Oh my God this is bad.
Elon Musk is standing there in the Oval Office doing all the talking while Trump sits there mute and pouting as he looks askance at Musk’s four-year-old picking his nose. I warned you a while back to prepare yourselves for President Vance. Instead it’s President Musk.
Newly-minted Defense Secretary and former Fox News moron Pete Hegseth is running around Europe proclaiming that the United States is no longer interested in guaranteeing European security or fulfilling its NATO obligations, and opining, crazily, that the mighty US Navy is no match for Putin’s dilapidated fleet on the high seas, apparently working his way down a list of Russian talking points.
Trump is on the phone with Putin, getting ready to sell Ukraine down the river. Hegseth, flapping his gums to the horror of his European hosts, has even seen fit to describe the broad terms of the Ukrainian capitulation Trump has in mind.
A Russian sympathizer and de facto Putin asset has just been sworn in as Director of National Intelligence. A crazed anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist is now Secretary of Health. A pop-eyed lunatic who’s pledged to turn FBI headquarters into a “deep state museum” is on the cusp of taking over America’s pre-eminent law enforcement agency.
A fictional department run by a private citizen is purporting to dissolve whole agencies of the US government, and withholding funds appropriated by Congress, while a bunch of 20-something incel DOGE computer nerds are ripping their way through the information systems of the IRS, the Treasury, and God knows what else. All illegal, of course, except that’s not a thing any more.
The GOP-dominated legislative branch, having shovelled its Article I powers straight into the dumpster that the White House was kind enough to send over, is sitting there quietly, content to watch and do nothing while Trump tasks Musk to pull off what amounts to a coup.
When he isn’t dicking around renaming the Gulf of Mexico and putting himself in charge of the Kennedy Center, Donald keeps threatening to impose ruinous tariffs on (perhaps soon to be former?) allies and annex various sovereign territories, including the whole country in which I live, plus, as long as he’s at it, an ethnically cleansed Gaza, which he plans to turn into some sort of seaside resort.
A gulag is being established at Gitmo to hold migrants who came to America seeking asylum.
I expect that we are only days away from The President refusing to abide by numerous injunctive Court orders while scoffing make me.
So far, nobody’s doing anything to address the rapidly rising price of eggs, but I’m sure that all the MAGA voters who cited inflation as their reason for electing a despotic maniac remain pleased with the way things are going, to the extent they’ve noticed.
I’m only scratching the surface here.
Make no mistake. This isn’t hypothetical any more. The crisis is upon us. As Trump and Musk destroy the government and do away with the rule of law, taking special care to get rid of the agencies and officials who might stand in the way of their own breathtaking corruption, a new geopolitical reality is dawning, in which the United States withdraws from its global role as protector of the post-war, rules-based liberal regime of international relations. I suppose I have to accept that the epochal, world-shaping work of the visionary giants who built the world order of the past 80 years has now been comprehensively and conclusively repudiated. I spent my whole adult life waving the banner for that world order. As an undergraduate and master’s student, it was my primary area of study. I spent years learning how men like Marshall, Kennan, Acheson and Truman, executing FDR’s vision of a planned peace, set about engineering an international network of military, economic, and political systems designed to ensure that nothing as horrific as a third world war would ever be possible. It was one of America’s, indeed all of history’s, greatest achievements. It now lies in ruins. It breaks my heart. I don’t know where this goes from here, but the pending betrayal of Ukraine is likely just the first extremely bitter pill to swallow as this process of international devolution plays out.
Everything seems so futile. Especially bleating out another blog post like this one, which I’ve been trying to avoid. I remain disinclined to scream and shout in this space every time Trump commits an atrocity, though I may have more to say on the geopolitical catastrophe now unfolding. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have posted this today, but it just got to be too much. Some sort of cri de coeur seemed necessary. So much that I hold dear is being destroyed.
Meanwhile, some doofus in Congress just introduced a bill to rename Greenland to Red White and Blue Land. I shit you not. Time was, that would have rated a Gomey. Back when I was a bag of laughs.
the needlefish 