A Dark Memorial Blotting Out the Miami Skyline

I once wrote back at the end of trump's first turn at destroying America about how even as a failed president occupant of the White House he was entitled to a library in his dishonor. Even then, I dismissed the prospect because of several points (some of which proved prophetic):

Another thing to consider is the overall mess trump's administration has been. Archivists, historians, and other observers have been complaining about the lack of effective record-keeping in his offices. A combination of understaffing and unqualified hires contributed to a disorganized management system. When you consider the possibility of half the things trump and his cohorts did in the White House - the way they broke the immigration policies and committed potential human rights abuses towards children, for God's sake - we're facing the possibility that half the documentation for trump's would-be library will be missing, destroyed, or redacted into solid pages of black lines...

As a Presidential Museum, of course, it would make perfect sense. The museum won't need to answer to the demands of history or accuracy: the trump Museum would be a grand display of trump's narcissism. Every nook, room, and hallway filled with garish, gaudy tributes to trump's "greatness". A performance hall with a stage dedicated to any speaker offering praise and holiest-of-thous to a con artist, an assembly dedicated to the greed and graft of a corrupt overlord.

It's why I don't see a future trump Library as being anything more than an oversized gift store: Balanced between a Far Right bookstore selling trump ghost-written hagiographies at 100 bucks a cover, and a South Florida tourist trap shilling MAGA beach towels and trump-signed golf clubs...

With trump's return to office, the prospect of his Library getting done became more likely, and with trump basically claiming Florida as his place of power it was unavoidable that my home state is absorbing the potential damage of hosting it (via Kate Payne at AP News): 

A judge in Miami has dismissed a complaint challenging a college’s decision to gift prime downtown real estate for President Donald Trump’s future presidential library, clearing the way for the real estate developer-turned-president to build a towering monument to his political rise in an iconic stretch of the city.

A local activist brought the lawsuit against Miami Dade College, arguing the school’s board didn’t give sufficient public notice and violated the state’s open government law when board members voted in September to give away the nearly 3-acre (1.2-hectare) property in downtown Miami.

The site is a developer’s dream and is valued at more than $67 million, according to a 2025 assessment by the Miami-Dade County property appraiser. One real estate expert wagered that the parcel — one of the last undeveloped lots on a palm tree-lined stretch of Biscayne Boulevard — could sell for hundreds of millions of dollars more...

After the college first voted in September to transfer the property to a fund controlled by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet, the GOP officials voted to transfer the land again, effectively putting the property under the control of the Trump family when they deeded it to the foundation for Trump’s library. That foundation is led by three trustees: Eric Trump; Tiffany Trump’s husband, Michael Boulos; and the president’s attorney, James Kiley.

Eric Trump has pledged the future library will be “one of the most beautiful buildings ever built” and “an Icon on the Miami skyline.” Under local zoning rules, the best use of the property would be a towering condo building, according to one Miami real estate expert, who described the site as a potential “cash cow.”

That the local developers are picturing the library to be more of a condo seems apt considering how trump and his family view property as money machines for their own pockets. /sigh

As for Eric trump's promise to make the library "one of the most beautiful buildings ever built," you have to remember that the trump ideal of "beauty" is oversized crassness, and this week's preliminary reveal of what they want the library to be wasn't that shocking (horrifying, yes, but not shocking). As Cameron Adams at the Daily Beast documents:

President Donald Trump has shared the first images of his latest vanity building—a book-free library that includes a tacky golden statue of himself and shiny gold escalators.

The first look at the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, to be constructed in Miami, Florida, suggests the building will be firmly on brand for the 79-year-old. It is a mammoth skyscraper with ‘TRUMP’ emblazoned near the top and images of the American flag.

"Book free". Yeah. /Librarian headdesking

An apparently AI-generated video shows multiple aircraft housed inside the library, as well as what appear to be replicas of the White House’s Oval Office and the president’s yet-to-be-built ballroom, as well as a huge gold statue of Trump in what looks like an auditorium.

Linked from the Daily Beast article.

"ALL HAIL THE GOLDEN IDOL! ALL HAIL trump! HAIL! HAIL!"

The president’s son Eric breathlessly posted that he had “poured my heart and soul” into the project over the past six months.

“This landmark on the water in Miami, Florida will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest President our Nation has ever known,” he said on X... 

There's an AI-generated video - which just adds to the tackiness of the presentation - to which I don't want to link. I will share a few more pictures at least.

All images linked from the Daily Beast.

It's all just one big placard for trump's name and likeness, isn't it?

Also note how high this skyscraper is going: it's planned to be the tallest building in Miami, which is already a flat landscape due to Florida's geography. You couldn't avoid it even from the safe distance of Broward County, I'd wager.

I'd also wonder about the all-glass exterior, which can be common among Florida skyscrapers but not at that height, and not at the expense of whichever Category 5 hurricane decides to hit the place.

One more thing I just remembered: Can the ground support the weight of such a structure? It's not the bedrock of Manhattan Island, and South Florida runs the risk of collapsing buildings in this day and age.

One last thing to remember is how trump and his kids are grifters of the lowest order: Anything that can make them money while they produce little to no results. Early "fundraising" shakedowns have raised concerns:

This month, congressional Democrats including Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote to ABC, Meta, Paramount, and X requesting details about the money they pledged to Trump’s library project as part of their legal settlements, The Washington Post reported.

“Now it is unclear where this money has gone, exacerbating concerns about corruption that were apparent at the time of the settlement,” the lawmakers wrote.

The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund was originally set up to manage the money, but was dissolved last year.

A second nonprofit fund, called the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation, Inc., was then established. The fund reported in December 2025 that it had received $50 million, though it did not confirm whether that sum includes the legal settlement funds...

There's no guarantee that trump's fundraising is actually going into this tower of triteness. I wouldn't trust anyone in this project with doing any fundraising to build a parking garage in Miami, which would be of greater value than this blight.

All this seems to me is - yet again - trump eager to build an oversized, underused monument to his own decaying corrupt ego, one that will likely get torn down the second he's out of power because nobody else really needs it.

The Last Con of donald trump

This ending may yet include bangs - especially if trump's mobs decide to try their rioting on state capitols this weekend - but by most measures donald trump's empire is about to end with a whimper. Let us refer to Jonathan Chait's overview of trump's troubles over at the New York Intelligencer: 

...But now, finally, the end is at hand. Trump is suffering a series of wounds that, in combination, are likely to be fatal after Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20. Trump is obviously going to surrender his office. Beyond that looming defeat, he is undergoing a cascading sequence of political, financial, and legal setbacks that cumulatively spell utter ruin. Trump is not only losing his job but quite possibly everything else.

One crisis, though the most opaque, concerns Trump’s business. Many of his sources of income are drying up, either owing to the coronavirus pandemic or, more often, his toxic public image. The Washington Post has toted up the setbacks facing the Trump Organization, which include cancellations of partnerships with New York City government, three banks, the PGA Championship, and a real-estate firm that handled many of his leasing agreements. Meanwhile, he faces the closure of many of his hotels. And he is staring down two defamation lawsuits. Oh, and Trump has to repay, over the next four years, more than $300 million in outstanding loans he personally guaranteed...

If this were still 2015, Trump could fall back on his tried-and-true income generators: money laundering and tax fraud. The problem is that his business model relied on chronically lax enforcement of those financial crimes. And now he is under investigation by two different prosecutors in New York State for what appear to be black-letter violations of tax law. At minimum, these probes will make it impossible for him to stay afloat by stealing more money. At maximum, he faces the serious risk of millions of dollars in fines or a criminal prosecution that could send him to prison.

Trump reportedly plans to pardon himself along with a very broad swath of his hangers-on. But a pardon hardly solves his problems. For one thing, a federal pardon is useless against state-level crimes. For another, the self-pardon is a theoretical maneuver that’s never been tested, and it’s not clear whether the courts will agree it is even possible to do so.

And what’s more, a pardon might constitute an admission of guilt, which could open up Trump to more private lawsuits. Remember how O. J. Simpson was ordered to pay $34 million to the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, even after he beat the murder rap? The families of victims of the January 6 riot might well sue Trump for his role in inciting the violence. Trump might try pardoning himself to make sure he can’t be charged with criminal incitement, but admitting the crime makes it even easier to bring a civil suit against him.

The easiest way out of the self-pardon dilemma would be for Trump to make a deal with Mike Pence, under which he would resign before leaving office and Pence would grant him a pardon. Unfortunately for Trump, Pence is still sore about the whole “whipping up a paramilitary mob to lynch him” episode. ABC reported recently that Trump does not want to resign, in part because he doesn’t trust his vice-president to pardon him.

The assumption until now has always been that Trump wouldn’t really be convicted of crimes or sentenced to prison, despite the fairly clear evidence of his criminality. American ex-presidents don’t go to jail; they go on book tours.

That supposition wasn’t wrong, exactly. It rested on the understanding of a broad norm of legal deference to powerful public officials and an understanding of the dangers of criminalizing political disagreement. But what has happened to Trump in the weeks since the election, and especially since the insurrection, is that he has been stripped of his elite impunity. The displays of renunciation by corporate donors and Republican officials, even if they lack concrete authority, have sent a clear message about Donald Trump’s place in American society...

I have written before on this blog during his campaign and then in the aftermath of 2016 that this - his run for high office, his tenure as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) - was it for him, the last con job in a string of con jobs he'd been running since his days as a racist landlord.

Everything about trump - the pandering and yelling toward the media to PAY ATTENTION TO ME, branding his name atop every property he could get his hands on, the grifting, the cheap products, the fake online university, the broken casinos, the busted sports league, the overall drive to promote himself as a success with every failure trailing in his wake - was about feeding his ego and satiating his greed. Neither of which could be served with each endeavor he undertook, even the only successful thing he truly had, a barely entertaining reality TV show that was as fake as he still is.

Getting into the White House was the next big con in his game. Oh sure, the talk is that he hoped to lose to Hillary in 2016 and then use the outrage from that to market his own cable "news" network to rival Fox's. But he had to know there was a risk he'd win, which the Electoral College did for him, and which led to his gleeful abuse of high office to line his own pockets some more.

And like every other con game trump played out, he had no idea what he was getting himself into and how poorly he was going to mismanage the whole thing. Four years of it, surrounding himself with a rotating parade of Yes men (and women) alongside other con artists using his administration to pull their own fleecing. Anyone halfway competent at their job didn't last more than a year. Anyone who conflicted with trump's graft and schemes found themselves isolated, banished, and fired.

There are so many points of corruption in trump's tenure it reaches further past what I can comprehend from where I sit watching it all: The violations of Emoluments Clauses using his hotel properties to entice foreign lobbyists to stay at his places and pay him the honor of doing so; Forcing Secret Service and other government agents to stay at his resorts at overbilled rates; Handing out no-bid contracts to business allies with hints of kickbacks; basically trump and his family ripping off taxpayers at every opportunity to indulge in God-knows-what... 

And then failing to realize that sooner rather than later trump will be out of the Oval Office and unable to hide all of the con jobs he pulled during his tenure. Even if trump HAD stolen his second term away from trump, there was no sign that trump would actually start managing his lifestyle habits any better in terms of what he needed to do.

Every trump con, where he jumped from one deal to another, seemed like he was trying to keep two or three steps ahead of creditors that he kept borrowing money from in order to keep his failing empire of half-abandoned resorts and buildings open. Even before the pandemic hit the tourist (and resort) industry, trump properties were deep in the red. trump had been living on credit even as President Loser of the Popular Vote, yet it never seemed like trump was using his corrupt practices to pay off those bills. You'd think that someone with 300 million dollars in guaranteed loans - as Chait pointed out earlier - would make an effort to pay those loans back.

It's as though trump thought - still thinks - he can keep using this big con job of being President Loser of the Popular Vote to extend his deadline, spin out his dues to another day, another year.

trump rarely had to pay for the bills that piled up on him. Sure, he filed for bankruptcy often enough - at least four or six you can find on Google searches - but those were his businesses, never his own ass. trump could walk away from them and still imagine himself - lie to himself - as a success story. "Aha, I tricked the courts into buying my sob story," trump probably mused, "now I can use that as a means to start a new business and find more suckers to finance me."

But he's now at a point where bankruptcy court can't save him. While his properties and business holdings are likely facing financial ruin as before, this time trump is now a direct target to fail. trump's flaunted too many rules, crossed too many lines, failed to pay his dues in ways that demand legal retribution... and he's running out of lawyers and legal loopholes to save him.

trump is facing legal matters that can hit his own person. The sexual assault and defamation lawsuits. Criminal investigations into his Emoluments violations launched by either a fully-led Democratic Congress or by Biden's Justice Department (maybe a special prosecutor backed by both branches), still needed after years of courts arguing over who had standing to sue on the Emoluments (with majority control of Congress, Dems now have a chance). State criminal investigations as mentioned by Chait and so many others, not just the tax evasion in New York but now elections interference in Georgia and elsewhere.

These are things that are going to stop trump from moving on, finding another con job or tricking potential business partners into another half-baked venture to promote his name in big gold letters.

I kept saying this was it for trump, because this was too big a con job to pull off. trump in the Executive Branch was too high-profile and too disastrous with his inept bankrupt leadership to lead to anything else.

It was too big for trump to resign early on when he had a chance to escape. It was too big for trump to risk self-pardons on (because the exposure of accepting his own pardon would be an admission of crimes, and likely doomed to fail even in Republican-led courts). It was too big for trump to moderate himself and avoid any stupid efforts at overreach, to avoid committing any further crimes that would trap him once he left the legal protections of the Oval Office.

And now it's too late for him. trump is stuck in a trap of his own making, and he can't charm or bully or bluff his way out now. trump's made too many enemies in too many places, and he's running out of resources - money obviously, but allies and cronies especially - he can rely on to survive.

This is it for trump. No more con jobs. No more social media assaults. he's done.

And good riddance.

This Dark Memorial In Some Discarded Corner of America

(Update: Infidel753 was kind enough to include this in his weekly blog roundup this Sunday!)

It's something that pops up on Twitter every so often, ever since November 2016, essentially this one question most of the people I follow end up asking aloud: "Does this Shitgibbon donald trump actually get a Presidential Library?"

It will be a disaster, less a library or research facility and more a messy gift shop with merch. I can't imagine enough reputable librarians would want to work there.

— Witty Librarian In a Mask (@PaulWartenberg) November 29, 2020

As a professional librarian this is a question that interests me and compels me to answer. Well, the simple honest answer is "Yes" the Shitgibbon will be granted the ability to form his own Presidential Library. The situation is a little more complicated than that.

We need to note what a Presidential Library actually is, what purpose it serves. If we go by the laws - like the Presidential Libraries Act of 1986 - set up by Congress, the primary purpose of the library is to serve as a depository for the National Archives and Records Administration (the agency responsible for storing, indexing, and sharing official documents so the government can keep track of what the hell it's doing and so historians will have something to argue over 100 years from now).

Every administration, especially trump's as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice), will have a stockpile of papers, memos, agendas, agreements, Executive Orders, and other tidbits required by law to remained stored and made available for future reference. Personal notes and papers - diaries and private correspondences - are also considered for collections to add context (this is optional, some Presidential private papers remain with family or were destroyed after death). 

As the powers and responsibilities of the Executive branch grew, the need to store and archive grew with it. Sharing these responsibilities out to a library dedicated to that particular President (mutter grumble trump shouldn't fcking count but he does mutter mutter) is a way to keep things organized by era (and to keep it from being kept in one oversized warehouse constantly expanding to keep up with the storage. Look at your own closet, how stuffed is it with 10-20 years worth of books, utility bills, and winter holiday cards?).

To that end, the Presidential Library serves as an academic research facility, with study areas, meeting rooms, and workstations to allow visiting students/researchers to access the materials for their needs. This part will be most like a small college library with clerks, assistants, and full-time professional librarians overseeing access to the collection.

But in practice a Presidential Library is more akin to a museum (close cousin to the library). The facility will be open for tours, displaying memorabilia, artwork, and promoting themes and iconography prominently associated to that administration. A mock-up of the Oval Office will be built (it would likely be where the carpeting and furniture from that tenure ends up). Presentation halls for large gatherings to one side, gift shops on the other.

A perfect example is the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. It's best known as a popular tourist attraction where every four years the Republicans would host a primary debate (so that the candidates can suck up to the ghost of Saint Ronnie to appeal to their party voters as Reagan's Heir to the Throne) in California.

The thing is, while NARA provides some funding, that funding is very limited. Every Presidential Library - and there are several NOT supported by the National Archives, usually the ones before FDR when the agency started managing presidential papers - has to fund itself in some form or another (hence the paid tours and gift shops).

Many a Presidential Library started through private funding and the setup of a non-profit organization to manage/oversee that library/museum. The non-profit is responsible for finding the land, planning the architecture, paying the construction, and hiring most staff at which point NARA signs off on the deal and shuffles the collected papers to that library's storage shelves. (Some libraries, serving more as memorials/museums, are overseen by National Parks instead. There's still a non-profit overseeing each of those)

This is where it gets tricky for trump himself. his track record with non-profits is... um... colorful at best, criminal (at the New York state level) at the least. trump's ability - or even the ability of his family and business associates - to start such a non-profit has been crippled at the moment (that and he's too busy grifting over the "fake votes" argument to set up emails begging for library funds). I haven't seen a foundation/non-profit set up for a Presidential Library for him, have you? (seriously if you did and it's a legit one not a parody site, add the link to the comment section please and thank you)

Another thing to consider is the overall mess trump's administration has been. Archivists, historians, and other observers have been complaining about the lack of effective record-keeping in his offices. A combination of understaffing and unqualified hires contributed to a disorganized management system. When you consider the possibility of half the things trump and his cohorts did in the White House - the way they broke the immigration policies and committed potential human rights abuses towards children, for God's sake - we're facing the possibility that half the documentation for trump's would-be library will be missing, destroyed, or redacted into solid pages of black lines.

It's not going to be much of a Presidential Library if the President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) shredded the entire paper trail.

Another big question about a trump Library will be "where the hell are they gonna put that thing?"

Insert flaming dumpster GIF here.

Others have already planned out a trump Presidential Library... as being a long hallway of Twitter posts and nothing more. Another one has plans for a fake border wall and COVID memorial pool.

Okay, all joking aside, this is a serious question. Most Presidential Libraries place themselves in areas of most importance to the President it honors (usually birthplaces, colleges they attended, or their primary residence when they became President). Gerald Ford is unique among NARA-supported facilities by having a Library where he went to college (Ann Arbor) and a separate Museum where he grew up (Grand Rapids). U.S. Grant's Library is at Mississippi State University (!) rather than Illinois or other places he resided. Obama is setting up his Center (it won't be a library for some reason, more a museum and advocacy office) where he came to political power (Chicago) instead of birthplace (HAWAII, YOU BASTARDS) or college (Columbia or Harvard). 

trump's Library placement situation has already been discussed, among the more serious punditry, although it's still a guessing game at this point. It seems unlikely trump will get an opportunity to use his college - UPenn and its Wharton College of Business have not bragged about their connection to trump since 2016 - and his unpopularity in New York (city and state) makes it unlikely he'll find a place in his birth-town of Queens.

One thing trump has advantage of is he already owns properties across the states - his trump Towers, his trump Resorts - that he could arguably turn into tax write-offs um non-profit center(s) to build his Library. Mar-A-Lago has oft been cited as a likely spot: It's where he relocated his residency status in 2019 and more likely where he'll go into hiding from arrest warrants after January 20 until he can sneak a ride out to a nation that won't extradite him. Property laws in Florida are relatively protective for owners: Lawsuits that might otherwise wipe out every other source of revenue trump could have won't be able to touch his Florida properties. It is unlikely that NARA will approve it as an archives location, however: Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach is right between the Atlantic Ocean and Intercoastal Waterway, extremely vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding. It would never be a library in any sense.

As a Presidential Museum, of course, it would make perfect sense. The museum won't need to answer to the demands of history or accuracy: the trump Museum would be a grand display of trump's narcissism. Every nook, room, and hallway filled with garish, gaudy tributes to trump's "greatness". A performance hall with a stage dedicated to any speaker offering praise and holiest-of-thous to a con artist, an assembly dedicated to the greed and graft of a corrupt overlord.

It's why I don't see a future trump Library as being anything more than an oversized gift store: Balanced between a Far Right bookstore selling trump ghost-written hagiographies at 100 bucks a cover, and a South Florida tourist trap shilling MAGA beach towels and trump-signed golf clubs.

Any honest, reputable librarian with a Masters degree in Information Sciences is going to steer clear of the place. I doubt there will be a need for a librarian at all: Only hucksters need apply.

Where Zero Sum in Breaking Treaties Leaves The United States At Zero

So for my birthday today, the Shitgibbon decided to shit on international relations by having the United States drop its commitment to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that severely limited Iran's capability to build nuclear weapons.

This is in spite of lack of evidence that Iran is cheating on the deal (whenever they came to a point of breaking one of the rules, they reported the problem and complied), in spite of the evidence that trump and his hard-line foreign policy "experts" (cough Bolton cough) want war regardless of the facts or the cost, in spite of how our nation's most prominent allies (France, Germany and the UK) are against this move.

From my perspective, this is really happening because:

1) trump is obsessed with destroying Obama's Presidential accomplishments. Not just by eliminating Obama's executive orders and turning back regulations set by Obama's administration, but by decimating every foreign policy success Obama gained. The JCPOA deal Obama worked out - despite heavy Republican interference - was an international accord that signaled America's strength and the nation's commitment to reducing nuclear conflict, and did so sharing our stance with our allies in a way to keep those alliances healthy.

2) trump despises any deals made that he thinks he can get a better deal out of it. he's convinced by making this move it could force Iran back to the table with him, at which point he can bully out of them a sweet deal for himself - trump Towers in Tehran! - and make himself look good for the Nobel Peace Prize at the same go.

3) trump got talked into this - either directly or indirectly - by his Russian handlers working for Putin. Because getting trump to balk at international cooperation and deal-making gives Putin more political sway and prestige on the global stage. Who do you think Iran is gonna deal with now? Everybody BUT the United States, and in terms of military and foreign aid that means getting it from the likes of Russia and China more than the Western European nations struggling to get out of ties with a U.S. that's no longer sane.

Don't listen to me on this. Here's Adam L. Silverman at Balloon Juice providing better foreign policy insight:

Iran’s stated strategy here is to continue to comply with the agreement, keeping it in place with the other signatories – China, France, Russia, the UK, Germany, and the European Union. By doing so Iran intends to isolate the US. As future IAEA reports of compliance are reported, and as Iran maintains the deal with the other signatories to mitigate the reimposition of US sanctions and the imposition of any new ones, Iran will have positioned itself as the good citizen of the global system and the US, under the current President, as the rogue nation...

The US withdrawal from the JCPOA, despite the IAEA certifying Iran’s ongoing compliance because the President and his enablers don’t understand the agreement and how it works or because they’d rather go their own way and threaten military attacks and war, is another example of the devolution of the US from a superpower, the diminution of its power and influence within the international system, and the end of the American century. Here America First clearly means America Alone...

Despite the President’s zero sum, hyperbolic style of negotiation, the Trump Doctrine isn’t in play with the Iranians. They don’t care if the President feels as if he, and by extension the US, is being treated fairly. They’re not going to invite him for a summit, roll out the red carpet, and schedule a military review for his edification. They’re also not going to empower someone close to the government to do business with his companies... The Iranians are not concerned with a reimposition of US sanctions because they’ve decided that if they stay in compliance with the JCPOA that France, German, the EU, China, and their strategic partner in the region Russia will not reimpose their own sanctions or go along with reimposed US sanctions. Moreover, because the leadership of our British, French, and German allies personally intervened to ask the President to stay in the JCPOA and he disregarded their entreaties, he has further isolated the US from its traditional allies...

This is the end result of today's move: The United States can't be trusted to keep its deals, especially under a deal-breaker like trump. As a result, few if any nations will actively deal with us on any foreign policy or trade issue. We're already getting kicked around Asia for ignoring earlier trade pacts, and China's rebuffing any outreach because of trump's earlier tariff war maneuvers.

The United States is no longer a superpower nation. We used to be the only one standing after the end of the (First) Cold War in the early 1990s. Now we're crawling in the gutters screaming "America First" and wondering why no one's taking our calls.

And let's hear from David Frum. You know, the guy who NAMED the "Axis of Evil" that included Iran as a major threat in Dubya/Cheney's Global War on Terror. He's not happy about trump at all right now:

President Trump has just pushed the plunger on a sequence of crises...

...China has emerged as Iran’s largest trading partner. Its trade with Iran jumped 30 percent in the first six months of 2017. China has extended credits to Iran totaling some $35 billion, a significant sum for the shaky Iranian economy. Who will make China stop?

America’s European allies have been more cautious about expanding trade with Iran. Yet will their publics allow their governments to follow the despised and distrusted Trump administration into an escalating confrontation with Iran? Fifty-six percent of Germans describe relations with the United States as bad or very bad...

trump was going into this with bad footing to begin with: On bad terms with an angry China and on worse terms with European nations we used to rely on. And the insane thing, trump won't care:

Trump has never valued allies or partners. The only relationship he understands is one of power: He commands; others obey. But on Iran, the most relevant partners are precisely those who cannot be compelled to obey. Perhaps he imagines he can blackmail them: Join me in imposing new sanctions or else I’ll start a war that you will like even less. That is a bluff at serious risk of being called...

Frum also points out that Iran's no longer as isolated as it was, by having complied with the treaty on their own terms they have become a greater risk in the Middle East, but one that can't be stopped by bullying anymore:

The second is a crisis with Iran itself. One bad consequence of President Obama’s 2015 deal is that Iran is now a better-armed, better-financed adversary than it was then. Thanks in great measure to Trump’s own decisions, Iran has also gained a big victory for Assad’s client regime in Syria. It can retaliate against U.S. interests in all kinds of ways. It can escalate its terror campaign against Israel by using Hezbollah and Hamas. It can green-light a hot war against Israel in Gaza. It can also accelerate its drive for outright nuclear-weapons-state status...

While noted earlier that Iran promises to stick to the JCPOA - it profits them better as a public relations coup to stay away from nukes at the moment - if things do get dicey they can rebuild their weapons program... and with Russia and China as trading partners at this moment they can rebuild faster than expected (and in ways any bombing attacks by the U.S. or Isral can't stop). I don't think Frum's fears of a nuclear Iran is a major concern: What's more dangerous is just more instability in a region that's been unstable since the fall of the Ottomans.

The third crisis—the most ominous of them all—is a potential crisis with North Korea. Trump admirers are debating whether he should display his Nobel Prize at Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower. On the evidence of his Twitter feed, Trump has convinced himself that the Kim regime has been subdued, ready to surrender its nuclear weapons at a grand summit with Trump. He may soon face the rude shock of discovering that the Kim regime believes instead that it has bested him...

This is a side story I hadn't been mentioning often because it was too unstable to get any hopes up. Recently, North Korea has opened up to the possibility of stopping its nuclear buildup altogether, something that has gotten all the pro-trump hardliners crowing about their big stick of bullying tactics to get Kim to the table. Thing is, so far all the deals have been between North Korea and SOUTH KOREA, and it has more to do with South Korea terrified of the fallout (literal) of any U.S. plans to invade the NK. And where Kim Jong Un is talking about "denuclearization", some observers note he's talking more about "getting the U.S. out of Korea altogether" instead of unilaterally quitting his nukes. That means trying to get trump to agree to something - troop withdrawals from a war zone his hardliners feel they can win - that would play bad back home.

And that's just one possibility. Jong Un may be willing to talk, but for all intents it'll be hot air and making jokes at trump's expense while he sits there without a Korean translator to help him out. And it'll catch trump in a situation where he'll be forced (by his own twisted Id) to wage two wars - against Iran and North Korea - at a moment where the United States can't afford to wage even one.

And it'll be at a moment when the United States will have few if any allies to come to our aid. Western Europe won't help in either case. Japan and Asia will refuse to back an invasion of North Korea (and South Korea might balk fearing NK reprisals). The only nations we could count on against Iran would be Israel and Saudi Arabia, and even then those nations would likely get tied down by uprisings at home. We could even face dire reactions across the globe - at the U.N. level - of having nations impose sanctions on us for trump's transgressions.

What the hell happened to a nation that twenty years ago was the most powerful on Earth? We squandered it all, chasing demons in the Iraqi desert we had no sane reason to chase. We succumbed to a massive military budget demand that spent and spent on junk that won't work while wasting our manpower on lousy pay and soul-breaking endless battles between Iraq and Afghanistan.

We let our jingoism and fear of Other drive half our nation into a drunken rage against the rest of the world.

And now that drunken rage is lashing out in ways that even our allies find repugnant and dangerous.

We're no longer a superpower. We're a wrestling has-been, tossed over the ropes onto the announcers' table, forcing Jim Ross to scream BAH GAWD at the devastation collapsed onto the floor.

This is definitely not going to end well.

I once noted the Republican Party was dead. Well, here's the zombie, come back for the United States, and we're getting bitten and there's nothing stopping us from becoming a shambling ghoul ourselves...

Obama Forever

I'm gonna try to focus on the positive here.

I do have to admit I may have jumped the gun back in May 2016 when I wrote this bit about the two legacies of Barack Obama:

What the 2016 Election is turning into is a Legacy election. Given the overall stability and economic recovery during the Obama years, and given the great strides in women's and gay rights under Obama's executive orders, and given the passage of health care reforms that are beginning to show positive results - everyone should be seriously following Richard Mayhew's health care updates on Balloon Juice - voters are going to have to look at what's at stake this November.

I admit now that I was projecting: I was HOPING the election would be one where the voters would work to uphold Obama's record and deny the Republicans any chance to dismantle his tenure. To be fair, a majority of Americans DID vote for Hillary Clinton to continue Obama's work, but the archaic and broken Electoral College (and a helping of voter suppression in key states) made that moot.

Thing is, even in the wake of a disastrous election where the Republicans did win out and are now poised to destroy every last bit of Obama's Presidential acts... I still think Obama will still leave powerful legacies to posterity.

I pointed out in that Legacy article that the other thing Obama leaves behind is a broken Republican Party. Sure, they won the 2016 elections: but they lost every last shred of integrity, honesty, maturity, intelligence, wisdom, and long-term survival in the process. They ran on a platform of destruction: massive tax cuts for the rich a majority of Americans don't support, nuking health care that a majority of Americans are beginning to realize is gonna hurt them if it's taken away, rolling back civil rights gains, and discrediting every foreign policy success of the last 70 years (!) just to appease their new best friend Putin.

And having made this fantasy world of lies - where OBAMA was a FAILURE - the Republicans are going to try to reshape the real world to that fantasy. And they're going to find the real world doesn't work that way (and that Obama was more successful than they feared).

We're going to witness over at least the next two years attempts by the Republicans to turn Obama into a damned memory (damnatio memoriae), trying to take his name off every ledger, removing every policy Obama had a hand in crafting. They'll do what they can to darken every story involving him, that somehow Obama was wrong in his logic, that he failed to achieve even a modicum of success. It'll probably get to a point where they won't utter his name at all and will drop hints to the media to keep his name out of everything, as though erasing him from existence.

It won't work. Even if they remove Obamacare, even if they wipe out every civil rights gain like gay marriage, the Republicans can never remove Obama from the office of the President. People are going to remember what he did in office, and what he spoke to. The void that the Republicans are going to carve out will be a reminder to us of the shape of what the world ought to be, and what we can get back to when the Republicans - unavoidable in their fate, as we've seen this movie before - implode on their own failures.

We're already watching the Republicans stumble on their attempt to purge Obamacare/ACA, but while they're setting up the first stage of launch they're finding out that "Repealing" is harder than they thought: Obamacare isn't just a layer added onto our existing Health Care laws, it BECAME our Health Care laws meaning any removal is going to leave a gaping hole in our economy that Congress HAS to Replace. Oh they'll still repeal Obamacare because they've made their Narrative and dare not deviate from script, but they're finding out NOW there's a huge price to pay and the Democratic Party is NOT going to be there to cover their asses...

I doubt the Republicans and their Far Right Noise Machine will ever purge Obama from the history books. They may write 100,000 screeds accusing Obama as "Worst Ever" and they may fly off the shelves for their intended audience of haters, but the real Obama biographies and retrospectives will be read in the classrooms 40 years from now while the anti-Obama books get shipped back to recycling.

There's 60 percent of Americans who are watching Barack Obama leave office with a favorable view of him. The Republicans will continue to label Obama a failed President - "A Disaster! We're cleaning up his mess! Everything bad that happens from 2017 onward is STILL HIS FAULT!" - but more and more Americans won't buy that shit. We'll know better.

We'll remember Obama as a level-headed, optimistic, groundbreaking leader. We'll remember the jobs that did come back during his eight years of office. We'll remember he opened the doors for gays and women, that he tried to speak to our better angels on race relations. We'll remember the good - he was the one who gave the order to take out Bin Laden, he set a nuclear armament deal with Iran that the Republicans can't readily block, and he helped open up Cuba that can signal the end of 40-plus years of bad behavior between neighboring countries - and the bad - he didn't do enough for the Middle East in places like Libya and Syria, he continued a War on Terror using questionable tactics - on his foreign policies.

We're going to remember Obama's place in our culture and history, not JUST as the first African-American President, but also as a major geek, a comic-book fan and wannabe Jedi, who was cool enough to be the Adult In The Room and yet still cool enough to be a guy who can chill at a backyard grill and talk about how bad the Chicago Bulls have gotten.

And we're never giving up the Joe Biden memes, the ones where he's like a clueless yet lovable prankster uncle figure.

The Onion's not going to know what to do with itself.

For myself...

I've lived now through eight Presidents (starting with Nixon) of whom only six - Carter, Reagan, Bush the Elder, Clinton, Bush the Lesser, Obama - I have any memory regarding their eras. I became fully aware of politics my college years (Bush I) so since then I have to say that Obama has left on me the most sincere, effective impression. I've had my issues - positive and negative - with each President, and I've come to terms with both Bushes for the most part while viewing Clinton as intelligent and effective but flawed. Obama is the one with the fewest disappointments for me.

I revel in the fact that for ALL the slime and falsehoods aimed at Obama over the last eight years, he is leaving the White House with the cleanest reputation. For all of the "scandals" and investigations into his office, no one from his West Wing has been charged, indicted, convicted of crimes. There have been at most resignations for failures in policy - a Secretary for Veterans Affairs had to resign over problems with service and medical aid to our hospitalized vets - but I view those as steps towards accountability.

Obama never had anything on the scale of an Iran-Contra, or the S&L Bailout, or a Lewinsky sex scandal, or a number of officials getting charged and convicted over corruption or other criminal wrong-doings. The Far Right thrilled to such things as Solyandra, Fast and Furious, and BENGHAZI ZOMG, but even their partisan witch-hunts turned into nothingburgers (problems that had more to do with a corrupt or broken Congress, or far down the chain of command among corrupt or inept grunts that the White House had no control over).

Obama, who crawled through a river of Republican shit and came out clean on the other side.

Today, he's leaving office for good. Eight years gone. Where did the time fly?

I can't rank Obama at the moment compared to all the historical Presidents - I dread knocking Truman out of the Top Ten - but he's got to well up there in the Top Twenty (out of 44), and likely well above Clinton, his closest contemporary.

To hell with the incoming administration. I'm doing my best today to not even mention the name.

I'm now living by one simple mantra.

Obama is STILL my President.

Update: Obama is starting up the Presidential Library project on his Obama Foundation page.

I GOTTA SEND IN MY LIBRARIAN RESUME!

The Two Legacies of Barack Obama

One interesting side note about the 2016 Presidential campaigning is how in the midst of all this Barack Obama's popularity numbers are going up. From AlterNet:

Barack Obama is getting more and more popular of late. A new Bloomberg Politics poll puts his job approval rating at an even 50 percent, a six-point jump from the survey they conducted in November. His favorability rating spiked nine points, all the way up to 57 percent. On specific issue areas that have been troublesome for the president in the past, like the economy and health care, his approval rating is inching up towards 50 percent. He’s getting positive marks for nominating Merrick Garland to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the late Antonin Scalia, and nearly two-thirds of the country supports his push to have the Republican-controlled Senate hold hearings on the nomination.

Just to note, Obama's favorables have tended to be steady throughout the 8 years he's served as President (check the chart to RealClearPolitics tracking since 2010). He's barely dropped into the high 30s in specific polls at any given week and has for the most part stayed in the mid-45 percentile. There's a couple of reasons for that: 1) all of the opposition from Republicans/conservatives who didn't like him or his policies, and 2) a good number of Far Left progressives who were unhappy Obama never went far enough or fought harder on certain issues. Every President, you gotta admit, have had detractors from both sides. You can't please 'em all...

What's striking is how steady and stable that chart really looks. Yes, the numbers go up and down, but they do to a near mathematical precision of fluctuations and never show any abnormal spiking (the high numbers in 2010 are due to the freshness/hope factor of the voters giving a new President a pass for the first year in office).

If we compare Obama's performance numbers to other modern Presidents, we'd see his overall approval is actually pretty average.

Compared to Bill Clinton - a remarkably popular President in spite of the sex scandals - and Ronald Reagan - as popular as Clinton ever was, but suffering from a major scandal in the form of Iran-Contra - Obama is running average and below their approval numbers. Compared to Bush the Lesser, Obama is way above Dubya, and a lot of that was due to Dubya's second term being an unmitigated disaster of bad wars, mishandling of deadly natural disasters, and economic collapse.

Obama has been the steadying presence, both in terms of personality and performance. He's remarkably cool (and geekish) and low-key as a person, yet undeniably focused on getting work done on foreign and domestic issues. As a result, his numbers reflect the slow-and-steady elements of his administration.

So why the upward spike now?

One thing that might explain why Obama's popularity is going up now is because we're getting to the point where his legacy is under review, and in direct comparison to those who would succeed him in office. If you compare to Reagan's numbers on that Pew Research chart for example, his approval numbers went back up during 1987-88 as his last year became a moment to review Reagan's impact and his looming legacy. Back to AlterNet:

On the Democratic side, there’s been no real effort by either candidate to distance themselves from Obama. Quite the opposite, in fact. Hillary Clinton has been running hard on the idea that she represents a continuation of the Obama policy agenda. Bernie Sanders, while more critical of Obama on trade and health care, still makes clear that he broadly supports the president and his policies. Having both candidates embrace the president and promote his agenda helps remind Democrats why they liked him in the first place...

...Speaking of Republicans, it’s probably safe to assume that their primary is also helping Obama. The front-runner is galumphing about on the national stage and insulting just about every minority group as he encourages violence at his rallies and picks petty fights with women on TV... The entire process has been dominated by petty squabbling, personal attacks, and unguarded extremism, most of it driven by Trump’s Twitter feed. Even if you’re not inclined to be of fan of Obama’s, you probably can’t help but look at the GOP primary and think “well, he’s not as bad as these fools...”

He's also making a very marked contrast to his biggest opponents in Congress. Obama's fight over getting Garland nominated to the Supreme Court - where the Senate is openly refusing to even meet the judge - is a clear reminder of the high level of obstruction this Republican-controlled Congress has been generating to stall and deny anything Obama wanted for the nation.

If anything, Obama's critics on the Far Left have to be letting go of their disappointments in him. Add to that a growing number of Independents and Moderates who are looking at the future possibility of a President Trump, and suddenly realizing that maybe overturning the 22nd Amendment and keeping Obama for a third term is a good idea. Hence the uptick in Obama's job approval numbers.

What the 2016 Election is turning into is a Legacy election. Given the overall stability and economic recovery during the Obama years, and given the great strides in women's and gay rights under Obama's executive orders, and given the passage of health care reforms that are beginning to show positive results - everyone should be seriously following Richard Mayhew's health care updates on Balloon Juice - voters are going to have to look at what's at stake this November.

Strengthening the Democratic platform is the fact that whomever wins the nomination - Hillary or Bernie - is going to run strong on the idea that Obama's policies and positions - which are turning out to be popular with a majority of American voters - will be safe in Democratic hands. That whomever it is, that Democratic candidate is someone who will build on Obama's legacy rather than tear it down.

And that's the one Legacy Obama will leave behind when he leaves the Oval Office.

The Second Legacy Obama will leave behind is the wreckage of a once-powerful political party in his wake. The Republicans have been acting as obstructionists and denialists for eight straight years against Obama, leading up to clear acts of sedition and un-Constitutional behavior that even their Far Right media apologists can no longer explain away.

And now the Republican Party is facing its greatest internal conflict ever since the 1964 Goldwater uprising. Their own habit of purging out RINOs has crippled their leadership and ability to think outside of the Far Right mindset. The policy of obstruction has gotten to the point that they are exposing their Senate candidates to angry voters who will blame them for blocking a viable SCOTUS nominee over partisan excuses.

Topping it all is the likelihood of a monstrously unpopular public figure in Trump winning their Presidential nomination... and then leading the party to a massive Popular vote thumping in November that could well adversely affect the entire GOP ticket. All because the Republicans and their media cohorts spent 8 years demonizing Obama rather than work with him, thus creating a toxic environment of denial and ignorance within their own bubble that turned against their own.

Why this becomes Obama's second Legacy is due to the reality of what the Republican Party is going to be like after 2017: are they still going to be stuck in Denial mode, happily spewing and eating their own lies about how wrong and unpopular and evil Obama was; or are they finally going to wake up to the reality that it's not 1985 (or 1955, or 1925, or 1855) anymore, and that they need to purge themselves of their more hateful (and deceiving) elements in order to function as a political party again?

The Republicans' future all depends on how they come to terms with Obama. If they can't, they have no future. They'll just be stuck in the same repeating loop of hatred and denial and fear, while out here in the Real World the rest of us will be moving on and building on the foundation Obama leaves us.