trump and Republicans Starting Fights They Can't Finish

I'm not an expert on war, so I try to look for those who are to get insight on how things are going once a moron starts an oil war against Iran. I found this assistant professor - Bret Devereaux - at North Carolina State who provides some input: 

I am going to spend the next however many words working through what I think are the strategic implications of where we are, but that is my broad thesis: for the United States this war was an unwise gamble on extremely long odds; the gamble (that the regime would collapse swiftly) has already failed and as a result locked in essentially nothing but negative outcomes. Even with the regime were to collapse in the coming weeks or suddenly sue for peace, every likely outcome leaves the United States in a meaningfully worse strategic position than when it started.

Now, before we go forward, I want to clarify a few things. First, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime, which is odious. That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them. Second, this is a post fundamentally about American strategy or the lack thereof and thus not a post about Israeli strategy. For what it is worth, my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so and there is a significant (but by no means certain) chance that Israel will come to regret the decision to encourage this war. I’ll touch on some of that, but it isn’t my focus. Likewise, this is not a post about the strategy of the Gulf states, who – as is often the sad fate of small states – find their fate largely in the hands of larger powers. Finally, we should keep in mind that this isn’t an academic exercise: many, many people will suffer because of these decisions, both as victims of the violence in the region but also as a consequent of the economic ripples...

Equally important, Iran was not a major strategic priority. This is something that in a lot of American policy discourse – especially but not exclusively on the right – gets lost because Iran is an ‘enemy’ (and to be clear, the Iranian regime is an enemy; they attack American interests and Americans regularly) and everyone likes to posture against the enemy. But the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries. Please understand me: the people in these countries are not unimportant, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others. Chad is not an area of vital security interest to the United States, whereas Taiwan (which makes our semiconductors) is and we all know it.

Neither is the Middle East. The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States. None of the region’s powers are more than regional powers (and mostly unimpressive ones at that), none of them can project power out of the region and none of them are the sort of dynamic, growing economies likely to do so in the future. The rich oil monarchies are too small in terms of population and the populous countries too poor.

In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. The eventual triumph of this approach was the flawed but useful JCPOA (the ‘Iran deal’) in which Iran in exchange for sanctions relief swore off the pursuit of nuclear weapons (with inspections to verify), nuclear proliferation representing the main serious threat Iran could pose. So long as Iran remained non-nuclear, it could be contained and the threat to American interests, while not zero, could be kept minimal...

But that was the situation: Iran was big and hostile, but relatively unimportant. The United States is much stronger than Iran, but relatively uninterested in the region apart from the uninterrupted flow of natural gas, oil and other products from the Gulf (note: the one thing this war compromised – the war with Iran has cut off the only thing in this region of strategic importance, compromised the only thing that mattered at the outset), whereas Iran was wholly interested in the region because it lives there. The whole thing was the kind of uncomfortable frontier arrangement powerful states have always had to make because they have many security concerns, whereas regional powers have fewer, more intense focuses...

The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing. That outcome would be – as we’ll see – robustly bad for a huge range of regional and global actors, including the United States, and it is not at all clear to me that the current administration understood how deeply their interests and Israel’s diverged here.

In any case, this gamble was never very likely to pay off for reasons we have actually already discussed. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime where the core centers of power (like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) are ‘bought in’ from the bottom to the top because the regime allows them access to disproportionate resources and power. Consequently if you blow up the leader, they will simply pick another one – in this case they picked the previous leader’s son, so the net effect of the regime change effort was to replace Supreme Leader Khamenei with Supreme Leader Khamenei…Jr.

trump - thinking entirely in terms of individual power, projecting his own desire to be an autocrat onto other world leaders - totally believed a decapitation strike would work and everybody else would clean up his mess. And like anyone who's ever bankrupted a casino - which is almost nobody else because trump is the only one to ever do that multiple times - trump had no ideas what the odds were and what the costs would be.

The gamble here was that because the regime would simply collapse on cue, the United States could remove Iran’s regional threat without having to commit to a major military operation that might span weeks, disrupt global energy supplies, expand over the region, cost $200 billion dollars and potentially require ground operations. Because everyone knew that result was worse than the status quo and it would thus be really foolish to do that.

As you can tell, I think this was a bad gamble: it was very unlikely to succeed but instead always very likely to result in a significantly worse strategic situation for the United States, but only after it killed thousands of people unnecessarily. If you do a war where thousands of people die and billions of dollars are spent only to end up back where you started that is losing; if you end up worse than where you started, well, that is worse...

Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’ – not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran – but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily left or reversed.

The trap, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz and the broader Persian Gulf. The issue is that an enormous proportion of the world’s shipping, particularly energy (oil, liquid natural gas) and fertilizer components (urea) passes through this body of water. The Gulf is narrow along its whole length, extremely narrow in the Strait and bordered by Iran on its northern shore along its entire length. Iran can thus threaten the whole thing and can do so with cheap, easy to conceal, easy to manufacture systems.

And here we come back to what Clausewitz calls the political object (drink!). Even something like a 50% reduction in shipping in the Gulf, were it to persist long term, would create strong global economic headwinds which would in turn arrive in the United States in the form of high energy prices and a general ‘supply shock’ that has, historically at least, not been politically survivable for the party in power.

And so that is the trap. While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime (who are making the decisions, not, alas, the Iranian people) have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy with its own supporters, leading right back to the ‘dead-or-poor-and-exiled’ problem.

Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not. Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the Strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s. “If the regime is threatened, Iran will try to close the Strait to exert pressure” is perhaps one of the most established strategic considerations in the region. We all knew this.

Except trump and Hegseth and Rubio and others in that broken, inept White House. None of them even read a Cliff Notes version of Clausewitz's writings, and jumped headlong into a fight without knowing who it was they're really fighting, the terrain they're fighting in, and the reason for fighting in the first place. It wasn't just that they were fools and rushed in: They were morons who rushed in without a goddamn clue.

If you read through - I recommend you do - the rest of Devereaux's thesis, he goes into the probabilities of escalation, the likelihood of U.S. naval vessels getting sunk by an Iranian military that's been planning this kind of war for 40 years, and a continuation of global economic chaos that augurs poorly for our nation. Our own military is struggling with military equipment build-up. The Defense Department is so wary of falling recruitment numbers that they're upping the maximum age of enlistments for guys in their 40s and scrapping restrictions on marijuana users. Talk about enacting the draft is making the 20-something MAGA crowds angry at trump, which could trigger a schism in the wingnut ranks.

We're heading into a regional Middle Eastern war again, with fewer exit ramp possibilities and almost no chance for victory.

All because too many media pundits accused the Democrats of being more war-hungry than trump and a rabid Republican base that's been starting wars since the 1980s and doing a piss-poor job of finishing them. No, I am never going to forgive those media assholes for that.

What I think is going to happen? This war will get out of control: Because trump doesn't know any better; and because Iran knows they don't have to beat the US, they just have to outlast trump and his handlers even if that takes another decade.

Gods help us, the ones who didn't want this war at all.

The Shadow That Was Dick Cheney

The big news today has been the passing of former Vice President (and administrative tone-setter) Richard "Dick" Cheney.

The best thing I can say about this was already said back in 2014:

Considering the former Vice President's recent hypocritical and vile comments about Obama's handling of the Iraqi mess Cheney left behind, about the prolonged history of Cheney's lies and distortions, about the thousands of lives broken and killed under his orders, there is only one thing to say:

Arrest the son of a bitch for war crimes and shove his goddamn criminality back into his goddamn face.

That's all that needs to be said now and forever.  No more television interviews.  No more speaking events.  No more book deals.  Send him to jail, put him on trial.  Make him answer for the torture regime, the lies about WMDs, the war-profiteering, the folly of waging two wars with massive debt and without end.

I also said a few things in 2013, when I reviewed Bush the Lesser's presidential tenure, noting how the real power in that White House flowed through and from the Veep's office:

So if Bush the Lesser was really a Passive-Positive at heart, something that Ivins points to, why was Dean so convinced that Bush was really an Active-Negative?

Because much of the Bush administration was a disaster of obsessive secrecy, reckless war-making, and abuse of powers that one regularly sees in an A-N administration.

Mind you, Passive-Positives preside over scandal-plagued tenures - Reagan's was chock-full, as was Harding's and Grant's - but for different reasons than an Active-Negative's such as Johnson or Nixon.  Pass-Pos' scandals are due more to the nature of such Presidents allowing their cronies free range to embezzle and indulge, whereas A-N's scandals stem from the President's own personal faults and obsessions...

It might help to understand that a Passive-Positive President is by nature too trusting of his allies and cronies: Harding is a perfect example.  It's often noted in a Pass-Pos administration the tenor of the office defined more by an underling or group of underlings (much like Franklin Pierce's seemed more dictated by his Southern Democrat allies, and Reagan's with regards to the Iran-Contra scandal).  With that consideration, also note that during Bush the Lesser administration we had the most politically-powerful VICE President our nation ever saw in Dick Cheney...

Cheney was different.  Cheney seemed to dominate Bush the Lesser's administration the minute he was given any authority by Bush, and that even began during the 2000 campaign.  Entrusted as a family friend of his father's, Bush put Cheney in charge of finding his Vice Presidential ticket balancer.  There seemed to have been a review process but in the end the selection was... Cheney himself, which puzzled people then but makes more sense when you look at Cheney more closely...

This was a man who was perfectly willing to tell a fellow politician on the floor of the Senate to "go fuck yourself."  Granted, this wasn't a full-on assault with a walking cane, but certain rules of decorum apply (you're supposed to save that for the parking lot).  This was a guy who told a fellow Secretary of Treasury that "deficits don't matter (regarding more massive tax cuts that even the Secretary felt were unneeded).  This is our due."

This was a man who chaired the secretive energy policy meetings.  This was a Vice President who had his office and had his friends in the Defense Department set up a competing "investigative office" to undercut CIA intelligence that didn't fit their "Iraq Has WMDs" narrative.  This was a Veep whose Chief of Staff "Scooter" Libby was indicted for his role in revealing the classified identity of a CIA agent whose husband had publicly questioned the WMD story.

This was a Vice President who used his unprecedented level of authority to ignore standard procedures on a regular basis.  When confronted by the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office - the ones who handle and store classified materials on a daily basis, mind you - about refusing to turn over materials starting from 2003 into 2007, Cheney did his best to eliminate that part of the National Archives altogether.  Cheney's argument?  As Vice President serving both Executive and Legislative duties (as President of the Senate), he was exempt (the "Fourth Branch" of government argument).  Basically claiming he didn't have to answer to anybody.  Not even to the President.

In short: Everything nasty, vulgar, illegal, and corrupt about the modern Republican Party evolved entirely from whatever dark template that spawned Dick.

That Cheney came to openly despise donald trump - his true heir to the Far Right regime Cheney engineered over the decades - is mostly due to how he viewed trump as too self-serving and stupid to be the Forever Dictator of a Republican-ruled America.

There are a number of obits today burying Cheney for the sins he'd committed while he sat in power, so I'll offer a number of links here so you can get a more informed understanding of how soulless that person was.

Mark Danner at Salon: Dick Cheney's Dark Legacy

David Frum at Atlantic: There Was Only One Dick Cheney All Along

George Chidi at The Guardian: Dick Cheney Remains Divisive In Death

Eoin Higgins at The Intercept: Dick Cheney Doesn't Deserve Your Heartfelt Eulogies

When you consider how the only one more hated was Henry Kissinger, Cheney is leaving a foul legacy indeed.

P.S. also sharing Stonekettle's simple observation on Bluesky:

Well, hell. Looks like I'm going to need to drink more coffee. Dick Cheney died and I'm going to need a full bladder for the funeral.

— Stonekettle (@stonekettle.bsky.social) November 4, 2025 at 8:44 AM

Just sayin', 2 liter bottles of Mountain Dew pass through much faster...

 

The Desecration of America Under trump

Update: Thank you once again to Batocchio for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. I apologize for the mess, I need to vacuum the place.

With all the madness happening over the past few weeks no make that a month actually it's the whole damn year - from the Republican government shutdown for all the worst reasons, the escalation of bombing fishing boats on the shores of South America, the growing hostility of ICE thugs towards not only legal immigrants now also children and protestors - the one bit really standing out in my current outrage is the wanton (arguably illegal) destruction donald trump is inflicting on the nation's most visible symbol of power The White House (via AP and NPR):

The White House on Monday started tearing down part of the East Wing, the traditional base of operations for the first lady, to build President Trump's $250 million ballroom despite lacking approval for construction from the federal agency that oversees such projects.

Dramatic photos of the demolition work showed construction equipment tearing into the East Wing façade and windows and other building parts in tatters on the ground. Some reporters watched from a park near the Treasury Department, which is next to the East Wing...

The White House has moved ahead with the massive construction project despite not yet having sign-off from the National Capital Planning Commission, which approves construction work and major renovations to government buildings in the Washington area...

It was unclear whether the White House had submitted the ballroom plans for the agency's review and approval. The White House did not respond to a request for comment and the commission's offices are closed because of the government shutdown...

trump's doing this now so that there's no interference from Congress - even from a handful of Republicans who would question the wasteful spending - from indulging in one of his worst vices: his overwhelming need to shove his vulgar tastes in everyone's faces.

Trump insists that presidents have desired such a ballroom for 150 years and that he's adding the massive 90,000-square-foot, glass-walled space because the East Room, which is the largest room in the White House with an approximately 200-person capacity, is too small. He also has said he does not like the idea of hosting kings, queens, presidents and prime ministers in pavilions on the South Lawn.

Given trump's personal obsessions with gaudy oversized architecture, I'm pretty sure he's the only occupant of the White House who'd ever considered getting a massive arena-sized ballroom to indulge his fantasies of having the biggest and brightest things to show off. Adding to the illegality of tearing down the East Wing is how trump plans to pay for all this: through direct contributions of the wealthy elite. A massive public quid pro quo with the billionaires trump wants sucking up to him.

There are other reasons why trump is doing this aside from his love of hideous décor. At the top of that list is trump's personal belief that he's not going anywhere. trump keeps pushing the false idea he can "run" again for the presidency in 2028 in spite of the 22nd Amendment saying "uh uh TWO TERMS IS THE LIMIT." Considering how he's looking to use the Insurrection Act - or some self-declaration of war without congressional approval - to declare a national emergency and suspend every election to usher in his dictatorship, trump wants to turn what's supposed to be a temporary residency for a temporary leader into a garish memorial of his (supposed) eternal rule.

This is trump's way of saying "the White House is MINE now, no one can take it away from me," and he's treating it much like his other properties. trump would love to turn the whole building into Mar-A-Lago North.

In the meantime, this photo is a perfect representation of what trump and his Far Right lackeys are doing to the whole nation:

from the Washington Post

It is going to take generations to undo this destruction.

Four For the Fourth: We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident...

(This is the third article for my Four For the Fourth blogging run. Do check out the previous articles!)

Here's a copy of the Declaration of Independence, America's most sacred text:

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

--

These were all grievances aimed at George III - some of it the fault of Parliament's legislation, due to the UK's own in-fighting between Crown and the governed - but can you tell which ones in the Declaration our current occupant of the White House - I will not call him 'president' - has violated?

They have listed trump's crimes over at Reason (by Ilya Somin):

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands (through trump's war on immigrants, even the naturalized legal immigrants).

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent (trump's excessive and arbitrary tariffs wars with other nations, without Congressional input).

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences (trump's unjustified and cruel attempts to ship detained migrants - many of them innocent of actual crimes - to overseas prisons, where abuse and death are / will be rampant).

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures (trump's actions deploying the National Guard may fall into a gray area, but sending Marines into L.A. and using them as border guards are clear violations).

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us (JANUARY 6th RING A BELL???).

Those are just the five Somin counts. For myself, I'm also looking at trump "Taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments" and "For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever" through his DOGE purges of our federal agencies and refusal to abide by the laws set by Congress. There's also "For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury" as he and his cronies at the DOJ operate without honoring the legal rights of Due Process.

trump and his Republican allies are currently committing about half of all the crimes we documented against a British king 249 years ago.

When the hell do we honest, law-abiding Americans issue our own Declaration against trump's crimes?

The Folly of trump's Nativism and Me-First World-View as the Trade Wars Escalate

trump is still obsessed with tariffs, even after all the economic chaos he's inflicted over the last three months.

Unhinged

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 20, 2025 at 4:07 PM

trump remains convinced tariffs are a winning move, that the "billions in revenue" getting raised by him - by the by, none of the ports were taking in tariffs because their systems are still screwed up - will fill our coffers even as Elon Musk and his DOGE minions empty them to their own pockets, and that - as always - he's the big business genius while every other financial expert/banker/CEO are screaming how tariffs won't work and are gutting their profits.

trump is still crowing how his "trade deficit" announcements are forcing nations to deal with him, even as there's every evidence that our major trading partners are about to drop very big hammers on us (hat-tip to Comrade Misfit who shared this CNBC report from Lori Ann RaCocco):

U.S. importers are being notified of an increase in canceled sailings by freight ships out of China as ocean carriers try to balance the pullback in orders resulting from President Trump’s tariffs and the escalation of tensions in the trade war.

A total of 80 blank, or canceled, sailings out of China have been recorded by freight company HLS Group. It wrote in a recent note to clients that with the trade war between China and the U.S. leading to a demand plummet, carriers have started to suspend or adjust transpacific services...

The impact of the diminished freight container traffic to North America will be significant for many links in the economy and supply chain, including the ports and logistics companies moving the freight. If each sailing was carrying 8,000 to 10,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units), that would equal a decline in freight traffic of between 640,000-800,000 containers, and lead to decreased crane operations at the ports, lower fees that could be collected, and declines in container pick-ups and transports by trucks, rails, and to warehouses for storage...

“We have no way of knowing how significant this drop in orders will be on vessel schedules,” said Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence. “There are no models to extrapolate this. What I can tell you is the majority of containers on the vessels servicing the Asia to U.S. trade routes is China. We won’t go to zero containers, but we will see a decrease in containers and as a result, in the future, we will see a massive raft of blank sailings announced...”

This is the first wave of a cascade effect, where the lack of shipments from China will disrupt our nation's supply chain from ports losing businesses to trucks / planes / trains / shipping companies losing money from dropped demand to deliver incoming materials across the nation. We won't see it now but in a month, maybe two months: fewer goods reaching our shelves at Wal-Mart or warehouses for Amazon. Fewer cars, and fewer car parts to manufacture here in the U.S. Fewer people working our supply chains, increasing unemployment and accelerating a growing economic recession. Among other losses to our nation's well-being.

And still trump thinks this is all glorious, that tariffs work.

I've written before why trump believes in tariffs, that he seems to think they generate revenues far greater than they really do. There are several other reasons he's obsessed: 

trump believes he's a world-class negotiator and that tariffs allow him to break and make deals to serve his whims. This is partly a vanity program; driven by pride and arrogance, blended with the stupidity and ignorance about how global economics really work (what the hell did he fail to learn at UPenn Wharton College of Business???).

trump really doesn't understand how trade deficits - which he based his blanket tariff orders a few weeks ago - work, and how little they affected our nation's economic strengths. Just because we were operating massive trade deficits with smaller (Third World) nations didn't mean those nations were defrauding the United States in any way: In a lot of cases it was because those nations didn't have enough revenues to buy things from our nation that would have meant any value to them. We traded with Madagascar for their vanilla but they had no reason to buy our soy or our motorcycles, not at the scale that would have balanced the books. And yet, the United States kept running one of the largest (based on GDP and sheer financial wealth) economies on the planet. Trade deficits didn't hurt us at all. Trade boycotts due to these tariffs, however, that will hurt...

But what's proving to be the biggest reason - other than trump's overall stupidity - is trump's Nativist / America-First world-view blinding him to how vital trade can be. trump wants to push his Narrative of "Make America Great Again" and to him that means cutting the United States off from the rest of the planet (with the exception of trump's BFFs Putin and Russia). Shutting down our foreign aid, closing off half of our State Department's foreign relations, pushing a harsh border enforcement to drive away foreign students AND tourists AND anybody else - and no lie, including penguins - all of this comes from trump's belief that America is a "superior" nation under attack by lesser mortals looking to defraud or destroy us.

It's a world-view no different than the one shared with trump's idol, the person he's admired for years. Yeah, that guy, he loved inflicting tariffs as soon as he came to power in Germany (via Timothy W. Ryback at the Atlantic (paywalled)):

Hitler had what one might call a diffident, occasionally felonious disregard for financial matters. He owed 400,000 reichsmarks in back taxes. His understanding of economics was primitive. “You have inflation only if you want it,” Hitler once said. “Inflation is a lack of discipline. I will see to it that prices remain stable. I have my S.A. for that.” (The S.A., or Brownshirts, were the original paramilitary organization associated with the Nazi Party.) Hitler held Jews responsible for most of Germany’s financial woes.

Hitler relied on Gottfried Feder, the National Socialist Party’s long-serving chief economist, to develop the specifics of an economic program. Feder had helped concoct the strange brew of socialism and fanatical nationalism in the original 25-point program of this putative “workers’ party.” In May 1932, Feder outlined what would become the first Nazi economic plan, in a 32-page position paper designed for ready implementation were Hitler to suddenly find himself in power. High on Feder’s agenda for a Hitler economy were tariffs.

“National Socialism demands that the needs of German workers no longer be supplied by Soviet slaves, Chinese coolies, and Negroes,” Feder wrote. Germany needed German workers and farmers producing German goods for German consumers. Feder saw “import restrictions” as key to returning the German economy to the Germans. “National Socialism opposes the liberal world economy, as well as the Marxist world economy,” Feder wrote. Our fellow Germans must “be protected from foreign competition...”

Any of that anti-foreigner rhetoric sound familiar?

The crash of 1929 had plunged Germany, along with much of the rest of the world, into an abyss. Markets collapsed. Factories were idled. Unemployment soared. In the early 1930s, one out of three German workers was unemployed. But Hitler had inherited a recovering economy: In December 1932, the German Institute for Economic Research reported that the crisis had been “significantly overcome”; by the time Hitler was appointed chancellor, in January 1933, the economy was on the mend.

You could say the same about Biden's economic recovery post-pandemic, which the mainstream media underplayed while obsessing over the price of eggs. trump's chaotic decision-making undid a lot of that, much like what happened in Germany:

But Hitler made no effort to reassure the markets, insisting that the tariffs were necessary and that he needed time to fix the ruined country his predecessors had left him. “Within four years the German farmer must be saved from destitution,” Hitler said in his first national radio address as chancellor. “Within four years unemployment must be completely overcome.” Hitler provided scant details as to how this was to be accomplished. By this point, he had broken even with the tariff cheerleader Feder, and had abandoned most of the action items for developing a nationalist and socialist economy. These items had included increased taxation of the wealthy; state supervision of large corporations; and the prohibition of “new department stores, low-priced shops, and chain stores.”

As chancellor, Hitler left his own plans for the German economy intentionally vague. His chief priority, as he told his ministers, was to secure an outright majority in the March 5 Reichstag elections. Hitler calculated that he needed between 18 million and 19 million votes. “There is no economic program that could meet with the approval of such a large mass of voters,” Hitler told party leaders.

But although the average voter may not have cared about the details of the Hitler economy, the markets did. The initial surge in stocks that greeted Hitler’s appointment halted then dipped and flattened amid the political and economic uncertainty of Hitler’s chaotic first weeks as chancellor...

The Hitler tariffs, announced on Friday, February 10, 1933, stunned observers. “The dimension of the tariff increases have in fact exceeded all expectations,” the Vossische Zeitung wrote disapprovingly, proclaiming the moment a “fork in the road” for the German economy. It appeared that Europe’s largest and most industrialized nation would suddenly be returning “to the furrow and the plow.” The New York Times saw this for what it was: “a trade war” against its European neighbors...

The primary targets of the Hitler tariffs—the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands—were outraged by the sudden suspension of favored-nation trading status on virtually all agricultural products, as well as on textiles, with tariffs in some cases rising 500 percent. With its livestock essentially banished from the German market, Denmark, for example, was facing substantial losses. Farmers panicked. The Danes and Swedes threatened “retaliatory measures,” as did the Dutch, who warned the Germans that the countermeasures would be felt as “palpable blows” to German industrial exports. That proved to be true.

“Our exports have shrunk significantly,” Foreign Minister Neurath informed Hitler in one cabinet meeting, “and our relations to our neighboring countries are threatening to deteriorate.” Neurath noted that informal contacts with Dutch interlocutors had been “bruskly broken off.” Trade relations with Sweden and Denmark were similarly strained, as were those with France and Yugoslavia. Finance Minister Krosigk anticipated that the agricultural sector would require an additional 100 million reichsmarks in deficit spending...

The costs of those tariffs arrived in the form of harsher sanctions and cutoffs, forcing the government to spend more than expected to aid farmers (and likely other industries). But none of that mattered to Hitler, who pushed forward on his agenda to seize authoritarian control of Germany outright, and basically building up a war machine with the armies to begin annexation and invasion of neighboring countries, triggering a world war by 1939.

If anyone else can notice the trends here - the tariffs leading to trade wars leading to military aggression and straight-up wars of blood and carnage - you can see where trump is taking the United States. We're not going back to some glorious isolationist nativist homeland that never existed outside of the fevered fantasies of a white patriarchal class: We're turning ourselves into a pariah state no different than Iran or North Korea, and about to escalate matters with our neighboring trade partners in Mexico and Canada with our unjustified version of an Anschluss. 

"This is NOT going to end well" is a fcking understatement tonight.

trump Destroying Heroes

Update: Thank ye, Steve in Manhattan for adding this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-up! Please remember to support your public libraries as trump and his lackeys are nuking library funding outright through shutting down the IMLS agency. (posted at my writing/librarian blog) /rage

If there's any good news is that millions of us are rising up in protest, if the turnout at the Hands Off rallies are anything (of course, the mainstream media barely paid notice).

There's been a lot of bullshit happening in this second round of trumpian destruction, but this is something that drew my ire. trump continues his war on American history - and on our education and literacy - by getting his fellow racists to purge our libraries to straight-up whitewash everything (via Lolita C Baldor at AP News):

The U.S. Naval Academy has removed nearly 400 books from its library after being told by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office to review and get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, U.S officials said Tuesday.

Academy officials were told to review the library late last week, and an initial search had identified about 900 books for a closer look. They decided on nearly 400 to remove and began doing so Monday, finishing before Hegseth arrived for a visit Tuesday that had already been planned and was not connected to the library purge, officials said. A list of the books has not yet been made available.

As a librarian, this enrages me. NO LIBRARY - be it public, be it school, above all a university library - SHOULD EVER PURGE A BOOK ON POLITICAL ORDERS.

The Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, had not been included in President Donald Trump’s executive order in January that banned DEI instruction, programs or curriculum in kindergarten through 12th grade schools that receive federal funding. That is because the academies are colleges.

Pentagon leaders, however, suddenly turned their attention to the Naval Academy last week when a media report noted that the school had not removed books that promoted DEI. A U.S. official said the academy was told late last week to conduct the review and removal. It isn’t clear if the order was directed by Hegseth or someone else on his staff...

Hegseth has aggressively pushed the department to erase DEI programs and online content, but the campaign has been met with questions from angry lawmakers, local leaders and citizens over the removal of military heroes and historic mentions from Defense Department websites and social media pages.

In response, the department has scrambled to restore some of those posts as their removals have come to light.

The confusion about how to interpret the DEI policy was underscored Monday as Naval Academy personnel mistakenly removed some photos of distinguished female Jewish graduates from a display case as they prepared for Hegseth’s visit. The photos were put back...

While the AP News weren't able to confirm in that story which books were getting removed, follow-up reports got out that some of the books under fire were biographies on Martin Luther King Jr, and WWII soldier - and major league baseball Hall of Famer - Jackie Robinson.

In short, Hegseth and trump and the rest of their anti-woke racists were desperate and eager to purge books on American heroes.

This is indefensible. Former congresscritter Steve Israel makes the case (via The Hill):

As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I took on the issue of professional military education. It may not have garnered many headlines, but education was viewed as critical from the top echelons of the Pentagon to the remote operating bases I visited in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We sharpen our warriors’ effectiveness when we develop their skills in critical thinking, languages, cultures and history. But we are now going dangerously backwards.

The New York Times reported that the U.S. Naval Academy is identifying books in the school’s Nimitz Library that may be pulled from circulation because they relate to so-called diversity, equity and inclusion. Among the 900 potential offenders: a biography of Jackie Robinson, “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.” and “Einstein on Race and Racism.”

The Chinese military is expanding. Russia is threatening Europe. But you can sleep better tonight knowing that the Navy is keeping its men and women safe from Jackie Robinson...

The irony in this move is rich. In the name of freedom, we mustn’t let our future leaders do things like, oh, read what they want to read. We must treat them like snowflakes, so brittle and sensitive that they must be protected from the offensive views of Robinson, King, Einstein and whoever else is on the blacklist of the Navy Blue and Gold.

Our warriors need body armor, not censorship. The best of them want to build their intellectual resilience. When I visited them in Iraq, Afghanistan and our military academies at home, many consistently told me that they fought better when they had time not only to drill, but to learn. To read...

It was a Marine who later explained to me why military education was so important: “If you know how to think, you realize you don’t have to kick in the door and start shooting; sometimes, you can find a safer way — for yourself...”

Instead of supporting our warriors with libraries that will give them an unvarnished telling of history, the Pentagon has decided to whitewash it. Instead of encouraging critical thinking skills, the Navy has decided to dull them...

There was nothing offensive in what Martin Luther King represents even as a man of peace who stood for civil rights. MLK may have spoke against the Vietnam War, but so did others of his era, and there is no shame in letting our military schools offer his biographies to highlight the man's overall commitment to justice.

There was nothing offensive in what Jackie Robinson represents even as a veteran of the Second World War - one of the few "good" or Just Wars humanity's ever known - who faced court martial during his service over refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus, and who broke the racial barriers in professional baseball to make it truly America's Game.

But these men - and many other men and women who impacted our nation's history over the centuries - offend trump and Hegseth and others among trump's ranks of hate-driven lackeys all because the likes of King and Robinson were heroes who dared to confront and bring an end to the institutionalized racism that scarred the United States since our nation's birth... and clearly still scars us to this day.

MLK offends the likes of trump because Reverend King dared to win the Nobel Peace Prize fighting for our nation's soul, sacrificing his own life in the pursuit of equality, justice, and economic fairness not just for Blacks but for the poor.

Jackie Robinson offends the likes of trump because Robinson suffered years of public attacks by haters while proving racists wrong that Black players were just as good as Whites, helping his Brooklyn Dodgers make playoffs and even a World Series championship. Jackie entered the hallowed Hall of Fame - notorious as one of the hardest sports halls to join - and his jersey number retired by all the major league teams in honor of what he endured.

King and Robinson and dozens if not hundreds of other American heroes - those who are Black, or Latino, or Natives, or Asians, or Women - offend trump and his ilk because King and Robinson and those hundreds of Blacks and Latinos and Natives and Asians and Women all defy the white supremacist myth that only White Men are capable and worthy of respect (that even the most mediocre White Man is superior to all others).

Rather than step away from an easily disprovable lie - that Whites can be mediocre and ought to live with the reality that We Are All Human capable of both greatness and failures - trump and the patriarchal racists would rather whitewash - literally - every fact and human face from our history books, from any form of information and knowledge that can inspire our generation and those who follow us.

trump will erase the fact we have heroes who aren't him - that there are heroes with different faces and different skins and different genders than him - just to make himself a false god.

Damn him.

Do not purge our heroes from the shelves, America.

Do not let these tiny, broken, hollow men erase everything good about our nation.

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.

Biden's Farewell

Update 1/20/25: Thanks again to Steve in Manhattan for including this article on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! I know today is going to be a dark and stressful one, so my suggestion to survive this day is 1) don't fcking watch and 2) hug your pets/loved ones. Good luck. We're all counting on you.

As most outgoing Presidents are wont to do - since Washington set the tone - President Joe Biden issued a formal Farewell Address to the nation, pointing out his term's successes and making dire warnings about what lays ahead (via Chris Megerian, Zeke Miller, and Colleen Long at AP News):

President Joe Biden used his farewell address to the nation Wednesday to deliver stark warnings about an “oligarchy” of the ultra-wealthy taking root in the country and a “tech-industrial complex” that is infringing on Americans’ rights and the future of democracy.

Speaking from the Oval Office as he prepares to hand over power Monday to President-elect Donald Trump, Biden seized what is likely to be his final opportunity to address the country before he departs the White House to spotlight the accumulation of power and wealth in the U.S. among just a small few.

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said, drawing attention to “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy people and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked...”

Biden’s speech in the Oval Office is the latest in a series of remarks on domestic policy and foreign relations he has delivered that are intended to cement his legacy and reshape Americans’ grim views on his term. Earlier in the day, he heralded a long awaited ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which could end more than a year of bloodshed in the Middle East.

“It’ll take time to feel the full impact of what we’ve done together but the seeds are planted and they’ll grow and they’ll bloom for decades to come,” Biden said. It was a tacit acknowledgement that many Americans say they have yet to feel the impact of his trillions of dollars spent on domestic initiatives...

Biden offered his own set of solutions for the problems that he laid out: change the tax code to ensure billionaires “pay their fair share,” eliminate the flow of hidden sources of money into political campaigns, establish 18-year term limits for members of the Supreme Court and ban members of Congress from trading stocks. His policy prescriptions come as his political capital is at its nadir as Biden prepares to exit the national stage, and after he has done little to advance those causes during his four years in power at the White House...

That last sentence aptly defines what could prove to be Biden's legacy: Both the long-term accomplishments he focused on working to rebuild the economy post-COVID and post-trump, and the frustration at letting too many needed reforms go pass. ALL of those things that Biden offered as solutions - especially the needed caps on campaign financing and on judicial overreach and corruption - were things HIS OWN administration could have worked on during the brief window of opportunity 2021 to 2023 when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.

To this, I would point to Professor James David Barber's cheat sheet of Presidential Character. Where Biden falls on that spectrum - Passive-Positive - explains a lot about the lack of energy or focus when working on extensive and radical reforms. Passives are the type that don't want to "rock the boat" too hard and shake off any support from the more extreme elements of their own coalitions (and are willing to work with opponents thinking everyone's all in one big happy Starfleet); while the Positive trait of seeing the powers of high office as a good thing for the public can blind such Presidents from the need to stop corruption in government. Such Congeniality wouldn't be a problem in times of normalcy: However, we are in the Age of trump, where lies and greed are the coins of the realm, and Biden exposed himself to attacks he couldn't overcome.

This is why Passive-Positives preside over either administrations of high corruption or low energy. The good news is that Biden's personal incorruptibility - in spite of the MAGA accusations that he's corrupt like his son Hunter - drove him to surround himself with good people who did their jobs. This keeps him from getting grouped with the likes of U.S. Grant (who failed to surround himself with good people) and Warren Harding (who happily surrounded himself with corrupt friends) and Ronald Reagan (who may not have been fully aware of his regime's corruption but allowed it to happen). Biden falls in with the likes of William Taft: Who rose to power during a Progressive reformist wave and served a relatively scandal-free term, but failed to capitalize on more economic reforms and corporate regulations that were needed in that era.

As a side note, this is where Barber's Character chart of creating four major traits falls apart in the specific successes and failures of each presidency. Not all Active-Positive Presidents behave the same way, nor do Passive-Positives or Active-Negatives (there have been too few Passive-Negatives to make that observation). Even within each Character there seems to be two types: With Passive-Positives there's the type that presides over corruption because they don't want to lose friends (Appeasers) or the type that doesn't want to push harder on things that need doing (Slackers) because they feared the risks (something Actives never worry about).

Biden ended up as a Slacker President, trying to focus on big-menu items like job growth and infrastructure but unwilling to press harder on major crises such as trump's lawlessness and foreign wars/interventions such as Ukraine (where Biden's fear of Putin's nuclear retaliation paralyzed our support efforts to Zelensky) and Gaza (even as Biden claims success with a ceasefire, it took too many months and too many innocent Palestinian lives to get here).

Because of Biden's inability to see trump as a genuine and ongoing threat to American democracy and political well-being - and because he feared falling into the accusations of dictatorship if they pursued trump's criminality - he didn't push too hard - and hired a like-minded Attorney General in Merrick Garland who also didn't press the need - to see trump held accountable for his actions on January 6th. That delay cost us dearly: It allowed trump to campaign again and use his gaslighting and denials to escape justice, and return to power with a vengeance (literally).

Biden's administration is going to be less remembered for the accomplishments he did achieve - especially a key infrastructure bill that should improve local manufacturing and job growth for the next 20 years - and more remembered for all the missed opportunities to end global threats like Putin and greedhead threats like Elon Musk. He'll be among the ranks of the recently passed Jimmy Carter: A Good man who didn't exactly do a Great job.

The Passing of a Good Man

His health had been failing for a long time, he'd been in hospice, and his wife Rosalynn had passed away earlier so there wasn't much else for former President Jimmy Carter to hold onto. It still hurts to hear this afternoon that Carter passed away (via Kathy Lohr at NPR): 

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, died Sunday at age 100. The Carter Center announced he died in his hometown of Plains, Ga.

Carter was president from 1977 to 1981, but he was perhaps more famous for the life he led after leaving office. Carter was one of the biggest advocates for peace, democracy and international human rights.

James "Jimmy" Earl Carter Jr. was born in Plains, Ga., on Oct. 1, 1924, and spent his childhood on a farm just outside that tiny southwest Georgia community. His father was a peanut farmer; his mother, "Miss Lillian," was a nurse. He was the first president of the United States to be born in a hospital.

Just saying, my twin brother and I were born in Albany, GA just down the road from Plains. We both grew up considering Jimmy as a neighbor. I digress.

Growing up on the farm, Carter learned the value of hard work and determination. He qualified for the U.S. Naval Academy and became an engineer, working on submarines. But Carter resigned from the Navy in 1953 after his father died.

Back in Plains, he was elected to the Georgia Senate and became the first Georgia governor to speak out against racial discrimination.

A lifelong Democrat like most Southerners at the time, Carter was a political unknown when he began a national campaign in 1974 and was first referred to as "Jimmy Who?"

But a grassroots effort changed that, Hochman said. "He would campaign on the street corners and go to radio stations. Nobody knew who he was except that he was running for president."

Carter's friends and family from Georgia, called the Peanut Brigade, traveled to New Hampshire, Iowa and all over the country talking to voters and campaigning for Carter, the dependable Southerner who wanted to be president.

During the campaign, Carter told audiences, "I'll never tell a lie. I'll never make a misleading statement. I'll never betray the trust of those who have confidence in me, and I will never avoid a controversial issue..."

Carter won in a close election over Gerald Ford in 1976, happening at a moment where the national mood soured over Watergate, the failure of the Vietnam War, and an economy struggling between high inflation or bad interest rates. Carter's own administration grappled with the economic (and spiritual) malaise that worsened his chances at re-election, before getting blindsided by the Iranian Hostage crisis by 1979 that dashed any incumbent hopes for good.

What happened post-Presidency with Jimmy Carter was one of the greatest humanitarian efforts that Americans ever saw:

After leaving office, Carter became dedicated to promoting democracy, monitoring elections, building homes with Habitat for Humanity and eradicating disease in some of the world's poorest countries. In 1982, the president and his wife opened the Carter Center in Atlanta.

In an interview with NPR in 2007, Carter talked about his experiences. "And for the last 25 years, my life could not have been more expansive and unpredictable and adventurous and gratifying," he said.

In 2002, Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor some said he had earned a quarter century earlier when he negotiated the Camp David Accords. He ended his acceptance speech with a plea for peace.

"War may sometimes be a necessary evil, but no matter how necessary, it is always evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children," Carter said...

When I did the year-long summaries of Presidential Character back in 2013, I ended Carter's review rather abruptly without going into the graceful post-Presidential work he committed. I wasn't too sure back then how to properly phrase the many good deeds - the work towards world peace, moderating elections at home and abroad to promote democracy, building homes for families with Habitat For Humanity, fighting disease in Africa like the near-eradication of Guinea Worm - and I was kind of worried even back then if I said anything positive like that I might jinx him to an early death (his health had been failing for some time. Getting into your 90s will do that to you).

The thing about Carter was how genuine were his efforts to do the right thing. He fought against segregation in a Deep South state, he committed to advocacy for human rights over power plays on the international stage, he promoted his Christian faith through good works instead of beating everyone's head with a thick Bible.

Carter never once promoted himself at the expense of other people. He never worked to take millions of dollars for himself, giving instead to his charities. He never crowed about his successes unless it was to celebrate and honor the hundreds if not thousands of fellow volunteers and allies who worked with him.

If there was any person on the planet in the exact opposite of the - you know what, shouldn't even name-drop that orange guy here - it was President Carter.

God Bless the man, who served his post-Presidency in ways that other former Presidents would envy: with hard work, diligence, respect from others, and the love of a grateful nation.

I want to leave you all with a clip from Saturday Night, back in the days of Carter's tenure, with Dan Ackroyd portraying him. This may not have been the real Jimmy Carter but it honestly reflects the man himself: caring for others, well-versed and intelligent, and a huge Allman Brothers fan:

“Right, you did some Orange Sunshine, Peter. Everything is going to be fine, you’re just very high and you’ll probably be that way for about five more hours. Try taking some Vitamin B or C complex. If you have a beer, go ahead and drink it. Just remember, you’re a living organism on this planet, you’re safe, you’ve just taken a heavy drug. Relax, stay inside, and listen to some music. Do you have any Allman Brothers?”

All flags to half-mast, America, for the passing of a not-too-great President and the best ex-President we will ever know.

The Fall of Assad, and the Fate of Syria and the Middle East

This had been happening over the past two weeks, but I didn't want to say anything about it because I'm tired of getting ahead of myself on historic events as they occur, but in the Middle East - alongside all the fighting and bloodshed - we're witnessing the swift and sudden downfall of a tyrannical regime in Syria (via Willem Marx at NPR):

A rapid advance by Syrian rebel groups on the country's capital has led to the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's control of a nation his family had ruled for half a century.

Crowds celebrated the seismic political shift in the streets of Damascus overnight and into Sunday, as Syrian state television broadcast a statement from a group of rebels, one dressed in a black hoodie, who announced that all Syrian prisoners had been freed from jail and Assad had been deposed.

The man reading that statement on television, just hours after the city's fall, had echoed calls from the leading group in this lightning rebel offensive, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, demanding that citizens and fighters alike ensure the country's national institutions were protected. He ended his statement with a declaration after more than 13 years of bloody civil conflict: "Long Live a Free Syria..."

The British-based war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Assad had left the country to an undisclosed destination.

Hours later, Russia, which had long used its military to prop up the Assad regime against wide-ranging opposition forces, also said that the toppled president had left the country. The Russian foreign ministry did not say where he had gone.

There's a timeline at AP News that helps highlight just how quick this whole turnabout moved. A lot of foreign policy think tanks are working overtime - like this Atlantic Council - to figure out the massive implications that Assad's fall means not just for Syria but for the entire Middle East region.

We're talking about a key Arab nation that had long contributed to the violent instability and chaos in the region well back into the 1950s. Syria - alongside Iran, and backed by Russia - were themselves backers for such extremists groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, which contributed to ongoing violence with Israel and leaving Lebanon in political and economic turmoil for decades.

Syria itself has been broken by a decades-long civil war since 2011 - among a number of uprisings going back to the 1980s - that sent millions of civilians fleeing as refugees to avoid the indiscriminate bombing and gassing that Assad's regime deployed as means of putting down resistance. Gods, I last blogged about this civil war in 2015 when I pledged some financial support to help those refugees, and the war itself in 2013 when Obama's presidency attempted to defuse Assad's use of chemical weapons in that civil war.

The end of Assad means only a temporary respite in that war, unfortunately. Syria as a nation was cobbled together by a mix of differing ethnicities and religious groups - Kurds, Turks, Sunnis, Shi'a, Christians, dozens of smaller cultural communities - some of whom remain hostile towards each other even in this moment of possible nation-building into functioning coalitions.

This is the thing a lot of Western nations are dreading: the potential of Syria to backslide much like Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya into still-broken internally squabbling states that could become home to corruption and religious extremists.

In opposition to that dread, there looks to be a sizable amount of hope. The HTS rebels who claimed victory are posing - at the moment - as functional moderates looking to legitimize their rule. In the years that they've received training from their Turkish handlers, there is the decent possibility that they've learned how Turkey handles religious tolerance and can placate the larger Christian populations in Syria. The Turkish government - looking to reduce or end the ongoing Kurdish separatist movement in their own borders - would want Syria to take the burden of dealing with the Kurds: This would require genuine coalition-building.

A stabilized Syria should mean an end to one of the largest refugee crises facing the Middle East (and Europe/United States). Fourteen million displaced Syrians could start moving back - hopefully within weeks - just as long as serious rebuilding efforts are funded by foreign aid to rebuild cities and homes to move back to. Ending this crisis could well relieve a lot of discontent among the sanctuary nations - especially across Europe - that had their Far Right parties spewing racist outrage to promote their own agendas.

There is also the possibility that the end of Assad's regime - which was hostile towards Israel and a major backer of Hezbollah and Hamas - could shift the dynamics of the ongoing bloodshed that Netanyahu's government has been inflicting on Palestinian and Lebanese civilians over the past year. Cutting off Syrian support of Hezbollah ought to weaken their position in Lebanon to where the broken power-sharing system falls apart. Pacifying Lebanon ought to mollify Israel... although letting up on the ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank is going to require different tactics.

A lot of this is going to involve diplomacy - and money - and gods help us if any of this drags long enough until trump is back in the White House to break it all out of his greedy self-interest, but let's not stress about that just yet (get on Air Force One NOW Biden, and get to Damascus to hammer out a deal before Christmas goddammit!).

The most obvious thing to note out of all this is how broken Russia is right now. As Michael Scollon and Frud Bezhan at Radio Free Europe point out:

When Vladimir Putin took the reins of power in a post-Soviet Russia in shambles a quarter-century ago, he immediately set about restoring Moscow's status as a global power.

It took 15 years, but Russia heralded its military intervention in the Syrian civil war as proof of its return as a force to be reckoned with on the international stage.

Moscow leveraged that image to expand its influence throughout the Middle East and beyond as a counterweight to the West.

Now, the fall of the government of President Bashar al-Assad, a key ally of Moscow, has dealt a serious blow to Russia's great-power ambitions.

"Putin's military adventure in Syria was designed to demonstrate that Russia is a great power and can project its influence abroad," said Phillip Smyth, a Middle East expert. "Losing Syria is a huge slap in the face for Putin."

Assad's ouster represents not only a reputational hit to Russia but likely a major strategic setback.

Syria is home to two major Russia military installations: an air base in Hmeimim and a naval base in Tartus. The latter is Russia's only warm-water naval base and provides Moscow access to the Mediterranean Sea...

Reports were fast and furious on social media that Russia's fleet at Tartus sailed out days ago - abandoning Assad even then - arguably forced to travel the long way around to the Atlantic and Baltic Sea, as getting back into the Black Sea means facing an eager Ukrainian torpedo boat drone attack that would happily sink it (that is if Turkey reopened the path through Istanbul's waterway for them).

Moscow capitalized on its involvement in both Syria and Ukraine to sell itself as a power capable of challenging the United States, NATO, and the West in general while expanding its global reach from the Mediterranean to Africa and Latin America.

Following Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Syria became more of an asset for Moscow, experts say, while also presenting the challenge of maintaining military campaigns on two fronts...

Syria's fall quickly makes it clear that Russia can't handle a two-front war. Putin is so obsessed and focused on conquering Ukraine that he can no longer provide manpower or equipment or time to any of the client states he's been propping up across the globe. Russia - aside from their nuclear missiles, and there's even some serious doubt about that - is no longer a military powerhouse. Their political and economic influences are just as diminished.

In fact, he's been vacuuming up equipment and manpower from those client states - look at all the weapons manufactured in Iran, look at the North Korean troops "volunteered" to slam into the meat grinder in Kursk - in a desperate attempt to force Ukraine to a negotiation table where Putin hopes to retain his land gains to justify retreating and repairing his losses. Putin dares not make any more mass conscription efforts among his own Russian people without risking draft riots. And he can't provide any mercenary support - bye, Wagner! - overseas (especially now that his long-range bases are cut off).

It used to be from the Cold War onward that Soviet Russia - and Putin's Russia - were militarily and financially capable of spreading their influence and support across the entire globe. Putin was attempting to market Russia as an alternative to other global powers like France and the U.S. across Africa, but now those efforts seem empty and likely unfulfilled. Client states like Cuba and Venezuela are now literally struggling to keep the lights on. Other nations that could be allies in Russia's time of need - China and India - are now too self-sufficient and too powerful themselves to where they can stand on the sidelines and see what benefits them most as things fall apart.

There's a lot of chaos still out there - not just in Syria and in Ukraine - and a lot of it can get worse when a meddling and incompetent trump gets back into office.

Keep hoping the good things happen before then.