As usual, Politico’s editorial cartoonist, Matt Wuerker,
says more in his drawings than mere words can, so I begin with his conception
of the present political chaos.
Little did I know.
I was just one of many pawns being used to carry out The Disrupter-in-Chief’s
“plan” of destroying our democracy from within. As his bizarre behavior and the ensuing bedlam
began to overwhelm everyone after the election, I was reacting with every
outrage by emailing or texting articles and thoughts to friends and
family. I’ve been duped, helping to make
“awful into worse,” adding my anxiety to what they too were already
feeling. I’m resolving to choose my
future messaging more carefully. So
forgive me my friends for these past indiscretions and just adding to what you
were already feeling, dreading, suffering, while watching this all play out.
We’ve already gone to the point of no return in Trump’s
second Presidency. If this was a story set to music (as dissonant as it would
be), the tempo is now approaching “prestissimo” and if not resolved in some satisfactory
way, it just collapses upon itself.
The numerous opportunities we had in our traditional
political system to prevent the obscenity of this 47th Presidency have come and
gone, two impeachments, not being able to bring him to trial for his culpability
in the Jan 6 insurrection and his attempt to interfere with GA votes, his stacking
SCOTUS with sycophants (Mitch McConnell deserves a special place in hell for
that), and now we are left with the utter chaos of cartoon character Cabinet
members, revenge plans, tariffs, deportations, and the final straw, DOGE and
the anointed Elon Musk.
I write as if Trump is in charge. He’s been called Putin’s useful fool. But I also think he is a useful tool for a
band of grafters, nihilists, right-wing zealots to whom the dim-witted American
Public handed the keys to the kingdom.
Democracy is now dying by a thousand cuts daily, much faster than anyone
could have anticipated, and being handed over to kleptocrats and kakistocrats. (“Like all good illusionists, the kleptocrats
know how to distract us from looking at their misdeeds and the kakistocrats
know how to distract us from their ineptitude. They do it by talking to us
about ideology and attacking those of their rivals. While we watch and play our
part in these ideological circuses, they steal. Or tinker with government
policies they don’t really understand.”….As quoted by https://carnegieendowment.org
and originally published by El País, June 18, 2018)
What’s to be done with sycophants such as AG Pam Bondi
who has decreed that someone who throws a tomato at a Tesla is a domestic
terrorist while backing her mobster boss’s exoneration of the J6
insurrectionists? What hypocrisy, but as
long as the American public is entertained, job well done!
The lonely anti-Trumpism voices are some journalists and a
fragmented Democratic leadership. The
Republican majority in Congress is complicit with its silence, ceding power to
the executive branch. The Judiciary now
seems to be useless, and he has cowed the nation’s largest law firms into
submission. Lots of luck getting legal
representation!
I’m almost resigned to the fact that if we as a nation
survive the next 4 years it will be purely by accident. To think that we’ve already alienated
alliances forged after WWII in these few short weeks. I’d be embarrassed to show my face in Canada and
Europe, and almost any place in the world.
During the weeks since the inauguration, I’ve been frantically
forwarding articles from the New York Times, even the Wall Street Journal, from
the historian, Heather Cox Richardson, and authors I follow on Substack, many
serious journalists and others best described as “acerbic humorists” who plant
F-bombs galore in their writing and therefore effectively channel the absolute fury
and helplessness we feel. I was an uninvited
curator of such news for friends, but really was intended to make ME feel good
that I was doing something.
But what to do with the gut-retching information I
normally send in some form? Perhaps I’ll let my frustrations play out in this
space from time to time, collecting them and posting when I reach a particular,
yet undefined nadir. I certainly don’t
want to set a schedule, like “the weekly list of shock and rage” although there
is guaranteed to be plenty of content.
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal thankfully
remain excellent newspapers with both seemingly drawn more towards the middle
from their traditional political extremes.
This is good as other papers such as the LA Times and the Washington
Post seem to be selling out, kissing the dystopian ring to avoid the wrath of the
“President.”
Unfortunately, the Palm Beach Post used to be a real
newspaper, but it has become a shell of itself with mostly syndicated articles. Its original editorial decisions are now subject
to local or political pressures. The Gannett Group, now the owner of the PBP, recently
dismissed Tony Doris, the PBP opinion editor of some 20 years, because of such
pressure. The NYT asked Doris to comment
and he said: “They’re afraid of their shadow. I think it speaks to a
misunderstanding or failure to engage with the mission of an editorial page.”
It is symbolic of what is happening all over the country
but his dismissal was a particular blow to me as he published my letters and
editorial opinions without much change; he seemed to welcome future ones. Now the venue of local newspapers is disappearing
as well; they are really controlled circulation advertising flyers. Any weakening of 4th estate has
dire consequences.
One feels as if one MUST do something though. I made an attempt to engage my Congressman
Brian Mast. He is an obedient MAGA
disciple. Yet I hoped a reasonable letter might make the difference. I appealed to his patriotism as a veteran of
Operation Enduring Freedom. As a
congressman, surely his allegiance to the Constitution would give him pause I
thought and as the Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee he might have
something of meaning to say about the administration denigrating Ukraine for
merely defending itself. Instead I got
what might have been an AI response, but nonetheless I sent a follow up,
pointing out the deficiencies of the response, not expecting a reply, and there
has been none.
The latest outrage which FOX and Friends and the administration
are whitewashing is the Signal messaging app security breach detailing plans
for the attack on Yemen. (True to the MAGA gospel of deflection, AG Bondi
declared that the incident will not be criminally investigated as “it was a
very successful mission.”) Talk about
hypocrisy, the Sturm und Drang over Hillary and her server, while rationalizing
the greatest breach of national security I can remember by the amateurs we call
our Cabinet, even inviting in a reporter and then saying he’s corrupt! The content of that discussion is
chilling. It’s like they were playing a
video game, replete with emojis of the American flag, a fist, fire, whatever. The
real damage (aside from the danger it might have caused our military) is
further alienating those European allies who will now remember an American
promise is only as valid as the administration that made them as well as the covert
hostility by this administration towards them. (Vance referred to the action as "bailing
Europe out again," while Hegseth accused Europe's reliance on U.S.
military might as "freeloading" and "pathetic.")
We need an opposition dream team to come forth, one that
can organize and coordinate meaningful protests, a team representing both sides
of the aisle: perhaps Beto O’Rourke, Tim Walz, Adam Kinzinger, and Liz Cheney? Each has spoken out for the truth and each is
currently out of politics. Some have
suggested Maryland Governor Wes More as a potential leader. His is a story of exceptionalism. Credible leadership is needed now
before it is really too late.
As I was concluding this piece I saw Heather Cox
Richardson’s most recent “Letters from an American,” with a particular passage
I would normally forward to many. So
instead, I quote it here. I’ve turned
over a new leaf!
The craziness going
on around us in the first two months of the second Trump administration makes a
lot more sense if you remember that the goal of those currently in power was
never simply to change the policies or the personnel of the U.S. government. Their
goal is to dismantle the central pillars of the United States of
America—government, law, business, education, culture, and so on—because they
believe the very shape of those institutions serves what they call ‘the Left.’
Their definition of
‘the Left’ includes all Americans, Republicans and Independents as well as
Democrats, who believe the government has a role to play in regulating
business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and
protecting civil rights and who support the institutional structures Americans
have built since World War II.
In place of those
structures, today’s MAGA leaders intend to create their own new institutions,
shaped by their own people, whose ideological purity trumps their abilities.