Leadership matters, and wise and decorous leadership is greatly to be desired. A great nation ought to have such leadership. But our particular nation appears to have lost its way and elevated a thoroughgoing degenerate to its presidency.
I am close to despairing over the situation. Day by day, I hope that Donald Trump will have an epiphany and undergo a damascene conversion from delinquency to decency. Day by day, I meet disappointment.
The only nationally beneficial policy of Trump’s that I can identify is his having put a stop to the virtually uncontrolled flow of migrants into the country across the southern border. But any Democratic president in possession of a proper pair could have achieved the same result, and without the gratuitous viciousness of Trump’s crypto-secret police, the agents of ICE.
Speaking of “crypto,” that has been one of the principal vehicles of the Trump family’s disgraceful grifting off the presidency. Trump’s nuclear family has made billions of dollars through various schemes and stratagems enabled by Trump’s presence in the White House. And then there is the spectral son-in-law Jared Kushner, always slithering about in search of something ripe for profitable snatching up.
The country has been saddled with a dangerous buffoon and his idiotocracy because of the vileness and/or stupidity of Trump voters. Well, sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. Unfortunately, most of the rest of us are in on the reaping when we did none of the sowing that has yielded the tornadic disaster that is Donald Trump in office.
My greatest immediate fear about Trump, though, has sprung from his obvious determination to interfere with the midterm elections coming in November to give Republicans an unfair advantage so that they can hold the House of Representatives, to his corrupt benefit.
This month, though, the U.S. Supreme Court finally quashed Trump’s attempt to interfere with Americans’ access to voting by mail. In Executive Order 14399, signed on March 31 of this year, Trump made a desperate lunge to drag the various states’ electoral systems under federal control sufficient to allow him to bar vast numbers of American citizens from voting in federal elections, especially in the congressional midterm elections on Nov. 3. These midterms are, after all, what will decide whether Congress grants him unobstructed passage to the end of his term with license to do as he pleases — or Democrats take over in the House and bring him to heel.
The Supreme Court turned down an appeal by the Trump administration seeking to overturn lower-court rulings barring the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out the Trump order that the USPS play a regulatory role in the coming elections. Ruling in United States Postal Service, et al., v. California, et al., a court majority issued this unsigned order:
The application for stay presented to JUSTICE JACKSON and by her referred to the Court is denied. The Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction. And the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court do not favor a stay.
Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, Trump’s most reliable votes on that bench, dutifully dissented.
For now, mail-in voting appears to be safe for the midterm elections, shielded from Trump’s corrupting touch. And I believe earnestly that when putsch comes to shove, a majority of Americans will vote as if they mean to give the coup-maker in chief the great heave-ho.
I am thoroughly sick of Trump and his malice-driven approach to the world. He has impulsively embroiled his country in an utterly foolish war with Iran and now resorts to fantasy because the conflict has proved to be a terrible snare and a tangle that he seems incapable of escaping. He had expected Iran to fold in days and come crawling to him to sue for peace. But the opposite has happened.
And so every few days for months now Trump has been threatening to annihilate Iran or been saying that Tehran is desperate to make a deal to end the war, or, that talks are at a fruitful stage and that a deal is imminent. The evidence from the real world is that no deal is imminent and that the Iranians are not desperate to make one. In fact, they have most decisively seized Trump by the short and curlies: Iran itself has throttled the shipping of petrochemicals through the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran’s allies the Houthis in Yemen are starting to do the same in the Red Sea.
In consequence, petroleum and natural gas is not leaving the Persian Gulf in the quantities needed to sustain the world’s economies. So around the world, the cost of energy derived from crude oil or natural gas has risen steeply, setting back the global economy. Here at home, the cost of diesel, the fuel that moves the entire U.S. economy, has risen to levels never seen before in this country. It all means higher prices across the board for you and me.
Thank you, President Trump, you clown! You could have whipped the inflation that was a holdover from the Biden administration — indeed you said while campaigning that this was a priority for you — but now you say that the concept of “affordability” is a “hoax.” Your brainless tariffs on imports also have helped to stoke inflation, and to this day you seem not to have grasped the basic idea that other countries do not pay the tariffs you impose on the goods they manufacture and send to buyers in this country. It is the buyers in this country who pay the tariffs. Your tariffs are a backdoor tax on Americans. But you can’t see that very basic thing, because you are stupid.
How stupid? This stupid: When you came to Washington for your second term in office, the magnificent John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts was a thriving institution. Then you maliciously decided to put yourself in charge of it and put your name on the building, above the name of the assassinated president for whom this institution is a living memorial created by Congress and dedicated to this one person. In the ensuing social and legal fight for the soul and control of the Kennedy Center, performers have abandoned the place because of you, and decent people refuse to enter the building while your name is on it and control of it is in your hands, and so it is going broke. And still you refuse to give it back and go on about your business. Now the whole place is fenced off and closed to the public. This tragic episode encapsulates your whole ethos: malice, toxicity and the rapid decay of so much that you touch.
I can tell you this, Donald Trump: You fancy yourself a great man, but on the day that you leave the White House, by whatever means you leave it, there will be global rejoicing not seen since the end of World War II. I pray that God hasten the coming of that day.
