Opinion

In just seven, short weeks, the traitor, Donald Trump, has crashed the economy, taken us to the brink of recession, wrecked the government, lost the respect of our friends and neighbors around the world, and surrendered to the murderous Vladimir Putin.

It is EXACTLY what was expected from the proven America-attacker by anybody capable of thinking about anything but themselves heading into November’s disastrous elections.

With ICE’s weekend arrest of a student who engaged in peaceful protests, Trump’s administration is flexing dangerously unconstitutional muscle and daring the nation to flinch.

Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University, helped to organize several pro-Palestinian student protests last year, all of which were peaceful and non-violent. Khalil was pulled from his apartment by “special agents from a department in ICE” who informed Khalil that the State Department had revoked his student visa. When his attorney advised that Khalil was a green card holder and lawful permanent resident, ICE said his green card had been revoked too.

I want to get a few things out of the way this morning, before really digging in and mining the anger inside me about the Democratic Party’s approach to the second Trump regime, which is aimed at finishing off America for good.

One of these things is the method in which our disintegrating mainstream media is framing this truly appalling chapter in American history. It’s as if they have completely given up and aren’t in the least bit interested in offering us the complete story of the madness playing out right in front of our tired eyes.

Tuesday night, Donald Trump stood before the nation and, with the full backing of billionaires like Elon Musk, laid the groundwork for the biggest heist in American history — the rapid, systematic destruction of Social Security, disguised as “reform.”

We saw the formal announcement of it during Trump’s State of the Union address, and the DOGE announcement earlier in the week that 7,000 employees at Social Security are to be immediately laid off — with as many as half of all Social Security employees (an additional 30,000 people) — soon to be on the chopping block.

It hasn’t yet been five whole days since the president’s State of the Union address, and miraculously, it’s already being forgotten. That’s well and good, as far as I’m concerned. It was a pack of lies anyway.

I figured I wouldn’t spend time writing about it, but now I find that I must, not because of anything Donald Trump did, but because of what 10 House Democrats did, which is to say, acting like goddamn fools.

In a 5-4 decision, the US Supreme Court has issued a caveat to Trump’s claim that presidents can do whatever they want. Ordering the administration to disburse $2 billion in USAID grants, the majority ruled that Trump must comply with the rulings of US District Judge Amir Ali.

Although the narrow ruling has been widely applauded as at least a temporary victory for the rule of law, as I see it, the victory is overshadowed by ominous signaling in the dissent.

Only a handful of media outlets have used the term, but America is under siege, in the throes of Trump’s second coup attempt. So far, Trump’s plan to subvert the rule of law and destroy the federal government has been administrative and largely nonviolent, but it’s early days.

By firing JAGS whose sole duty is to assert Constitutional guardrails, and by politicizing the military and all federal offices that possess the power of force, Trump has laid solid tracks to execute wildly unconstitutional orders. I fear these orders are coming, in some iteration or other, and predict that they will follow a series of declarations, first of manufactured and well-hyped national “emergencies,” then of martial law. Fox News, OAN, and the rest of the more than 2000 right wing media outlets will amplify the danger perpetually to keep martial law in place, because it will financially benefit the oligarchs who own them, at least in the short term.

Imagine that the NFL made a rule change that allowed every team to have an extra three men on the field during the game — but half of the NFL teams, protesting the new rule as “wrong” and “too much of a deviation from fairness and norms” refused to add the three players to their own lineups.

Who’d be winning almost every game? Who’d be going to the Superbowl?

It would be helpful if we stopped pretending this terrible chapter in American history won’t close without bloodshed …

It would be helpful if Americans, and our feeble Democratic politicians in particular, stopped implying by their comatose actions that Democracy is some damn American right and has no end date.

Elon Musk just called for the United States to withdraw from NATO, leaving Europe to Putin’s tender mercies.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Hegseth ordered our federal operations to detect and stop Vladimir Putin‘s infiltration of American cyber security — from our nuclear facilities and dams to our news and social media spaces — to cease. As Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer noted yesterday afternoon:

Let’s get this out of the way: I wouldn’t watch Traitor Trump deliver his Russian propaganda to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night with your eyes.

If you are interested in the truth about the state of our union, hang with me for a couple of minutes, while I deliver it here.

Get ready.

The resistance to billionaires running our government is growing. Bernie Sanders is touring the Red State Midwest and drawing massive crowds. Federal workers are pissed. Republican politicians are in hiding, refusing to do town halls even when their constituents demand them or try to set them up.

It was late-fall of 2015, and the end of an era. Our latest troubles as the world’s most enduring democracy were finally behind us, and endless possibilities lit up the road ahead.

I’d argue it was the most unappreciated and significant moment in modern American politics.