Trump's hellscape has become just plain normal for half the country. From supporting Putin to firing CIA officers to being just plain rude to a reporter, it's all become just plain normal for half the country to accept that this is the president.

 

Watch the short video of President Donald J. Trump both refusing to answer a simple question and being rude to a reporter from NBC News and ask yourself if there’s any other president since the press asked questions on television who would have done what he did.

There is an article about this on RawStory: ‘You’re not supposed to be asking that’: Trump refuses to answer questions about Musk.

On MSNBC this morning former CIA director John Brennan was talking about new employees at the CIA being fired and he noted that these were people who were hired because they had crucial expertise. In the background of the screen was an image that said “Reshaping the World Order.” I thought “reshaping, hell, they are overtruning the world order.” I’m not the only one to think this. Consider that this was published in The Wall Street Journal: Trump Is Overturning the World Order That America Built. (Subscription not required to read.)

Here’s an excerpt from the article. The paragraph below the photo is mind-boggling and horrific.

America’s 80-year run as the world’s strongest power, a relatively benevolent hegemon that attracted willing partners and allies, has been rooted in two major U.S. initiatives launched in response to the upheaval of World War II.

One was to convene the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which enshrined the idea of free trade and low tariffs, generating unprecedented prosperity for the West. The other, five years later, was to lead the establishment of NATO, an alliance that won the Cold War and has ensured peace in Europe.

To fashion this system out of the chaos and rubble of world war, wrote Dean Acheson, a key adviser to Roosevelt and Truman throughout this period, required America to make “an imaginative effort unique in history and even greater than that made in the preceding period of fighting.” Acheson, who first entered politics in the 1930s to combat “America First” isolationists, called his memoir “Present at the Creation.”

Both of these legacies are being undone with stunning speed by President Trump. His second administration has targeted America’s closest allies with punitive tariffs, has ordered an abrupt stop to military assistance for Ukraine, has frozen foreign aid—and is raising the prospect of a geopolitical realignment toward authoritarian Russia.

It is easy to be distracted by what could be seen as the amusing or ridiculous things that have been happening like the scrubbing of a reference to the bomber Enola Gay or innocuous words that could be consdered woke or DEI (article).

The nonsense that RJK Jr. has precipitated like ordering a new study on vaccines and autism and recommending olive oil as a measles treatment (read article) are distractions. 

The clash between Musk and Rubio is nothing more than a fart in the wind.

The attention being paid to court cases, many of which are rulings against Trump & Co’s. actions also amount to small victories which will add up to nothing when Trump & Co. cements their power.

My friend Dianna Jackson in her Substack post “It’s the Lawyers, Stupid” dreams of the American Bar Association stepping into sanctions to disbar unethical attorneys. Trump acolytes want to take over the DC Bar Association. Trump’s attacks on the ABA are threatening the group’s funding. This is a distraction. When they are ready, as far as Trump and Co. are concerned “the courts be damned, full speed ahead” when is comes to creating the Trump Reich.

What Musk tweets about the judiciary will also be irrelevant.

Many elements of DOGE are also lots of smoke and many mirrors which obscure what Trump & Co. are really doing.

In a similar way, eliminating the Department of Education and eliminating or drastically cutting back USAID and foreign aide is irrelevant. Their employees don’t carry guns.

Not only are tariff threats lots of choking smoke, no mater how toxic to the countries targeted, but I shouldn’t have to bother to point out how immaterial to Trump’s ultimate goal demanding Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal become parts of the Untied States are.

This background image was on MSNBC this morning: 

Purging the federal payroll of thousands of employees makes us miss how he/they are reshaping crucial agencies like the CIA and FBI to be his Gestapo/FSB and SS.

The two things Trump is doing dwarf anything else that seems like a tsunami of malevolent mishegaas. The craziness has come in a giant wave washing over us. It is difficult to pay attention to the most dangerous elements of the Trump & Co. agenda. 

One is to turn us into an autocratic police state with no checks and balances on what nicely could be called “executive authority.”

This MSNBC chyron will be relegated to the history’s heap of futile efforts:

What we are observing now is the a king’s juggernaut to exercise his weaponization of his power both to eliminate opposition and satisfy his need for revenge. 

The other is equally grave and alarming. It is that Trump & Co. have only just begun to extricate the United States from our traditional allies and realign the country with Russia. He is using the war in Ukraine as an excuse. In fact this has less to do with the war than a convenient way to establish a new world order where he is a kind of Ceasar or Hitler with the military might to dominate every other country and force them to bend to his personal will. He doesn’t see himself as ruling over a Holy Roman Empire which will last for generations or a Third Reich. He doesn’t care who the ruler is if by chance it is true that he is actually mortal and will eventually die. He doesn’t even care about starting a dynasty that his son Donald Jr. can take over when he dies, and then Barron, and then more Trump spawn.

Trump wants what he wants for the rest of his life. After he dies his attitude is “fuck it” let the chips from one of his defunct failed casinos fall where they will.

Addendum:

Stories like 'It reeks of incompetence': Lawmakers baffled by demoted Trump appointee still on the job and others showing ineptitude are just setbacks as Trump’s blitzkrieg to take over the country hits a few bumps in the road.

I want to thank all of my readers and my Substack subscribers. You can read all of my Substack posts here. If you subscribe you will recieve an email every time I post. Respectful comments are always welcome even if you disagree with me. I generally reply to comments.

I post on BlueSky though the day, You can read my posts here.

I couldn't write this without using the F-word. If you're offended by profanity don't read it. It is about 1960's protesting and protesting Trumpism. By Hal M.Brown

Above is a photo me which was taken last night. Below is me in 1969. I had more hair back then but was just as pissed off then as I am now, and was just as involved in protesting what the goverment was doing. Today I do it mostly on Substack. Then I was one of the leaders of the protest movement at against the Vietnam War at Michgan State, albeit only in the Social Work Department. Michigan State students and faculty were very active in protesting against the war. There were rallies, marches, and teach-ins. After the Kent State Massacre there was a student strike. All of my grad school clesses were held off campus or not at all. Out of five classes I got deferred grades in four of them. MSU was one of the five universities featured in the book “Campus Wars: The Peace Movement At American State Universities in the Vietnam Era (read review).

You can read more what happen at Michigan State here. 

In the 1960’s I subscribed to Paul Krasner’s not particularly slick antiwar and anti-establishment magazine, The Realist. It was printed on newsprint paper.

One isse was sent out with an insert that became infamous becasue of one word. That word was “fuck.”

This is photo of Krasner is from The Realist Archive Project.

From the Archive:

Original "Fuck Communism!" Typography and Design by John Francis Putnam, who also designed The Realist logo. Poster concept was a collaboration with the suggestion for "Fuck" belonging to Putnam, followed by the suggestion for "Communism" belonging to Krassner. Putnam was a regular contributor to The Realist, best known for his MODEST PROPOSALS column. Read a few here, here and here. 

Also Note: The MOTHERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION was a fake organization created by The Realist for use on this poster, and for letterhead for occasional correspondence with parties of differing political opinion that would most likely not communicate with The Realist itself.

The idea of the poster was to mash together two charged themes of the early 1960s, obscenity and anticommunism, but it was obviously Krasner want to offend people by using the then charged word “fuck.” Now even people like Mary Trump use it in their writing. She has finally had it with him so much so that in her recent Substack podcast, The Depravity is the Point, she used the word fuck twice. 

Here’s a bit about Krasner from Wikipedia:

Paul Krassner (April 9, 1932 – July 21, 2019) was an American writer and satirist. He was the founder, editor, and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies, a term he is credited with coining.

Here’s the part about the poster which Kurt Vonnegut described as

"a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein's e=mc2." Vonnegut explained: "With the Vietnam War going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM. At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. ... By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn't merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.

Now we have many versions of merchandise saying “Fuck Trump.” This is from Amazon.

I think we need to go beyond saying just “fuck Trump” even though he is so easy to demonize. He has fostered a cult of personality. He wins when we make it all about him. It is about the movement he has unleashed which would still be here if he died tomorrow. We don’t just need to fuck the hell out of Trump, we need to fuck the hell out of Trumpism. If he disappearred tomorrow, we’d still have J.D. Vance, Mike Johnson, and all the wee fascists in Congress, and half the coutry who voted for an autocracy.

I personally think this is too much of a cliche to buy one of these “Fuck Trump” posters to put on my wall. I don’t want his name in my house. I want anyone who comes into my living room to look at this sign and mentally see the word “Trumpism” rather than”Communism.” I want it to be a testament to the protest movement which led to the result we wanted.

Enough about posters:

What this time in our country reminds me of is when protesting against the government ended up making a difference. The Kent State Massacre was a turning point during the Vietnam War. Many supporters of the war found scenes like this to be too much.

One photograph more than any other showed the horror of the war.

Then the most credible voice in the county, Walter Chronkite, said the war was hopeless.

This is the conclusion of his editorial:

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.

On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honourable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”

I hope I don’t have to wait as long as I did for the end of the war against Trumpism to result in the victory for democracy as I did for the end of the Vietnam War. It is possible that at 81 I won’t live to see Trumpism defeated. I may spend my final years watching in horror along with half the county as Trump turns the United States into a police state.

Addendem:

Now the word “fuck” appears in two pictures in my house.

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I want to thank all of my readers and my Substack subscribers. You can read all of my Substack posts here. If you subscribe you will recieve an email every time I post. Respectful comments are always welcome even if you disagree with me. I generally reply to comments.

I post on BlueSky though the day, You can read my posts here.

What's wrong with Trump's "Golden Dome" missile defense plan? Everything. By Hal M. Brown

 

I had one takeaway from Trump’s State of the Union address aside from what most everybody else is alarmed and disgusted over. It needs to be addressed. It is Trump’s promising a “Gold Dome” over the country to protect it from attack. You can read the details in this article. Basically it is Ronald Reagans “Star Wars” on steroids.

Trump wants a golden dome over the United States that makes it invulnerable to missile attack. He likened it to Isreal's "Iron Dome" which is used very effectively to shoot down rockets before impact. 

He wants to call his "golden" not, I think, just because ‘Iron Dome’ is a registered trademark of the Israeli defence company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. I would hazard a guess this is because he thinks calling by the name of his favorite metal, the metal he is obsessed with, makes it superior. Forget that gold is hardly a stronger metal than iron. He could have called it “The Steel Dome.”

There is so much wrong here. Aside from the obvious fact that the United States is a far bigger country than Israel which only has to protect itself from missiles and rockets fired from only miles way, if the United States is attacked it will be by ballistic missiles fired from across the globe.

Add to this the question as to which countries would have the capacity to attack us this way. There are only two, Russia and China. Of the two Russia has the most missiles and, most important to consider, some of them are the hypersonic Kh-47M2 Kinzhal. This missile travels at 10 times the speed of sound or Mach 10. This means that currently there is no way to shoot them down.

Let's assume that Russia is still our enemy. This may be a bold assumption since there is growing evidence that Trump has shitcanned our alliance with former allies. Perhaps Russia has become our ally and our former allies have become, if not enemies, countries, as I wrote yesterday, which he doesn’t give a fuck about. 

Say Russia, Russia, Russia is as Trump says, a giant hoax. If Trump isn’t in bed with Putin, we have to make the assumption that Russia is the only country which might threaten us with annihilation. Then a first strike from them, while devastating, would still result in our retaliation from our nuclear triad, and destroy much of Russia.

If it was even possible to build an infallible "golden dome" defense system, dismissing the budget breaking cost which would make all the DOGE cost savings negligible, there is something exponentially worse that this would do. It would start an arms race with Russia which would make the Cold War arms race look like it was a midget standing next to a giant.

Now that I’ve gotten this out of the way, military expert that I am not, just from a common sense point of view, let’s look at where the most likely attack from a foreign power is likey to come from. This ought to be a no-brainer. It is over what in the quaint old days used to be called the “Worldwide Web.” Now we may call it “The Cloud.” Web or Cloud, every country has an infrastructure venerable to what is now called cyber-attack.

If you haven’t heard the news about what Pete “ChristianWarrior” Hegseth has just done, you haven’t been paying attention:

Not only that, but as noted in the AP article, the “Trump administration also has rolled back other efforts at the FBI and other agencies related to countering digital and cyber threats.”

The article also says that “during his Senate confirmation hearing this year, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said America’s rivals have shown that they believe cyberespionage — retrieving sensitive information and disrupting American business and infrastructure — to be an essential weapon of the modern arsenal.” This is the CIA director selected by Donald Trump.

We have two giant questions here. 

One is whether Russia is still our enemy and the greatest threat to our homeand security. By a threat to homeland security I don’t mean a threat from imaginary maruading migrants raping and pillaging their way across the land, but to the homeland being obliterated by a hostile power. How much more real is the threat of a nuclear attack today than it was when the overriding deterrent to a nuclear attack from Russia was mutually assured destruction, or MAD. This aspect of geopolitics is derived from game theory and the Nash equilibrium, although the end of civilization is no game.

The second giant question is whether this “Golden Dome” is really made out of iron pyrite, otherwise known as “fools gold.” Put another way, will it really work as promised? (Actually iron pyrite did have a military use. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was a source of ignition in early firearms.) 

Another way to put it is to quote Shakespeare and remind ourselves that “all that glitters in not gold.”

“The popular form of the expression is a derivative of a line in William Shakespeare's play The Mechcant of Venice, which employs the word "glisters," a 16th-century synonym for "glitters." The line comes from a secondary plot of the play, in the scroll inside the golden casket the puzzle of Portia’s boxes (Act II – Scene VII – Prince of Morocco):”

All that glisters is not gold—
Often have you heard that told.
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold.
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgment old,
Your answer had not been inscrolled
Fare you well. Your suit is cold—

Is it worth the cost if it is nothing more than Trump’s self-aggrandizing showmanship and he’s trying to sell the country a pig in a poke? Is it worth the incredible cost if all we will get is something that “glisters” and doesn’t do what it is supposed to do?

Maybe Trump, Pete Hegseth, Dept. of Treasury head Scott Bessett, White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Kevin Hassett and economic advisors you’ve never heard of should get together with Elon Musk and do a little basic arithmetic and measure the cost of the “Golden Dome” against all of the supposed savings from DOGE. If memory serves me, the other night Rachel Maddow said that the personnel cost of federal employees, not counting the military, amounted to 5% of the budget. Musk could fire everyone and Trump still wouldn’t be able to cut the taxes for his billionaire friends.

Note: There are over a dozen links in this Substack. If you want to learn more about the subject with the links just click on them.

I want to thank all of my readers and my Substack subscribers. You can read all of my Substack posts here. If you subscribe you will recieve an email every time I post. Respectful comments are always welcome even if you disagree with me. I generally reply to comments.

I post on BlueSky though the day, You can read my posts here.