Marco Rubio, the Donald’s Secretary of State, was all over the tube last Sunday trying to logically explain what is happening in the peace talks, but forever frustrated by Trump’s affinity for the big lie. Trump has lied so definitively over his public career that there is no longer any truth to pursue. When Trump says that he will commit to greater sanctions, we and the rest of the world knows it’s a lie and that he will say just the opposite tomorrow. Faced with this situation, Rubio has nowhere to go, even though his intentions are as pure as one can find in the Trump government. His ability to make anything work in Trump’s world of lies is all but non-existent.
Look, Trump wants a Nobel Prize and that’s really what his whole presence in the peace process is about. He also needs to wave a distracting flag in front of those who are too interested in his involvement with his pedophile buddy, Epstein. Putin handed him the flag and now he’s sort of obligated to do something with it. Unfortunately, the guy who wrote (sort of) The Art of the Deal wasn’t up to reading it, and has no idea what to do about Putin. So far, we have seen no indication that Putin is willing to give back any part of Ukraine, so what’s really happening is Zelenskyy is hung out to dry, and Trump looks like a fool who has been completely duped.
*****
Since the beginning of the Trump administration, sixteen major military officers have been fired or reassigned to insignificant jobs.
This is unprecedented in Pentagon history. What’s even more disturbing is that a disproportionate number of them have been women, leaving the officer class without a single female representative among our current command. Would I be mentioning this if Trump weren’t president? Probably not, but the unfortunate truth is he is president and because of that every odd move is suspect. In this case, it’s definitely about the fact that women are being removed from high command. The equally abhorrent fact is Trump’s people are molding a white, male military command structure, which will set us back socially, intellectually, and militarily over half a century.
*****
One of the most frightening facts that has come out of the new Trump presidency is that in the time since Trump began his run, the Democrats have lost over 2 million votes, which have all gone over to the Republicans. That’s a shocking number in so small an amount of time, especially considering the fact that Trump has been on the short side of almost all the polling done since the election. So, why have the Democrats lost ground to the GOP when they are faced with an opponent whose only popular position is in the control of the border?
Could it be because they have allowed their party to be taken over by its most progressive elements at a time when moderate governance is what is most appealing to voters? Trump just moved the National Guard into D.C., a move that should have every single American in an uproar, but he told the voters that he was doing it to save the city, which is overrun by crime, an outright lie, but he has lied so much that voters just don’t pay attention anymore. Nor do they realize that he has picked the most important issue on which to move. Sure, there’s a lot of noise made about the border, tariffs, voter registration, medical insurance, and a lot of other things, but nothing gets the public attention like crime, because whether or not it has touched us as individuals, we’re vulnerable in brutal and dangerous ways, and papers like the NY Post love to play it up.
The liberal wing of the Democratic party has played the crime card completely wrong, not because they had the wrong interpretation of what’s good and what’s bad, but because they had the wrong interpretation of what’s important and what’s not from the voter’s point of view.
Back before Trump’s first term in office, when progressive legislators looked at the criminal justice system, they saw a government process that had broken down and they saw a fix that would help alleviate the faults of the bail system, so they pushed legislation to that end. But when the voters looked at the failing system, they saw one in which the courts weren’t doing anything to keep them safe. They didn’t care about criminals’ rights. They cared about their own and their family’s safety. So, when the same legislation that helped those in the system get their fair shake also endangered the victims of those criminals it was helping, the voters said, “screw the criminals, I want my kids to be safe,” and they ended up accepting Trump’s National Guard on the streets of D.C.
When NY GOP Rep Mike Lawler was asked about the National Guard in NYC, he jumped to the fact that most criminals are released to commit the same crimes over and over again. What we need are laws that protect the innocent from the career criminal. Sure, we need to also protect the rights of the accused, but when an individual is accused, over and over, of illegal acts, there comes a point where we realistically have to recognize that individual as the problem itself. Recidivism is a major part of the criminal justice system and many of the solutions that have been proposed to alleviate it are a big help, but recidivism is basically criminals committing the same crime because they were not taken off the streets when they committed that crime in the first place. This system-wide failure to recognize the responsibility for repeated criminal activity seems to evade our progressive legislators and hands a very appealing platform to the GOP.
*****
The nonsense between Donald Trump and his favorite police force, otherwise called our National Guard, has gone on far too long. Sure, he can get away with his bullshit in D.C. because D.C., unlike other American cities, isn’t a part of any state but is a federal entity of which the president is the governing officer. This isn’t true of LA or Chicago or New York or any other city in the country, so whereas it’s legal for Trump to be calling the Guard into the capitol, it wouldn’t be so in any other American city. But that’s not the only consideration. The Guard is trained as a fighting force that the President can call into foreign conflicts when he doesn’t want to use our regular armed forces. There can be many reasons for this but none of them are a high murder rate.
So why does Trump think the Guard is a better anti-crime force than regular police? That he’s dumb as a post isn’t a good reason. Spending money on the National Guard instead of hiring extra cops is dumb and counterproductive. So why is he doing it? Because he knows that armed troops in the streets will eventually end in a conflict with the local citizens and that will lead to something bigger, like Federal troops usurping the responsibilities of a freely elected city government, and bingo, Trump will have established a Federal takeover of a state municipality, creating the building blocks of a coup.
Such a situation will lead to escalating demonstrations across the country, giving Trump the excuse to seize local power, much as the National Socialists did in Germany in 1939, leaving us, as it did Germany, with a firmly established dictatorship and Trump with the need to grow a small mustache.