Category Archives: Donald Trump

Donald Trump, national news

Our Union is broken

Donald Trump is going to lie about the State of the Union in a little while, so I thought I would get ahead of him and tell what I believe to be the truth about our national condition.

The State of our Union needs triage. It needs attention to repair the damage that Trump and his goons have delivered to the nation we all love. I cannot wait for what I know will be a cascade of untrue assertions. He will declare the economy is the strongest in human history, that our military is locked and loaded and ready to go to war, that Americans love him and his policies, that the border is secure and his get-tough immigration policies are working.

The Union is strong, he will tell us. It isn’t. Not at this moment in history.

I will declare that the Union can be repaired. It can be stitched together into the kind of government our founders wanted when they created the Constitution in 1789.

The rebuilding will take patience and time, as we will learn in real time that a structure can be dismantled far more quickly than it can be rebuilt. I am going to stand by my faith in the court system the founders created.

Trump has surrounded himself with a cadre of yes men and women. We have watched them lie just like the guy to whom they are faithful. Polling data suggest that Americans across the board — Republican, Democrat and independent — have had their fill of the lying. Therein might be our way out of this slop. The midterm election in November can deliver us from the evil of Trump, who has no working majority in Congress.

I will offer a word of advice to those who choose to listen to Trump deliver his SOTU speech: Don’t believe a single statement that flies out of his mouth.

Donald Trump

Trump drips with irony

Oooh, a recent campaign post by Donald Trump is so damn ironic that I cannot let it slide without a brief comment.

Someone who speaks for Trump inserted a claim against a Republican primary candidate and said the president accused another GOP candidate to be a “RINO.” Voters should turn away from this fellow because he’s a Republican in name only, and not the real deal.

In other words, if you are a Republican and you oppose Trump, why … you’re nothing more than a RINO.

Does anyone out there grasp the irony of that so-called accusation? I have been calling Trump a variety of epithets “in chief.” One of my more recent references has been to label him the nation’s RINO in chief. That’s right, Trump is not a serious Republican.

He is an egomaniac with delusions of grandeur — maybe even godhood — who wants the world to revolve around him. He wants to the world to adhere to his desire. He wants to spend us into oblivion to achieve whatever grandiose plan he has to seize and keep power. He wants to expand government, not shrink it. Trump doesn’t give a damn about policy and cannot tell you why leveling a regressive tax on Americans in the form of tariffs is good for them.

Trump has turned a once-great political party into a perverted shadow of itself. Is he a real Republican? Hardly. For him to label others what he has emerged to become is laughable on its face.

Except that it isn’t funny … and I am not laughing.

Neither should you.

crime news, Donald Trump

ICE needs to lose the masks

I am going to make another run at a topic I raised a while ago, but it’s important enough to repeat.

What’s more, I have found some help in a high place to further the argument I want to make … which is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs need to get rid of the masks and start enforcing immigration laws with humanity, not brutality.

Gordon Sondlund was U.S. ambassador to the European Union from 2008 to 2020. He supports Donald Trump’s view that immigration laws need to be enforced vigorously. Frankly — and don’t be surprised — so do I. However, the implementation of that policy has gone far into the weeds, off the rails. ICE agents have gone too damn far in enforcing the law.

They are hiding behind masks. “A confident nation does not hide its face when it enforces its laws,” Sondlund writes in an essay published today by the Dallas Morning News. “It does so openly and stands behind what it does.”

ICE goons are deployed in Democratically controlled cities by Trump to ferret out what Trump says are criminals who are here illegally, preying on innocent victims. They have beaten U.S. citizens, arrested them, separated children from their parents. They have shot at least two Americans to death. They are donning flak vests, camo outfits, all the equipment they need to restrain individuals. They are behaving like bullies.

Homeland security officials say the agents are covering their faces to protect them from reprisals. What an utter case of bullsh**!

Sondlund writes, “If officer safety is the concern, the solution is professionalism, not concealment. ICE agents should display their names or badge numbers clearly. All operations should include body cameras with audio, activated as a matter of policy. Local police … operate under these standards every day. Federal immigration enforcement should do no less.”

U.S. law enforcement operates in the open, Sondlund writes. “Authority is not hidden,” he states. An open approach to law enforcement “is not a concession to critics; it is a core feature of legitimate governance,” he declares.

He said, though, that “masks erode that legitimacy. They transform lawful enforcement into something that appears secretive and militarized. They invite comparisons the administration does not want and does not deserve.”

There you have it. Just lose the damn masks, ICE, and treat the people you serve with humanity. I could bet real American money such a change would bring far more cooperation than condemnation.

Donald Trump

The insult list goes on and on and on …

Counting the top 50 or 100 lists of insults leveled by Donald John Trump would be an exercise in futility.

Hell, I cannot even come up with a top 5, 10 or 20 insults. Why the futility? Because Trump is surely to top any of them before the sun goes down on any given day.

Yeah, I have my “favorites,” although I use that word with an abundance of cynicism. I dare not mention any fof them here because they no doubt will not fall on everyone’s top list of Trump insults and epithets. He is almost certain to make an even more stupid statement.

As an observer of many things political, I am left to respond at times in the moment to insults that fly out of the shithead in chief’s mouth or watch him display his uncanny boorishness in front of the world that is too stunned to react.

I am declaring, therefore, an end to any effort to measure the level of depravity that Trump may sink. It’s beyond measure. The stick I would use to plumb its depths doesn’t have enough measuring units.

I am left to comment on his pronouncements as he declares them. I also seek to measure the damage they do to (a) our ability to govern and (b) our standing in a world community where we once stood as the “leader of the free world.”

At the moment, we can barely govern ourselves and only God knows what world leaders in their nations’ capitals are saying about Trump when his back is turned.

Whoever would have thought that we could measure our presidential leadership on levels of stupidity?

Donald Trump, national news, political news

Wackiness keeps building

Our fragile world is getting wackier by the day, week, month or whatever measurement of time you choose to identify.

For instance, I saw a poll this weekend — and I believe it’s a reputable one — that said 41% of Americans approve of the job Donald J. Trump is doing as he pretends to run the country. OK, you’ll know by that previous statement that I am not one of the 41 percenters. Those who oppose Trump number in the mid-50s.

Yes, 41% of Americans would still vote for Trump, I presume, even as his retribution tour in his second term as POTUS picks up steam. You’ll recall that he telegraphed that punch during the 2024 campaign when he said he would be the “revenge” and “your retribution” were he elected president.

He has delivered … and then some.

It absolutely astounds me that the dipshit in chief continues to reap the support of 41% of those surveyed. I have been a “never Trumper” since before he entered the political arena in the summer of 2015. He and Melania rode down the escalator and the candidate then announced his intention to ban travelers from Muslim countries from entering the United States and said Mexico is sending rapists, murderers, thieves, drug dealers and sex traffickers to this country.

He’s out of control. He is off his well-coiffed rocker. He is as unfit — maybe more so — to be POTUS as he ever has been. That is just my view. He apparently appeals to other Americans who have swallowed the swill he offers promising them things he cannot possibly do … you know, things like lowering the price of food, ending a savage war in Ukraine and producing a health insurance plan that actually works.

Dude is a con artist.

Donald Trump, national news

Time to pray … for our leaders and our nation

I am going to enter into a period of prayer … yes, even for an individual I happen to detest with every fiber of my being.

That would be Donald J. Trump.

Why pray? Why now? The first answer is easy. I am a man of faith. I am a baptized Christian and I adhere to the notion that prayer isn’t the “least I can do,” but rather it is the “most I can do.” I don’t proclaim my faith loudly. I merely seek to live it quietly.

It could be argued that Trump is the most immoral, amoral, conscience-lacking man ever to hold the nation’s highest political office. Therefore, one might surmise he doesn’t deserve the prayers of the nation he’s been elected twice to lead. I’ll disagree with that view.

You see, the consequences of praying for Trump could bode well for those who watch him from afar. President George W. Bush famously told his successor, President Barack Obama, that despite their deep political differences that he would pray for the new president’s success. The reason was because prayer could produce results that benefit us all.

It must have worked. The new president enacted policies in 2009 that helped lift the nation out of a deep economic recession.

I will admit I haven’t prayed much for Trump over the course of his time in office. He has angered me beyond all I can grasp. The insults, the lack of dignity, the heartlessness, lack of humanity — all of it — have made me an angry American patriot. I think I have peaked out on my anger quotient.

That means I can now pray for success that the nation can grasp. Is Trump capable of change? Not a chance!

I am going to pray, though, for success. Trump might not deserve it. The rest of us certainly do.

Donald Trump

Time to work for all of us, Mr. POTUS

Donald Trump keeps insisting wrongly — and stupidly — that he won the 2024 presidential election in a landslide over Vice President Kamala Harris.

He did no such thing. He finished with a couple million more votes than Harris. Yes, he did capture all those “battleground states.” However, his vote total didn’t add up to a majority; he won by a nominal plurality over Harris.

So … let’s toss the landslide talk aside. It just didn’t happen.

This is my way of saying, therefore, that it is time for Trump to govern as the only elected official — oh, yeah, so is VP J.D. Vance — who is elected nationally. If he is going to say that he won in a landslide, then he absolutely needs to pull away a bit from the MAGA cult that constitutes his base of supporters. It fascinates me to no end to watch the MAGA bloc begin to fracture, which tells me that Trump is even weaker than he lets on.

Still, he clings to the fantasy of a landslide victory. If he is going to continue to persuade himself of such idiocy, then he ought to govern accordingly. End the immigration crackdown in major cities; roll back those moronic tariffs; stop insisting we are a Christian nation when we clearly are a secular state; end the fixation with ridding the statutes of the term Obamacare, which MAGAites detest because it carries the name of the 44th president of the United States.

You and I know none of that will happen. Donald Trump isn’t smart enough to figure out that if he’s going to say he won big, then he ought to govern the same way.

Donald Trump

Why do they hang with this guy?

Men and women of good will, a deep faith in God, of conscience and commitment to public service all swear allegiance with the same oath of office.

They all pledge to serve the Constitution of the United States without fear or favor.

Why then — I have to ask — do so many of them stand behind a man who has become the embodiment the perversion that has overtaken so many men and women who get into public service? Donald Trump has become the antithesis of what we once called the better angels of our society.

His vengeance campaign against his political foes is beginning to make many of his Republican allies squeamish. The longer we watch the GOP leadership back away from their unconditional support for Trump, the more concern I feel for the very fabric of our democratic republic.

I stand behind my earlier assertion that the Constitution will hold up under this intense pressure. That it will show how well it works even as the president does all he can to undermine it. That doesn’t mean I will enjoy seeing the Constitution being stretched beyond recognition as it faces pressure from all three government branches.

Through it all, we have 535 members of two congressional chambers who take an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies. Too many of them don’t seem to realize that the founders implied strength for them by ensuring that their power matches that of Congress and the courts.

The sooner they snap out of their daze, the better for the nation.

Donald Trump, medical news, military news, national security

Why surround yourself with morons?

It’s a fair question, so I am going to ask it: Why does Donald J. Trump insist on surrounding himself with imbeciles and then put them in charge of vital organizations designed to protect our health and everyone from foreign and domestic enemies?

Two examples stand out. You know who they are, but I’ll spell it out anyway: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth.

RFK Jr., scion of one of the nation’s great political families — and namesake of my first political hero! — continues to astound me with his lack of knowledge of vaccines, of the value in investing in scientific research and his insistence that vaccinations do as much harm as good.

RFK Jr. needs to be shown the door. Rapidly. Without hesitation. Before more people die on his watch as secretary of health and human services. It won’t happen because RFK Jr. embodies the one thing that Trump demands: total loyalty to the notions that fly out of his mouth.

What about Hegseth, the former “Fox and Friends Sunday” co-host whom Trump plucked to become defense secretary? Spoiler alert: I categorically refuse to call him “war secretary” and head of the “war department,” per his and Trump’s name-change effort.

Hegseth summoned every flag officer in uniform to the nation’s capital, where they gathered in a room to listen to Hegseth and Trump talk to them about the need to eliminate “fat generals and admirals,” how women should have to meet the same physical training standards as men and how Trump’s deployment of troops to our nation’s cities should serve as practice for when they go into actual combat.

What is unintentionally hilarious is how Hegseth’s applause lines were greeted with stone-cold silence by the command staff … many of whom have served multiple combat deployments. These men and women are seasoned, highly skilled and effective warriors who need no lecture from a tinhorn soldier such as Hegseth about physical fitness.

And yet … Hegseth continues to disgrace our military — the most lethal and skilled organization of its kind in human history — simply by serving in a capacity for which he has earned zero qualification.

God help us!

Donald Trump

How does he do this?

I am headed for the great beyond eventually, although I am not wishing for any sort of exit sooner … as I would rather it occur much later.

Before I check out of this world, I am going to seek to understand how people I consider to be reasonable, intelligent, well-read and blessed with the ability to discern right from wrong can continue to stand behind the charlatan who is masquerading as president of the United States of America.

They support this Republican In Name Only even as he:

  • Embraces dictators, tyrants and killers around the world.
  • Grants full pardons to individuals who attacked our government on 1/6 and inflicted harm to police officers.
  • Cuts off international aid aimed at preventing terminal illnesses.
  • Stands behind the lying Russian goon and then denigrates our own intelligence network that determines that Russia sought to influence the 2016 presidential election.
  • Selects unqualified and unfit members of a Cabinet he runs.
  • Violates at every turn the oath of office he took to protect and defend the Constitution.

There’s probably more to list. You get the idea.

What perhaps is equally baffling is how Donald Trump has managed to buffalo these aforementioned folks into believing a single thing that flies out of his overfed pie hole.

That brings me to what might be the million-dollar question. Which is more frustrating, that millions of Americans continue to slather up this guy’s lies or that Donald Trump, the man with no commitment to anyone other than himself, is able to persuade his followers that he is “one of them”?

He isn’t. Donald Trump is unique. There can be no one else on Earth who can manage this kind of political stunt work.