Trump the only president who’s had two cabinet nominees requiring a Vice-Presidential tiebreak after a 50–50 vote. No other president has had even one. Which says everything about the quality of his choices. 

For those who believe Democrats’ unanimity in voting no was purely political, votes for the previous SecDef nominees, Democrats and Republicans, were as follows: Lloyd Austin, 93–2; Mark Esper 90–8; James Mattis 98–1. Ashton Carter 93–5; Leon Panetta 100–0. Robert Gates 95–2. The difference: credentials. If not all R senators are stupid enough to think Hegseth is qualified (?), only 3 had the guts to vote no, one of whose cynical hypocrisy put us where we are. It’s shameful and cowardly.

Arriving at the Pentagon, Pete went to work implementing Project Trump 2025: his first communiqué was about ending DEI, because any military member not straight, male, white, and Christian is inferior. Then, calling them “dishonorable” and “liars,” he banned trans people who, because they had the courage to be public about who they are, are braver than most; and about whom there’ve been fewer deportment issues than non-trans members. And he announced plans to interview top general officers to see which will kowtow and which won’t. Shoot protestors in the legs. 

Beyond turning the military into his domestic enforcers, Trump is eliminating people and programs that would keep him in check. He fired inspectors general of virtually all government agencies. His Department of “Justice” ousted every prosecutor who worked with Jack Smith and will subject them to “investigations,” and it just ended further pursuit of Trump’s crimes. The firing of the IGs was clearly illegal because the law requires thirty days’ notice. The message: Whatcha gonna do about it?

Same with the TikTok law passed by Congress, signed by President Biden, and approved in a rare 9–0 ruling by the Supreme Court. Trump ignored it. Likewise, his demented attempt to rewrite the Constitution by executive order. He’s convinced he’s above the law, which, thanks to congressional pusillanimity and judicial corruption, it turns out he is. Then, because they’d get in his way, he rescinded the ethics rules ordered by President Biden. 

In a silent coup, our country has been captured by a group of very wealthy men, Christian nationalists who are anything but Christian, whose aim is to remove from government all institutions that have, till now, protected us from people like them; that stand in the way of unchecked power and unregulated self-enrichment; that let people not like them retain the power of the vote. And they’ve put in place enough judges and justices to clear their path.

It’s been a concerted effort for years. In Trump, they recognized the perfect stooge, one they could convince he’s in charge because he so desperately needs to be; a frontman willing, for his needy gratification, to keep public eyes off what’s happening; to cede the agenda to Project 2025. It’s not Greenland or Panama or Canada. It’s in the backrooms of the White House, into which they’ve charmed and threatened unimaginably rich oligarchs to bankroll their efforts. Trump gives them what they want because they give him what he needs.

Trump was elected by a minority of voters, strategically convinced it was about eggs and immigrants. People who look worshipfully at his self-pity and rejoice as he strikes at the vulnerable, who will include, before long, themselves. When they realize that, it’ll be too late.

It’s hard to accept, to know whether to tune out or scream into the night. Trump has the limelight. For him, vengeance is the goal; that, and validating his neediness. He’s president of people who see the cruelty and love it. And of the string-pullers. The more distracting outrage he engenders, the more he lies and pounds his chest, the more he fools the media into focusing on the hole rather than the donut, the more easily the Project-iles can take down our democracy, all but unreported, brick by brick.

For those who still believe in democracy and kindness, it’s hard to watch and harder to know what to do.