WAR ON THE HORIZON?

A few weeks I ago, I posted on this blog that while I think Donald Trump is a worse person than George W Bush, I think Bush was the inferior president, given that Bush led the country into the disastrous war in Iraq and Trump has not done anything equal to that terrible mistake.  But it now  appears that he has taken a big step towards his own military disaster.

Last Thursday, Trump announced that his national security advisor Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster was being forced out, and that his replacement was former American ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.  Trump recently mentioned in a press conference that he is -"really at a point where we’re getting very close to having the Cabinet and other things that I want.”  If Bolton is who he wants advising him on national security, the country is in serious trouble.
Bolton's last worked with the Bush administration, and since then he has spent most of time his appearing on Fox news, where he often clings to the notion that the Iraq invasion was a success.  He has also repeatedly attacked Barack Obama's deal with Iran to limit their nuclear weapon capabilities and ridiculed the notion that negotiations with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un about limiting their nuclear weapons could be productive.  In fact, he recently wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal making the case for bombing North Korea's nuclear weapons arsenal preemptively.  This is an exceedingly dangerous notion; even if the US military were able to take out Un's nuclear weapons  before he could use them (no sure thing), he still could use his chemical weapons on both American troops and people in South Korea, potentially leading to a war with a casualty rate in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions.

As if that weren't bad enough, he has also made the case for abandoning  the weapons deal with Iran and then bombing them if they attempt to build nuclear weapons of their own.  Yes, if Mr. Bolton has his way, America could soon be embroiled in two more wars to go along with the still ongoing US conflict in Afghanistan.
So, will Trump listen to Bolton's war mongering?  Well, Trump has an odd attitude towards the military; although he has never served in it, (and found a way to avoid the draft in Viet Nam due to a mysterious bone spur in his foot), he has an almost child like excitement about our military.  On the campaign trail he boasted that "no one is more pro military than me", and swaggered as he said that he would "blow the shit out of Isis." In office, he has increased our already massive military budget by tens of billions of dollars.  And he has decided that the country should have a military parade on Veteran's day, something we haven't done before, which will inevitably turn into another excuse for him to pump up his ego as he is saluted by passing soldiers.

Given all of this, along with Trump's often impulsive behavior and love of looking tough,  it is entirely possible that Trump will listen to Bolton's war mongering ideas and lead the country into a potentially disastrous and unnecessary war sometime soon. And history will have to wonder how such a narcissistic psychopath could possibly been elected president.   

CHAOS ON THE HORIZON

"If you really like Donald Trump, that's great, but if you don't, you have to vote for me anyway. You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges." -Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2016.

Chaos has been the operative word to describe the Trump administration since the very beginning: from his flip flops on immigration and gun control to his constant firing of cabinet members and advisors, it's easy to see why.  But the future for both this administration and the entire country may be even more chaotic soon.
Recently the New York Times ran an article about how 81 year old Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is considering retiring from the court.  Although he was appointed by Republican Ronald Reagan back in 1988, he has drifted  towards progressive decisions, casting an important swing vote on some of the biggest issues in America.  If he does retire, the battle to replace him will be an ugly one. 
Trump has already been lucky enough to get one Supreme Court pick just by taking office: after Justice Antonin Scalia died ten months before the Presidential election, the Republican Senate refused to even meet with then President Barack Obama's choice to replace him, instead letting the court rule with only eight members for almost a year.  After Trump's victory, and with a slight Republican majority in the Senate, he was almost immediately able to appoint conservative Neil Gorsuch to the court. 
This was a bitter pill for Democrats to swallow, but at least that was a case of one conservative judge replacing another.  But if Kennedy resigns, and Trump appoints another conservative, then this country is in for some battles on issues that once seemed decided.  For example:  

1. Gay Marriage: Gay and lesbian marriage has been legal in this country since 2015, with millions of couples tying the knot.  The ruling was 5-4 in favor of marriage, with Kennedy in the majority.  His moving quote in the majority opinion has often been repeated at ceremonies: "No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were."  If this ruling is overturned, it will invalidate millions of marriages and upset the lives of innocent people as states will scramble to allow or disallow their marriages.  The country will become a pathetic patchwork quilt of pro and anti marriage states.  And all this could happen even as, in poll after poll, the country supports gay and lesbian marriages more and more.  So much for making America great again.
2. Abortion:  Roe Vs. Wade, the court ruling that protected a woman's right to choose nation wide was was passed in 1973.  It was challenged in 1992, and Kennedy was one of the five justices that voted to uphold the ruling on this, perhaps the most divisive issue in the country today.  His  replacement on the court could very well cast the vote that strikes down a woman's legal right to choose.  It is stunning that Trump, a man who ran against the first female major party candidate and lost the popular vote by almost three million votes, and who has a history of sexual assault charges (and who was caught bragging about such behavior on tape), could be the man who appoints the judge who overturns Roe Vs. Wade.  Just like with gay marriage, the country would be swiftly divided into pro choice and anti abortion states, but beyond that, it would further divide our country on an issue that sparks more passion and anger than any other.

After Trump's unlikely victory led to women's marches across the nation and the world, which led to the "outing" of male sexual predators in the "Me Too" movement, it looked like things were changing for women in this country.  Now imagine if that same man those women were protesting against ushers in the end of Roe Vs. Wade; the anger against him will be palpable.  Hopefully, there will be such an uprising against both Trump and the party he ran with that his one term presidency will be see as the crazy aberration it is, and the country can go back to have a normal leader instead of a so called "stable genius."  But before that happens, there are going to be some major political battles in this country.  Buckle up, the chaos Trump unleashed just may get worse this year.

IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE

Recently, Donald Trump drew gasps from Republicans when he appeared to support expanding gun control laws during a bi partisan meeting with congress members.  He even ridiculed members of his own party for being afraid of the NRA!  Trump seemingly working against the party he is supposed to lead is nothing new: several months ago he seemed to endorse a clean bill for the Dream Act at a similar meeting, only to move in the opposite direction several days later.  It's obvious in both cases that his innate desire to be liked by everyone made him say things that the Democrats in the room would like, even if he never intended to stick by them.  To put it another way, his egotistical desire to be admired in the moment was more important to him than the political party he now is in charge of.

This raises an interesting question: could Donald Trump ever have run for the presidency as a Democrat?  That may seem crazy, but remember that this is a man who used to be pro choice, and who has even donated money to Planned Parenthood in the past.  His recent "conversion" to being anti choice was obviously made out of political necessity and not some spiritual awakening.  Looking at his history of books and interviews over the years shows a man who appears mostly moderate politically.  What happened was his embracement of birtherism, that noxious belief that Barack Obama was not born in this country.  He first started peddling this nonsense in interviews back in 2011, and the more he said it, the more Republican voters cheered him on.  Since there's nothing he loves more than people praising him, he kept repeating it more and more, even going so far as to deny that the long form birth certificate that Obama eventually released was authentic.  Then he immersed himself in right wing media and quickly discovered that their abiding principle was that undocumented immigrants (they call them "illegals") were ruining our country.  So, when announcing his candidacy, he called Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers, and, sadly, he never looked back.

But what would have happened if he had embraced a different conspiracy theory?  In the years after 9/11, a surprising number of people on the left became convinced that there was a conspiracy by the Bush administration to lie to the public about them, some thinking that the president knew about the attacks in advance and did nothing to stop them, and others going so far as to say the attacks themselves were carried out by the government as an excuse to justify the later invasion of Iraq.  Trump was often critical of the Bush administration in interviews he did at the time.  What would have happened if he started to agree with the 9/11 conspiracy theories?  Would leftist voters cheer him on?  Would he keep repeating it?  I think it's possible that he very well could have run as a pro choice, pro LGBT rights candidate in the Democratic primaries.  Would he actually have won?  Well, that's a tougher question; I like to think that his constant boasts and lies would hurt him more with Democrats than it did with Republicans, not to mention his lack of political experience.  Still, you never know; his candidacy seemed like an utter joke two years ago, and now here we are.

Obviously this all conjecture, but my point is that we are in the unique situation in which we have a president with little interest in actual politics, and who's abiding principal is his unshakeable belief in his own almost god like nature, and for whom loyalty to him is more important than any other issue.  The result is utter chaos; a regime in which cabinet members are constantly being fired or quitting because they can't keep up with a president who constantly lies and changes position, all while expecting them to completely fall in line with him and constantly praise him like a small child learning to read.  Quite simply, Trump has not ever seen the presidency as a position that will allow him to make the country better, but instead he sees it as a marker of his own greatness, another sign that he is a winner.  He truly seems to be a psychopath that cannot ever care for any other person in the world, and who has left a wake of disorder all around him.  We'll see how this turns out for the country and for the world, but right now, things don't look good.