American Madness

“America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.” - Frederick Douglass

She died at only age 20, picking up trash for a president who cannot pick up responsibility.

A young National Guard soldier from West Virginia was sent to Washington under false pretenses to fight crime. Instead, she spent her time under the President’s orders trying to “beautify” the nation’s capital for cameras. The military term is MOS, Military Occupational Specialty, and hers was not to quell a riot or protect a monument. She was bagging garbage on streets that needed policy more than PR. There was no rational reason for her or other members of her unit to be present in Washington and she, like every other soldier deployed there, was a wide-open target for the insane. When she died, the American president was asked at a Thanksgiving press conference at Mar‑a‑Lago whether he will attend her funeral. He did not speak her name, nor did he mention her service or sacrifice, he turned the conversation, as he always does, to his endless celebration of self.

“I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere,” he said.

He continues to exhibit a toxic vanity and such self-involved and insensitive remarks have become totally normal stuff from an abnormal human. There used to be an America where presidents measured themselves against history. In this country’s present incarnation, perhaps its last, the president sizes himself up against county‑by‑county maps, and still manages to make a dead soldier’s funeral about what he views as his own greatness.

You can almost chart the moral decline of a country in the way its leaders talk when they’re cornered by grief. A reporter asked a basic question about respect for a fallen soldier and gets, instead of a simple answer, a statistical boast. Another female reporter asked about the President’s insistence that the Afghan shooter who allegedly killed that Guard member was an “unvetted” refugee, which was not true. He was granted asylum this past April by the current president’s administration. Reporting has indicated the killer worked with U.S. intelligence during our occupation of Afghanistan as part of a “Zero Unit,” which Afghanis considered a death squad and US forces claimed was deployed to target assaults on terrorists. When confronted with the facts by a female journalist, he snapped, “You’re a stupid person.”

In a separate disturbing incident aboard Air Force One, a female reporter from Bloomberg attempted to ask the president about Epstein emails that indicated he “knew about the girls.” His response to the questioner was, “Quiet. Quiet, Piggy,” as he pointed his finger at an experienced and accomplished journalist.

The madness of the American President and his cabinet enablers continues to unspool in every direction. He treats the country like a reality show he had already canceled in his head. He shut down the federal government for 43 days over Obamacare subsidies, swearing that continuing them would be the end of freedom as we know it. Then, as the political heat built, he began musing in front of cameras about “considering” an extension of those same subsidies, as though stumbling onto a brilliant new idea. The people who missed paychecks, delayed medical care, and watched savings drain away were little more than extras in his plot twist. Congressional Republicans, of course, erupted in outrage, not over the damage to ordinary lives but because their prophet had briefly flirted with an act of sanity.

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Everyone gets a dosage of betrayal and lies from our president, especially American allies. His Ukraine “peace” plan is a 28‑point ransom note written in the euphemisms of diplomacy. The elements of the proposal mostly demand an ally surrender territory to Vladimir Putin, to recognize Russia’s thefts as faits accompli, and to shrink its military capacity, all so he can claim he “ended the war” and get back to ranting about dishwashers and shower heads and low water pressure. European officials and Ukrainians see what’s really on the page, which is a Kremlin draft, a wish list of concessions Moscow never won on the battlefield but might still obtain at the negotiating table of a distracted and misled superpower. The context also includes that leaked transcript of envoy Steve Witkoff chatting with a top Putin aide, offering tips on how to flatter the American autocrat. “Very nice tan, dear leader,” would probably work. Our ally is Ukraine; our head of state is the guy the Kremlin is being briefed on how to seduce.

At home, the institutions that are supposed to constrain this kind of lunacy are populated by people who confuse loyalty with law. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is busily trying to turn Senator Mark Kelly, a Navy combat pilot who flew dozens of combat missions for his country and then rode a rocket into orbit, into a villain for appearing in a video reminding troops that they must refuse illegal orders. Hegseth, a low-intellect talking head from the FOX network apparently is unaware of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Nonetheless, he talks about “potential punishments” and reinstating Kelly as an active‑duty soldier so they can court‑martial him, as if the Pentagon, like the Department of Justice (DoJ), were now an arm of the White House’s grievance committee.

Meanwhile, Hegseth, has begun blowing up what the U.S. alleges are narco boats off the coast of Venezuela, convicting and condemning people to death without due process. There is no evidence the boats are anything more than fishing vessels and families have come forth to make claims that husbands and fathers were killed without justification. The administration insists it is fighting narcoterrorism, which appears to be a selective concern since the White House just announced a full pardon of the former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández. An American jury found him guilty last year of conspiring to import 400 tons of cocaine into the United States and sentenced him to 45 years in a federal prison. The president, though, gloated over the pardon on his social media platform and exclaimed in all capital letters, “MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!”

Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has turned D0J into the madman’s personal law firm, has just absorbed a public battering as a federal judge tossed her politically theatrical indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Any first‑year law student could see they were stitched together for revenge, not jurisprudence, but Bondi marches out like a 1950s party apparatchik to insist everything was fine and her hand‑picked U.S. attorney is “excellent.” That’s what enablers do, of course, when they stand on the courthouse steps and pretend failure is victory because the dear leader demands applause, not analysis. Karoline Leavitt plays the same role in the press room, telling us that when her boss insults reporters and ducks funerals, what you’re actually seeing is “authentic leadership” and “toughness,” not a man hiding his cowardice behind cheap insults.

The law is non-existent to his entire cabinet. Kristi Noem at Homeland Security, for instance, ignored a federal judge’s orders to halt deportation flights to Central America. Instead, she personally directed that they continue, loading hundreds of people onto planes bound for El Salvador’s CECOT mega‑prison, a place known for its inhumane conditions. Why ICE Barbie has not be charged with criminal contempt of court is inexplicable. Her consort, FBI Director Kash Patel somehow manages to make things worse with every headline and casts recurring doubt about whether the Epstein files will ever be fully released. Patel is more concerned with spending taxpayer money on security for his country‑singer girlfriend, and raged when her armed escort slipped away before she could sing at an NRA convention. Even the administration’s most fervent loyalists are tired of cleaning up after his chaos.

Nothing is more confounding, however, than the man in charge of the nation’s health, who appears to be running his own side show. RFK Jr., the ex‑junkie elevated to cabinet rank, is now the subject of an Olivia Nuzzi book that describes a “digital affair,” psychedelic drug use, and a request that she have his baby. He has dragged official messaging on vaccines and autism deep into conspiracy swamp water, using the microphone of public health to amplify ideas that ought to be confined to fringe comment sections. In a sane administration, this would be the main scandal. In the current cabinet, it’s just a palate cleanser between episodes of constitutional vandalism.

Threaded through all of this is the unsettling question of Trump’s mind. He has recently boasted about acing what doctors call a dementia screening exam, insisting it’s a “very hard” intelligence test and daring critics to match his performance. Neurologists and psychologists point out that confusing a cognitive screen with an IQ test is itself a worrying sign. His public remarks show all the signs of advancing dementia with meandering tangents, misremembered facts, lurches in logic that leave staffers scrambling to “clarify” what he meant. When that’s the man weighing whether to defy a federal judge, hand Ukrainian land to Putin, or send more Guard units on trash duty, it all begins to look like a late‑night comedy skit instead of a national security risk.

But this is who we are now as a country. We have allowed all this to happen. We know what’s wrong but do nothing about it. In a better republic, the young female Guard member would still be alive or her death would force a reckoning about how and why we use citizen‑soldiers, and whether a president who deploys them as set dressing deserves the authority to command. In America today, though, her sacrifice is reduced to a prompt for a vain fool to brag about his vote margin and an opportunity for his surrogates to insist that such madness is “normal politics.” I’ve spent much of my career writing about how power behaves when it thinks no one is paying attention. The difference now is that they act this way when all of us are watching. The soldier dies, the president boasts, the enablers nod, and the rest of the world wonders how long a crazy country can keep pretending this is just another chapter in the American story.

Instead of a warning flare that the ship of state has taken on too much water and can no longer be saved.