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.

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.

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. 

Idiots, All The Way Down

 

Tomorrow's newspaper column, today:

It’s a big, diverse country, so there’s no surprise it contains people who support Donald Trump’s ever more egregious demagoguery. Of course, it’s that very diversity which animates those non-diverse supporters who show up at his rallies. These are scary people; scary as a “president” who, in Arizona, read words claiming to love all Americans, after which he spewed venom at pretty much everybody. Especially reporters who, he says, don’t like America. Reporters, whose job it is to correct lies and uncover corruption. Who, coincidentally, will be reporting results of investigations. 

Phoenix was the worst yet: meandering, wallowing in self-pity, blaming others for his failures, threats against enemies perceived and real. (No mention, though, of ten sailors who died the day before.) But they cheer him. Even when, after promising Mexico would pay for his wall, he threatened to shut down OUR government if WE won’t pay for it. And now, pardoning a racist, law-flouting (but birther!) sheriff whose malfeasance and crimes are manifold, “Law and Order” Trump has sent us a clear, specific message; and it’s grotesque. 

On cue, they cheer and boo, making clear who really doesn’t like America. They’ll say otherwise, of course: they love it. Except its laws; except immigrants and minorities; except the mainstays of democracy: a free and adversarial press; voting by citizens they don’t like; and public education. What they don’t love is the foundation on which the republic stands. It follows, then, that they’re fine with a sociopathic leader who doesn’t love those same things. 

Trumpists posted scenes of tens of thousands filling the streets of Phoenix for the rally. The pictures were actually of throngs in Cleveland for the NBA champ Cavaliers; that’s how much they prefer lies, the more the better. As usual, Trump lied about crowd size, too. 

If it’s creepy having an insecure “president” who’s so needy he holds rallies to wallow in adulation, it’s beyond bizarre that he whines, rambles, fumes, can’t stay on message, contradicts what he said moments earlier. He invokes hatred (Lock her up, they chanted. McCain should die.) He misleads, he fails to understand those things of which he speaks (tinyurl.com/U-clean-it). And they cheer him. He offers up scapegoats, validates their prejudices. Are they brainwashed, or just willingly uninformed? Decide for yourselves. 

That there’s an audience in America hungry for Trumpo-totalitarianism is obvious. We’ve seen the neo-Nazis and white supremacists up close now, the salutes and chants and flags (“We all salute the same flag,” said Trump) of the ideology hundreds of thousands of braver Americans died to defeat. The ideology that killed millions of innocents; whose fascistic descendants loved Trump’s Charlottesville response. The difference between Arizona attendees and marchers in Virginia is geography. Those who’ve seen Trump’s disjointed ravings and still applaud are marchers in their minds, and they won’t be back.  

Trumpism was never about “economic insecurity” or “America first.” Only a day before the rally, Trump announced a “plan” for open-ended war in Afghanistan that was no plan at all. And now, after encouraging police violence, he’s re-arming them into a military force. Remember when Foxolimjonesians warned of Obama imposing martial law? 

Rational people see what participants in Trumpic love/hate-fests never will. They’re raising alarms about his sanity, concerned he’s in over his head, worrying that a vengeful, confabulating man is in charge of our military. They see historic parallels in his gullible, enthusiastic followers. And these aren’t liberals whose safe spaces were invaded. They’re conservative foreign policy experts, CIA officials who’ve served presidents of both parties. 

Not all Americans can resist the appeal of tyrants, especially people who believe they’ll never be targeted. Which is how it begins. If Trump’s inveighing words are reminiscent of dictators throughout history, we must consider whether he can accomplish on our soil what others have elsewhere. Not if enough decent people who voted for him are, finally, shocked enough by what they’re witnessing to join those who’ve seen it all along. 

Getting through to those who attend or approve his rallies is impossible: he’s their demagogue, tells their lies. But it’s well past time for Republicans and conservatives who love actual America to put country above party and reject Trump’s dangerous demagoguery. He’s Hurricane Harvey. Houston is America.  

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