Water Over The Bridge

 

Michelle Obama told us, “I've seen firsthand that being president doesn't change who you are. It reveals who you are.” It was true of her husband: intelligent, thoughtful, well-informed, empathetic. And humorous. As people living in Queens knew all too well when Trump was there, he was dishonest, superficial, nasty, racist, and narcissistic. As “president,” those disqualifying characteristics have intensified a thousandfold.

The quote applies also to Trumpists. It’s clear that people who see him as God-given and God-like didn’t become that oblivious when Trump descended that golden escalator, or as he has continued his bottomless descent ever since. The desire to submit blindly to a demagogue has to have been there all along. They may not have known it; they can’t recognize it, but there it is.

I torture myself occasionally by watching video interviews of MAGAs at Trump rallies. It’s mentally harmful and physically painful. Same with observing the weak-kneed people in charge of Google, who, while Trump’s idiotic edict was still echoing in the Offal Office, instantly changed the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. As I write this, Apple Maps hasn’t, but they just hired a new CEO. We’ll see.

Because Trump and his enablers are vengeful people, businesses that cave to him have something to lose, and not just their integrity. Trump’s “presidency” has revealed their cowardice and greed. But how to explain the evident submission of our conservative Supreme Court Justices, with their lifetime appointments? Their claim to be Constitutional originalists and literalists is as dishonest as Trump and his Cabinet-squatters. Their proclamations that money is speech and corporations are people were created out of vapor. But allowing Trump’s illegal attempts to ban mail-in ballots is inexplicable, blatant disregard for the original, literal words of Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution, which says:

"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators."

Each state. Altered by Congress. Nothing, expressed or implied, gives that power to a president. We can’t know what the Submissive Six thought when they reread the Constitution, but what they said was, “We don’t care and there’s nothing you can do about it.” I recall incessant right-wing screaming about executive orders when issued by Presidents Obama and Biden. Trump’s are met with the silence of the lame.

His renaming water is mostly laughable and embarrassing and, hopefully, like Trump’s name and images everywhere in D.C., will disappear on January 20, 2029. If polluting the capital that way is a presidential right, any could have done the same, but none have been so malignantly narcissistic. Same with Trump’s bullying of corporate entities. None sicced the FCC on media whose personalities and content they didn’t like, nor did any prior presidents appoint such unqualified but worshipful people to run executive branch agencies.

Trump isn’t bright, is getting dimmer, and he’s all but illiterate. But he recognized something that was there all along, but which, out of respect for the law and for our country, no prior president chose to employ: laws are only as effective as those who follow them and those willing to enforce them. Having surrounded himself with the opposite, privileged with a Congress empowered by a fog-brained electorate to ignore his every transgression, and granted nearly complete immunity by less-than-supreme Justices, Trump does what he wants, enriches himself beyond imagination, and gets away with it unchallenged, except by a powerless minority. And he’s doing everything he can, come November, to keep that minority from power.

There are consequences. For example, replacing departing FBI agents who refused to serve an incompetent leader, Kash Patel has lowered hiring standards. Per CBS, “According to multiple sources briefed on the matter, the FBI did so to facilitate hiring in some cases, even if candidates acknowledged they engaged in sexually deviant activities or stole from an employer.” Hiring criteria for ICE, it’s apparent, are even lower, as those masked thugs appear to enjoy brutalizing non-white immigrants, most of whom have no criminal records and, lately, were here legally.

Deporting “the worst of the worst” has long since disappeared from Trump’s incoherent rhetoric. It’s all about intimidation and, like Putin and Kim, quashing dissent. When I served in Vietnam, the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes, enjoyed editorial and content freedom dating from the Civil War. I looked forward to every issue. Pentagon Pete, demanding content aligned only with his tough-guy preening, fired its editor and the woman (!) in charge of protecting its independence. It’s another marker on the path(ology) to authoritarianism, unchecked by Congress, SCOTUS, or MAGA voters.

What else is new in Trump’s America? He just defunded bike lanes on roads because they’re DEI. His cruel removal of legal status from Haitians has led to at least one suicide. The insanity has to stop. If we can overwhelm his vote-suppression tactics in November, it might.