The Life in My Years

Here in Trumpistan it’s not all bad news. Take the now well publicized amateurish chat group of administration officials discussing a military strike against the Houthis in Yemen, using Signal, a retail messaging app, and accidentally inviting journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor in Chief of The Atlantic, to the party.

When I read about this latest Trumpy misadventure I was elated. To be clear, in normal times elation wouldn’t have been counted among my list of emotions that would have included disbelief, disgust, and of course relief that no American lives were lost. Make no mistake, after hearing the details of Signal-gate I was disgusted and relieved. What happened to disbelief? Given the collection of arrogant, unqualified nitwits that populates the Trump administration the Signal episode is exactly what one would have expected.

The details about a journalist accidentally being included in a chat between high level government officials planning an airstrike in Yemen are by now well established. Even the administration and the cast of clowns who perpetrated the fiasco admit to the sequence of events. Now the arguments are over semantics and legalities and the prospects of rolling heads (Pamela Jo Bondi our miniskirted Attorney General and Trump acolyte has shown no inclination to bring charges).

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Back to my elation. There’s a bright silver lining that surrounds the dark cloud of ineptitude, in that it has exposed yet more of the administration’s lack of competence, disregard for protocol, outright arrogance and disdain for the law. It has also exposed the fecklessness of Republican members of the United States Congress who have been bending over backwards to offer weak excuses and proffers of “get out of jail free cards” for a fiasco that would have had any active duty officer court martialed and jailed. Even Republican lawmakers who are on the fringes of normalcy offered pathetic comments. Mike Lawler of New York suggested that there should be “guardrails put in place to make sure it never happens again.” Hello? There are plenty of codified guardrails in place, along with an important guardrail that is not codified nor should it be – commonsense. You can have volumes of rules and regulations in place, but in the end Congressman Lawler, you can’t, as the saying goes, fix stupid.

The Signal misadventure is just one more example of the utter incompetence of an administration that is populated with neophytes, cronies, Trump bootlickers, and unqualified imbeciles. In a comedy starring Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller it might be hilarious but in the real world of a nation that used to be a world leader and has now turned to vomiting all over itself and acting like a lout who’s had far too many tequila shots, it’s tragic.

Just as Nixon’s Watergate was a good thing, Signal-gate is a good thing. Both exposed major problems with out of control, lawless presidents. The difference is that the Republican reaction to Watergate was outrage, as it should have been, while the current GOP falls back on a shameless duck and cover drill..

It’s a sad situation when we have to rely on slapstick blunders to wake people up to the five alarm fire that is going unchecked. And the even sadder and potentially more tragic aspect is that we need more slapstick blunders, and misadventures, and law breaking, and rights violations to get people to wake up and help out the bucket brigade.

And so while my better angels (if I have any) say I should decry the administrations outrages and all the damages that they’re causing, I’ve found myself applauding them. And that’s conflicting.

If Trump’s Administration was simply indistinct and harmless I’d figure we’ll get by for another four years. When Trump 1.0 began, as much as I detested the man, I was all for Trump’s success. For the good of the nation and the world one should pull for the success of a president. But Trump 2.0 isn’t harmless and has no intention of being harmless. In fact he and his pack of thieves, con artists and thugs are striving towards destruction. So yes, I’m cheering failure. Every time the administration steps on the proverbial rake I’m pumping my fist, and Signal-gate just about broke the poor hapless rake.

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The Signal affair is just the latest in a series of rake handles to the administration’s forehead, such as DOGE firing the people in charge of taking care of America’s nuclear arsenal, putting FBI headquarters, and the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building (known as Main Justice) on a list of buildings to be sold, ordering people back to workplaces that have no office space or supplies, and triple counting the cancellation of a $655 million dollar contract, thus inflating that “savings” to over $1.8 billion in savings.

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No pain, no gain.

No doubt about it, the calamities, inconveniences, rights violations, broken laws, authoritarian excesses and all of the associated pains are going to keep coming, some of it inadvertent, most of it intentional, and I share the mindset of many that we should just tear off the Band Aid and go for it – bring on the pain – and sooner rather than later. Measles outbreaks, lost Social Security checks, no FEMA relief, hours long lines at government offices, eggs at five dollars each, telling Johnny that the game console he wants has been priced out of reach, cars and houses too expensive, family farms auctioned off, and a stock market crash.

Canada is rightfully angry and they’re buying Jameson instead of Makers Mark, and employees at the Kentucky bourbon distilleries might get laid off. Adding insult to unemployment, they might be forced to drive 100 miles for a flu shot (which probably won’t be available anyway because there’s an anti-vax loon in charge of vaccines) because Medicaid cuts will have closed clinics. Too bad, so sad, most of them probably voted for Trump anyway.

The list of inconveniences is endless and growing – and I say bring it on.

I’ve been of that mindset from the start, when Trump first blustered about tariffs. When the nightly news showed clips of his trade war threats I would scream at the television, “Do it! Dooooo it!” In the early days I just wanted to see the people who sat on the sidelines or cast protest ballots to feel the pain they’d helped to unleash on the nation. Now I see the acceleration of misery as fundamental to the survival of the republic. Why?

Because it’s a race.

In his column titled, “Smash and Grab: Why Trump Is Moving So Fast”, writer Ed Kilgore of New York Magazine’s, Intelligencer, suggests that Trump and his gang are moving rapidly because, “they (the administration) believe they are living on borrowed time and have to smash the deep state and then grab the tax cuts made possible by budget cuts before the American people react in ways that might quickly reduce their power.”

In a podcast with liberal Ezra Klein, the conservative Santi Ruiz explained the DOGE theory that “if we (the administration) don’t take this one opportunity now, while the window is open before the midterms, before public opinion naturally swings back and we lose the House, there’s a green field to run into to try and cut, cut, cut. And this will never happen any other time.”

It’s the administration’s version of driving the stolen SUV through the front window of the high end jewelry store, grabbing whatever they can lay their hands on and then speeding off as soon as they hear the sirens.

And, heartless knaves that they are, if there’s collateral damage, then so be it.

So if, in crashing the SUV into the jewelry store the bandits caved in the roof of the old folks home next door, then it sucks to be an old folk.

Government becomes more unpopular when it takes things away and right now the government is taking things away at breakneck speed. It’s taking away popular things like park and monument access, administrative offices that provide services, medical benefits, and Department of Education resources to name a few.

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But there’s a more sinister destruction that’s going on, and for reasons beyond securing a tax break windfall for rich people.

In keeping with Trump’s hunger for retribution and authoritarianism, the administration and Trump himself, have been busy erasing the intangibles that we’ve enjoyed and taken for granted since the founding; civil rights, free speech, freedom of expression, and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They’re the promises put down in the parchment of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

It’s a creeping movement towards authoritarianism that’s being viewed with far too much indifference. Because as the election results showed us, democracy just isn’t sexy enough. Not as important as fried eggs.

This slinking despotism is evidenced by the deportation of green card holders and those who are here under legally protected status. They’re being whisked away to detention centers in Louisiana, or shipped to countries they’ve no ties to (a Hmong woman who has been in the country since she was 8 months old, and has no ties to Laos where she was sent), or to a brutal prison in El Salvador. In many, if not most cases, these people have not been given due process. We don’t know what they’ve done because the government is keeping it a secret. Even the deportees don’t know what they’ve done. They haven’t been given the right to confront their accuser.

People, innocent or not are here one day, disappeared the next. How would you feel if it was your parent, sibling, aunt, uncle or just a basically decent person you happen to know? And if they’re snatching people off the street who are here legally is there anything to stop them from going after citizens? Trump and some of his MAGA, and billionaire, and tech bro acolytes have floated the idea of denaturalizing American citizens who aren’t following in lock step.

The most recent and maybe most disturbing is the case of Fullbright scholar Rumeysa Ozturk who was accosted on the street and hustled into an unmarked SUV by plainclothes federal agents wearing masks. It could have been, should have been, just the scene out of an episode of Homeland, but it was indeed a real life violation of basic rights. And why was she taken into custody? The administration says she was “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” Her lawyers say that she co-authored an essay critical of the war in Gaza. That’s a gigantic divide but either way the issue is one of free speech. We’ve come a long way since 1979, when Jewish lawyer David Goldberger defended a Nazi group’s right to demonstrate in Skokie, Illinois. A long way, but not a good way.

And the justifications for these actions are on squishy grounds. Kristy Noem, the Homeland Security chief who enjoys battle gear cosplay and expensive watches, couches the arrests and deportations as counterterrorism. Tom Homan, Trump’s Stasi-esque thug calls deportees gang members. Marco Rubio, who should know better, justifies deportations of green card holding students (such as Ozturk) by accusing them of anti-Israeli activities. So if I write an article critical of the Israelis indiscriminant, civilian massacring, scorched earth bombing campaign does that make me a subversive? What’s the difference between me and Ozturk besides place of birth. So slap the cuffs on little Marco, I’m guilty.

No specifics are being offered for arrests and deportations. There is no explanation of what constitutes a terrorist act, or inflammatory speech, or what defines a “gang tattoo.” We’re all supposed to take the government’s word for it. And why does that matter? Because if the government can rendition a legal resident to a foreign jail or a secret facility in Louisiana without due process and without explanation, then what will stop it from doing the same to citizens who the government deems to be subversive?

This is how authoritarians grasp their power. They first go after the low hanging fruit, the ones who the majority is ambivalent about. And then the justifications become shakier and more questionable and then there are simply no questions. The government doesn’t like you, it silences you – one way or another.

The foundations of our democracy are not tactile things. You don’t realize you’re losing your rights until they’re gone. Losing rights is not as tangible as being closed out of a national park because of staffing cuts. Sure, a student gets deported and it makes the news but you can still go to your Pilates classes, or get your Sunday morning latte with friends, or enjoy your end of week happy hour with coworkers. There’s still baseball in spring and football in autumn and life hasn’t really changed so much – until it has.

Until your own gardener gets disappeared because of his tattoos, or your college student daughter gets questioned by a guy wearing a blue FBI jacket because her thesis struck a nerves with Kash Patel, or your non-Christian church gets harassed by the government, or your trans friend can’t get medical care, or that company you used to love closed down because it angered Trump and Trump’s DOJ harassed it out of business, or election day has been suddenly called off because of some “irregularities” and the president who would be king declares martial law.

So there’s a race going on. The flower of resistance needs to grow faster than the weeds of autocracy and plunder and right now autocracy and plunder are growing like, well, weeds.

We learned from the election that democracy is taken for granted. Over the course of two months we’ve seen that Americans aren’t particularly moved to action when they’re comfortable – even when innocents and their fellow citizens have been made uncomfortable. Unfortunately there are far too many people who don’t feel the necessity to resist until their personal comfort is infringed upon. So if getting people to move means tangible pain and inconvenience, then bring it on because the hurt is going to come anyway. Let’s; close the parks, libraries, and field offices, and pollute the water and air. Let’s let poor kids go hungry, and kids catch the measles, and the elderly die from the flu. Bring on the inflated prices of cars, and electronics and let the cost of basic necessities go into the stratosphere. Once the populace rises up in resistance to get their comforts back we can only hope that democracy will get dragged along in the wake.

Whatever it takes I guess. No pain, no gain.

Banner photo courtesy of Pexels.