America has reached the momentous, yet really meaningless milestone that occurs every four years; the completion of the president’s first 100 days in office. It’s an unofficial-official anniversary demanded by nothing more than tradition. Neither required by law or mandated by the Constitution, the hundredth day is when the pollsters poll, the press reports (in varying degrees) and the pundits analyze, harrumph or huzzah, and then issue their report cards.
An article (link here) published by the think tank Brookings, provides a thumbnail history and explanation of the first 100 days and its importance; as if there actually is any importance to it.
The marking of a president’s first 100 days began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term. There’s a sad irony when one compares the two men on each end of the timeline; the one who received the very first 100 day report card with the man who received the latest. The differences are stark and revealing and shows just how far the dignity of the office can tumble.
April 27, 2025 I was at a protest yesterday and one of the speakers asked the assembled crowd, “How many of you are afraid to look at the news in the morning?” The show of hundreds of hands was almost unanimous, and I imagine that those who didn’t raise their hands had them full.
Almost as if it was predetermined, I woke up at four in the morning, shook off the cobwebs and picked up my phone to read; ‘Smithsonian begins removing exhibits, artifacts from African American History Museum.’ Well, with the idea of another hour of sleep dashed by exalted leader, I got up, set the coffee to brew, and read the bad news.
Bad news?
Well of course it is. It’s what happens in Trump’s America.
“We were heading onto the ferry leaving France to England. The French border officer asked if I had applied for entry when I first arrived last week. I told him I believed the ETIAS was not required until October. He said I needed to pay the penalty within 3 days. Then when entering the UK border, the immigration officer held me for a couple of minutes to check how many days I had already been in the UK to verify I was not overstaying. I honestly believe they were harassing me simply for being American. I’m disappointed that a U.S. passport is no longer respected. I was not expecting the questions.”
That was the unfortunate experience of an American acquaintance of mine who was traveling in Europe this month, and who, for years has been traveling to Europe extensively for the past few years. My wife Cora, and I discussed this briefly. I have a hard time blaming the agents who took those unexpected extra steps. “Human nature,” I said. “Our country has become so hostile and unwelcoming that I guess this is their chance, on a personal level, for a little payback.”
If they were putting a little squeeze, just a little one, on an American, over the mistreatment being meted out by the Trump regime, I don’t blame them.
It used to be that for Americans traveling abroad, the biggest issues were; understanding the local language, the currency, local customs, figuring out the transportation systems, and the most confounding one, when it’s customary to tip or not to tip. There’s always been the jitters at passport control but I’ve never seen an American detained.
I had a moment of pause at passport control in Vienna before the 2024 elections, when the officer thumbed through my passport and asked about a previous stay in Italy. Apparently the Italian official had stamped my passport incorrectly. After a few questions, some raised eyebrows, and a few moments of shifting her glance from my passport to my face, she waved me through.
My wife and I are in our seventies and trying to squeeze in a few years of travel before the creaks and aches of age leave us bound to local road trips. Last December I began planning a trip to Vietnam and then put it on hold when my wife confessed that Vietnam was not her dream vacation. We agreed that if I wanted, I could plan a trip by myself.
We’ve since talked about Istanbul, and Greece, Portugal and Morocco. We’ve discussed a trip to Singapore and the Philippines, my wife’s native country. I would like to take a solo trip to Italy, the land of my mother’s birth, the land that I love dearly and consider my heart’s home. I’ve thought about Sweden, the country of my paternal family’s origin.
Those plans are all on lockdown now. Part of the reason is that I’m wary of the reception we would get while abroad. The other reason, the more worrisome, is that I’m wary of the reception I would get when clearing U.S. Customs.
“Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model. Americans, Brits, Spaniards, Australians—everyone—can and should learn from it.” Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, The Hungarian Conservative, December 2022.
With his engaging kindly smile, the shortish, stocky fellow with his silver/white hair parted down the middle could be any child’s doting grandpa. Wife Anikó Lévai describes her husband Viktor as tender at home, a characterization that’s likely meant as a deflection from the persona of the man who’s been described as “choleric,” “unstable and impulsive,” a “hot tempered” moody man who is “quite aggressive in conflicts.
And while the stout man might be a doting father to his five children, the aggressive, “choleric” side of the man is the autocrat’s imperative, one who has ruled Hungary for 15 years while exhausting his nation’s potential and bleeding his once relatively rich country dry. While the moody Viktor Orban has made himself a pariah within the European Union, he’s become the darling of America’s morally wrecked Republican Party.
If Project 2025 couldn’t serve as an auger for what America under Trump 2.0 could be (it was literally in writing that anyone could download), then anyone paying attention could have looked to Orban’s Hungary for a sneak peek of a Trumpian America. But the GOP’s love affair with Orban didn’t have anything to do with the price at the pump, so who cared?
If Orban didn’t show up on the radar of an American electorate that could’ve seen incoming trouble, he was on blast when it came to Trump, the GOP and all of the usual right wing mouthpieces who had discovered a role model. And for a party that has become a dishonorable vestige of its former self that blast was a positive.
In May of last year, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held a convention in Budapest (that’s in Hungary, for those who are still dim on matters international), it’s third such event in Hungary.
When it came to Orban, name brand Republicans were over the moon. So smitten were they that they made your stereotypical teenage girl with a crush seem like a restrained, disciplined monk.
After meeting Orban, Kari Lake, the Arizona woman whose hobby is election denial gushed, “he changed my life (one wonders if Lake has washed her hand since it shook Orban’s). Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland called Hungary “one of the most successful models as a leader for conservative principles and governance.” Steve Bannon described Orban as “one of my heroes in the world today, in addition to President Trump.”
After hosting Orban for a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in March of last year, Donald Trump said of the autocrat, “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic.”
Sean Hannity, the commentator whose deer in the headlights facial expression is a mask of perpetual confusion, said of Orban, in a statement that, after a quarter of a year of Trump would be hilarious if America’s current situation wasn’t so tragic, “He is defending democracy against the unaccountable billionaires, the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and certain western governments. He is fighting for democracy against those forces which would like to bury it.”
The second of two parts about the Trump Administration’s assault on the First Amendment.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ~ Alexander Butcher, 2016 winner of the Orwell Youth Prize.
It’s a mostly innocuous op-ed, but it got flagged as being anti-Semitic and posing a threat to American interests. If that’s the case, then the standard for either offense is a chasm so broad that it can gobble millions of people, citizen or immigrant. The breadth of that standard can only be defined as a rationale to help the administration reach the deportation goal that it set early on (which by some reports is lagging and making Trump furious), to get rid of people it considers to be undesirable or subversive, and to strike terror and subsequent silence into people who would have the temerity to speak out against the policies of the Trump regime. Or maybe it’s just as simple as retaliation. Because retaliation and vengeance are hallmarks of the Trump regime.
The “controversial” opinion piece with the unwieldy title, “Try again, President Kumar: Renewing calls for Tufts to adopt March 4 TCU Senate resolutions,” was co-authored by Tufts PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk, and was published on March 26, 2024 in The Tufts Daily. Link to op-ed – here.
The piece is almost solely concerned with the Tufts University policies towards the Gaza War and Tufts University President’s rejection of resolutions passed by the student Senate regarding Israel and the Gaza War. Of four resolutions that were taken up by the Senate the three that passed called for: The university to stop the sale of Sabra products because its co-owners, the Strauss Group, have materially supported the Israeli military’s Golani Brigade. The university president, deans and provost to acknowledge the Palestinian genocide, and to apologize for (Tufts President) Kumar’s previous statements. The Tufts Investment Office to disclose all of the university’s investments and then divest from companies tied directly and indirectly to Israel.
The first of two parts about the Trump Administration’s assault on the First Amendment.
“Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.” ~ Burmese Days by George Orwell
On January 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump’s first day in office, he signed Executive Order 14149. The E.O. is titled, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship”. The title is an unambiguous declaration that the Executive Branch will be a bastion for the right of freedom of speech and expression as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
When Trump signed the order it was a promising sign that maybe the 47th President would back off from some of his bellicose campaign rhetoric. Well, promising to the gullible. Because since January 20th, Trump and his administration have been laying waste to the freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment. Just as he said he would.
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” George Orwell’s, 1984. In his novel, 1984, George Orwell introduced the literary world to the term, Newspeak, a language prescribed by the all powerful, ruling Party for use by the people of the fictitious state of Oceania. The idea behind Newspeak was to destroy the traditional language (Oldspeak) in order to restrict free thought.
Published in 1949, Orwell’s classic dystopian horror story of government control has existed for my entire lifetime as the stern warning. Since it was published it has been the chilling, “what if”; the red line; the third rail. Call it what you want, 1984 was not the place Americans wanted to go. For decades the idea of an American 1984 was largely brushed off. We have a Constitution. We have guardrails. We have checks and balances. We have a deep and abiding appreciation for the the law, and for the judicial system that keeps the wolf of tyranny at bay. We survived McCarthyism and we survived Watergate. We were authoritarian proof.
And now we have Trump.
And here we are.
Trumpspeak Trump’s Executive Order 14149 notwithstanding, the Trump Administration, with its irrational fixation on anything that it feels smacks of “wokeness” or DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) put together an expansive list of forbidden words that have been deemed to promote “wokeness.”
The list was compiled, and the order went out that government websites and documents should, whenever possible, be scrubbed of the offending words, and whenever possible, to limit or avoid the usage of those words in the future. The list includes the words: activism, at risk, abortion, prostitute, pregnant person, multicultural, underrepresented and . . . the list goes on and on and on. The list also includes “climate science” and “climate crisis”; because if you don’t say it, it can’t be happening.
I don’t do many outings with my camera anymore. Most of my time has been taken up with America’s current political situation (and I wish i didn’t feel such a duty). My blog, which used to concentrate on photography and travel, and the life in my many years, has turned into a personal political journal about life in these trying times which I hope to turn into a book.
My most recent photo outing was a protest in Walnut Creek, California. Whatever anyone’s political bent, and whether you agree with it or not, this is a small snapshot of American history.
On Sunday April 6th, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman turned to X (Twitter) and sounded the alarm after Trump’s so-called “liberation day” liberated Wall Street of $5 trillion dollars (and me of $20,000 dollars). Ackman wrote in part, “ … by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital. If … on April 9th we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate. What CEO and what board of directors will be comfortable making large, long-term, economic commitments in our country in the middle of an economic nuclear war? I don’t know of one who will do so. When markets crash, new investment stops, consumers stop spending money, and businesses have no choice but to curtail investment and fire workers.”
Two days later, on April 8th, the day before economic Armageddon, I bought two pairs of Brooks running shoes at the usual $139 dollars before the price would skyrocket to – who knows. Not knowing if tariffs would adversely affect airline fares and hotel accommodations, I also made reservations for a ten day stay in New York City in May.
I wasn’t the only one making preemptive purchases. In January there was a surge in imports and in the days leading to ‘liberation day,’ there was a spike in purchases of everything from clothing to small and large appliances to electronics and gadgets to imported food products. Provisioning in anticipation of the cataclysm.
To travel or not to travel has been the ongoing discussion between my wife and I ever since Trump began antagonizing the world, scrambling the global economy, and leaning Putinesque when it comes to basic rights. Foreign lands were removed from our travel map early on, not so much because we were afraid of the reaction we would receive as Americans but because I would be worried about being hassled by customs when trying to reenter. We’re both law abiding citizens but every day basic rights and the law seem to become more blurry. Better to remain inside the borders until/unless it becomes prudent to cross the border for good.
In the end, knowing that our window for traveling is beginning to close, we decided to go. Our future, everyone’s future, has become uncertain. That said, Cora and I consider ourselves lucky. We’re far less vulnerable than so many in this country, who are facing growing uncertainty; deportation, imprisonment, prosecution, loss of income, loss of healthcare, food insecurity, loss of shelter and loss of any number of support systems. Every day we feel anxiety, but we don’t wake up to the nagging gut wrenching fear that others face every minute of every day. This is life in Trump’s America. And so we take one more trip, not knowing when we’ll feel comfortable traveling; or if we’ll be able to travel.
I wonder about the people who have a 401K and don’t bother to look at it and just assume it’s taking care of itself and only take a peek at it every few months. I know some people who are simply too afraid to look. They’re in for a surprise.
I wonder about the emergency meetings being held in corporate boardrooms to try to strategize what they’re going to do in an economy that’s being held hostage by the capricious whims of a combative president who operates out of impulse. And then there are the small businesses and start-ups that have a slimmer margin of safety than large corporations.
April 5, 2025 Around the country, across all 50 states, a financially devastated, Trump weary nation took to the streets to protest. In New York and Washington DC the crowds were estimated at 100,000 each; St. Paul, Minnesota was estimated at 25,000; 10,000 in Montpelier, Vermont; 30,000 in Chicago; and 20,000 in Atlanta. In little Hercules, California where my wife and I attended, the crowd was estimated at 300. Protests were held worldwide in sympathy and in anger; Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, London, and Lisbon.
Elon Musk fell back on the oft used conspiracy theory that demonstrators against Tesla and the administration are being paid by rich liberals who Musk, the very same man who was in Wisconsin trying to buy votes, claims must be prosecuted.
Four servicemen return home It was a smaller and more somber crowd at Dover AFB in Dover, Delaware, where four American servicemen; Staff Sgt. Troy S. Knutson-Collins, 28, of Battle Creek, Michigan, Jose Duenez Jr., 25, of Joliet, Illinois, Edvin F. Franco, 25, of Glendale, California, and Pfc. Dante D. Taitano, 21, of Dededo, Guam, returned to the States after serving their country in Lithuania. They were all deceased, having died in a training accident.
After being recovered from a submerged military vehicle, the bodies of the four American servicemen were driven in a ceremonial motorcade through the streets of Vilnius, Lithuania. The streets were lined with thousands of Lithuanians that included Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nausėda, all there to pay their respects. School children joined the crowd, as they waved Lithuanian and American flags in a show of honor and respect. It should be stressed that Lithuanians were paying their respects to four men who represented the nation that has been treating the world with utter contempt.
It was a show of respect and thanks for their service that the deceased men’s commander in chief couldn’t be bothered to grant. It’s a tradition that the president meets the returned bodies of servicemembers at Dover, in what is called the dignified transfer. But Donald Trump, who is neither dignified or extends dignity where that quality is demanded, handed the duty off to his disgraced stooge of a Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.
Another Tesla Takedown protest and a much larger crowd. The previous week’s crowd was estimated at 1000. This week’s estimation is 2000. Larger and louder. Never large enough, never loud enough. From grandparents to grandchildren to family dogs, but it’s still not enough. It’s a race against autocracy and autocracy is winning.
I come away from these protests feeling energized and euphoric, and those feelings last for …
… less than 48 hours.
But there’s life besides Trump. There has to be, or all that remains is bottomless despair. It’s not like there’s no solace at all. I’m buoyed by the annual optimism of spring baseball. In March, every baseball fan in America feels the same surge of hope. Our own local nine, the Giants, has started the season off on a positive note. But we’re only three games into 162 – a marathon not a sprint. I need the team to keep the hope alive into August. I don’t need a World Series Championship. Just give me competitive, compelling, well played baseball; something to focus on besides Trump.
March 31, 2025. I try to insulate myself from the news on Sundays. I don’t bother with the Sunday interview shows; politicians harrumphing or lying – or both. Theoretically the weekends are supposed to be slow news periods, and in normal times, with the exception of some natural disaster, one could count on that theory holding true.
But in Trump’s America, bad news, like rust, as Neil Young suggested, never sleeps.
And so by the time my Monday morning coffee has grown tepid, so too has my enthusiasm.
What did we wake up to today?
King of America The President of the United States said he’s not joking about running for a third term, a thing that would run afoul of the 22nd Amendment. And, if he tries the J.D. Vance for president and Trump for Veep with Vance stepping down gambit, he would run afoul of the 12th Amendment. But it isn’t like the Constitution has been a problem for this lawless president. He imagines himself as king of America. Not the America as it’s currently shown on the globe, but a vast America that stretches into the far arctic north of Canada and the sparsely populated island Greenland (a congressman from Georgia named Earl L. “Buddy” Carter was kind of spitballing when he suggested that once we take Greenland it should be called, Red, White and Blue Land). Trump juts out his chin, a caricature of Mussolini and rattles a menacing verbal saber. That he makes a wary world nervous must give him some gratification that borders on the sexual.
The charlatan will see you now, or, the wolves are guarding the hen house Frustrated by what he called, Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s ‘misinformation and lies’, Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator has resigned. He was given the choice to walk of his own volition or be shown the door. To his credit, he chose the former.
In his letter of resignation to Sara Brenner, the Acting Commissioner of Food and Drugs, Marks wrote, in part, ‘Efforts currently being advanced by some on the adverse health effects of vaccination are concerning. The history of the potential individual and societal benefits of vaccination is as old as our great nation.’
Not content with running out a scientist, Kennedy recently hired an anti-vax coconspirator to seemingly validate Kennedy’s own anti-vaccine lunacy. David Geier has been tapped to be a senior data analyst with the Department of Health and Human Services. His mission is to review the long ago debunked theory that vaccines cause autism, most likely to come up with a preconceived result of turning fiction into reality. But that’s the stock in trade of the entire Trump Administration. If truth and history are inconvenient simply make up your own, repeat it enough and soon the wide-eyed and trusting will seize the lie and reject the truth.
Why not Geier? If the administration can hire a news anchor to run Defense, and a talk show host with anger management issues to help run the FBI, why not bring in an anti-vax kook with no medical degree, who was disciplined by the Maryland State Board of Physicians for practicing medicine without a license? Why not? In a world turned topsy-turvy it makes perfect sense.
Kennedy’s quackery is being felt – hard – in Texas and New Mexico. Not only is measles gaining a strong foothold in those states, the science denier in chief has pushed cod liver oil, with its high Vitamin A content, as a miracle measles cure/preventative. In response, parents have been overdosing their children with cod liver oil and other Vitamin A supplements.
Doctors in a West Texas hospital who have been treating children for measles (which in a normal world they wouldn’t be doing) have discovered, through routine lab tests, signs of liver damage that include yellowed skin and high levels of liver enzymes. Why liver damage? Because in too high doses, Vitamin A can damage the liver, and in some cases lead to coma and death. But for those who believe Donald J. Trump is never wrong, RFK Jr is a pioneering oracle.
In my previous post, I stressed the need for America to feel, in as short a time as possible, the inevitable pain resulting from the administration’s policies. Serious illness and death are about as painful as it can get and the loon who is in charge of Health and Human Services seems to be hell bent on hastening that pain. That’s perfectly fine with me. If you’re prone to listening to quacks, liars and con artists then maybe you should reap your unfortunate rewards. Just allow the rest of us a return to normalcy.
Leading up to Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a physician who believes in the efficacy of vaccines, had voiced concern about Kennedy’s thinking (a word I use liberally here). In the end Cassidy was swayed, either by lies from Kennedy himself or by pressure from Trump, and he voted in favor of confirmation. Before becoming a senator, Cassidy had run a large scale immunization program.
Now?
Now, along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Cassidy will have to explain the butcher’s bill that looms. Kennedy, who was literally and personally responsible for measles deaths in Samoa will deflect and blather his pseudo-science bunk. But what of Dr. Cassidy?
Do no harm, doctor. Do – no – harm. That’s the oath Cassidy took, before he took the one to defend the Constitution. He took two oaths and managed to break both of them.
It’s likely that there’s no statute that can hold Kennedy, and by extension, Trump, Cassidy and every other feckless senator who voted to confirm, criminally liable for this monstrosity. There should be, but even if there was such a statute, the bootlicker AG Pamela Jo Bondi would never prosecute.
Cora and I are already wondering whether or not there will be flu vaccines available in the fall. Maybe we should start stocking up on masks.
The human cost of a tax cut After Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, slashed USAID, the agency that provided (operative word “provided”) for the poor, the malnourished, and the sick, Musk infamously insisted that all was well, posting, “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” It should come as no surprise that Musk lied. In an administration that takes incompetence and stupidity to new levels the one thing that the administration has mastered is the art of prevarication
.n his heartbreaking opinion piece for The New York Times, titled Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True, Nicholas Kristof documents the casualties wrought by Musk and the further casualties that loom on a dark, deadly horizon.
Kristof tells the story of ten year old Peter Donde, who contracted AIDS at birth. Under the PEPFAR program started during the George W. Bush Administration, 26 million lives, including young Peter’s, were saved. When PEPFAR was shut down, Peter was unable to receive his medication. He died from an opportunistic pneumonia infection when his immune system, like the program that kept Peter alive, shut down.
Thirty-five year old Jennifer Inyaa and her five year old son Evan Anzoo were HIV positive but kept alive by American aid. When the aid stopped Jennifer and Evan became sick and then died within a week of each other.
Over the coming year it’s estimated that the the stopping of American aid will take the lives of 1,650,000 people from HIV/AIDS related illness.
With the cutting off of other aid it’s estimated that 500,000 people will die without U.S provided vaccines and another 550,000 will starve to death.
Kristof’s piece is a long read. Not because he’s verbose but because he requires the space to document so much projected death and tragedy. Kristof documents numbers, but every number represents a living person who is expected to perish.
But Musk and his billionaire friends don’t think in terms of lives. They’re focused on dollars. The cutting off of American humanitarian aid means a future of sickness and starvation for the poor and the hungry, while for Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others in the billionaire’s club, shuttering USAID represents money saved in order to fund a tax cut.
What is the life of a hungry Black child in Africa to Elon Musk, the oligarchs, the tech bros and the MAGA cronies? For that matter, what is the life of a Black kid in Mississippi to this gang heartless pillagers? What are lives when there’s more money to be had, because why settle for billions when there’s a race to be the first trillionaire?
MAHA That’s the acronym that RFK Jr. came up with. It means Make America Healthy Again. Not a bad idea. So it seems counterintuitive that ten thousand federal health workers will be joining their colleagues from other federal agencies in the unemployment lines. The cuts are to agencies that regulate food and drugs, and research treatments and cures for various diseases.
Why?
Because these cuts, along with the unconscionable slashing of USAID and all of the other cuts are being made in order to fund the aforementioned tax cuts for the wealthy.
There was some good news but it didn’t come out of Trump’s White House. It came from the French who know something about serving justice. A court in Paris found Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally Party, guilty of embezzling European Parliament funds. She’s been barred from seeking office for five years. It’s what should have happened in the United States. Republicans had countless off ramps from Trump’s highway to hell but they chose to drive on.
It’s tiring and it’s dispiriting. Cora and I are planning a spring trip to New York City. A Mets game, a Yankees game, Broadway, jazz at Birdland, a mountainous corned beef sandwich at Katz, and steak at Peter Luger. My heart is only partially into the idea. Not just because of the doldrums of life in Trumpistan but because I have doubts about the wisdom of spending thousand of dollars during this time of upheaval.
Maybe part of the malaise is due to the constant rainy weather. Maybe all we need is a stretch of sunny weather. Maybe what we needed was less apathy and more commonsense last November.
The Life in My Years 