May 2025 Archives

Dear America,

 When I think about our current political situation, I think in terms of the things Trump is doing that are unsettling, and often reprehensible; his standing behind the presidential seal while regaling his hundreds of paying guests for patronizing his bit coin scheme for example.  Millions of people are buying into bit coins all over the world despite the fact that they are ostensibly no more than a legalized version of numbers running, but legitimating the scam by putting the presidential seal on it, either by word or image is, to use two of Trump's favorite epithets, disgusting and disgraceful (Trump is big on "d" words).  And of course there are his executive orders and peremptory flouting of our courts as well as appointing cronies to high positions on the federal bench...I just heard a report from Hungary indicating that altering the courts is how Victor Orban initiated his usurpation of power...that are disturbing.  Then there is his vituperation of anyone who disagrees with him and the calumniation that goes with it to consider, and the list of despicable behaviors goes on and on.  But in the final analysis, the danger he represents isn't just the ultra vires acts and deeds he commits to enrich himself.  It's him.  He is so motivated by neurotic impulses that it is not his purported conservatism that is dangerous.  This is just my opinion, but I think it is that he is psychotic.

Consider the motives apparent in much of his public behavior.  He insists on demeaning Joe Biden whenever the opportunity presents itself, even when it is entirely extraneous to the topic on which he is speaking, which precipitates the question, why?  No one seems to talk about this, but his motive seems both obvious and quintessentially important.  Trump impugns people he doesn't like as "losers," and that is because he takes his own losses so personally to the extent of denying them even when they are patently clear.  Each one constitutes a counterargument to his claim to be the ultimate winner, which to him is next to godliness.  But in 2020, Joe Biden beat him profoundly--by 7 million votes, about three times what he beat Harris by--and that just can't be allowed to lie.  If not counteracted, that makes Trump a loser, and almost as bad, it makes Biden a winner at Trump's expense.  So every chance he gets, Trump invokes the Biden presidency as an excuse for his own failures and the adversity that seems imminent in consequence of his policies, including last quarter's decline below zero growth of our GDP and the anxiety our corporate leaders are evincing in consequence of his Hooveresque tariff policies with their extremeness and his vacillations.  And though he claims an enormous public mandate by virtue of his 2.6 million vote win over Harris, that is essentially an admission that Hillary Clinton, who beat him by approximately the same vote total, which was a higher percentage of the total votes cast, came out of the 2016 election with the public mandate, not him; another loss to account for.  In the final analysis, I think Trump is pathologically insecure, which makes empowering him dangerous.

In part, that insecurity may be a function of his relationship with his mother.  In at least one account of Trump's history, it was reported that Trump was sent to that military school as an adolescent because his mendacity and bad behavior were so intractable.  Trump's father doted on Donald, and in consequence went to see him often on visiting days at the academy.  But his mother refused to go.  It seems apparent that she didn't like Donald, and that may be a minimization of her feelings in Donald's favor.  Many believe that a boy whose mother doesn't love him is destined for emotional pain if not abject anguish, a kind of male Electra complex, especially when the maternal disdain is intense as Donald's mother's seems to have been.  The question that evokes is this: Is he a menace to society?  Draw your own conclusion.

As for me, whether his upbringing is the excuse for the way he is or not, I see him as malignantly nefarious and pathologically vain and venal.  His amorality is, and has always been even in his business career, a menacing danger to anyone he takes a disliking to.  And why that is a problem when it comes to leaving him in high office is this.  He is dispensing with due process regarding undocumented aliens now, but he has admitted that he hasn't ruled out doing so with regard to American citizens.  In fact, he is using the civil courts as a bludgeon already.  Are you an American? If so, you have the right to vote.  Use it with that in mind.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

 The apprehension, loathing and disgust I have felt since Trump was reelected has finally been transmogrified into abject consternation.  This "big, beautiful bill" nonsense was the last straw, even though it is not yet a fait accompli.  It bodes so ill for the nation that it now seems to me that the Trump administration is an existential threat to the endurance of our democratic ethos.  I fear we are doomed.

The tax portion of this bill is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to add $3.5 trillion to the national debt, which is already almost equal to our annual gross domestic product, or GDP, all in the name of enriching people who already have more money than they could ever spend, some of them hundreds of times more.  And I fear that this legislation, in conjunction with Trump's version of Hoover's Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, will most likely push us over the same edge that Herbert Hoover's governance did.  I'm guessing that some of Trump's plurality, including the pusillanimous Republican Party as a whole, takes solace from the deluded belief that Trump is possessed of some kind of wisdom that is guiding him in the direction in which he is leading us.  But regarding the debt, for example, that faith in a man who is and has always been nothing more that a snake oil salesman selling grandiosity out of the trunk of his limousine is disastrously misguided.  It has to be remembered with regard to the debt that Trump once called himself "the king of debt" during his dubious career as a businessman.  We can't forget that over the course of five or six bankruptcies, Trump made money for himself and his businesses by what I would consider devious if not nefarious tactics.  For example, when his casino in Jersey City, the precociously and vulgarly ostentatiously named "Taj Majal," had been run almost into business penury, Trump's management company floated a raft of junk bonds that it never wound up paying back, the proceeds from which were used in part to pay that very same Trump management company just before the corporation declared bankruptcy and in consequence failed outright.  Trump got paid by using the debt of one of his corporations for his own enrichment at the expense of the willing dupes who bought the debt he was selling.  To him, the presidency is just another Taj Majal debt scam from which he will walk away richer and the rest of us can go to hell as far as he is concerned.  More golf for him and consignment to the dumping ground of history with the likes of Rome, Greece and the Holy Roman Empire for us.  We, our nation, will play the roll played by the dupes in the Taj Majal caper. Who knows what will happen to America in consequence.

As to the tariffs, when Hoover attempted to use them for the same purposes and in the same modality as that in which Trump is employing them, they seemed to accomplish their purpose initially.  But within a little more than a year after the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent market vicissitudes, the worm began to turn, and instead of commerce turning in our favor, both imports and exports declined by more than half.  Unemployment began its rise from 8% in 1930 to 25% by 1932-33.  Efforts by other nations to combat economic trends just exacerbated them and led to the devastation of the common man constituted by  "The Great Depression."

Now add Trump's abuse of due process in the matter of deportation of undocumented aliens, who by the way are a major source of workers for American business and industry for which there is probably no substitute.  Compound that with his persecution of all those who disagree with him through both civil litigation and use of what used to be a somewhat honorable institution, the Department of Justice, which Trump claims was doing to him what he is now doing to his adversaries: "weaponization" of the DOJ and the FBI.  The fact is that, in his case the government was just trying to get back secret documents that he had flaunted to people like Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov (Trump read from one in the oval office, as shown on the news during his first term) and an ensemble of his sycophants, one of whom was writing an autobiography of Trump in the aftermath of his loss in 2020 (which reading he did on tape that also made the national news).

Of course you can add the Qatari jet, the crusade against DEI consideration, the dire reductions in entitlements like Medicare and SNAP, the food stamp program, which are included in the bill, Trump's bit coin venture from which he is profiting handsomely, and illicitly in my opinion, while in office, his sons and son-in-law using their consanguinity with him to make lucrative deals in foreign countries anxious to curry American favor, his plan to turn a country, Gaza, into a luxury resort instead of part of a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli war of attrition...and on and on.  I hope someone can show me that I am wrong about the future, but unfortunately, only time will tell in the end.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Donald Trump slid Ed Martin into the temporary post of interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, one of the most powerful positions in the Department of Justice, and as his nominee for the post permanently.  Now, Trump is sliding him out.  One or more Senators, including one or more Republicans, made it clear that Martin merits their censure for, among other things, his affiliation with a known, overt anti-Semite named Timothy Hale-Cussanelli, a January 6th protester and an anti-Semitic pod-caster who once adorned himself with a Hitler mustache.  Martin publicly referred to him as an exceptional person, who happens to be a one of the January 6th protesters pardoned by Donald Trump.  Martin also approves of the Trump pardons of those convicted criminals, which brings me to my point: Trump and Martin are birds of a feather.  Trump invited Kanye West, a notorious anti-Semite to dinner at Mara-Lago, suggesting that even though he is deporting pro-Palestinian undocumented aliens without due process for anti-Semitism, on the subject of anti-Semitism he's flexible as long as you agree that the 2016 election was stolen.  The two of them should start a new political party and call it "bogus claims "R" us."

With regard to the deportations, I believe that Trump is so blinded by his obsession with them that they will be his undoing.  Several courts have ordered them stopped and with regard to a few people who have been imprisoned as a prelude to deportation, and courts have ordered two victims released from their incarceration.  The courts have also ordered the Trump administration to "facilitate" the release and repatriation to the United States of another whom they mistakenly arrested and sent to El Salvador to be extra-judicially imprisoned as a terrorist.  So far, Trump has flouted the order by claiming that there is nothing he can do to facilitate that release, but the lawyers for Kilmar Abrego Garcia have been invited to file a motion for contempt by the presiding judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis. The reason for which she invited the motion for her consideration was that despite her order for the Trump administration to show her evidence of their efforts to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return, nothing that she finds persuasive has been produced.  Concomitantly, Trump and his minions have been mindlessly defending his administration's claim that they lack the power to do anything--according to a DOJ lawyer, they would "gladly facilitate his return" if he showed up at a port of entry by taking him to prison--because Abrego Garcia hasn't done his part, as if that absurd scenario were in Abrego Garcia's power to effect.  To put it concisely, if it's not too late for that, the case for a contempt finding seems to have already been made, and there is no doubt that Trump is behind it.  A cognate finding of contempt would qualify as a "high crime" under the constitutional requisite for impeachment.  But what would happen if such were issued?

My guess is that Trump would hold his ground, and his fate would then hinge upon when the finding went to the House Judiciary Committee: before or after the November 2026 elections.  That is the petard on which Trump is in the process of hoisting himself.  If the Democrats prevail in their effort to regain control of The House of Representatives, the committee would almost certainly impeach Trump and send the case to the Senate for trial.  Then the Republicans in The Senate would have to decide the issue with the 2026 elections in mind, and we all know that politicians like to stay in office.  So the threat to each of the Republican senators' tenures would just have been suggested by the house election results and the fifteen to twenty of them needed for the two thirds majority required to convict would have a conundrum; Who gets to stay in office, him or me?  My guess is that, poltroons that they are, the Republicans will chose self-preservation in the knowledge that Trump will be gone and never able to return.  After all, if a president refusing to obey orders affirmed all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States isn't grounds for removal from office, what is?  One must assume that the voters would answer that question correctly and vote accordingly.

Of course, all this is speculative.  Trump is a poltroon in his own rite.  He may relent in some kind of back-alley deal and get Abrego Garcia back to this country and then try to jail him in spite of the "withholding of deportation" order still in effect...in violation of which he was arrested in the first place.  And when the issue of contempt in that case comes up, Trump will get to tempt fate again, and who knows how long that would go on.  In the interim, Trump will continue to claim victory as he always does, but impeachment will still be a distant prospect.  We can dream, can't we?

Your friend,

Mike