The Problem With Liberalism

(This is, by the by, NOT an April Fools prank. Sorry about the timing, I've been working on this for a month...)

With all of the current chaos in the United States - with trump and his Far Right MAGA brownshirts rampaging through our federal government - there's discernable alarm among the Democratic faithful wondering why the hell their own party leadership - who ought to be opposing trump's smash-and-grabs more forcefully - is publicly playing nice with a conservative Republican party that keeps punching Dems in the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) face.

There's a number of theories why the modern Democratic Party seems so apprehensive in the face of historic destruction by Far Right Wingnuts. I'll throw this one hypothesis out here to give me the excuse to discuss yet another political philosophy (those -isms) of how Liberalism - as a core foundation of modern Democratic Party world-view - is the source of this seeming inaction and timidity.

Liberalism I would argue started as the American world-view, back when it wasn't confined to just one political party. If you look up the term in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (3rd ed, 2009), liberalism "is the belief that it is the aim of politics to preserve individual rights and to maximize freedom of choice." (p. 306) As a philosophical response to the shifts in the United Kingdom from absolute monarchism - the Divine Right of Kings argument that had led to Charles I's execution and then the end of Stuart rule with James II's expulsion in 1688 - the emerging Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and John Stuart Mill developed ideologies justifying the actions against the British kings that didn't want to play nice with others.

Locke in particular had a major influence on American political (liberal) thinking. In Locke's First Treatise of Government, he directly countered the Divine Right of Kings - posited in Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha - as a form of slavery (from York University's PDF archive):

To make way for this doctrine, they have denied mankind a right to natural freedom; whereby they have not only, as much as in them lies, exposed all subjects to the utmost misery of tyranny and oppression, but have also unsettled the titles and shaken the thrones of princes... However we must believe them upon their own bare words, when they tell us, “We are all born slaves, and we must continue so;” there is no remedy for it; life and thraldom we entered into together, and can never be quit of the one till we part with the other... (p.8)

Locke made this point, against the ill intents of absolute rulers:

The great question which in all ages has disturbed mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of those mischiefs which have ruined cities, depopulated countries, and disordered the peace of the world, has been, not whether there be power in the world, nor whence it came, but who should have it. The settling of this point being, of no smaller moment than the security of princes, and the peace and welfare of their estates and kingdoms, a reformer of politics, one would think, should lay this sure, and be very clear in it: for if this remain disputable, all the rest will be to very little purpose; and the skill used in dressing up power with all the splendor and temptation absoluteness can add to it, without showing who has a right to have it, will serve only to give a greater edge to man’s natural ambition, which of itself is but too keen. What can this do but set men on the more eagerly to scramble, and so lay a sure and lasting foundation of endless contention and disorder, instead of that peace and tranquility, which is the blurriness of government, and the end of human society? (p.69)

Having argued against Divine Right in the First part, Locke dug into the Second Treatise (same PDF source):

To this purpose, I think it may not be amiss to set down what I take to be political power. That the power of a magistrate over a subject may be distinguished from that of a father over his children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife, and a lord over his slave. All which distinct powers happening sometimes together in the same man, if he be considered under these different relations, it may help us to distinguish these powers one from another, and show the difference betwixt a ruler of a commonwealth, a father of a family, and a captain of a galley... Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws, with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good... (p.106)

To understand political power aright, and derive it from its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man. A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty... (p.106)

That is where the basic element of classical liberalism - the rights of an individual compared to the power of the state - takes root. Locke does care to set limits:

But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence; though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions... (p.107)

There's arguably a lot more I can quote from Locke, but I'll stop here because this is the point where we can see Locke's influence on Thomas Jefferson, whose work on the Declaration of Independence is the keystone of American political philosophy: From which we derived the belief "that all men are created Equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

You might notice Jefferson switches out "possessions" or "property" for "happiness", because that created back in 1776 a rather sticky moral conflict with America's UN-Equal system of chattel slavery on Blacks. Which does point to a more subtle yet still potent problem with liberalism as a political -ism that refers to the main problem overall.

What Locke - and Jefferson, and the rest of the liberal movement of the late 18th Century - aimed for was the establishment and reinforcement of the idea of The Social Contract (edited/cited by Alex Tuckness at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): 

Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments...

The most direct reading of Locke’s political philosophy finds the concept of consent playing a central role. His analysis begins with individuals in a state of nature where they are not subject to a common legitimate authority with the power to legislate or adjudicate disputes. From this natural state of freedom and independence, Locke stresses individual consent as the mechanism by which political societies are created and individuals join those societies...

Into all of this Locke and other liberals built up the the concept of "The Rule Of Law": 

The Rule of Law comprises a number of principles of a formal and procedural character, addressing the way in which a community is governed. The formal principles concern the generality, clarity, publicity, stability, and prospectivity of the norms that govern a society. The procedural principles concern the processes by which these norms are administered, and the institutions—like courts and an independent judiciary that their administration requires...

In this, Liberalism subsists on a structured, procedural form of governance where the people as is their right elect leaders, the leaders create laws and enforce them, and the courts balance things out by defining the laws. If that system breaks down in any way, liberals - if any were in charge - would make changes to the laws and realign the administration and argue for judicial decisions to keep the system going.

This is how the Founding Fathers - balanced between more "conservative" world-views of business and class culture, with the "liberal" world-views of democratic/republic principles and legal stability - worked themselves from makeshift state-level confederations into a "strong" federal Constitutional system designed to provide the individual freedoms promised by their liberalism while guaranteeing that chaos/anarchy and the threat of European monarchism (the Absolutism of the day) did not threaten the American way of life. 

This is why when arguing about the nature (well, the sins) of Conservatism I disagreed with Frank Wilhoit's contention that Conservatism was the only American -ism. Wilhoit believed Conservatism - the modern, twisted version of it - had driven all other -isms out of the political landscape. My contention is that Conservatism - obsessed with seizing and maintaining political/economic/social control for the elite few - exists today as a counterpoint to Liberalism - the guarantees of individual rights within a shared community - which persists as a primary American ideology because the institutions it built - our entire Constitutional system of checks and balances - remain standing.

The problem with our modern Liberalism is how it has blinded itself to the perpetuation of that constitutional system, even as it is collapsing on itself from Far Right conservative misrule.

That Rule of Law that liberals insist on - believe still functions normally - is under attack as trump and his underlings both in the Executive and Legislative branches work to undo all of it: Either through attacking civil liberties of Americans and legal residents, or dismantling/shutting down federal agencies without following procedure or getting legislative consent as Locke intended. I've said this before: A lot of our constitutional federal system relied a lot on Good Faith, that all parties involved were acting for a common purpose or at least with genuine conviction to do the right thing. Without that, without the "unwritten rules" of governance that our nation's relied on for centuries to make things work within both the letter and the spirit of the law, the system's falling apart.

And yet, our current Democratic liberal leadership - that should be in active opposition to the damage trump and the radical Conservative Far Right are inflicting on that system - are still acting - almost deluding themselves - as though the political norms can still be upheld. They're so beholden to the Liberal ideology of the Social Contract that they're opening themselves to manipulation by their Conservative opponents to accelerate the constitutional system's collapse.

The likes of Minority Leader Schumer, and half the state governors planning to run for the Presidency in 2028 - as though a corrupt trump won't shut down elections altogether to seize power permanently - are going through the motions like the political norms they're used to will still be there after trump and the wingnut conservatives have burned it all down. They don't see the urgency or dangers of the moment, because they want to believe the liberal foundations of our nation will somehow survive even without action or defense on their part. They don't want to act in ways that would upset their understanding of that Social Contract: those unspoken norms, those natural rights.

The other problem with adhering to those norms of The Social Contract - that individual rights are upheld through the law, and with justice for all - is how uneven how unequal the enforcement of that Social Contract can be. Even as liberalism as an ideology demands equality for all as a right, in practice our liberal systems have a hard time enforcing or even defining those equal rights because even liberalism desires stability - a status quo - over change. 

You have to remember, even the liberal Founding Fathers compromised on the American system of Black slave labor to get the Declaration approved and the Constitution enacted. The liberalism of early American politics, business, and culture allowed slavery to thrive and spread to where it threatened our nation's well-being by the 1850s, and did little to stop the steady march towards Civil War when the spiritual and political harm of slavery could no longer be tolerated. It became the breaking point of the Social Contract, one that required a full Reconstruction and amendment reforms to repair... and which was left unfinished by the 1870s once the Social Contract (between White leaderships) was reimposed, leading to a century of Jim Crow inequality requiring another round of Civil Rights reforms by the 1960s to achieve even a modicum of justice under the Rule of Law. (All now threatened by a very anti-liberal trump regime undoing every Civil Rights act and social shift of the last 60 years)

Even as that Civil War allowed more left-leaning progressives among the liberal powers to enact major reforms involving education, agriculture, business, and law, and even as the Civil Rights movement attempted even further reforms, those reforms were not equally enforced to ensure the liberal system lived up to its own ideals. This is Liberalism's darkest flaw: It relies on a shared agreed-upon social order that bends too much to the corrupt world-view of more conservative, self-serving ideologues.

This is why there's a power struggle between traditional (classical) Liberals and more progressive (socialist) elements of the Democratic Party pushing for radical reforms and stronger equality for all to undo the damages of conservative elites eager to bring back Divine Right of trumps Kings to dominate us all: Liberals are wary of even incremental changes to the political system if it throws their understanding of the Social Contract into chaos.

There are other elements of Liberalism - such as the early adoption of Capitalism as an economic reform against the authoritarian corruption of mercantilism, without realizing how greed undermined Capitalism like any other economic -ism - that would require more discussion, but I've spent too long trying to hammer this essay out and I need to refocus on other outrages and observations of the current train wreck(s) we're enduring.

In short: Liberalism's problem isn't that it's weak, or vacillating when confronted by conservative or even fascist opposition. It's a genuinely well-informed, well-founded -ism compared to the other more destructive political beliefs that rise and fall with the cycles of history. Liberalism's problem is that it holds too much faith in a Social Contract that's too easily shredded and requires the same repatching over and over. At some point, our modern system of liberalism (neoliberal, I think) has to reposition itself on the chessboard and realize a more profound, truly just system of equality and opportunity has to be forged.

The Isolation

The way things are going, you'd think donald trump doesn't want any foreign policy at all. he's burning nearly every bridge the United States has to the world (via David E. Sanger at the New York Times (might be paywalled)):

In a span of only 50 days, President Trump has done more than any of his modern predecessors to hollow out the foundations of an international system that the United States painstakingly erected in the 80 years since it emerged victorious from World War II.

Without formally declaring a reversal of course or offering a strategic rationale, he has pushed the United States to switch sides in the Ukraine war, abandoning all talk about helping a nascent, flawed democracy defend its borders against a larger invader. He did not hesitate when he ordered the United States to vote with Russia and North Korea — and against virtually all of America’s traditional allies — to defeat a U.N. resolution that identified Moscow as the aggressor. His threats to take control of the Panama Canal, Greenland, Gaza and, most incredibly, Canada, sound predatory, including his claim Tuesday that the border with America’s northern ally is an “artificial line of separation...”

Mr. Trump has imposed tariffs on his allies after describing them as leeches on the American economy. And he has so damaged trust among the NATO allies that France is discussing extending its country’s small nuclear umbrella over Europe, and Poland is thinking of building its own atomic weapon. Both fear the United States can no longer be counted on to act as the alliance’s ultimate defender, a core role it created for itself when the NATO treaty was written...

trump is presenting a master class on how to alienate allies and punish innocent people. Not just with a trade war with his insane self-damaging tariffs - yes, trump's threatening 200 percent tariffs on European wines! - but with turning our visitation/visa policies into a straight path to prison as more people traveling to the U.S. are getting detained and harassed by our customs/border agents.

Balloon Juice collaborator Rose Judson - from what I can tell, she's watching all of this from the safety of the UK - is documenting these atrocities towards average Euro tourists:

Since the start of the new administration I’ve seen lots of UK- and EU-based folks wondering aloud on social media whether they should travel to the US. At first, this impulse was couched in a moral objection to Trump and Musk and everything they stand for. Now, this chatter has an edge of self-preservation, thanks to several recent news stories about tourists with minor visa irregularities vanishing into ICE custody for weeks at a time...

From the Guardian, “British tourist detained by US authorities for 10 days over visa issue”:

His daughter wants to leave the country and fly back to the UK, he said, but he feared the immigration crackdown in the US meant there could be a long delay before her case was dealt with.

“She’s in this orange prison outfit,” he said. “She just feels so isolated and desperate, you can imagine, she’s saying, ‘I want to come home’.”

She is safe, he said, but living “in horrendous conditions” and had not had access to legal representation. He was taking comfort from the fact that the other women at the facility, many of whom have been incarcerated for months or even years while fighting deportation, had “all been really nice to Becky,” Burke said.

But wait, there’s more!

Two German tourists were detained for more than 10 days each in separate incidents: a young man and a young woman. The young man, Lucas Sielaff, was traveling with his American fiancée from Mexico. He was held in detention for two weeks (his fiancée also alleges she was shackled and handcuffed and subjected to a body search)... 

Jessica Brösche, a 29-year-old tattoo artist from Berlin, will reportedly join Lucas Sielaff, 25, from Bad Bibra in Saxony-Anhalt, who is reported to have returned to Germany on 6 March, after being arrested at the Mexican border on 18 February before being detained for almost two weeks.

The families of the two tourists, who were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), had compared their ordeals to “a horror film”...

Judson's conclusion?

If you have family or friends planning to come from abroad, ensure they triple-check their entry requirements with the US consulate in their country and that they send scans of their documents (passports, visas, etc.) to you before they travel. Or, better yet, rearrange your plans. This isn’t getting better anytime soon.

As a Floridian - whose state relies a lot on international tourism - this royally sucks.

And there's been no need for ICE to go overboard detaining people especially for weeks at a time. Most of these issues tended to be minor glitches in the paperwork, or misunderstandings that a good translator would negotiate down to a stern lecture about not doing that again. Now? The cruelty and sadism of the trump regime requires handcuffs, incarceration, harassment, intimidation, and psychological (if not physical) harm. Nobody's going to want to visit a nation where the law enforcement can lock you up over the slightest quibble and subject you to hellish, soul-breaking conditions.

Throw into all this how trump and his lackeys have killed off - literally - the international health and financial aid we've been providing to third-world nations for decades, and you can see how trump is creating an environment where most of the globe is going to hate America for the cruelty and stupidity we allowed to happen by voting for this sadist/asshole.

And if you look far enough ahead, you can see what the end result trump wants: he wants us tied - financially and politically and emotionally - to Putin's Russia.

Think I'm joking? Look at the recent UN vote - which was mostly symbolic as the United Nations has no way to enforce it - where the U.S. were the only nations alongside Russia, North Korea, and Belarus to reject a motion declaring Russia the aggressor in their war against Ukraine. We are now siding with the dictatorial nations we declared over the decades as the bad guys.

With all the tariffs and trade wars our nation will enact, we'll be cutting our business ties with all the major economic powers - not just the European Union or the UK, not just Canada and Mexico, not just Central and South America, but pretty soon Japan and India as well - we could rely on... leaving only Russia as a "trading partner" - more like "raiders" as Putin and the oligarchs vacuum up every bit of wealth our nation has left - to give Putin fresh lease on rebuilding a Russia he's broken through corruption and war. 

Think I'm exaggerating? Putin's already preparing for trump to lift as many sanctions as possible: While the other G7 economic powers will likely keep their sanctions in place, rebuilding any trade with the U.S. - the largest economy on the planet - will quickly repair many of Russia's losses over the past decade.

What trump is doing is the standard practice of an abusive gaslighting narcissist - any cult leader - does in all relationships: he's enforcing his will on other people to make them reliant on himself and to any belief system he imposes. he's cutting us off from friends and families who are warning us of the dangers, who could provide sanctuary or rescue and end his control of us. he's going to isolate the whole nation from a western (liberal) culture we've been attuned to for centuries - a culture that we helped create - and force us to make friends with his fellow bullying authoritarians - and fellow uber-rich oligarchs like Elon Musk - so that we'll have nowhere to find relief.

There are a lot of Americans - even among the Republican voting base - who aren't fond of Putin or his spiteful world-view, and yet Putin's world-view - hating homosexuals and trans people, fighting border wars to build empires, letting only the rich and connected enjoy the fruits of everyone else's labor - is going to get shoved down our throats very quickly, very painfully.

Don't accept any of it, America. trump is pushing us over a cliff into inept, corrupt rule that tends to implode on itself every cycle of history. We're better than this. We should have been better last November, but that's in the past and we're fighting for our souls today.

Don't buy into the hate that Putin/trump/Musk sell us.

(P.S. This is the 2499th blog article at this site. We're coming up to 2500. I'll try to make it a special one)

The First Freedom Denied, The Chain Being Forged

Update: Thanks as always to Batocchio for including my blog at Crooks & Liars for their Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please, check out the whole blog, and if you're in Central Florida I hope to see you at Avon Park's Spring Book Binge local authors fair this March 29th.

With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.
-- Jean-Luc Picard, from the episode "The Drumhead"

The disappearings - the moment when authoritarians begin "arresting" others and hiding them from any transparency in the legal system - under the rule of trump (and Musk) have begun (via Ximena Bustillo and Adrian Florido at NPR):

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate student at Columbia University and a green-card holder, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers over the weekend in what is likely one of the first high-profile detentions of a student who participated in the protests against the Israel-Hamas war.

The arrest follows through on one of President Trump's executive actions, which directed the government to use all its tools to punish those who have engaged in "anti-Semitic harassment and violence." The executive action cites the federal law that authorizes deporting a foreign national who "endorses or espouses terrorist activity."

The move is an escalation in Trump's effort to increase deportations from the U.S. and strip protections from those who violate the new administration's priorities.

In a social media post on Monday, Trump said the arrest was the first of many to come. He vowed that his administration "will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again..."

Khalil was one of the pro-Palestinian students who negotiated on behalf of the campus protesters who pressed Columbia to divest from Israel over its war with Hamas in Gaza.

Amy Greer, Khalil's attorney, told NPR that ICE officers arrested Khalil in the lobby of his university-owned apartment.

First, they told Khalil, who's of Palestinian descent, that his student visa had been canceled. But he's not on a visa; he's a legal permanent resident. His wife went to get his green card from their apartment, but officers said his lawful permanent residency had been revoked.

"I demanded to see a warrant or have a warrant shown to me or Mr. Khalil before they removed him, and the agent hung up the phone on me," Greer said. "Mr. Khalil was under the impression that as a lawful permanent resident, that he had some modicum of protection that may not exist for people who do have student visas or who are undocumented."

Notice how the arresting officers shifted their excuses when their first allegation didn't fit reality. It didn't matter what Khalil's legal status was; they were going to violate it, claim their scalp, and drag him off to parts unknown.

While trump's people are claiming he's endorsing/supporting terrorism, all that's certain is that Khalil was protesting - under First Amendment rights - inhumane acts of genocide by Israeli forces against Gaza residents in response to Hamas' terror attack on October 7th 2023. Nobody from ICE or Homeland Security has presented any evidence that Khalil had ties to Hamas in any way.

Adding onto the horror is that in spite of Khalil having legal representation, his lawyers haven't been able to contact him. They've got reports he's been transported to Louisiana, halfway across the nation and nowhere near his wife or his attorneys. Anything - especially any level of mistreatment if not straight-up torture - could be happening to him.

trump and his Far Right thugs are claiming they're doing this to defend American Jews from antisemitism, but all they're really doing is setting up an environment where anyone - not just Palestinians or Arabs but also Jews, Blacks, Latinos, anyone deemed "Other" or "UnAmerican" - can be grabbed off the streets and punished by the unfettered bullies that answer to the Top Bully in the White House. And there's a number of Jewish organizations who understand full well what's at stake here.

To quote friend Emily L Hauser from the Horde over at Bluesky:

Freedom of Speech - the right to peaceably assemble, which the protestors have done, and the right to redress grievances - ought to be universal among all Americans, natural-born and naturalized and legally here. It's a right being promoted and encouraged as protestors in New York City are marching right now speaking out for Khalil's rights.

While it's looking like the courts are intervening to prevent any further harm - at least stopping any deportation effort - there's still a major struggle to regain Khalil's immigrant status and his rights to stay here in America.

This isn't just for Palestinians in America. This is also for our Jewish-Americans, for our Asian-Americans, for our African-Americans, for our Latino-Americans, for our Native-Americans, for our Trans-Americans, for our Gay/Lesbian-Americans, for any and all Americans who want to express their displeasure at a trumpian leadership looking to deny our very rights to even be citizens. 

We're up against trump and his bullies looking to chain us all.

Don't let them. Your voice is your power. Speak up. Call Congress. Demand better leadership against trump's unconstitutional acts.

Break the chain.

One Sentence Thought About trump's Big State of the Disunion Speech Tonight

Oh gods, he's going to declare war on Mexico and Canada and then activate the selective service draft to make every white guy under 25 into his cannon fodder while surrendering every tank and artillery we got to Russia so BFF Putin can finish off Ukraine, isn't he? 

The Failure and The Fall

When I heard a few days ago that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy was going to visit the White House to meet with American President Nope Still Not Going There donald trump to discuss arrangements to keep the U.S. committed to Ukraine's defense against Russia, I knew it was going to be a disaster.

We've long known that trump adores/worships Russia autocrat Putin - that trump seeks to emulate Putin's corrupt ruling style - to the point of defending him on the global stage in spite of America's own interests. There's been stories, rumors, even criminal investigations into trump's ties to Russia that exposed how extensive those ties were (and still are). With regards to which side trump took in Russia's prolonged and expanded war on Ukraine ever since 2022, it was clear trump was rooting for Russia even parroting every pro-Russian talking point in opposition to the real world.

Whatever Zelenskyy was hoping to get out of this meeting revolved around confirming at least security agreements in Ukraine's favor leading to any legitimate peace negotiations, making sure that Ukraine won't get abandoned at the table. Leading up to all of this were efforts from trump and his foreign handlers trying to squeeze a reckless deal for Ukraine's rare minerals to the tune of $500 billion, a public and vulgar attempt at extortion.

So this meeting, whatever hopes people had going in... well, that got stomped into dust real quick. This is trump we're talking about: his idea of "the art of the deal" is to bully and yell at his opponents until they cave and give him something to crow as a victory.

The bullying came in different directions, not only from pro-Russian media attendees asking skewed and insulting questions at Zelenskyy but also from Vice President "Weird Boy" JD Vance making accusations that allowed trump to ratchet up his own threats (via NPR):

Trump told Zelenskyy, "You're not acting at all thankful" for the support Zelenskyy's country had received from the United States, adding that the Ukrainian leader had been disrespectful and telling him, "You're gambling with World War III."

Zelenskyy tried to object, saying he has "all the respect for your country" and saying, "I said thanks," as Trump raised his voice to speak over him...

The argument came at the end of a lengthy question-and-answer session with reporters, after Trump defended his approach with Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he was trying to broker a deal between two parties.

"I'm not aligned with anybody. I'm aligned with the United States of America, and for the good of the world, I'm aligned with the world, and I want to get this thing over with," Trump said.

Vice President Vance then defended Trump's approach as "diplomacy."

That elicited a strong response from Zelenskyy, who said Putin had broken previous deals. "He broke the ceasefire. He killed our people... What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about? What do you mean?" said Ukraine's president, who has been seeking greater security assurances as part of any deal to end the war.

At least Zelenskyy left having retaining his nation's mining rights and natural wealth from falling into trump's greedy mitts. On the other hand...

In terms of actual diplomacy, this was a disaster for the United States. It exposed trump as a bully - yet again - on the international stage, and this time with arrogance and recklessness that our allies can no longer ignore. It showed trump and his administration are wholly on the side of Russia, which is the clear villain in all of this tragedy, and signals the growing likelihood that trump will flip almost 80 years of American pro-Western policy to turn us into Putin's next puppet state alongside Belarus and Georgia (and what Putin wants to do to Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Baltic nations, and the rest of Eastern Europe).

There was this dread during trump's first term disasters that he was going to pull the United State out of NATO, a long-standing alliance that assured peace between the major Western nations since the 1950s, all to appease Putin who is desperate to dissolve NATO in order to rebuild his dream of a Russian Empire. Previously, he didn't have full control of his Cabinet or the Joint Chiefs who were likely horrified to lose NATO allies. This time, trump is in full control and all he needed was an excuse like "being disrespected" for everything the U.S. (under Biden) did to support Ukraine since 2022.

After today, the NATO nations have to understand they are on their own. The newly elected (likely) German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said after his party's victory this past weekend that it's clear "this administration does not care much about the fate of Europe." Whatever dominance the United States had as a superpower in the post-World War era - our political influence, our ability to maintain global alliances across every continent - is fading fast as trump reveals that most of the nations out there can no longer rely on America.

Doubling down on this has been the recent freezing of USAID financial, medical, and transactional support of nations and peoples in need of aid. trump's open disdain of "shithole countries" has translated into an immediate refusal to provide any support, leading to broken services overseas and broken promises as people start dying from this cruelty (via Alan Yu, Allison McManus, and Laura Kilbury at American Progress):

The forced takeover comes after two weeks of attacks on foreign aid. On January 20, President Trump signed an executive order freezing nearly all U.S. foreign assistance for 90 days, claiming a need to reassess taxpayer dollars spent abroad. Days later, Secretary Rubio issued further guidance that forced U.S. officials to issue “stop work” orders to contractors, nongovernmental organizations, and aid groups; in response to strong opposition, Secretary Rubio later issued a waiver for core “life-saving” humanitarian needs, but its scope remains ambiguous.

In total, the Trump administration’s actions the past two weeks have caused unnecessary chaos and disruptions across the world. U.N. agencies, international relief organizations, and U.S. aid groups are scrambling to assess and mitigate the damage to lifesaving programs and more. While some of the administration’s efforts are already facing legal challenges and strong pushback from members of Congress—several of whom were denied access to USAID headquarters this week—these actions have real and lasting consequences for Americans and people around the world.

Trump’s attacks on aid are not about cutting waste or making the government more efficient; they’re about using blunt force to fulfill Project 2025’s pledges to put to death U.S. foreign assistance spending and “serve the President’s agenda...” But slashing the U.S. foreign assistance budget is a textbook example of penny-wise, pound-foolish. In fiscal year 2023, USAID managed a budget of $43 billion, comprising about 0.7 percent of the total U.S. budget. Extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, by comparison, would represent the equivalent of more than nine USAIDs each year: $400 billion in costs that would disproportionately benefit the ultrawealthy...

The broad range of U.S. foreign assistance programs—from lifesaving global health programs to alliance-building security partnerships—represent cost-effective ways to ensure global safety, security, and stability that do not require the United States to send troops into war. Foreign aid accounts for just 1 percent of the federal budget, and by disrupting it, the administration invites costly litigation and job loss throughout the foreign assistance sector...

Nothing kills trust like abruptly halting equipment, training commitments, and funding. Foreign governments that count on U.S. assistance now see their agreements suddenly upended by a political decision in Washington. Such harmful actions are “own goals,” both undermining trust and partnership with recipient countries and sending a clear message of unreliability and untrustworthiness around the world. This weakens U.S. global power—not just the so-called “soft power” of foreign assistance but also the required foundation of trust, durability, and respect to rally foreign partners’ support and action when it comes time to achieve U.S. goals. These include competing with China; combating transnational threats such as climate change, narcotics trade, and pandemic disease; and addressing the next global macroeconomic crisis...

The United States - for all the sins we've committed over the decades, the questionable wars and military interventions, the economic dominance we've imposed that kept poorer nations struggling to serve our needs, the cultural hegemony that made America arrogant and ignorant on the global stage - was (no longer is) a legitimate leader among nations trying to keep the peace and perform real humanitarian work. Now, no nation can trust us nor should they rely on us. Other superpowers like China and Russia - whose goals on the global stage are not humane nor friendly to their regions - are likely racing to fill the void of leadership that trump created, and the chaos that's coming will be unavoidable.

Today was the day the American Empire - not so much an empire of nations as it was an empire of ideas - fell from grace. The damage being done even if we free ourselves of trump's - and the Far Right sadists' - corrupt rule will last at least this generation and the next.

I apologize to the rest of world: I know there are a sizable number of Americans - broken and spiteful - gleefully reveling in this destruction. There were a near-equal number of Americans who tried to prevent this, and there's arguably a growing number of Americans who were disaffected before now waking up to the damage done. But all the guardrails were torn down in my nation the last 40 years, and now we're all falling over the cliff into the rocky shoreline.

I call on America's allies, our long-standing friends across every continent, to stand against the evils trump and his wingnut lackeys are inflicting on all of us, do everything possible to break and end his corruption before it ruins us all.

Erasing America

Update: Thanks to Steve In Manhattan over at Crooks & Liars for including this blog in Mike's Round Up! Please take a look around, and I am getting close to my 2,500th post so keep an eye out for anything special I'll do for that moment (haven't figured it out yet).

Ta-Nehisi Coates warned us, years ago:

His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

It is a shameful yet common view among racists that Blacks are "unqualified," a long-standing myth since the (first) Civil War that Blacks can't be literate, intelligent, or successful. Frederick Douglass spent his adult life as abolitionist defending his eloquence, writing skills, and self-learning. It's a myth that defined the segregationist Jim Crow era that prevented Blacks from achieving better employment, and reaching higher ranks in the military until the Second World War; when the more vicious racism of the Nazis compelled America to look for our better angels.

Even after all of the efforts of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s - after all the attempts to equalize educational and employment opportunities - that racist world-view is what got trump his electoral chances to enter the White House and impose his fearmongering and rage onto the nation's already broken psyche.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch... that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.

As Coates noted, trump entered the White House as the least-qualified person ever - since arguably Andrew Johnson, who at least had political skill to win elections in his career - only because he exulted his whiteness. trump was a disaster as a businessman, filing more bankruptcies than people have had hot dinners, and yet marketed himself as a deal-making "genius" all to get people to buy his next scam. 

If a black man had even filed once for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, he'd never get another loan to start a new business ever again. But trump did repeatedly, even after banks realized he was a money pit from which they'll never get their interest back. 

If a black man got exposed as a sex offender, his political career would end in a heartbeat. trump exposed himself repeatedly, was even found liable for sexual assault that the judge equated to rape, and most of the media and national leadership ignored it all while enough Americans voted for the monster to gain - and regain - the presidency.

All of the warning signs were there that trump is a monster, and yet his whiteness became the very thing that lifted him into power. And now, he's using that power to drag the rest of us backwards into our racist past to rebuild an America that was never all that great. As Adam Serwer noted this weekend at the Atlantic (paywalled):

Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration...”

Under the Trump administration, schools within the Department of Defense system that serve military families—American service members are disproportionately Black and Hispanic—have torn down pictures of Black historical figures and removed books from their libraries on subjects such as race and gender. This record, within a school system entirely under the administration’s control, offers an alarming preview—one in which a historical figure like Harriet Tubman is no longer a welcome subject in educational settings because she was a Black woman.

An OMB memo ordering a federal-funding freeze illustrates the ideological vision behind these decisions. The memo states that the administration seeks to prevent the use of “federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies,” Acting Director Matthew Vaeth wrote. Equal opportunity in employment is described here as “Marxist,” because it affirms what the desegregators see as an unnatural principle: that nonwhite people are equal to white people, that women are equal to men, and that LGBTQ people deserve the same rights as everyone else...

It should be noted that Marxism - and Communism, and even Socialism, all equated to Liberalism by the Far Right - is the go-to dismissal of civil rights, painting the Civil Rights movement as a Soviet plot to undermine American greatness (it was also accusations by the South African Apartheid system to suppress Blacks in their country). The Far Right didn't want to accept those equality gains of the 1960s, and they are desperate to undo everything LBJ, hell everything Truman and FDR and even Teddy Roosevelt ever did to advance the rights of all of us.

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly...

Serwer seems to think that these acts of erasure by trump and his wingnut allies will only go as far as resetting our nation back to the segregated days of Jim Crow. But I see something more ominous, tied into the efforts by trump and his cohorts to undo birthright citizenship. They may be currently aiming at the children and families of Latino immigrants, but going after those rights opens the door to allowing whoever is in power - and right now it's that racist bastard trump - to expand denying citizenship to so many others.

I wrote about this before, when wingnut punditry and politicians were talking about undoing the 14th Amendment years ago:

What could happen then in a world where Citizenship is not an automatic given based on birth but instead vulnerable to the whims and interests of whichever political party is in charge of Congress, the White House, and the Courts?  Nowadays the Republicans can call you "Un-American" and that would be just another insult.  If the 14th Amendment were gone... A Republican With Authority can call you "Un-American" and mean it... which would also mean no rights under the law, no protection from immediate arrest, no Habeus, no home, no life...  This is the true danger of what the Republicans are proposing to do by getting rid of the 14th Amendment.  They claim it'll be to get rid of unwanted illegals... but also consider that the Republicans have no love of Muslims right now, and not much love for Blacks, and very little love for Liberals... and so on, and more, and also...  Repeal the 14th Amendment and NO ONE would be safe from the charge of being "Un-American."

We're looking at a reality where trump - backed by a cowardly Republican-controlled Congress that won't stop him and a supine Supreme Court that's already enabled trump's criminality - can erase the rights of any group he despises, which is a lot of us who aren't rich, white, and male.

With citizenship gone, the minority groups across America - Blacks, Latinos, Asians, even women (the GOP will try to carve out exemptions for White women who register Republican, no doubt), and even the handicapped (trump has a serious hate-on for them) - will lose their right to vote which Republicans hope would ensure their control of government forever, will lose their rights to own property, will lose any possibility of getting good jobs at good wages because companies will ignore or abuse them, will lose any chance at higher education (and see their basic education weakened to the point of uselessness), will lose any standing before the courts where in theory (alas, not in practice) we're supposed to be equal before the law, which was the major horror of the Dred Scott decision, when Taney proclaimed Blacks - even freedmen - had no rights. That was why the birthright citizenship clause was formed in the first place. 

It won't matter how qualified a Black or Latino or Asian person will be with their education, their experience, their genuine skills. It won't matter how qualified a woman will be with her education, her experience, her genuine skills. It won't matter how qualified a military veteran or handicapped person will be for those jobs or educational opportunities offered through the civil service. They will all lose their standing compared to White men who have not enough education, not enough experience, not even the skills for the jobs and opportunities that are out there. All because trump and his ilk are convinced "unqualified" minorities are taking all the good jobs away from "deserving" White men who aren't competent or deserving at all.

In this version of trumpian dystopia Black- Latino- Asian- and Native Americans, the poor and starving, the women and families fighting to feed and care for their own, will have no recourse but to submit to every demand and folly the powers that be - the patriarchy of mediocre white guys - can squeeze them and get away with it. All because mediocre White guys can't abide sharing anything with others they can't perceive as being human. They will all be erased - from the history books, from our archives, from our rollcall of legends and heroes - to allow these mediocrities the delusion that they alone are superior over everyone, even fellow Whites who won't play to those fantasies.

It's been noted before: White Privilege White Grievance is a hell of a drug.

And our nation is truly going to suffer for this. Any and all competency and expertise we tend to see in our civil service - our communities even at the municipal and county levels, where the lack of federal aid and quality of service will be felt most - will disappear in a wave of cronyism and hackery that would make the Spoils system of the 19th Century seem quaint.

All because trump and his racist allies cannot see the beauty and strength of a diverse and unified community that America could be.

That long arc bending our history towards justice is no longer tied up in a pretzel. It is now a solid u-turn back to the dark ages of ignorance, racism, and fear. The next thing we'll see is the campaign of violence and terror that defined the horrors of the Jim Crow years, and arguably a nation caught up in a tyranny of martial law under the worst White man to ever sit in the Oval Office.

Gods help us.

Downsizing America

Update: Thanks as always to Batocchio for including my blog at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Remember to think positive, call your lawyers to sue Musk for stealing our personal data, and ignore any emails telling you there's a "fork in the road."

It's gotten ugly during the first two weeks of President trump Musk raiding and hijacking federal agencies (via David Ingram at NBC News):

The billionaire tech magnate has never been elected to office or been confirmed by the Senate for a high-level government job, but in the span of a few days, Musk has still gained access to sensitive federal data through his position as head of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency project, or DOGE, to push a far-reaching agenda and potentially spark a constitutional crisis. 

Musk has embraced Silicon Valley’s most notorious instincts to “move fast and break things” in a lightning battle to muscle into the computer systems and power structures of federal agencies. As he did with his corporate takeover of Twitter in 2022, he has brought in a team to assess details such as office building leases, budget line items, vendor contracts and the performance of individual employees — with the stated intention of radically downsizing the organization...

There are deep concerns among many Democrats and some Republicans that Musk — and his staff members who are not government workers and are not bound by the same ethics and rules that apply to federal workers — are acting in secret, without accountability and potentially against the law in the Trump administration’s effort to shrink the federal government...

DOGE’s targets include the U.S. Agency for International Development, which closed its headquarters Monday in anticipation of shutting down entirely. Musk’s DOGE has staff members working at the Treasury Department, which pays the government’s bills, and he has said on X that he wants to slash or overhaul several other agencies, including the General Services Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Education Department...

Inside the offices of USAID, more than 1,000 staff members and contractors have been fired or furloughed because of a near-total freeze on foreign assistance, and the agency’s security leaders were put on administrative leave Saturday after they tried to prevent DOGE employees from accessing secure systems, NBC News has reported. At least some of the DOGE employees had insufficient security clearances, sources have said.

None of this is legal. Musk is operating at a level in trump's administration that deserved a vote of approval from the Senate, operating without any level of accountability, and operating against a slew of laws and constitutional authority.

As Ingram noted, Musk is bulldozing through our federal agencies on a mission to downsize our government like he took over Twitter... which he turned into a disaster through mass firings, questionable policy changes, and a willingness to let the worst of the worst take control under his guidance. Musk - like many other CEO oligarchs and high-income pundits - is obsessed with the idea that "government should be run like a business".

There are two problems with that mindset. First, a government is not focused on generating profits - which businesses do, and for the most part that's how capitalism works - government is focused on performing public service (as Grover Cleveland noted: "Public office is a public trust.") so it's not about saving money as it is about effective customer service to the millions of Americans. Second, Musk - and that epic business failure donald trump - are not the best people to fucking run government. 

It's being documented - even as Musk and his techbro interns (gods, one of them barely graduated high school) try to hide from public scrutiny - how sloppy these office raids are being conducted in terms of cybersecurity. There's evidence Musk's teams are inserting bad code into existing networks that will make them more vulnerable to future attacks. They're violating every privacy requirement in the CFR and US Code books. Musk is literally mismanaging our nation's major institutions, and no one fucking voted for him to do that.

In the process, Musk is fulfilling the fantasy of every Far Right wingnut out there - from Grover Norquist on down - who dreamed of shrinking government small enough to drown in Grover's - and now Elon's - bathtub. They're convinced that there's too much waste in the federal system, and they believe it's all tied into to oversized staffing and bloated personnel budgets. This is why trump ordered a freeze for new hires and why Musk is pushing workers to retire early on questionable "deferred resignation" offers. They don't notice or care that a lot of agencies are understaffed - that's not where the bloat is, the wasteful spending is from corrupt vendor contracts - and by gutting many of these agencies of trained, qualified employees is going to make public service that much worse.

Treating the federal government like it's a new acquisition for a venture capital vulture capitalism firm is a bad idea. Mass firings - which you can see Musk is heading, because he's done it before - do not lead to improved services, only to overwhelmed staff that remained which now have to juggle more duties, and which worsens performance. Any attempt to refill those agencies will suffer from trump's need to staff people who are loyal to him, getting people not qualified for those duties.

The loss of jobs cascades across the employment spectrum: places that relied on a major employer - like a regional federal agency that staffed 200-500 people - will see less income coming in, gutting local businesses that will have to fire their own employees, which adds to the downward spiral. All of that job growth that happened under Biden is going to stop, unemployment is going to go up, and without any genuine investment from public spending - as Musk grabs every penny from a hijacked Treasury - our economy is going to tank.

All of this is happening because a Republican-controlled Congress refuses to fight trump - or Musk - on this issue, relinquishing any authority they have with "the power of the purse" to enforce the spending and staffing they already voted for. It's been up to the agencies' unions or outside advocacy groups filing lawsuits to try and stop Musk's rampage. And even that might not work as these lawsuits will end up before a conservative - and trump-friendly - Supreme Court that may well expand their definition of presidential powers to eliminate any checks or balances the Constitution demands.

This is going to get ugly, as fast as Musk can break everything.

Gods help us.

Current Status: My Writing Efforts

Just as a quick note, since I can no longer submit blog articles to the FWA Royal Palm Literary Awards, I submitted two unpublished short stories - one involving vampire bikers, and a sci-fi flash fiction - for consideration instead.

In the meantime, my trip to last weekend's Sunshine State Book Festival yielded zero sales for Funny Locations or any of the Strangely Funny anthologies I had on display. The guy on my right sold seven of his books, the guy on my left sold four. 

/deep heartbroken sigh 

I gotta work on my marketing skills ('cause I don't have any).

Will blog later tonight.

The Bank Alarms Are Going Off, But Will Anyone Stop Musk's Raids?

This is how chaotic things are going with President trump Elon Musk taking a sledgehammer to the federal government (via Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany at the Washington Post, so it may be paywalled):

The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department left the agency after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.

David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.

Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration...

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate...

With the kind of control Musk is seeking, you have to question by what authority Musk can do any of this. He's not a Secretary of the Cabinet, he's the head of a non-approved advisory committee that Congress never budgeted or signed off on. Yet he's out here doing the things a Cabinet member would be doing, and without any accountability to anyone except trump. And even trump might not be in control of this train wreck.

This is what's scaring the experts and people in the know:

The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all agencies to ensure it has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which would appear to include the Treasury payment systems.

It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts.

Musk is going after the money: Either to shut down spending in part or in whole - which is unconstitutional and would crash the economy - or to funnel moneys into his and others pockets - which would be the largest bank heist in history and also crash the economy.

All of this is happening on the whims of a person whom NO ONE ELECTED to any office. Musk does not have the approval of the voters, he does not have confirmation from the Senate, he does not have any established legal authority outside of trump's executive orders. What he's doing ought to be illegal as hell.

And yet, thanks to the President First Felon in the White House, all of the checks and balances from the legislature or the judiciary might not be able to hold Musk - or trump - to account here.

If any advocacy groups outside of the federal government have the power to fight these corrupt acts, for the love of GOD do so, please and thank you.

Otherwise, the nation drowns in Grover's Elon's bathtub.

The Revenge Tour

trump promised he would seek vengeance on those who convicted or attempted to convict him on the many crimes he'd committed over the years, and while he's a known liar we all knew this was going to happen because trump is a tiny, spiteful, bitter man who must lash out against those who humiliated him in public (and to the history books). 

So it's one week into his second attempt to fleece and destroy the United States when trump got around to firing anybody he could who was involved in his insurrection and stolen documents federal cases (from Ryan Lucas and Carrie Johnson at NPR): 

The acting attorney general moved on Monday to fire several Justice Department officials who worked on the federal criminal investigations into President Donald Trump, according to two department officials familiar with the matter.

In termination letters sent to more than a dozen officials, acting Attorney General James McHenry wrote that he did not believe they "could be trusted to faithfully implement the President's agenda because of their significant role in prosecuting the president," one of the officials said...

The move comes the same day that Trump's acting U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Ed Martin, issued a memo announcing a "special project" to review the department's prosecutions of Jan. 6 Capitol rioters, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Martin instructed prosecutors to provide all information related to the use of a specific obstruction charge, including files, documents, emails, notes and other information. He also describes the use of the charge against rioters as a "great failure," according to the person who described the memo to NPR...

Martin is lying, because those obstruction charges worked in the court trials to convict 1,500 or so rioters who were violent towards law enforcement and threatening the safety of Congressional elected officials and staff. This is trump and his loyalists attempting to rewrite the facts into trump's fantasies. Back to the firings:

President Trump, has lashed out for years at the Justice Department, accusing it of unfairly targeting him and his supporters in what he claims were politically motivated investigations.

He was particularly angry about the two investigations brought by special counsel Jack Smith. One case revolved around Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and the other case stems from Trump's keeping of classified documents after he left office. Both cases were dropped after Trump won the election.

Department officials, including former President Joe Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland, have rejected the allegations of weaponizing the department. They point out that the department prosecuted prominent Democrats during Biden's term, including the president's son, Hunter, as well as two prominent Democratic members of Congress.

The horrifying thing is, trump - and those lackeys who have their own agendas against American ideals - needs to accuse Democrats of "politicizing" the Justice Department because he himself wants to turn it into his own political enforcement tool. he needs to turn the courts away from holding him accountable for the many crimes he wants to accomplish back in the Oval Office, and to harass everyone else to keep them broken or too afraid to stop him.

Look at the other firings trump committed over the weekend, when he purged the Inspector Generals of most of the Executive branch agencies that will be most affected by trump's schemes (via Lucia Suarez Sang, Scott MacFarlane, and Nancy Cordes at CBS News):

The Trump administration purged at least a dozen federal inspectors general overnight Friday, multiple sources confirmed to CBS News. It is an unprecedented move that will likely result in legal challenges.

Speaking to reporters abroad Air Force One on his way to Florida, President Trump on Saturday described the firings as "standard" and a "very common thing to do."

But one of the fired inspectors general, Mark Greenblatt, who was nominated to be inspector general of the Interior Department by Mr. Trump during his first term, told CBS News in a phone interview Saturday that he was "stunned" when he received the notification.

Asked why he thinks Mr. Trump fired him and others, he responded, "The most charitable interpretation is that he doesn't believe in our independence or our fairness. The least charitable interpretation is that he wants lackeys to rubber stamp what he's trying to do."

"It's very bizarre," Greenblatt said. "There's no unifying theme as to why he chose this group of 17. It just doesn't make sense, to be completely honest. It does not make sense. No one can figure out what was driving the list."

Don't forget, it was an inspector general who provided direct testimony into trump's illicit phone call to Ukraine withholding funds, which led to trump's first impeachment trial. You can bet trump did not forget that slight either.

If there's any good news, it's that trump's firings may have been illegal, and could well raise the ire of even a Republican-controlled Congress:

The inspector general of the U.S. Small Business Administration, Hannibal "Mike" Ware, said the firings are legally dubious and will be challenged.

Ware, who was among those fired and who chairs the the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, argued in a letter to a White House personnel official that he "does not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient."

According to Ware, he and other inspectors general were sent an email from Sergio Gor, the director of presidential personnel, on Friday informing them that "due to changing priorities, your position as Inspector General...is terminated, effective immediately."

Ware, in his letter, which was obtained by CBS News, recommended Gor reach out to White House legal counsel to discuss the "intended course of action" as "we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss Presidentially Appointed, Senate Confirmed Inspectors General."

Federal law requires the White House to give Congress a full month of warning and case-specific details before firing a federal inspector general.

The fired inspectors general include many who were appointed during the first Trump administration, according to one source. Ware and Greenblatt were both sworn in during Mr. Trump's first administration. Back in 2020, Mr. Trump fired five inspector generals.

Ware, who is also the chair of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, an independent oversight body, said in a separate statement that inspector generals are not "immune from removal." However, he echoed that unjustified removals are a "significant threat" to the jobs they're meant to do.

"Congress specifically established the authorities and structure of the IGs to safeguard their vital oversight role, by mandating independence under the IG Act," he said. "Removals inconsistent with the law are a significant threat to the actual and perceived independence of IGs."   

Ware also noted that Congress recently amended the Inspector General Act to require the president to notify Congress 30 days prior to the removal of an inspector general, as well as requiring a "substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons."

in short: trump has to show cause, direct evidence that all of these inspector generals were in violation of some other law, or performing at a level of incompetence that would justify removal. But trump doesn't have that: All he has are his grievances and his corrupt needs to behave without accountability to anyone.

The firings of career prosecutors at Justice may also be unlawful, but it depends on how the civil service protects their professional employees from wrongful terminations.

This is now all on a Congress that may be controlled by Republicans, and whether they are keen to at least push back against trump's aggressive assaults on the rule of law and threats to their own authority. This is also on a Supreme Court - also controlled by Far Right jurists - who already granted presidents - trump especially - with broader executive powers, to which they could justify these firings and allow trump to escape further accountability.

None of this would be happening, by the by, if 77 million of you sadists and assholes didn't vote for the Convicted Felon and Court-Confirmed Sex Offender.

You're going to see corrupt rule by the worst people now over the coming months, and it's a legitimate question if most of us will even survive any of it.

(on a personal note, this is blog No. 2491, I'm nine away from 2500 which should be celebrated in some way. Maybe if people would visit the Sunshine State Book Festival in Gainesville, FL this February 1st when I'll be there promoting my books! Ow stop hitting me...)

Begun, the 2025 Trade Wars Have

If anybody had Colombia on their trump Tariff Bingo card, you can cash in your winnings with Vegas tonight (via Regina Garcia Cano and Astrid Suarez at AP News):

The United States and Colombia, long close partners in anti-narcotics efforts, clashed Sunday over the deportation of migrants and imposed tariffs on each other’s goods in a show of what countries could face if they intervene in the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Presidents Donald Trump and Gustavo Petro, in a series of social media posts, defended their views on migration, with the latter accusing Trump of not treating immigrants with dignity during deportation and announcing a retaliatory 25% increase in Colombian tariffs on U.S. goods.

Earlier, the U.S. president had ordered visa restrictions, 25% tariffs on all Colombian incoming goods, which would be raised to 50% in one week, and other retaliatory measures sparked by Petro’s decision to reject two Colombia-bound U.S. military aircraft carrying migrants.

At issue are the methods of how trump is sending the deportees. We have long-standing agreements in place with various Central and South American nations about returning illegals to their place of origin, but there's supposed to be procedure and protocols and trump reportedly rejects all that. Instead of standard air transport, he's ordered the use of military planes. Instead of going through a evaluation - which takes time - he's deporting people without due process and without informing the other nations of when and where.

Enraging the Colombian government - as well as other nations - is how the deportees are treated: chained up like prisoners instead of people:

Earlier in the day, Petro said his government would not accept flights carrying migrants deported from the U.S. until the Trump administration creates a protocol that treats them with “dignity.” Petro made the announcement in two X posts, one of which included a news video of migrants reportedly deported to Brazil walking on a tarmac with restraints on their hands and feet.

“A migrant is not a criminal and must be treated with the dignity that a human being deserves,” Petro said. “That is why I returned the U.S. military planes that were carrying Colombian migrants... In civilian planes, without being treated like criminals, we will receive our fellow citizens.”

While other nations like Honduras and Guatemala are accepting trump's use of military planes to return deportees, having Central/South American countries reject these attempts are going to create humanitarian dilemmas for the United States.

In the meantime, trump's swift use of tariffs as a stick to beat nations like Colombia into doing his bidding is going to hurt Americans who are relying on that nation's various imported goods... like coffee. While Colombian coffee only makes up 20 percent of our intake, any increase in costs is going to cripple the amount of what we get. With Brazil's market hit by lowered production due to natural disasters, there's already a shortage to where coffee prices have gone up. Are Americans - seriously addicted to coffee - ready to pay $20 a latte at Starbucks?

trump is looking to make an example of Colombia, hoping to bully them with weaponized tariffs into accepting his mass deportation scheme the way he wants it: cruel and clumsy. But all he's doing is signaling to the world that he has no care or concern about what tariffs and trade wars actually do (don't forget, trump thinks trade wars are good, and easy to win). And he's pushing our major trade partners in this hemisphere into shopping for other markets, likely with a China that is eager to supplant the United States in economic dominance... the very thing that's triggering trump's demands to take back the Panama Canal.

In the meantime, trump is ramping up the "mass deportation" plan here at home, with orders getting sent down to ICE departments to reach daily quotas of 1,200 to 1,500 arrests per day. We're talking about pressure on immigration officers to round up at least 50 people an hour, as though locating and targeting undocumented migrants is easy. What's going to happen is that ICE agents will grab anybody who looks Latino and claim they're illegals, even if they have genuine IDs proving they are American citizens. 

This is like Stop And Frisk - a shameful and failed practice that's still deployed by police - on steroids, with the horrifying implications that thousands of Americans are going to have their rights and their freedoms denied.

None of this is doing our economy or our citizenry any favors. Both the war on trade and the war on Latinos are going to turn into disasters, and a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt (or even killed).

Welcome back to the trumpian chaos that makes America even worse. Thanks a lot, 77 million trump voters, for fucking us all over.

Update: the next morning the news reports are that cooler heads prevailed and that Colombia's insistence on better treatment for deportees will get handled. trump of course is crowing that it's a victory because "he fixed it" and got a nation to admit to taking back "criminals". It's more likely some of his people warned him a large tariff on coffee would be a very bad idea. Either way, this incident demonstrates what we'll expect - again - out of the Eternal Shitgibbon: political acts no different from bullying, designed to cause controversy and disrupt things until trump can profit from it. And he's going to keep doing this until somebody - maybe Mexico, maybe Canada, hopefully most of Europe and Asia - punches back and keeps punching.

Remaining Awake

The thought that keeps me going in dark days like this one:

Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. 

-- Martin Luther King Jr., 

trump and the Republicans have turned that arc into a goddamned pretzel, but the fight continues.

What If: So How Bad Is It Gonna Get?

So the Eternal Shitgibbon ahem Dark Lord is returning, greedier and more terrible than before, and there's not so much panic as there is despair and regret among the Center-Left people I hang out with. I know I'm feeling it, the utter dread of knowing trump - a court-convicted felon, a certified sex offender - is getting back into a White House with Presidential powers now more far-reaching than he wielded last time.

Meaning things after January 20th are going to get worse than what we saw from 2017 to 2020. Which - given the racism, the cruelty, and the greedy self-glorification - was pretty bad.

I could game out what I expect to see out of the Cruelty Is Policy 2.0 administration trump is about to unleash. But I got to admit when I attempt these "What If" guessing games, I'm really not making the correct predictions. The last couple of "What Ifs" were actually heart-breaking.

So if I'm going to do a "What If" for trump's second term of office, I'm going to have to recognize that - given how sadistic and greedy the upcoming policies we already know is coming - whatever I'm guessing at is likely going to be worse.

I mean, it's already a given that trump will use his inauguration speech to rage through his grievances. The media is already reporting how he's going to issue Executive Orders to begin mass deportations, to declare Mexican drug cartels as terrorists so he can deploy the military against them, to begin purging the civil service through Schedule F rules to decimate the federal agencies, pardoning every person convicted in the January 6th insurrection, and even change the rules on electric vehicles (which benefits his BFF Elon Musk).

But let's suppose the "What If" has trump going full Dictator on Day One like he threatened to do during the campaign. What if trump goes completely overboard with the abuse of executive power?

Let's say trump during his speech gives the order to arrest every Democratic figure on the stage with him - Biden, Obama, both Bill and Hillary Clinton, any other congressional leader - on "charges" that they "conspired to steal" the 2020 Election from him. Don't forget, that's still a serious thorn in his pride as he can never admit he loses at anything. Most of the punditry and power players in DC knows he's going to unleash "his" Justice Department on those who slighted, indicted, and convicted him. But what if he does it right there, Day One, ordering the Secret Service and other law enforcement at the inauguration to drag the Democratic leaders off to jail cells?

We know trump wants to implement massive tariffs on our major trading partners. While his handlers are trying to talk him into a slow incremental process at 5 percent (which would still cause serious havoc), trump is likely eager to jump right at the 15 percent across-the-board hike just to show how tough he is on trade.

We know the mass deportations and round-ups of "illegals" are going to begin the second he gives the order - they're already telling us which city (Chicago) so the media can show up and let them get their publicity while they harass and attack thousands of people and families - but we shouldn't expect ICE or any of trump's eager brownshirts to go by proper procedure. We're going to see bloody faces and bodies as a show of force. We're going to see a lot of innocent people who aren't "illegals" - a lot of Puerto Ricans are going to have a rough week - get caught in the chaotic dragnets.

Worse, don't be surprised if the migrant hunters go after the local schools instead of workplaces. trump is going to issue Executive Orders removing the Birthright Citizenship protections. They're going to aim for loopholes so they can "detain" any Latino or dark-skinned child even if they were genuinely born in the United States and gained their citizenship (even children who have one parent who IS a natural citizen will get targeted). Remember everybody: Cruelty Is the Point with trump's anti-immigrant crusade and they WILL go after kids. It may be unconstitutional right now, but don't be surprised if trump gets this before his puppets on the Supreme Court and gets them to uphold the loopholes as "legal."

I wouldn't even be surprised if trump declares we're in a "state of war" with Mexico concerning the border, which would excuse his attempt to create a national emergency and grant himself more power. It would let him - through the Joint Chiefs - seize control of every National Guard in every state including the Democratic-controlled ones, and use them to fill the logistical - manpower and firepower - holes in the deportation plans.

If trump declares that national emergency, he could go to Congress and get his Republican lackeys to pass legislation activating the draft (Selective Service): It will allow him to quickly fill the military ranks to use in his deportation schemes, and also shake the stick even harder at Mexico to get them to bend the knee to trump. Thing is, trump could try to ignore Congress altogether and set up his own draft using his own parameters to pick and choose who gets drafted. It may be against the law, but he'll certainly try it because he's testing the limits of "official acts" of the presidency. What he'll set up will be no lottery, no physical or educational requirements, no psych evals: A way to bring in a lot of the Proud Boy and white supremacist extremists who'd otherwise get filtered out of the military.

And because trump is fully "anti-woke" - he opposes racial diversity in hiring practices - he's going to abuse his office to purge our own military of what he'll call "DEI" hires of Black and Latino (and maybe even women) officers and undo everything we've done since Truman to make our armed forces a truly American - and honestly diverse - institution. he's going to turn our military into an overpowered national police force for which it wasn't designed to do, while crippling the chain of command during all of these adjustments.

Oh, and he's going to insist on the military and every civil servant to swear a new oath of loyalty, not to the United States or the Constitution. he's going to insist they swear loyalty to himself.

The result of all this madness? Arguably within the first week of trump's takeover?

Obviously, the lawsuits from various civil rights groups to counter trump's efforts. They will try to delay the immediate effects of trump's cruelty, but there's no guarantee they'll succeed in a legal system now skewed to trump's will.

We will see serious damage to our federal bureaucracy and in ways that will make service to the public even worse. trump's purge of agencies will leave behind those unqualified at their jobs or overwhelmed by the workload expanding as more people are fired (or quit in disgust). In terms of the military, gutting the officer corps could also trigger mass resignations, disrupting the chain of command even more. I doubt trump and his Far Right buddies will care, though.

The more interesting consequences will be with the economy, which was chugging along pretty well under Biden. trump's efforts to enact tariffs will create shock among investors and cause markets to crash - much like they did during trump's first round of tariffs - all the while forcing prices to go up, because those tariffs will both be an extra tax on the citizenry as well as create supply chain shortages making goods more expensive. Not to mention the tariffs will trigger trade wars on a greater scale than we saw earlier, because the other nations - Canada, Mexico, and China in particular - are not exactly keen on dancing to trump's tune.

trump's efforts to create a national emergency over immigration will trigger international outrage, especially if trump tries to start a border war with Mexico. Considering how trump is panicking Europe over his obsession with buying annexing Greenland from Denmark, we're going to find ourselves with few allies.

trump's also threatening to send troops to the Panama Canal to retake it, arguing that China is getting too influential with that nation (but more than likely he's angry with them for shutting down his properties there). If he pushes too hard, we're going to witness most of Central and South America - and other global powers affected by trade through the Canal - retaliate however they can. trump is rattling his sabers at everyone (except Russia) and he's going to make more enemies that are willing and able to push back.

And speaking of Russia: trump is likely going to do everything he can to lift the massive economic sanctions to allow Putin more freedom to attack Ukraine even harder. I don't buy the public narrative that he'll issue more sanctions on Russian oil. he's too beholden to Putin to play the tough guy. There may be foreign policy experts - and a sizable number of Republican congresscritters - who are pro-Ukrainian and hopeful that success on this front would break Russia's corrupt influence across most of the planet. But trump doesn't care about experts, he only cares about getting adoration from those he views as his equals (the rich and the corrupt).

So by next Saturday: expect Wall Street to be engulfed in flames, with half of the Armed Forces seriously considering a coup to overthrow trump and the Republican Congress before they fire a third of their generals and admirals, while Mexico and Canada agree to a mutual self-defense pact escalating the chance of a two-front war along America's borders. All the while half our nation's sheriffs departments and National Guardsmen overwhelmed chasing after migrant workers instead of doing their normal duties in their communities.

That's what I'm expecting. I don't believe I am over-exaggerating. trump and his wingnut allies really want to disrupt everything they can so they can profit from the chaos.

Don't forget: 77 million of you voted for his madness to drive our nation over the cliffs. Goddamn you.