February 2025 Archives

Dear America,

 I've made it pretty clear how I feel about Donald Trump.  That being said, I have no objection to a RIF (reduction in force) in the federal civil service as long as it is done rationally and without impairing the performance of government agencies and services, but there's the rub.  As with most everything Trump does, a lack of forethought and rational objectives taints the process we are going through now.  If I have to chose between Medicaid and foreign aid, I will chose Medicaid for those Americans in need.  But if I have to chose between the Centers for Disease Control and an increase in defense spending, I will chose the CDC in the hope that it can create vaccines we need when we need them rather than the $1,000 toilets that the defense department is alleged to have bought in years gone by, which brings me to Republican memes.

You may have noticed that whenever a Republican is asked about something like the priorities driving Trump's actions, especially the questionable or even bizarre ones, the first response is that Joe Biden caused the problem at issue whether the etiology of the problem is significant or not, and for that matter, whether Biden even had anything to do with it.  Inflation is a world-wide problem, this round of which started with the pandemic and supply chain problems internationally.  Biden administration acts and policies had nothing to do with it, but Trump and his party are still campaigning against Biden whether out of shear pettiness or invidiousness, in either case attempting to distract from the dubiety of their own positions on the subject.  Trump said he would bring prices down starting with his first day in office, but he has done no such thing...or for that matter even made any effort in that regard.  For that matter, he also said he would end the Russo-Crimean war on his first day in office, but so far, he has just made it a bigger mess, but I digress.  A second pervasive Republican meme is that they are addressing fraud and abuse in the federal government by ending programs and contracts.  But you'll notice they haven't produced much in the way of evidence of such problems, nor have they even mentioned ones like the thousand dollar toilet I just referred to or the fact that they are proposing to increase the defense budget by hundreds of billions rather than rooting out gouging by suppliers and cost overruns on defense oriented projects like new weapons and aircraft.  They would rather focus on Medicaid than the defense department when they contemplate budgetary constraints.

When it comes to Trump's aversion to Zelensky and Ukraine, and his extolling of Russia's dictator, Vladimir Putin as well as the fact that Putin started the war, not Zelensky, they don't bother to take a position.  They just side-step the question and find a way to deflect the conversation to Joe Biden or proffer some bogus new issue that has nothing to do with Trump's apostasy relative to the American ethos on the subject of kleptocracy, tyranny and autocracy, probably because Trump admires Putin and aspires to being just like him.  And I've never heard a Republican come up with a rationale for Trump's claim that Ukraine started the war.  But their unconditional fealty to Trump is always on display, which is the last thing I want to talk about today.  Trump is a miscreant, a pathological liar, a narcissist, a braggart and so many other things that are at least detestable, but certainly odious.  That being said, he couldn't be where he is, that is in the White House, if it weren't for Republicans, both office holders and voters of the party.  Somehow, that plurality of the electorate has justified their support for a despicable martinet who extols white supremacists and dictators and vilifies their victims.  They putatively advocate for virtue and condemn the lack of it in everyone but Trump, and it is that hypocrisy that puts our nations centuries of "truth, justice and the American way" in jeopardy.  

Make no mistake, this is no defense of Trump nor is it a minimization of his villainy.  Trump is a plague that we, as a nation may not survive.  But he is not a plague, nor is the Republican refusal to stand on venerable American principles, something about which we have no control, and that is my point today.  The mid-term elections are coming up in 2026, less than two years from now.  All we have to do is resist the degradation of American virtue until then and we can save ourselves at the polls.  The open question is, will we?      

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

 When I turned forty, I realized that even though I had considered myself an adult since about the time I graduated from college, I had made quite a few immature choices over the prior fifteen or twenty years.  But I determined that as of the beginning of that decade, I had finally arrived at maturity.  At that point I resolved that I would perform a retrospective on my life every ten years with the specific purpose of assessing my maturity since I had been so mistaken in my self-evaluation in the past.  Well fifty came along with me thinking over the past decade that I was my fully matured, actualized self and I recognized in my decade's review that I had been no such thing over the past ten years, but I opined once again that I had finally become a fully developed adult.  However, I recognized that the real test would be my sixty year review, which came soon enough.  To my surprise, once again I was not satisfied with my level of maturity, and I certainly hadn't arrived at the sagacity I thought maturity surely entailed when I was fifty, but once again I felt that I had achieved the goal that I believe we should all strive for: the wisdom of age.  But guess what I concluded when I reached seventy.  Despite the confidence I had granted myself that I was at last fully mature at sixty, the ensuing decade made clear that I still hadn't reached the justified self-confidence in my maturity that adulthood entailed.  Now I am approaching eighty, but I gave myself no pass on my level of sagacity when I assessed myself at seventy.  On the occasion of that review of the previous decade, I took a major step toward my goal and reserved judgment, and as I sit here typing, I recognize that I have a little less than two years to achieve my goal.

I hadn't thought about those assessments until last week when I saw what Pete Hegseth and Jimmie Vance said in Europe.  I admit that I had been previously aware of their bombast and their conceit of wisdom, but I assumed that ascension to high office might have humbled them and endowed them with at least the modicum of judgment required to understand that you don't have to let every thought you have fall out of your mouth.  That assumption was unjustified.  Hegseth started by addressing most of the grayed heads of Europe that they had no business expecting that Ukraine could become a NATO member and keep its territory.  And then came Vance informing those same grayed heads that they didn't understand their own democracies, and that they had to allow a place at the decision making table for the reactionary political forces, like Germany's neo-Nazi AfD party, that were emerging in their nations, tacitly alluding to the MAGA constituency in this country as if their victory in one election was the equivalent of permanent hegemony.  Both of them effectively bragging about their personal wisdom by presuming to cajole those to whom the people of Europe had entrusted their governance, rather than garnering some claim to the kind of prudence that "the people" of the countries of the world attribute to their leaders embarrassed us at home in America with their arrogance and presumptuousness.  These two callow would-be political hotshots showed that the United States could no longer be relied upon for wise leadership, but rather had to be taken with a grain of salt, maybe such as might be distilled from the "Gulf of America."  Between the spectacle that Donald Trump has rendered our presidency and Trump's delegation of the responsibilities of governmental leadership in our country--Musk at the DOGE and Bove III at the Justice Department, for example--these two presumptuous barely post-adolescent, callow whelps felt qualified to lecture men and women with multiple decades of responsibility in positions like theirs in their pasts.  Hegseth and Vance went abroad and evinced the very qualities, the sanctimony for which Americans are reviled in much of the world, and rightly so.  Who are we to tell the world what is right and what isn't when we are now deeply entrenched in an effort to show it that we don't know, and we're proud of it as well.

All of this is not bound to end well in my opinion.  I believe that our economy will wax plutocratic and our government will become more and more oligarchic as time passes and as Trump purges the American beurocracy of all who disagree with him.  And if people think inflation is a problem now, wait until the tariffs kick in and a trade world war starts in earnest.  In the words of Bob Dylan, a hard rain's gonna fall, but don't blame me.  I didn't vote for him. 

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

 I read the opinion section of the New York Times yesterday and I was somewhat dismayed by the tenor of normalcy that pervaded the commentary offered there.  Of course it was critical of Trump and of his position on everything he is doing in the way of usurping the power of others, including both houses of congress.  Like the authors of those pieces, I am not surprised by the fact that the hegemonic Republican Party has been co-opted and cowed by Trump's naked bullying.  They are poltroons to a man and woman, and they are opportunists to the quick.  The combination must have made Trump's mouth water when he decided to run for president again.  His party--and I reiterate...HIS party--was kneeling before him waiting for the opportunity to kiss his ring, and they were obviously committed to suffering his abuse in the hope of self-service.  The executive orders for the conduct of government business in ways that would have seemed straight out of some perverse fairy tail about a dysfunctional and tyrannical king before Trump walked back into the White House have poured down upon the nation like a pure acid rain, but the critics seem not to be noticing that this isn't just some aberrant behavior on the part of an aberrant personality.  They seem to be taking all this to be a blip in our history rather than a turning tide.  But let me make an analogy in the hope of shaking our polity out of its relative ennui.

Suppose that the Gaza Strip had another name.  Suppose it was called, say, the Sudetenland.  I'm sure you see where I'm going with this, but let me finish.  Now say that the West Bank of the Jordan River had another name too.  Let's say it was called, um, Ethiopia.  Finally, let's say that Trump's minion wasn't running something called DOGE.  After all, that was the name of the mayor of Venice in the old days, and I'm leaning toward something more suggestive of reality.  Let's say the DOGE was actually called, the Schutzstaffel, otherwise known as SS.  If you think about these allegorical references in terms of what is being done now under the putative aegis of the presidency, it all suggests another insinuation of illicit power that turned out to be not so innocuous, and certainly not benign.  You see where I'm going now, don't you.  What I'm saying in case you don't is that all of Trump's misappropriations of power may be as insignificant as the critics think they are.  It may be the case that Trump is just making psychotic gestures the way any megalomaniac would and in the final act, he will retire from the scene and his successor will assume the duty to undo all of Trump's pathological gestures.  I'm hoping that too...just like the opinion writers in The Times.  But my fear is that soon the press won't be so free to publish such overt criticism, polite as it may seem, for fear of the law suits that Trump has already begun filing against members of the press and news organization threatening to thrust his critics into financial ruination if they make too fine a point of Trump's ominous behavior.  That's right, I said ominous, not just untoward or crass.  Donald Trump's presidency is foreboding, not just ugly or inconvenient, which leads me back to my analogy.

If you measure the mood of the country, even taking into account that just shy of 77 million voters elected Trump not by the "mandate" that he claims was but by a thin plurality of only about 1.5% of the voting electorate, you can't help but notice that there are a lot of people willing to adopt Trump's more vicious inclinations.  Then add the fact that in the current world, autocrats are not particularly unusual, and they seem always to have ascended to power by an initially at-least-purportedly legitimate election and you can see what we are looking at in our not too distant future.  You can also see that the nation's power source, our erstwhile democratic system, may not stand up to the subtly sub rosa baser instincts of that same electoral plurality that elected Trump, and in that light, the Sudetenland, Ethiopia and the SS evoke names other than Trump, Netanyahu and Musk.  And they evoke events other than balancing the budget and feeding and healing the poor of the world.  They dispel what could become the myth of American beneficence and our American experiment.  They become an ominous overlord controlling most, if not all, of the rest of the world.

Paranoia?  If that's what you think, I'm rooting for you to be right.  But if you feel the same apprehension that I do, I wish us all luck. 

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

 With each passing day, the Trump administration goes farther past travesty and that much closer to catastrophe.  As if the Canada-Mexico-China tariff fiasco wasn't enough, Trump added threats to Panama and Greenland, and now Gaza as if he never heard of international law.  The nations being threatened, as well as much of the rest of the world, reacted with indignation and repudiation of America's reputation as a force for law and justice resulting in what appears to be at least a temporary pause in Trump's imperialistic overreach, but I guess he got restless and bored.  Elon Musk's schoolboy staff of nerds at what Trump has denominated "DOGE"--Musk is reputed to have staffed his quasi-agency with a staff of twenty-odd year old tech vandals who apparently know no bounds and aren't really keen on prudent restraint or deference to law and authority--are now demanding access to the data and software that controls the issuance of checks from the federal government.  I am retired and live in part on my social security benefits, which means that a troop (as in monkeys) of precocious twerps are trying to gain access to the check-issuing mechanism that makes it possible for me to pay my mortgage.  They claim the right to peremptorily stop those checks from issuing, and I don't mind telling you that I am more than annoyed that my financial well being seems now to be in the hands of barely-post-pubescent smart-asses who think they rule the world under the aegis of Trump and Musk.  Who died and made them kings?

But perhaps worse is the fact that the Republican Party is acting as enabler by never making a sound about all this other than to say, "if you say so, sirs."  Rather, they sit on their fat, callow behinds counting the days until the 2026 election on the presumption that Trump's plurality will protect them in their bids for continuing tenure in congress.  I mentioned Social Security, and that program makes the point.  It is what is called an entitlement and it is paid pursuant to the Social Security Act of 1935 as modified by a set of amendments embodied by another act that became law in 1939 taking the program from the states and vesting its powers in the federal government.  If Musk and his Muskymouse club have a problem with the program, they should be talking to their congresspeople and senators about repealing the laws, but instead, they are demanding the power to stop the checks, which are the products of entitlement under established law, from going to the people who are entitled to them.  To Trump's credit, he has insisted that he has no intention of interfering with Social Security, and I assume that Musk and the Musketeers won't meddle with the program.  But there are other programs...functions of enacted law...with which they apparently do intend to interfere.  If such were not the case, why would they have gone to Scott Bessent, Trump's Secretary of the Treasury, to enlist him in ordering those who oversee issuance of the federal checks for all programs to give their little league team access to the programming and information through which the checks come into being and get sent to their intended destinations, as well as to the entitlement information and personal data of the recipients, which is confidential for a reason: prevention of its use by unauthorized persons in committing fraud, among other crimes.  Those checks also go to federal employees, soldiers and sailors, law enforcement officials, congresspeople and senators, cabinet members (who don't need the checks because Trump appointed almost exclusively billionaires for the most important cabinet posts), veterans entitled to disability benefits and on and on, and that's where the prospect of catastrophe comes in.

Suppose these juvenile delinquents and Musk succeed in interdicting payment of federal funds to the wrong programs...like defense and law enforcement.  In the immediate aftermath of doing so, little might happen, but over the course of, say, a year, imagine what chaos might ensue.  And if they interfere with the well being of the employees of the IRS, if tax collection stops or is significantly diminished, how will the government at large function.  If people don't get paid, they might not come to work, and if a thing like that eventuates, the national downward spiral could be, as I said, catastrophic.

I don't mean to be an alarmist...well, yes I do.  If you have a Republican congressperson or Senator, you might want to ask him or her what he or she is doing in anticipation of this wild usurpation of the power to govern.  After all, that's their job.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The newest outrage perpetrated by Donald Trump is his covetous display of lust for Gaza.  Never mind the will of the people of Gaza and to hell with international law.  Trump thinks Gaza would make a great Riviera for the United States to preside over while the Gazan population...well...goes somewhere else.  So he wants to annex Canada, invade and seize the Panama Canal and Greenland, and rename the Gulf of Mexico after us: the Gulf of America.  And then, he wants to seize Gaza and add it to what he perceives to be his entrepreneurial empire of buildings, name plates on other people's buildings and golf courses.  He's a Michelin Man shaped autocrat with delusions of grandeur like those of Napolean and Vladimir Putin, and he has an army of Republican poltroons behind him saying, "whatever you say, boss."  Trump is making of us a "natio non grata" in the rest of the world, and all the while he is clapping his fat little hands saying "goody goody," imbecile that he is.  My fond hope, and day by day a more and more credible prognosis for Trump world, is that come 2026, the nation, even those of you who voted for the deranged, despicable Donald, will see the error of your ways and throw him and his party out for good.  With each new Trumpian fiasco, that outcome becomes more likely.  My fingers are crossed.

My reason for applauding the Republican death spiral is that I see in that party a willingness to lie incessantly claiming a reality that favors their thirst for political power at any cost.  Mitch McConnell was interviewed on "60 Minutes" this past Sunday by Leslie Stahl.  She asked him about his statement on the floor of The Senate at the time of the second impeachment of Donald Trump, which by the way he voted against when the time came.  He said from the floor that Donald Trump was not qualified to be president and that he had precipitated the January 6th insurrection, which should disqualify him to be president again.  But then a couple of days later, while before the news media he vowed to vote for Trump if he ever became the nominee of the Republican Party again.  When Stahl asked him, in essence, what sense that made, his answer was, "I'm a Republican."  It never occurred to him that he might be morally responsible to heed his loyalty to the nation, and be an American, before honoring his loyalty to his party, and that is entirely consistent with what I see the Republican Party doing with regard to Trump, that and pursuing the self-interest in being reelected by other Republicans.  That is why I think they are bad for the American ideal and the future of our country.  They are strictly self-interested, and they see their party as the instrumentality by which they can pursue their individual interests.  The Republican Party is the party of "me first, you never."  And they lie unabashedly in the name of that pursuit.  That's why I dislike Republicans, and Mitch McConnell is the proof that I am right to.  He was the leader of the party for forty years, which means that he was blindly supported in his words and deeds by his party.  The party of McConnell is not good for anyone by its electees, and I hope that the members of the party who vote will see that over the next two years.  The Republicans are destroying us, America.  They are turning us into a Russian China.

Of course, if you ask a Republican about all of this he or she will just say that it is Democratic rhetoric and nothing more.  But I encourage you not to take my word for everything I have said so far.  Unlike the Republicans, I want you to think for yourself independently rather than toe any party line.  Just consider the fact of what Trump has proposed and if you can get by the absurdity of those things--the sheer reckless absurdity of proposing to annex parts or all of other countries either with their consent or if they decline by force--and if you see merit in those odious ambitions, ask yourself what that merit is.  Ask yourself how you would feel about China if Xe jinping proposed to do the same things, and America was to be one of the Chinese acquisitions.

China has already taken such positions with regard to Taiwan and Tibet, and it has become a confederate of Russia with regard to Ukraine, and hence, China is anathema to us, isn't it.  So why should we be permitted that same imperialistic goal with impunity.  Who are we that we should be able to do what we forbid others to do.  For all you evangelicals who voted Trump into office, "What Would Jesus Think?"  

Your friend,

Mike