Did anyone think it would be this bad? The first couple of months of the crazed Trump take over of America has been stunning and terrifying. His twisted fascination and misunderstanding of tariffs has crashed the stock markets costing people trillions of dollars. For the Baby Boomer generation, they see years of investment savings evaporate in two days. Younger people have years to recover. Almost every economist sees prices for everything going up substantially. Trump says he’s not changing his mind and he’s going to make everyone richer in this “Golden Age” of America. After he dropped the tariff bomb and had the country reeling, he flew off the Florida to play golf.
When we look back on the first Trump term, he didn’t expect to win. He really didn’t know what he was doing, but we were lucky that he was surrounded by people who thought they could control him. They often didn’t succeed. His longest lasting chief of staff, General John Kelly spent much of his time trying to rein in Trump from doing stupid things and keeping bad influences out of the Oval Office. Kelly described the White House as “crazy town”. This time around there is no General Kelly and Trump has surrounded himself with “yes” men and women and whose main qualification is loyalty.
There is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with no experience running anything other than his mouth. We now know how good he is at that by discussing attack plans against Houthi rebels on the that unsecured Signal app. That text chain was set up by National SecurityAdvisor Mike Waltz whose main job is security. He managed to include Atlantic magazine editor Jeffery Goldberg into the text chain by mistake. He had Goldberg’s number in his phone. Oops. He and Hegseth still have their jobs. Anyone else at any level of the government or military who made such a mistake would have been fired on the spot.
Let’s talk about Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The former governor of South Dakota and congresswoman with no national security experience. What she has is the “look”. She’s attractive with long flowing hair and a magazine cover face. Trump loves that. She has a very active social media presences. She’s been on raids in New York City. She’s been to the border riding horses in her cowgirl hat. She been to Guantanamo where immigrants were housed briefly. Most recently you can she standing in front of caged alleged gang members in an El Salvador prison. She has her ICE hat on an over her long locks and she’s wearing what’s been estimated to be a fifty-thousand dollar Rolex watch. She’s standing between us and the bad guys.
Noem’s most high profile employee is Tom Homan, Executive Associate Director, Enforcement and Removal Operations. But everyone calls him “The Border Czar” like a character out of the old Soviet Union. He comes off as one too. In every interview he’s arrogant and insist no one is going to stop him from departing eleven million illegal immigrants. There have been mistakes. You may have seen the video of thirty year old Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk being arrested in Somerville, Massachusetts. She was accosted by several ICE agents in masks and hoodies with no obvious identification and taken away. It was something you would expect to see in 1930’s Germany. She was sent to a detention center in Louisiana.The government claims her visa was revoked because she took part in pro-Palestinian protests. Her lawyer and friends say she was not involved in any protest. She did co-write an op-ed in the student newspaper criticizing the school’s response to students protesting the war in Gaza. Oops.
And finally, let’s never forget Laura Loomer. Never heard of her? She’s a thirty-one year radical conspiracy advocate. She’s been a big Trump supporter. She’s been described as a white nationalist and an Islamophobe. She has claimed several mass school shooting were staged, and of course, 9/11 was an inside job. She managed to get into the Oval Office to meet with Trump and some top advisors including National Security Advisor Mike Waltz who she ripped for not firing people on his staff that she claimed were not loyal to Trump. Guess what? They were fired.
This is an America we have never seen before run by dangerous incompetent people. Dan Rather summoned it up in a Turkish proverb, “When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace instead becomes a circus.”
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