ANOTHER WEEK OF INCOMPETENCY AND CHAOS

 

One of the depressing things about the American voters decision to give Donald Trump a second term in the White House is their inability to remember the utterly wild chaos and incompetency that swirled around him in his first term.  Remember the attempt at a Muslim ban?  His saying that a white supremacist  rally had "wonderful people on both sides"?  The multiple failed attempts to start a so called  infrastructure week?  And that was all before his pathetic handling of the pandemic.

And yet, even by Trump's standards, the last week has been crazy: first, there was his misguided attempt to have the US take over Greenland, culminating in a speech he gave at a summit in Davros, Switzerland in which he outright demanded Greenland be sold to our country, and he threatened his usual round of tariffs against countries that opposed the takeover .  He didn't care that all of this flew in the face of a strong majority of Americans not supporting the takeover, along with even stronger majorities of people in Greenland opposing it.  Really, the whole idea seemed to spring from Trump's own childish desire to be remembered as a president who expanded the country, along with his even more childish anger at not being given the Nobel Peace Prize.   Thankfully, after making that speech, Trump seemed to almost completely give in, calling off the tariffs and saying that instead some vague plan about America having more influence in the region was going to be negotiated. His main reason for giving in seems to be that the US stock market plunged after his tariff threat. All of this would be laughable, with Trump's usual macho bluster falling far short of reality, if it weren't for the fact that he has done permanent damage to the NATO alliance, with some of our oldest and strongest allies now saying that they cannot trust the US to do the right thing anymore.  The next day, in response to Trump, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada spoke and said that “Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”  This is in the wake of Canada making a deal with China to allow their electric vehicles, which are banned in the US, to be sold in Canada.  Once upon a time the idea that one of our oldest allies would be making trade deals with a Communist country would be unheard of,  But now, given Trump's wildly erratic use of tariffs against Canada and other allies, China is actually seen as the more stable business partner.  Really, why should Europe and other American allies trust the US after Trump berated them for adopting renewable energy in his speech, and even said "your countries are all going to hell" in a speech at the UN earlier this year.  He has said all this, even as, as John Kerry pointed out in an editorial in the New York Times, "Europe is America’s largest trade and investment partner, responsible for some $2 trillion in annual trade, more than $5 trillion in mutual investment and millions of jobs straddling the Atlantic Ocean." 

So NATO, the powerful alliance of over thirty countries  that helped prevent the world from falling into a third world war, has been badly damaged by a president who wanted to take over another country like a greedy child demanding more dessert.  And that was just during the first part of the week.

Yesterday, the ICE occupation of Minneapolis became deadly once again, with Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a U.S. citizen with no criminal record, being shot while being held down on the ground by ICE agents.  While the Trump administration reflexively tried to call him an armed  domestic terrorist, it must be said that the gun he was carrying was legally registered, he was not threatening ICE agents with it at the time of the shooting (in fact, it clearly appears in videos from the scene, that the gun had already been taken away from him), and that they shot him ten times while he was on the ground..

And along with the shooting deaths of Prettin and Renee Good a few days ago, there have also been videos released of ICE agents pepper spraying people on the ground  dragging people into vans, and openly racial profiling, all carried out by poorly trained, masked, vicious, thug agents,  These are the kind of images we used to see in dictatorships like Pinochet's Chile in the 70's, ones  that would have been unthinkable in the US before the Trump era.  While it is good to see that Trump's approval ratings have plummeted in recent polls (and, of course, Trump has threatened to sue the pollsters!), it still is deeply unsettling that tens of millions of Americans voted for a man who promised just this kind of chaos in our nation's cities.

Yes, the sad fact of the matter is Trump will be a transformative president, just like he wants, but that transformation will be the normalizing of brutality, cruelty, hatred and distrust of our allies  and corruption.  And we're only one year into his second term.  

THE POLICE STATE IS HERE

 

During the first Donald Trump term, his administration carried out child separation policies at the border that were so cruel that even Trump himself first tried to blame them on his predecessor Barack Obama before ending them.  Sadly, the American public seemed to have forgotten this terrible policy when they voted him in for a second term in 2024, even as his supporters at his rallies held signs reading MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW.  That extremist desire has lead to Trump acolyte Stephen Miller pushing  U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into making more and more arrests.

Right now we have masked, armed government thugs grabbing people off of our streets because of the color of their skin or the accent that they use.  Gone are the words about getting out all the gang members or drug dealers, now we're seeing law abiding people who have been part of their communities for years being brutalized and held against their will.  American citizens wrongfully swept up have been released after suffering through days of tortuous treatment, with no recourse to sue for false arrest.  And while this all may be done in the name of throwing out" illegals", a recent chart in the New York Times shows that the arrests have focused on states like Illinois and California, states that did not vote for Trump in 2024.  If all the Trump administration wanted to do was deport undocumented immigrants, they would have focused on a border state like Texas, but this really more about revenge than deportation.  (The same could, of course be said about his sending National Guard troops to "protect" blue cities, which has been thankfully halted by the courts).   

Things really came to a head a few days ago when an ICE agent shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good, a 37 year old mother.  Just hours after the shooting, the Trump administration tried to justify it by saying that she had tried to weaponize her car; they even  branded her as a domestic terrorist.  But the videos that have been released of the shooting clearly show that she was just swerving her car to avoid the agent, and at the very least she did not deserve to be shot three times at close range.  But this is Trump's America now, where this woman is called a terrorist by the same president who pardoned over 1600 January 6th protesters, 200 of whom had been convicted of assaulting law officers.

We should have all seen this coming; a few months ago, when Trump signed a budget bill that gave billions of dollars to ICE, which has been recruiting for new members with blatantly xenophobic advertising, it was obvious that it would lead to an increased crack down in blue cities that would inevitably lead to unnecessary violence and death.  For Trump, this is nothing new: remember how he encouraged his followers to attack protestors at his rallies, or cheered a congressman who assaulted a reporter?  Or how about the reports that he watched the rioting unfold on January 6th with more delight than horror; obviously this is a man who loves the idea that his loyalists are so faithful that they would fight and kill for him. So not only does Trump not care about the shooting of Good, he sees the protests against it as an excuse to increase the number of troops in Minneapolis, even threatening to declare Martial law, although he thankfully hasn't done that yet.

America's slide into what can only be called fascism, with Trump's private army doing his bidding, has been accomplished in only a year.  It's amazing how national ideals can crumble when one leader with a cult like hold over his followers, a docile congress and a mostly obliging court system can run rampart over things that once would have seemed unthinkable.  But here we are.  I've never felt more ashamed to be an American than right now.

WE WILL RUN THE COUNTRY

It was just weeks ago that I asked the question, is America stumbling into a war with Venezuela?  Well, today I got my answer: Venezuelan Prime Minister Nicolás Maduro and his wife were taken into custody by the US military this morning.  They are soon going to face drug related charges. Before the attack  President Donald Trump  gave no acknowledgment to congress, nor any real explanation to the American public about it.  It could be seen as an illegal assault, given that only congress has the right to declare war on another country.  At the very least, Trump could have looked at the polls that showed strong majorities of Americans opposing military action in Venezuela and addressed the people's concerns before the attack.  But instead he just acted without warning or approval, behaving like the king he thinks he is.

After the assault, Trump did address the nation, but he was frustratingly vague in both his explanation for the attack or what happens next.  Ominously, he said that  the United States would “run the country” until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” could be made.  He even mentioned the possibility of sending American troops to Venezuela. 

Clearly, the taking of Maduro was a relatively easy thing to do, but what lies ahead will almost certainly not be.  Venezuela is a country of almost thirty million people, and is around twice the size of California. Just what will it take for America to be able to "run the country"?  If we do send troops to the country, will this be seen a major betrayal from a president who ran on a platform of not starting wars?

The important thing to remember here is that, despite what Trump says, Maduro was not taken out because of his ties to drug dealing (most of the drugs from Venezuela go to Europe instead of the US), he was taken out to give the US access to Venezuela's massive oil reserves.  Although one other reason is that Secretary of State Marco Rubio may see  removing Maduro as a stepping stone towards eventually overthrowing the Communist government of Cuba, an ally of Venezuela.  Also, Homeland Security Advisor and raging xenophobe Stephen Miller reportedly sees  a war with Venezuela as an excuse to use the 18th century law, the Alien Enemies Act, a way to legally deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans currently living in the US.  So perhaps it's no surprise that Trump wanted this attack, as it allowed him to look tough on drugs, Communism and immigration while also gaining access to more oil for American oil companies, all at once

Look, now that the die is cast, I hope that everything goes the way that Trump says it will; that an orderly transition to a democratically elected leadership takes place without the need for American troops to occupy the country.  But I don't think it's likely.  Just how bad this all turns out remains to be seen.

THE WORST

 

Now that the first year of Donald Trump's term is coming to a close, instead of trying to cover the dizzying amount of terrible things that he has done, from Tariffs to ICE raids, I've decided to focus on the one thing that he did that may stand as the largest art of cruelty ever committed by any president.  Or, at the very  least, the worst thing that any modern president has ever done.

This requires a little history: the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, was a program first created by the Kennedy administration back in 1961.  It's goal was a humanitarian one: to provide food, medicine, educational assistance and  other forms of aid to places in the world in desperate need.  It's goals were not entirely altruistic as it was seen as part of the cold war, with the assumption that countries getting aid from the US would be less likely to fall under Communist influence.

Over the years the agency has endured under presidents from both parties.  In fact, it was Republican, President George W Bush who worked with USAID and other  agencies to create the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR,  a program that is believed to have saved millions of lives all around the world.

While it delivered aid  around the world, the USAID agency only cost the tax payers a pittance; the amount of our federal budget going to the program rarely reached more than one percent in any year since it began.  But, sadly, the American public have never understood just how little we were spending on aid to foreign countries.  According to Our World in Data, a Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll done earlier this year found that most Americans thought that aid to foreign countries made up around a quarter of our budget, with only 30% correctly saying that was less than 5%.  

Given the public's ignorance on this issue, it's no surprise that USAID became a prime target when Trump allowed ketamine addled narcissist Elon Musk and his band of inexperienced tech bros known as DOGE to start cutting at what was seen as unnecessary government waste earlier this year. While DOGE was wildly incompetent and released a list of its so called accomplishments that was riddled with errors and exaggerations, it was, tragically, able to successfully gut the USAID program.  In a moment that was truly staggering in its callous casualness, Musk sent out a tweet saying that he had thrown USAID into the "wood chipper".  He would then go on to constantly lie about the devastating effects of those cuts, even though every  analysis said that they were absolutely that.   

How devastating?  Well, with 83% of its budget now slashed, a study from the medical journal, the Lancet released last June said that the death toll by 2030 could be as high as fourteen million.  Think of that.  All just to save less than one percent of our national budget.  Or to put it in raw numbers, the country spent around thirty five billion dollars on USAID in 2024 before Trump came to office,   Last year the Trump administration gave over thirty billion to farmers affected by his tariffs and twenty billion to bail out the right wing Argentinian  government.  In other words, DOGE and Trump cut USAID because it was an easy target that wouldn't effect most Americans, not because it wasted money.

Looking back over the various presidents that have ruled in my lifetime, I am hard pressed to find anything so stunningly destructive to the world than what Musk and Trump have done by cutting USAID.  Together the world's richest man and the world's most powerful man have ended programs that will result in the death of millions of the world's most vulnerable people and shrugged it off as if it was nothing.  If there were any justice in the world, Musk and Trump would remembered as the men responsible for negligent genocide.

WAR CRIMES

 

Recently the Trump administration has continued to bomb boats from Venezuela that it claims were carrying drugs on them.  The explanation given  is that  the drug dealers were enemies in our war on drugs. After the first bombing back in September happened, Geoffrey Corn, a retired uniformed lawyer who was the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, said “I think it’s a terrible precedent.  We’ve crossed a line here.”  Sadly, the Trump administration continued the bombing, even as some Republicans in congress balked at the news that the first bombing attack  hit the boat twice, killing two survivors who were hanging onto the wreckage when  the second bombing hit, in open violation of the rules of engagement.

While Trump has been claiming that all of the attacks are legitimate and  even claimed  that “Every boat that we knock out ,we save 25,000 American lives.”  the notion that these attacks are justified as part of our  nations's war on drugs is absurd; for one thing, even if the boats were bound for America, they would have carried cocaine and not the far more dangerous fentanyl, which comes across the Mexican border and not from Venezuela, so the notion that the bombings saved so many American lives is preposterous.  Another point could be made that ferrying illegal drugs is not a capitol offense worthy of the death penalty, and that having the US harbor patrol stop and search the boats would not only have prevented the loss of lives, it would have allowed the drug dealers to be interrogated, which could lead to more arrests.  And to make matters really quite insane, last month Trump pardoned  Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who had been convicted of smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine into the US and was about to serve a forty five year sentence.  So much for cracking down on illegal drug deals!

It's clear that what Trump wants is not to blow up a few boats, but to force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power. To that end he has already mobilized the US Navy around that country and recently had a Venezuelan  oil tanker seized.

Now, it must be said that Maduro is a corrupt leader who has jailed opponents, wrecked Venezuela's  economy and caused millions to flee the country since he took power in 2013.  And, yes, it appears that he has cut deals with illegal drug traders, although he denies this.  So a case could be made that removing him may be the right thing to do, although it really appears that Trump is more interested in getting access to Venezuelan oil reserves than in taking out a dictator.  Either way,  Trump and his administration seem to have come to  the conclusion that Marduro must go.  However, as we found out in the Iraq war of 2004, it's much easier to remove a corrupt leader than it is  to replace one while also trying to  stabilize a country militarily.  It is therefore understandable for the American public to expect the Trump administration to explain to us just why we need to possibly risk American lives to force Madero out.  Even though I always opposed the Iraq war, at least George W Bush's administration attempted to make as strong a case as possible for the invasion.  The Trump administration is just gearing up for some kind of attack with little to no communication with the public.  This is especially galling given that recent polls show a whopping 70% of the American public oppose such an invasion.  

One of the many troubling things about the second Trump term is his administration's attitude that they know what's best without even bothering to inform the publics about it's motivations.  For example,  when Trump was questioned about pardoning that drug lord, he vaguely shrugged it off by saying he heard that  Hernández had been framed by Biden, as if that was a legitimate answer.  Of course, Trump is really more the cult leader of the Republican party than he is a president, and like any cult leader, he hates to be questioned about his decisions.  And so the country may soon be in another war based on an oil grab carried out by a president who couldn't care less about the consequences.  We continue to live in unprecedented and horrifying time in this country.

NICK FUENTES IS NOTHING NEW

 

Recently, there's been a conflict in the right wing media world, with popular right wing podcaster Tucker Carlson having another popular figure in right wing media, Nick Fuentes on his show.  Fuentes is, putting it bluntly, an utterly unrepentant bigoted, antisemitic misogynist.  He has denied the Holocaust, said that "black people should be in prison for the most part" and advocated for taking away women's right to vote.  Despite all of that, Carlson's two hour interview was full of mostly softball questions, showing just how much hard right, despicable beliefs have become mainstream in the rightwing MAGA movement.

Or have they?  At first, Kevin Roberts, the leader of the right wing Heritage Foundation released a statement about the interview saying that “We will always defend truth.We will always defend America, and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda."  But this caused enormous division within his own group, and he later released another statement on X, coming out strongly against  Fuentes's antisemitism, but leaving Carlson off the hook for having him on.  But, given the late nature of Roberts's statement, the Antisemitism Task Force has already cut ties with the Heritage Foundation and several members of the group have left in disgust. Now lines are being drawn on the right about what to do about Fuentes and his supporters of mostly young men known as"Groypers,"

All of this reminds me of something that happened decades ago: David Duke, an unrepentant former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan, who's views on race and religion sounded just like Fuentes's, became a prominent political figure in the state of  Louisiana in the 80's and 90's.  After running a stunt campaign for president in 1988, Duke actually won a Louisiana House seat in 1989.  He then tried to run for the US senate and then governor, and while he lost both times, he did surprisingly well in the polls. (As he would proudly point out, he received a majority of the white vote in his run to be governor.) To be fair,  many Republicans condemned Duke at the time, but his stands on the big issues of the day were not really much different than theirs.

Like Fuentes does now, Duke's surprising popularity with a segment of the Republican base shows the ugly underbelly of bigotry that has always existed since Richard Nixon first developed the racially coded Southern Strategy in 1968.  While I'm certainly not saying that all Republicans are bigots, what I am saying is that the pro business, libertarian wing of the party (the Mitt Romney style Republicans) have, in the past few decades, relied on the support of Republican blue collar voters who do not vote the way they do because of, say, supply side economics.  Instead they back the GOP because the party has convinced them that the Democrats only care about people who aren't white or heterosexual.  All that Duke and Fuentes have done is loudly state what Republican politicians have been dog whistling for decades.  

While I'm glad to see some members of the right coming out forcefully against Fuentes, I can't help but feel it's a little too little and a little too late.  Where we these people when Donald Trump had Fuentes over for dinner at Mar A Lago just before he started his 2024 campaign?  Why aren't they going after Carlson as much as Fuentes?  It's clear that, as with David Duke in the 90's, the GOP wants to appear to condemn the opinions of Fuentes while keeping the support of his voters.  It's dark, cynical politics, the kind that has worked well for the conservative movement in this country and very well may continue to for years to come.

NEW LEVELS OF CORRUPTION

 

Another week, another set of new lows for President Donald Trump.  Much media attention has been given to the fact that, to construct an enormous golden ballroom, his administration has demolished much of the East Wing of the Oval Office.  This was after he promised not to alter the existing architecture, but then what do you expect from an inveterate liar like Trump?  And this is nothing new for him; way back in 1980, when he constructing Trump Tower in New York, he made a deal with the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art to donate some artistic statuary from the building that was being torn down to make way for his tower.  But then he went back on his word and had the statuary demolished, because of course he did.  Now, while I certainly don't care for the way that Trump is ripping apart a publicly funded building to turn into his own gaudy, gold edged playpen, and I'm also not fond of the way that he's raising funds for the work from wealthy companies trying to curry favor with him, I also think that in the grand scheme of things, this is hardly the worst thing he's done just this week. In other words, I agree with former Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, who publicly said "He can demolish the entire White House, raze the whole thing to the ground, if he takes ICE off the streets."

Much worse than that construction is his recent contention that he deserves recompense for past investigations into his 2016's campaign ties to Russia and his refusal to return classified documents after his first exit from the White House.  The amount he's asking for is 230 million dollars, a staggering number even give how big his legal bills may have been, or how accurate he was about the illegitimacy of those investigations.  And unlike that ballroom, the money would come directly from the taxpayers.  Even Trump himself seemed a little awestruck by his own corruption here, pointing out that it would be he himself who finalizes this huge pay out to his own bank account.  Sadly, given how much he has already corrupted the Justice Department by filling it with his bootlicking lackeys, he very well may get that money.  

And he would get that money even after ProPublica reported that at least 170 American citizens have been held against their will by immigration agents since Trump took office in January, some of whom faced physical violence, and none of whom will be able to sue the government for false arrest.  Yes we now live in a country where our billionaire president can ask for almost a quarter of a billion dollars  to cover his legal expenses for past investigations of his wrongdoings, but American citizens wrongly arrested can't get any compensation for being held in brutal conditions.  What a time to be an American.

Another utterly corrupt moment came when Trump pardoned the world's wealthiest cryptocurrency owner, Changpeng Zhao.  In 2023, back when there was some sanity in this country, Zhao's cryptocurrency exchange known as  Binance, did not have decent compliance systems, which allowed terrorist groups like Hamas, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, to move money on his platform. Zhao pleaded guilty to laundering and served four months in prison.  After his release from prison, Zhao has praised Trump and Binance has made deals with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto start-up, deals that the New York Times estimates could make the Trump family tens of millions of dollars this year.   The pardon will make it easier for Zhao to run his company after he stepped down while admitting his guilt in 2023.  Once again, Trump has used the power of the presidential pardon to reward his friends and business associates while lining his own pockets while his Republicans allies in congress ignore it.  And to add to the whole terribleness of this, just imagine if a Democrat pardoned someone who made it easier for terrorist organizations to move money.  Again, what a time to be an American.  

All of this is happening as Trump continues to use the Justice Department to go after his political enemies like Leticia James and James Comey and sends National Guard troops into states that don't want them and separates families and  tears communities apart with his ICE raids.  He can't even get inflation under control, with his tariffs driving prices up for American consumers, while his recently passed budget bill will raise healthcare premiums for millions of Americans. His second term  is proving to be a corrupt disaster for the country, and he hasn't even been in office a year yet.  And that's not even considering that former Trump advisor Steve Bannon says that there's a plan for him to run again in 2028, the 22nd. Amendment of the Constitution be damned.  At the recent No Kings rally, protestors chanted against the rise of fascism in this country, and with good reason.  Sadly, we do seem to be heading that way.