It should be clear to people now that we are entering the nightmare world of Donald Trump’s own creation, with those of like mind in his administration creating its demonic scenery. The truth was, as The Atlantic pointed out, that
Trump, Biden officials ruefully note in private, will inherit a strong hand. He will take the helm of a healthy economy and will become the first U.S. president in decades to assume office without a large-scale military deployment in an overseas war zone. And the grueling conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza—which Trump has demanded end immediately—both appear to be at inflection points, with war-weary sides showing a willingness to talk.
But this asshole...
...who believes in nothing and runs the country like he would run his own business, for his own "profit," has somehow convinced voters that they were living in his personal nightmare vision, not realizing that he and his billionaire and bigoted cronies would be the only ones to profit from it. We should remember Trump never suffered personally from his many bankruptcies because he didn't actually invest his own money in failed endeavors, so it was others who were fool enough to invest in his "brand" who lost their shirts; so it will be with the country.
Furthermore, Trump might not even have run again if not that he wanted to "pardon" himself from the crimes he had committed. Voters were only provided a “taste” of what crazed vengeance he had in store for the country on the campaign trail, with just a little peak of what was inside his personal Pandora’s Box before he left it wide open to escape into the world like so many infectious diseases.
Trump and his minions continue to use inflammatory terms like
“invasion” and “national emergency” because people as bigoted as he is respond
to such terms, and he continues to use them because those people as yet have
not themselves become sickened, and still believe they are “immune” from any
“collateral” effects of Trump’s actions.
People who were “shocked” that Trump actually won election again are afraid to hold the line against attacks on the truth and human decency simply because Trump "won," so what can they do now? Elie Mystal, writing in The Nation, is pessimistic, to say the least, if this country is anywhere near ready to face the truth not just about Trump, but about themselves since they, after all, voted for this alien in human form:
But we, as a country, absolutely deserve what’s about to happen to us. We, as a nation, have proven ourselves to be a fetid, violent people, and we deserve a leader who embodies the worst of us. We are not “better” than Trump. If anything, thinking that we are better than Trump, thinking there is some “silent majority” who opposes the unserious grotesqueries of the man, is the core conceit that has led the Democratic Party to such total ruin. America willed Trump into existence. He was created from our greed, our insecurities, and our selfishness. We have summoned him from the depths of our own bile and neediness, and he has answered.
And now that he is here, we deserve our fate, because the most fundamental truth about Trump’s reelection is that Trump was right about us. He will be president again because he, and perhaps he alone, saw us for how truly base, depraved, and uninformed we are as a country. Trump is not a root cause of our ills. He did not create the conditions that allowed him to rise. He is, and always has been, a mirror. He is how America sees itself.
If people would just look at him, they would see themselves as we’ve always been. He is rich, because we are rich or think we will be. He is crass because we are crass. He is self-interested because we are. He punks the media because the media are punks. He is unintelligent because we are uninformed. The president of the United States is the singular figure who is supposed to represent all Americans, and Trump reflects us more accurately than perhaps any president ever has.
Franklin D. Roosevelt declared in his first inaugural address that the only thing to fear was fear itself, that “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” It is clear that enough voters in this country chose retreat into a reactionary world where certain—well, let’s admit it, we know who they are—people feel that this is their country (you know, not to the people who they found who already resided here) respond to the suggestion that not only shouldn’t they be made to feel “guilty” about anything, even if it means social and environmental collapse and chaos.
There is still some “hope,” in a fashion. Far from being “dead,” MSNBC and CNN ratings have rebounded since Trump’s inauguration. And why not? There are people who are still interested in what is happening not just in, but to the country. People are seeing that Trump was only “kidding” when he said he’d just be a “dictator” for a “day.” A week later he is still issuing forth mindless executive orders that ignore the law, common sense and simple human decency.
So there is yet “hope” for this country that if Trump and his allies are seen to be going further away from “greatness” into national collapse than anyone thought possible, than people will say “Wait a minute, are we supposed to follow Trump like lemmings over that cliff too?”
But for now, Trump is hoping they will not notice that by making things “personal,” especially for his trailer trash supporters who need scapegoats to blame for their lives. Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders tells us
Section 1. Purpose and Policy. The Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military. This was a concerted effort stemming from President Biden’s first day in office, when he issued Executive Order 13985, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”
Pursuant to Executive Order 13985 and follow-on orders, nearly every Federal agency and entity submitted “Equity Action Plans” to detail the ways that they have furthered DEIs infiltration of the Federal Government. The public release of these plans demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination. That ends today. Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great.
The truth is that certain people—and we only have to look at the people chosen by Trump to be in his government (see any “black” faces, for example, save for Kash Patel, an Indian?)—to know who he doesn’t treat with “equal dignity and respect.” I suspect one reason why billionaires like Musk wants to "import" more people from India is because there is so much to "learn" from their racist caste system, where everyone knows their "place" on the social ladder, regardless of "merit."
But then again, Trump has been accused of being a racist since at least 1973, and we shouldn’t wonder why he doesn’t like having an accusatory finger pointed in his direction. It isn’t about “policy,” it’s about his and his supporters personality and character “issues.” Here 3 Robert Reich skewers Trump and his white supremacist minions for claiming that the DC crash that killed 67 was due to "DEI" and not enough "competent" white people. Trump claims he "knows" this because he has "common sense"; many would say that it is Trump who not only lacks common sense, but is suffering from the "severe intellectual disability" which he claimed new ATCs that the FAA was hiring were suffering from under a "diversity" program. Again, he could provide no "evidence" of this; it was just his racist "opinion."
Trump bizarrely mentioned in his racist rant that "African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, we took care of everybody at levels that nobody’s ever seen before." If he means at levels too low to be seen, then we should believe him. One thing we do know is that he is taking care of billionaires like Musk with clear conflicts of interest "at levels nobody's ever seen before."
But the one executive order that goes on for pages and pages and is most “dear” to Trump’s heart is the “invasion” order here 1 which underlines Trump total lack of human decency. As Dahli Lithwick in Slate tells us, Trump outright is ignoring immigration laws that do allow for asylum seeking by anyone south of the border; as Stephen Miller proclaimed at the American Nazi Party rally in Madison Square Garden a week before the election, “America for Americans only,” ignoring that “nation of immigrants” thing.
Of course the truth of the matter is that immigration law since 1965 has made it a “priority” to keep brown-skinned immigrants out of the country, and making legal entry impossibly difficult. Trump is completely unmindful of the fact that nearly all migrants do not come here to commit “crimes”: Lithwick points out that “The new orders have fallen hardest on some of the nation’s most vulnerable, including immigrants, migrants, asylum-seekers, and others who have done nothing more awful than believe in the promise of the American dream.”
However, Trump wants people to believe that they are “all” here to “harm” Americans in one way or the other. Many come here to escape the violence of cartels that are fed by the U.S addiction to illegal drugs, and that of U.S.-bred gangs who learned their “skills” in this country, which in turn deports to countries without the “skill” to deal with them. Here 2 we are told that
Now, the strongest argument that the Trump administration might attempt is that migration from Mexico or other Latin American countries amounts to an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” at the behest of drug cartels that operate as de facto governments in those regions. On that theory, the Alien Enemies Act permits him to deport Latino immigrants who are undocumented or involved in criminal drug activity indeed, even if they are legally present.
But
The 1798 Congress sought to address feared armed attacks by a foreign power (France), not individuals fleeing persecution or pursuing economic opportunity…Historical examples of the uses and abuses of the Alien Enemies Act confirm that it applies only in wartime and when the invasion or incursion occurs at the behest of a “foreign nation or government.” Drug cartels are hardly de facto governments or foreign nations. The infamous reliance on the Act to intern innocent migrants based on nothing more than their ancestry during World War II was until now the last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked.
This country has never seen the likes of what we are seeing today—a former governor who was declared to be a racist by the Native American tribes in her state who sought to prove her “tough guy” cred by admitting to killing a puppy for being “naughty”—is now the head of DHS. Kristi Noem was made to look like an incompetent fool while filming ICE operations in Manhattan; according to ABC News, “Tuesday's Bronx operation required around three dozen law enforcement agents that yielded a handful of arrests. Noem said it's a ratio she's comfortable with.” She claimed that there was “no doubt” that such “back-up” was needed, despite arresting three allegedly “dangerous criminals” who were “handcuffed without incident.”
NBC News reported that in Newark, NJ Puerto Ricans and members of the Navajo Nation were detained because, apparently, they looked like “illegal” persons. “Those who are getting caught in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids are being targeted because of their race or skin color, according to witnesses.” 81 percent of the 65 million Hispanics in this country are U.S. citizens, but many were not born in the U.S. but naturalized, and some of them might “forget” to have the proper “papers” on themselves if they are accosted by an ICE agents.
NBC News also noted that nearly 50 percent of all those detained by ICE nationwide “had nonviolent offenses on their record or were people who had not committed any offense.” Being in this country “illegally” is still a civil, not criminal, offense despite what people have been led to believe. But what is happening now is that an apparent “quota” is being mandated, meaning that if it is “hard” to find actual “criminals,” then the “round-up” will be even less centered on those “dangerous criminals” that Trump hoped that Hispanic voters would be conned by.
Trump claimed that the deportations were to get "the bad, hard criminals out. Murderers, people that have been as bad as you get. As bad as anybody you've seen.” You know, not like those white mass shooters who look “normal,” and more like these women being off-loaded in Guatemala, with those “facial tattoos” that Hispanics all have so that you know that by just “looking at them” that they are “criminals” as Trump told Sean Hannity:
Of course for every migrant accused of an alleged violent crime in White House press releases, there are many more being deported for “crimes” like traffic violations or no crime at all, only to be abused still further when that Laken Riley law takes effect, when just an accusation of a “petty crime” is sufficient to deport even legal residents. Along with new “guidance” to ramp-up daily detentions, it is likely we will find out that researchers were right when they reported that illegal immigrants are less likely to commit real crimes than U.S. citizens, and the piddling number of gang members detained only underlines the fact that MS-13 and other U.S-created Hispanic gangs are a piddling tiny fraction of all gang members in this country.
Meanwhile, a conference of U.S. farmers from across the country are meeting in Texas, to among other things discuss the effect that Trump’s mass deportations will have on farm labor, that many foolishly hope that Tom Holman and company will not feel tempted to invade farm fields during harvest time, and in reducing harvest, driving up prices, and forcing the importation of foreign produce just to make his and Noem’s racist political “point.”
Texas Public Radio observes that “Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller that Donald Trump’s mass deportation will have a negligible impact on Texas agriculture production” due to “mechanization,” but we have to remember he is just another Texas fascist like Abbott, Patrick and Paxton living in fear of a Hispanic “takeover” of the state (Texas is less than 40 percent non-Hispanic white). TPR notes that
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other studies estimate that 50-70% of hired farmworkers are undocumented immigrants. The National Agricultural Workers Survey has reported that approximately 73% of farmworkers are foreign-born, and among these, a large percentage lack legal status. Labor-intensive crops like fruits, vegetables, and nuts are particularly reliant on undocumented labor. These require hand-picking and delicate handling, which cannot easily be mechanized. The dairy sector also depends on undocumented workers, with some studies suggesting they make up around 50% of the workforce.
Undocumented agricultural workers contribute significantly to the U.S. economy by ensuring food production at lower costs. And without that labor force, production costs will rise. So, if Miller is mistaken and there is a reduction in the availability of undocumented labor for agriculture then we will see the impact at the grocery store. Studies predict that stricter immigration policies could lead to a decline in agricultural output and higher food prices and shifts in crop production to less labor-intensive crops. Also, increased imports of produce from other countries—which would cost more due to the Trump tariffs and weaken American food security.
Well, OK, maybe the “unaffected” may feel affected by that.
As noted, the White House press notifications of specific arrests appears to show that ICE arrests are short on those “horrific” crimes that the Laken Riley Act was predicated on, but “big” on non-violent or no crime at all, except, of course, if being the wrong “ethnicity” is a “crime” in this country. In San Francisco, a student reported that an ICE agent who followed him on a school bus questioned him about his “identity.” In the Manhattan raids, children were left behind those detained, with a “we’ll get to that later” attitude about what to do with them. When it gets to this point, it is clearly going too far.
Yet for people who voted for this, those people are not to be treated as human beings, and what happens to them happens to them is to happen without compassion or human decency. Of course, there are those who get caught up in the “side issues” that are part of Trump’s narrow and bigoted world view. These would include people who believe they should be masters of their own fate, with beliefs that don’t align with Trump’s heedlessly mindless agenda that dispenses with such things as “science,” “truth,” “facts,” “civil rights,” “history,” “law” and of course gender affirmation issues—who find themselves caught as “collateral” in the net like endangered aquatic species during fishing season.
We see Trumpist extremism in the likes of fanatics like Oklahoma school superintendent Ryan Walters, who is accused of completely ignoring his actual job, instead imposing his personal religious and “cultural” views on unwilling students and parents who wonder why if things were so screwed-up before, why do they seem even more screwed-up now. Walters and others like him claim that teaching far-right white Christian nationalism politics to kids is a “freedom of speech” issue, but if that is the case, then why are people in the line of fire of anti-DEI rhetoric saying that their freedom of speech rights are under assault? Because it is?
But for the time being, racial minorities and the “radical liberal” agenda on green energy are in Trump’s direct line of fire. In the case of the latter, in an article about the alleged “energy crisis” declared by Trump, the Natural Resources Defense Council notes that there is no such thing, and Trump just seems to be making it all up just to be “contrary” and frighten people:
“There is a bit of a hypocrisy in declaring a domestic energy emergency while we flood international markets with fossil fuels,” says NRDC senior attorney Gillian Giannetti, who specializes in interstate gas transit and other federal energy issues. “We’re the world's number one exporter of oil and gas, and we have an energy emergency? What is this based on? There isn't a there, there.”
The article notes that the U.S. seems to be forcing countries to buy its liquefied natural gas because there isn’t enough need for it here; the U.S. has been selling it at a discount to China just to get rid of supply it has no room to store, and China has only turned around and sold it to other countries at a profit. It is also pointed out that domestic energy companies have shown little interest in purchasing leases on land in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, despite Trump seemingly on the verge of threatening them to do so, just as he threatened Colombia with tariffs unless they accepted deportees who are being treated in an “uncivilized” manner aboard military aircraft, for the purposes of giving the military something to do with those billions they are given for otherwise doing nothing but sit around in the motor pool.
And of course it is "safer" to be "fighting" unarmed civilians and children than the Chinese or the Russians, because they are our "friends" and those other people are merely "vermin" to be "exterminated." Frankly, a bully is also a coward, and we can see on what ends of that Trump is on. It should be pointed out that another example of Trump's cowardice is his need for sycophants; he is deathly afraid to be proven wrong, and the fact that he lies almost all of the time means he is also wrong most of the time.
A president who can't admit to mistakes, instead blaming others, is someone we all should fear. Trump of course has the news media in his crosshairs, threatening legal action those that report the truth and not his version of it. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a free country; what Trump wants is to be "free" to do whatever he wants without any comment that does not align with his own. The truth is his biggest enemy, and it must be purged from public discussion. This is a dictatorship in action.
The alleged “energy emergency” is just another element of the “nightmare” world that is entirely of Trump’s imagination. However, if the actual truth is that Trump is deliberately making false claims and not completely schizophrenic and demented, then that means that what we are seeing is an affirmation of what Aldous Huxley demonstrated in his assessment of Hitler’s rhetoric—that the wilder the lies and misinformation is, the more liable are people to actually believe at least some of it is “true.” In truth the country was hardly in that state when Trump was elected, certainly nothing like during the Great Recession or Trump’s botched reaction of the COVID pandemic—you know, the one that Elon Musk asserted, believing the false claims made by Chinese officials, would end in a month? But Trump took us to his nightmare world because, as Mystal pointed out, enough people wanted to go there.
Of course the problem with Trump is that his endless executive orders are not well thought out, but just a creation of his (and his fellow fanatics) super-heated imaginations, just throwing gobs of their cow pies against the wall and see how many actually “stick” and won’t make people question why they are being forced to step into them or being forced to watch their steps to avoid them until the courts order the Trump administration to clean the place up and start dumping in the toilet like civilized people.
Although Trump’s elimination of the birthright citizenship decree has been for now put on hold by federal court order, and anger from even Congressional Republicans persuaded Trump to rescind the OMB pause on approved funds passed by Congress to see if they “aligned” with Trump’s fascist agenda first, a dangerous and unconstitutional over-reach of executive power into the prerogatives of another branch of government clearly defined by the Constitution. All this and more shows that Trump’s dictatorial impulses excepts no guardrails, and even with the courts doing their jobs (but don’t count on the Fifth Circuit to know what is constitutional if any case goes there), he may well ignore rulings he doesn’t like, and see what happens given that the U.S. Supreme Court foolishly gave him of all people “immunity,” knowing his willingness to engage in unlawful and unconstitutional behavior.
The Boston Globe observes that Trump is not yet paying a political price for his executive orders of questionable or outright illegality because a relatively “small” number of people are being targeted, mostly people who are not “white,” such as immigrants, racial minorities, but also those who don’t “fit in” with Trump’s reactionary agenda:
Since returning to the White House last week, President Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders on a wide range of topics. Understandably, most of the attention has focused on those most directly affected — people facing deportation, teachers, workers in economic sectors like green technology, and Americans who rely on nonprofits that receive federal grants.
But beyond the immediate policy impacts, there is a broader and more troubling pattern emerging: a flagrant challenge to the rule of law.
Yes, Trump is the first felon ever elected to the presidency. However, his executive orders aren’t necessarily about committing new crimes — though he did issue pardons for 1,500 people convicted of offenses related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Instead, what we’re witnessing is an administration openly disregarding existing laws, daring others to challenge its actions, and counting on either prolonged legal battles or a Trump-friendly Supreme Court to rewrite the rules in his favor.
Of course it all came down to voters in 2024, and subsequently what their level of approval of Trump’s inhuman and unlawful actions will be, as well as how isolated the country will become due to a chaotic idea of what “foreign relations” is supposed to be. Trump doesn't believe in "cooperation," because it would require him to follow rules, which is why his 2020 "trade deal" with China fell flat on its face because he didn't want any "enforcement" rules that applied to him.
It also isn't just that we discover that Trump has no real "plan" to end the war in Ukraine, with Putin seeing that Trump is too busy making war on children in this country, and is only too happy to let him play bully here until it is too late to stop to make any "peace" save on Putin's terms. Trump has so far made absolutely no comment on what he plans to do on "ending" Russia's invasion of an ally country, which only confirms that he is nothing but empty space when faced with a real opponent who doesn't care what he thinks or does.
Trump's announcement that he is putting 25 percent tariffs on Mexican and Canadian makes a mockery of trade agreements and is simply a matter of Trump's crazed egomaniacal nature, and the hypocrisy of Trump's rationalization for only imposing a 10 percent tariffs on China instead of the 50 percent claimed on the campaign trail was apparently his misinterpretation of China's complicity in the fentanyl trade: nearly all fentanyl and its ingredients originate in China, from where Americans can purchase fentanyl under assumed names from Chinese drug companies online and shipped through commercial shipping companies. And let's be honest, if Trump can't: in a country addicted to illegal drugs, it is easier to bring fentanyl manufacturing back to the U.S. than it will be for typical consumer goods.
Meanwhile,
Trump’s new Latin American policy of threatening gestures (like Trump’s tariff
threat on Colombia unless it accepts his human “exports”) and changing place names to suit his own personal conceits is more likely to
drive countries further into the arms of China, especially since the U.S. has
no plans of useful investment in Latin America, and China does. One “irony” is
that some Latin American countries actually can’t wait to get these deportees
back because they believe these people have learned useful skills in the U.S.
that can help their own economies—and not the U.S.’.
It is useful to remember in the hyper-partisan country that Trump never pretended to “represent” all people, because people like him need something to hate on, and if there is no one to hate on and cause harm to, then what is their “point?” Make America “great” again? Trump’s definition of “great” should only be seen in his own personal terms, which included the need to commit crimes, felonies and insurrections. How can a country be made “great” if the man tasked to perform it defines it in terms of his own prejudices and greed?
