April 2025 Archives

Dear America,

 Every day that passes evinces not just the error of Trump's judgments but the peccancy that leads to them.  Yesterday he went from insisting that his tariff policies would never change to changing them after just half a day of watching the potential disaster that they had unleashed.  Secretary of Obsequiousness at the Treasury, Scott Bessant, praised Trump for "courage" after Trump, seeing the stock market continue the nose dive it had started two days earlier as it began to reverse early gains and resume that dive yesterday, reversed himself.  For Bessant's information, and that of all of the other sycophants our government now employs in consequence of Trump's insistence on personal loyalty from those benefiting from his largesse, that was not a display of courage.  It was pure craven self-preservation they witnessed.  Trump saw what I asserted last: that his tariff policy was a direct recapitulation of the Hoover policy that led to the Great Depression.  It's not that he saw that I said it that led to his tariff apostasy.  It's that it is obvious to anyone who pays attention to history.  It's that his vanity...his sheer conceit...would not risk riding the policy to which he purportedly was committed into history as the second proponent of a policy that had been proven to devastate the world.  Trump reversed himself, blaming that recantation on popular trepidation rather than the fact that he had set the nation on a fools errand, out of self-serving motivation, not magnanimity.  He just doesn't know the difference between serving his fellow Americans and self-aggrandizement.  He is the embodiment of pure ego and conceit with feet.

But his minions continue to tout his pompous self-service as virtue for reasons of their own.  Trump has surrounded himself with blind loyalists who will say anything to stay in his favor because the alternative is the fate being suffered by two loyalists from his first term who felt compelled to publicly offer criticism of his policies and practices.  Trump's director of his cyber and election security agency, Kris Krebs, is now under investigation for collusion in the election fraud that Trump claims stole the 2020 election from him, despite the fact that, as Krebs says, there was no fraud at all.  And then there's Miles Taylor, who served in the Department of Homeland Security and had the audacity to write a book criticizing Trump and his policies relative to that department.  With regard to Taylor, Trump has sicced the DOJ on him to find anything he might have done, calling him a traitor, presumably because he dared to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, not Trump, which points to another of Trump's cardinal traits: hypocrisy.  He built his campaigns in both 2020 and 2024 at least in part on the premise that the Biden administration and the Democrats had "weaponized" the Department of Justice against him while he, himself, is weapon-izing that department through his blindly loyal minion, Pam Bondi.  Among other things, Taylor is alleged to have revealed state secrets in his book "Anonymous" while Trump denies the rectitude of the FBI's search of Mar-a-lago for the boxes of records that he had purloined from the White House when he left in 2021, even though there is audio tape of him reading to confidants from, and bragging about, a top secret document that was part of his purloined documentary loot. That is close to a definition for hypocrisy, but Trump is so brazenly autocratic that he doesn't even suspect that his hypocrisy is blatantly on display.

But while Trump's lack of awareness is folly, his desire to stifle criticism through illicit misuse of governmental authority is a fundamental threat to the foundational rights that secure for us our civil liberty: freedom of speech.  This persecution of critics is a giant step too far.  His desire to elevate himself to a Putinesque position of autocrat is daunting, but his misuse of government power to stifle first amendment rights is a dire threat, and he is brazen enough to be overt about it.  His 77 million member constituency seems willing to threaten the future of our democracy so as to enlist Trump to implement their unutterable agenda.  We are in deep trouble if his usurpation of government power for self service goes unchecked, but the Re-poltroon-ican Party shows no sign of caring, much less of acting to interdict what could be the end of the American democracy.

As I said last time, don't blame me.  I didn't vote for him.  But as I hope the rest of you will do, I intend to write about it and talk about it regardless of consequences.  I hope I'm wrong about all this, but I fear that I'm not, and I think you should too.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

This is starting to be discussed fairly openly and widely now, but Trump's egocentric obtuseness and the obsequiousness of those to whom he listens seem to have deafened him to the obvious; We are heading for a repeat of the Great Depression and we are going there gleefully.  You think I'm prophesying doom, but the historical parallels between the beginning of the second Trump administration and the one and only Hoover administration are startling and daunting.

Hoover was elected in 1928 and began his term in January 1929.  On October 29, 1929, the traditional account of the stock market crash begins, but the fact is that the market had started to wobble months earlier.  On the 29th however, a major decline in stock prices occurred, and over the following eight months, the market continued to decline until June of 1930, at that point having lost 89% of its value by some accounts, it hit its nadir.  Where we are right now is parallel to October 1929, and the question with regard to the market, and thus to the retirement security of many millions is, where will we be in December, eight months from now...but there's more to the parallel.

The following June in 1930, Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.  The Depression had started with those initial steep declines in stock prices of October 1929 and in an attempt to interdict the fall of our economy, The Senate introduced and Hoover signed the act, which put heavy tariffs on about 20,000 products being manufactured abroad and competing with American industry in that regard.  Among those products were some 30% of our exports to Canada, for which Canada retaliated in kind, diminishing those exports in commensurate amounts.  Of course, jobs manufacturing those products declined as well.  All in all, countries around the world imposed tariffs in amounts comparable to those imposed by Smoot-Hawley and the downward spiral began here and around the world.  The Great Depression was afoot, and it lingered over the world for a decade, beginning to abat only when FDR took office and instituted government spending programs to prop up the unemployed and we fought a world war, which ironically probably constituted the economic stimulus that the world needed to begin and sustain the long economic climb out of the hole created by the depression.  But that's enough of the history that parallels our future in my opinion.

The question now is, what can we...what will we learn from our past now that it is no longer in the active memory of the vast majority of not just Americans, but the citizens of the entire world.  In the thirties, the community of economic experts warned of the dangers of the course prescribed and taken by Hoover, Smoot and Hawley.  But did Hoover, the sine qua non for the bill to take effect, listen?  Of course not, and nothing has changed.  We have a president who thinks that he is smarter than all those who actually do know something about the subject, and his sycophants are cheering him on, which is like a sirens' song for our president, who loves nothing more than praise and obeisance...enough so that he never doubts himself, nor does he listen to the opinions of those who oppose his point of view.  The experts today stand no chance of prevailing upon the president to take a lesson from history.  He is committed to proving himself a Putin-style international gangster of whom everyone should be afraid.  He is motivated by what motivates every bully: power and the proof of it.  So the fate he is courting is the fate that we all shall suffer. 

You might wonder why I am writing this in the fashion in which I am.  I am not the only person who has opined this way, and as of now, it has availed the world of nothing.  So I have no illusions about whether I am doing something that will be availing for our society or the world.  This is all old news.  But I do have a motivation.

Since the election last year, I have been pondering the issue of why 77 million people, incidentally a plurality, not a majority, voted for a man who is very little more than conceit with feet.  His flawed (and to use that word in this context is to minimize its meaning) character is open and obvious to anyone who pays attention to what is happening around him.  But somewhere deep inside me I've been pining for the opportunity to say this.  When the worst happens, don't blame me.  I didn't vote for him.

Your friend,

Mike