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O.K, the Gulf of Mexico will remain so named, and the Government Publishing Office on North Capitol Street in Washington can stand down: The “Gulf of America” idea is no longer much of a kick.
In the same line, Greenland will remain a Danish possession. Canada will still be called Canada, and Canadians can continue to think of themselves as gentler and more courteous than the nation of yahoos on their southerly border.
Only a few weeks ago there were those among us who anticipated the demise of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the course of this spring. No, NATO’s future is secure; its grand headquarters in Brussels will not be turned into a hospital, as some people, possessed of the old “irrational exuberance,” foretold in the Trump regime’s early days.
Ditto the European Union: If anything, the technocrats in Brussels and the central bankers in Frankfurt stand to gain power as the Continent drifts into its version of neoliberal authoritarianism.
And the Deep State: not going anywhere, this sprawl of invisible, undemocratic power. The headquarters building of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a few blocks from the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue: No again, Trump’s people will not turn it into an exhibition hall dedicated to institutional corruption.
The Trump White House doesn’t say much about these sort of things these days. They were all fun, but fun things become un-fun when, like windup toys, they stop going along as the springs go slack.
True enough, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, the C.I.A. propaganda front The New York Times insists on describing as a producer of “independent journalism” — Jeez, I mean really — may be headed for the Museum of Cold War Artifacts now that Trump is defunding it. But I am in wait-and-see mode on this one.
When distractions wear out, there must be new distractions. This is the Trump regime’s m.o., you see.
We’re now reading about Trump’s plan for a hyper-technologized missile shield system he is calling Golden Dome. This is all about satellites in space, hundreds of them, and advanced rockets that will activate when enemy projectiles are detected.
Trump’s people put the cost of Golden Dome at $175 billion, which means the true cost will be some multiple of this figure. The Congressional Budget Office says $500 billion is more like it. Trump promises to get this done in three years. Defense technology people say this kind of thing will take two decades to develop.
I have in mind the old Strategic Defense Initiative, the “Star Wars” debacle of the Reagan years. I am interested only in how long it will take for Golden Dome to prove another irresponsible fantasy and how much money will be wasted between now and then.
His Second Term So Far
How shall we think of Donald John Trump now that he is a few months in office and the lay of the land comes clear? Who is he? What makes him tick, as the old cliché goes?
The drift among those who make America run and will go along with anything so long as it is profitable, is that there is no denying, rejecting or subverting Trump this time around. You have to sidle up to the man — dinners at Mar-a–Lago, Oval Office sessions, and so on — to make it these next four years.
This turn in thinking has been evident since the 2024 campaign season. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg went to Mar-a–Lago to dine with Trump and all the liberals gasped? The chief executive at Meta proved merely the first to put his forehead to the palace floor.
You can generally count on the liberal cliques, especially the corporatists out in Silicon Valley, to get it wrong. During his first term they did everything they could think of to subvert Trump. Those who once tried to sink his ship now clamber up to the first-class deck.
This is upside down. Trump had a few sound ideas —decommisioning NATO, ending the forever wars, a renewed detenté with Russia — during his first attempt to be president. Now he trades in idiocies and cannot get done the only good idea — better ties with Russia — that remains from his first term.
A few months into his second four years Trump proves a dangerous figure in all sorts of ways — dangerously stupid, dangerously incompetent, dangerously erratic, dangerously distracted — and so must be subjected to damage control to the fullest extent.
Courts of law already prove key to this imperative. A coherent “movement” in the 1960s sense of this term appears out of the question — Americans seem too atomized, privatized, and alienated for any such thing to materialize — but let’s not forget that the 1960s were unimaginable during the 1950s.
There is no knowing what Trump will say or do Tuesday based on what he says or does Monday. He once wanted to get America out of its wars of adventure and altogether out of other nations’ business. Now he boasts that a $1 trillion budget for the military-industrial complex is on the way.
It is time, plain and simple, to give up the thought that anything good is to come out of the next three and a half years.
I have come to three different ways to reckon with how one might best understand who the occupant of the White House truly is such that one’s expectations of our 47th president remain in line with reality between now and Jan. 20, 2029.
It is possible to be 78 and still count as a hyperactive child. Trump demonstrates this to my satisfaction, anyway.
Think of a child on Christmas morning, flitting from one toy to the next, maybe fascinated briefly even by the boxes they came in. Everything’s a mess in no time.
Now think of Trump’s record these past four months — Greenland, the Gulf of America, I-just-had-an-excellent-call-with-Vladimir-Putin, Putin-is- absolutely-crazy, etc.— and ask yourself how much difference there is between the two.
There is the question of a democratic society, even one that was collapsing long before Trump came along.
I look at Trump and cannot help but think of a World War II correspondent named Mark Gayn, improbable as this may seem. Gayn covered Tokyo after the surrender and described what he saw during the Occupation in his book Japan Diary (William Sloane, 1948).
Apart from a brief experiment early in the 20th century, the Japanese had no experience of democracy — no experience, no understanding of it, no idea how it worked. In the autumn of 1945, Gayn observed with acuity, many Japanese consequently thought democracy meant “you can do whatever you want,” as he put it. A certain social and political chaos resulted in the Occupation’s first months.
This, too, is Trump. Trampling the Constitution, which I doubt he has read, ignorant or abusive — or both — of principles such as checks-and-balances, storms of executive orders that may as well begin, “I want…”
This is a man with no evident idea of the limits governing the president as well as the rest of us. “I can do whatever I want” appears to be his operating principle.
Contempt for Expertise
If you look at Trump’s cabinet — Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi among the most obviously unqualified — you have to conclude Trump holds experts and the notion of expertise in near-total contempt.
This is true of Trump himself, of course: he who can end a war in 24 hours, he who can bring manufacturing back to the United States — he who altogether can make America great again.
True enough, experts deserve much if not most of the malice and mistrust Trump expresses in behalf of many, many people. This is because a goodly proportion of them, having discarded all thought of disinterest, have long abused their capacity to influence policies and events in the cause of their own or someone else’s gain.
We now live in a society wherein elites and any kind of elitism, as well as experts and expertise, are prevalently — fair to say — discredited. This is a problem. Trump and his dreadful gathering of incompetents are not the answer.
The other week Maggie Hassan, a Democratic senator from the great state of New Hampshire, asked Kristi Noem, “What is habeas corpus?” You have to figure Hassan saw the secretary of Homeland Security for all she is and is not.
“Well,” Noem replied — and this is in Senate hearings, mind you — “habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to—”
At which point Hassan cut her off, having made her point. It is mine, too: Good enough to mistrust experts, given what many of them have done with their training and their elevated positions. Not good enough to proceed as if a healthy society can do well without them.
The Trump regime, in short, faces us with a truth that seems to have fallen by the wayside over many years. No polity can do well without qualified experts. It requires experts who have the principles and moral scruples to make use of their qualifications and learning in the cause of the commonweal.
Trump, in his disdain, has a baby-and-bathwater problem, to put this point another way.
It is the same with elites, I may as well add. “Elitism” may be a condemnation for many people, but not where I live. Please don’t make me imagine what life would be like in a society wherein there is no elite. The thought reeks of what we used to call “ultra-left adventurism.”
I refer here to an elite that, as with experts, understands the responsibilities they bear in consequence of their privilege and their positions. And I mean their positions in society, not atop it.
It is the wrong kind of experts Donald Trump will deliver to us these next three and some years. He can carry on all he wishes about the capacity of Everyman to get complex things done. But such displays will not make America any more democratic.
In my view all the hollow posturing will, in net terms, confirm the influence of just the sort of experts Trump and his crew purport to eschew — not least those at the Pentagon and other institutions vital to the imperium.
I wish I could end this column with something like “Good night and good luck,” but there’s no matching Ed Murrow for freighting a phrase, and this one belongs to him in any case. “Bon courage” was Dan Rather’s signoff for a brief time, an attempt at gravitas swiftly booed off the air for its pretentiousness.
“M.I.C., see you real soon” is the best I can come up with.
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This precisely the line that any populist president should follow. Trump’s error is that he won’t let this so-called elite band of government experts resume the proper pose of morons, homeless starvation.
As a Scientist, the destruction of trus in Science by the ‘experts’ in Medicine, and ‘Climate Change’, has been very depressing. I used to think, if only we Scientists ran things (technocracy), objective, rational, etc, it would be great. Only to find that Scientific institutions can also be completely corrupt (money/power).
Thanks for the heartwarming Christie Noem airhead story, I never heard that one. This is actually the perfect setup!
Real dolls like Noem are free of pernicious law-school indoctrination because it never sunk in in the first place. You could give a spokesmodel like Noem a ventriloquist to make her answer, “ICCPR Article 14§3(a).” Short & sweet and way better than the official right answer!
Because then you’ve elevated the principle from common law to supreme law of the land. You’ve put it in the purview of actual independent experts selected for their world-class competence. Besides which, the authority cited gives you rights that beat the hell out of your halfassed obsolete revoked constitutional rights.
When Eurasia gets fed up and nukes the Beltway flat they can just get some Noems, we’ve got loads of em, plug em in and put short pithy words in their mouths. You can tart em up like Fox bots, hubba hubba! A bit of rote memorization or a teleprompter, and we’ve got a sovereign state! Decapitation is easy in totalitarian states: destroy the apex, Langley, replace it with the module of your choice. Russia could do this no problem – they had the best constitution in the world until they derogated some rights with wartime exigencies to ward off the NATO assholes.
So cheer up, we’re all set!
Whereas previously The White House was an Alzheimer’s Asylum.
Professional Engineer here. My awakening to this nonsense occurred with the appearance of “truth is relative” in the mass media. I had some fun arguing this point when newspapers still permitted free opinions.
Another fun fact is the abolishing of arithmetic in schools because it is too difficult for certain demographics.
Wait ’till these ‘educated’ brains are in charge of design of bridges, buildings, cars, ships, airplanes, power plants. Well we have seen some of these results with Boing, and most recently the launching of North Korea’s pride and joy.
Then there are various modern buildings that are sinking or leaning. “May you live in interesting times” is a Chinese curse I believe.
You hear the word “power” in politics a lot, which is inconsistent with a democracy. You hear about how a president “took office,” but just as often you hear that he “took power.” Elected officials used to be “public servants,” but today they are “persons of power.”
Behind all these incompetents you mention, including DJT, stands a pack of Jews with bribe money or blackmail files or both, destroying American for many decades now with their parasitism.
As for this article, it must be said: The Js love it when we remain distracted by the shabbos goys they prop up, and not “notice” who’s behind them.
where do you live patrick, where elites are admirable people that use their expertise to benefit the human condition? certainly not anywhere in the western world that i can think of. well perhaps, in whatever plato republic you live in, with your philosopher kings, reigning in justice and humanity, in your utilitarian paradise, your elites have the best interest of their people in mind.
however here in the real world, (what we call america, even though it’s as ersatz as israel) elites are the scum that rises to the top of the great melting pot of ours. you see that’s why they’re called “elitist scum”. they assure us, that as the creme dela creme (as they like refer to themselves), they are essential and that we couldn’t get along without them. i question their claims and propose an empirical experiment to prove once and for all, whether or not, their claims are valid.
let’s round up all of these elites, lop off all of their heads, place them in formaldehyde for future scientific study, as to the differences of physiology in their brains, over the average working joes, which could explain why they are so much better than the average commoner.
then let us follow the venezuela model and pick the most dependable bus driver we can find and make him president. if after five years, he isn’t doing as well as the dead autocrats did and we do find some genetic and/or biological difference in the elitist class, we can import all new foreign elites, perhaps from the house of hanover and follow the british model.
Well, it’s one tradition handed down from administration to administration.
Words of less than three letters aren’t worth typing.
Good on ya, “Playpen” nicely evokes the CIA kompromat app that revolutionized kiddy porn sales. Speaking of illegal domestic CIA covert ops:
CIA power couple The Ohrs led the DO program to ratfuck Trump out of office.
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/newly-declassified-fbi-document-proves-fusion-gps-contractor-nellie-ohr-lied-to-congress-about-contributions-to-crossfire-hurricane
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/nellie_ohr_fbi_analysis.pdf
If Trump does nothing but get revenge on the CIA scumbags who purged him, he will be a historic figure.
So the fight between executive power and the unelected courts continue.
The hypocrisy is so thick, like a fog, you could cut it.
All those who have totally bypassed the constitution and only paid lip service to it, when it suited them, have all of a sudden found their righteous indignation and are tub thumping at Trump’s audacious disregard of the constitution in his tariff war in bypassing congress.
Americans you have to get rid of these liars and hypocrites, your society is becoming one of those banana republics laughing stock.
This is a great article even though its depressing. I am going through the stages of grief over the demise of America no matter which of the satanist parties controls the White House or Congress. A side of me hoped that Trump would really get us out of NATO, and some of the other horrible activity that America is involved in around the world but he enables all of it. Its time for me to tune out from the internet for awhile and watch my old DVD tapes of The Rockford Files. When I watch old shows, I remember what America used to be like before open borders, DEI, nonstop LGBT crap, censorship and cancel Culture. My God I miss the old days.
“…Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, the C.I.A. propaganda front The New York Times insists on describing as a producer of ‘independent journalism’…”
The New York Times is one of the first things that needs to “go” in the U.S., for real improvement of the nation.
How shall we think of Donald John Trump now that he is a few months in office
A genocidal Jewish mafia member and a THIEF. He has pocketed billions of dollars with the support of the gullible American genocidal terrorists who have robbed the world. He along with the Jewish mafia tribe should be arrested and executed. They are genocidal and corrupt, totally corrupt who want the world support the existence of these scum of humanity where should go into their graves now. Let them die by not supporting these thieves and genocidal mafia family.
This famous quote from the Sage of Baltimore is getting a lot of play these days, and rightly so. “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
We have, as that other, cartoon sage is oft quoted, met the enemy, and he is us.
The “is” has been incorporated into “this”, in the modern grammatical principle of “immersion”. LOL
A P.E.?
Impressive. Your stamp is golden.
Unlike previous administrations, Trump has engaged with Russia, the Palestinians and Iran. Trump is all about negotiation, which has its highs and lows. He lacks tact, but where did being tactful ever get us? It got us into WWI, WW II, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. It got us open borders, discrimination against white males, inflation, feminism, lawfare, collapsing infrastructure, an impoverished white working class, the Great Replacement, CRT, DEI, Drag Queen Story Hour, 52 genders, George Floyd, and the Jews taking over everything.
Trump’s instincts are sound: anti-woke, anti-globalist, populist, traditionalist, and non-interventionist. He arrived in Washington in 2017 as a businessman knowing little about how to govern. He was tricked into hiring the wrong people, who set out to sabotage him. He’s learned from that experience.
Pete Hegseth might not be the greatest, but at least he’s not going to do what Esper did: undermine Trump’s authority both as President and Commander in Chief. Robert F. Kennedy might be less than impressive, but at least he isn’t Anthony Fauci. Stephen Miller might be a Jew, but at least he’s a ferocious defender of Trump’s policies and knows how to defeat Trump’s enemies. Kristi Noem might not know anything about habeas corpus, but at least she isn’t Alejandro Mayorkas. Pam Bondi might not be Supreme Court material, but at least she isn’t Merrick Garland.
I know a lot of people here want Trump to fail — for whatever creepy reason — but if Trump succeeds and is able to get all the Republicans on his side (a tall order), we will have an America with secure borders (we’re 95% there already), an end to antiwhite discrimination, a fair judicial system, and peace in Europe and the Middle East. Our country will be reindustrialized, investment will flow into the United States, and we will be self-sufficient in energy. China will no longer be able to have access to our technological innovations and national security secrets. This website is currently crawling with CCP bots and agents. They don’t understand that Trump is actually doing China a favor. Just as the US needs industry at home, China needs to develop its consumer market. The trade imbalance has hurt both countries. It needs to end, and only Trump is going to make that happen.
You can look good by doing nothing while covering up the corruption eating away at your country. Or you can engage, face a ruthless and determined enemy, get bloodied, sometimes make a fool of yourself, and – if you’re lucky – make positive change. In the final analysis, taking cheap shots, acting smug and superior, and being negative might seem to be clever, but they’re not. They’re just stupid and boring.