the imbroglio 2.0

… and it’s an inside job. Rebecca Solnit nails it: “Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled.” She continues: 

It is striking that the Trump team’s constant refrain is that we cannot afford to protect the vulnerable or provide for the people, which is why the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, atop Doge, destroyed USAID last year, which has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths from starvation and preventable disease. The Iran war is creating a fertilizer crisis in Europe, Africa and Asia that may also result in widespread famine. Meanwhile, the former head of homeland security Kristi Noem spent more than $200m on an ad campaign starring herself before she was fired.

Although there are far worse things about the utterly gratuitous and literally unjustified war on Iran, the fact that it burns through billions a day is striking, given that huge cuts are being made to environmental protection and national parks, and the forest service is being effectively sabotaged, while public lands are being offered up to fossil fuel companies and mining interests. The forest service headquarters are being moved across the country, which will probably cause many resignations, like the similar move of the Bureau of Land Management in Trump’s first term. More than 50 forest service research stations are being cut, meaning more loss of irreplaceable ongoing research, data, facilities and staff.

Trump said in his droning dullard speech last week: “We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country … We’re fighting wars … It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” Your money, our money, our public lands, our kids. Trump even bribed the builders of offshore windfarms almost a billion dollars to stop, just because he has a personal vendetta against the clean energy systems. The US used to lead the world in scientific research, including medical research, which had led to important breakthroughs in disease treatment and health, but all that has been slashed to the bone and beyond. This is murder.

The whole thing is worth reading because it distills what is happening into a brief summary. The scale of the madness and destruction makes getting the full sense of it difficult, which makes a short article like this so valuable.

The U.S. is being murdered and it’s an inside job. Now what are we going to do about it? Solnit points at some big picture answers to that, too:

It’s the antidemocratic weaknesses in our system that created the vulnerabilities that let this happen – the electoral college and voter suppression that gave Trump a minority victory in 2016, the gerrymandering that has given a minority party majority power in Congress and statehouses, a grotesquely corrupted and unaccountable supreme court and the corrosive influence of the ultra-wealthy in a system that gives them power on a scale that is a direct assault on democracy. We need to imagine a more democratic, more egalitarian, more generous country, one that operates in recognition of an abundance of wealth that should serve all of us – and nature and future generations too – rather than is driven by the moral poverty of billionaires.

The November mid-terms are now a little more than six months away. If we can learn the lessons from Hungary and put sane majorities in both the House and Senate, the madness will not stop, but it should slow considerably: 

Should Democrats take the House, they will gain the power to issue subpoenas as they investigate his administration, and can block the president’s legislative agenda. Should they wrest control of the Senate from the GOP, Democrats could stop Trump from appointing nominees to cabinet positions and the federal judiciary, including the supreme court.

That Guardian analysis from February looks pretty dated since it was published just before the start of Little Donnie’s illegal war against Iran, but sadly, even with that incredible disaster figured in, everyone in the prediction game still thinks the Demorats will win the House, but not the Senate. Only the Kalshi gamblers think Democrats can win at the moment. Although I’m not a fan of turning everything into a bet, here’s hoping the money currently being placed on the Democrats turns out to be correct. 

At Slate today, Ian Prasad Philbrick surveys the field of pundits and prognosticators and wonders: “Where does the chronic impulse to forecast Trump’s imminent downfall come from?” Well, it’s not like there aren’t a million reasons he *should* fall. As Philbirck notes, critics have predicted the end again and again:

It happened after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, when dozens of Republican elected officials rescinded their support over Trump’s comments bragging about grabbing women’s genitals. The end was again nigh in May 2017, when former CBS anchor Dan Rather declared that “the curtain may be coming down on this act of this tragedy” after Robert Mueller started investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. After Trump equivocated over a deadly white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, the journalist Matt Taibbi called it “the final stake through the Grinch-heart of his presidency.” An FBI raid on the office of longtime Trump fixer Michael Cohen the following year emboldened then-New Yorker writer Adam Davidson to argue that “we are now in the end stages of the Trump presidency.“ This fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” an “exhilarated” Sen. Mitch McConnell told a New York Times reporter hours after a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol. “Donald Trump is now forever disgraced,” the historian Brenda Wineapple opined in the Times after the House committee investigating Jan. 6 referred him for criminal prosecution. Weeks before Trump won the 2024 election, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz predicted that his debate performance against Kamala Harris would cost the former president the race. 

This is what makes those of us who still believe in the U.S. Constitution — in justice, in principles in fairness, and in morality — so insane. No one should still have popular support after *any* of these episodes, let alone all of them. The world is upside down when a “leader” can do all of this and still get more votes than his opponent and maintain the support of his party and all of the sycophants around him. 

The world is truly upside down when this person can go to war against another country for no reason he or anyone else can identify, spending over a billion dollars per day of our money, killing our fellow Americans, and even aiding this so-called “enemy” by lifting sanctions to allow them to profit from their oil to the tune of $14 billion (which they will certainly spend to attempt to kill more Americans or damage American interests), and still… still, this person maintains his position, the support of his party, and the support of most of the people who voted for him. 

Seriously people, what will it take for this demagogue to be dethroned? 

Little Donnie and the MAGAts are at war with Iran because, they claim, Iran is the enemy. So why is Little Donnie helping the enemy? 

The Trump administration said on Thursday that it planned to remove sanctions on Iranian oil, an unorthodox move intended to lower surging crude prices, which have hurt U.S. consumers and helped Iran profit. The strategy would be a sharp reversal from years of maximum-pressure sanctions aimed to cripple Iran’s economy.

How is this not treason? Oh, wait, it IS treason! 

Or, could it be that Iran is not an enemy? Then why are we wasting a billion dollars a day bombing Iran, killing Iranians and destroying the world economy? 

As David Kurtz of TPM puts it:

Shoring up your adversary in an armed conflict you initiated in a desperate attempt to mitigate the consequences of your elective war may forever stand as the paramount example of Donald Trump putting his personal and political interests above the national interest.

Which is true, but also just another example of how we have become inured to the treasonous criminality of the U.S. government. The U.S. has become a rogue and lawless state and its leaders are sending our troops to fight and die while at the same time providing material aid and support to the same forces our troops are fighting. Insanity doesn’t even begin to describe this. Language is inadequate to the task of capturing how truly evil and insane this really is, so let’s just call it what it is — treason! — and begin the appropriate proceedings immediately. (But this time, convict!)

Whether I like it or not, I’m pretty much compelled to read the news every day adn sometimes I read something that I simply must share because of how it clarifies the current situation or for what it memorializes or for how it inspires. Yesterday was one of those days when reading Heather Cox Richardson’s account of how citizens in Surprise, Arizona, are reacting to ICE buying a giant warehouse the size of 7 football fields, in their community. ICE hasn’t said exactly why it bought the building, but it’s a good bet it’s to house prisoners before deporting them. Government officials in Surprise said they don’t know what ICE plans to do with the building but, “It’s important to note, Federal projects are not subject to local regulations, such as zoning.”

The citizens of Surprise aren’t having that:

On Tuesday, February 3, more than a thousand people turned out for the Surprise City Council meeting to oppose the establishment of the federal detention center. One of the speakers reminded the council of Ohrdruf, the first Nazi camp liberated by U.S. troops, on April 4, 1945. He said:

“The U.S. Army brought the leading citizens of Ohrdruf to tour the facility, which turned out to be part of the Buchenwald network of concentration camps. A U.S. Army colonel told the German civilians who viewed the scenes without muttering a word that they were to blame. One of the Germans replied that what happened in the camp was ‘done by a few people,’ and ‘you cannot blame us all.’ And the American, who could have been any one of our grandfathers, said: ‘This was done by those that the German people chose to lead them, and all are responsible.’

“The morning after the tour, the mayor of Ohrdruf killed himself. And maybe he did not know the full extent of the outrages that were committed in his community, but he knew enough. And we don’t know exactly how ICE will use this warehouse. But we know enough. I ask you to consider what the mayor of Ohrdruf might have thought before he died. Maybe he felt like a victim. He might have thought, ‘How is this my fault? I had no jurisdiction over this.’ Maybe he would have said, ‘This site was not subject to local zoning, what could I do?’ But I think, when he reflected on the suffering that occurred at this camp, just outside of town, that those words would have sounded hollow even to him. Because in his heart he knew, as we do, that we are all responsible for what happens in our community.”

We are all responsible. We can’t just be “good Germans” and go along with things we know are wrong. I don’t know what the good people of Surprise, Arizona can do to stop this detention center, but they have taken the first steps. Getting the word out that this is happening is another step. Encouraging every other community where ICE tries to build a new camp or prison to mobilize against it is another step. Lending our voices and our money to the effort is another. One step at a time, it must continue. We are all responsible so we all have to do whatever we can.