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.