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.