Trump and the Strawberries

Ah, where to start this week. As I begin writing this on the day after Easter, it would be easy to rant about the obscenely inappropriate Easter message from the only President we have on Sunday. No doubt the F-bomb warmed the hearts of Christians on Sunday, and the crack about Allah was oh-so amusing to the Muslims who are ostensibly still on our side in the Iran conflict.

Most of us, except MAGA diehards, saw it for the desperate gesture it was. His deadline for Armageddon was pushed back yet again in another TACO performance. The phony macho threats keep changing like a Bugs Bunny argument...

He's like the French knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail...

No, he doesn't know how to truly wrap this thing up, or what victory looks like. Defense Secretary, The Right Reverend Peter Hegseth of the Order of St. Franzia Boxwine keeps telling us we are kicking some evil ass, and he'll keep firing experienced generals until he finds one that agrees with him. Blacks and women first, of course.

OK, I gave him a phony Catholic title even though he and his Christian Nationalist buddies don't much care for them. The Pentagon Easter service was Protestant-only, for example, and announced as such. Hegseth this week ordered sweeping changes to the U.S. military’s chaplain corps, with a plan to simplify a system that he said has become too focused on “new age” concepts.

Sorry, Father Mulcahy.

Allies are staring open-mouthed at Trump's insults and taunting as he asks for help in the war he says we already won. Confusing, why yes as a matter of fact. And no one in the NATO Alliance he keeps slowly destroying seems to be able to untie the Gordian Knot that is his train of thought. At the since deleted Easter event at the White House, he even insulted French President Macron in a bold diplomatic stroke.

In fact, he continues to call our NATO allies cowards all the while asking for their help putting out the fire he started.

Meanwhile, two names keep popping up in any conversation about the why of all this...Netanyahu and Epstein. One obviously has the President's ear and the other used to, along with other body parts. As for the latter, he...wait! No! Look over here! No, over here! You see that explosion!

His latest budget request for $1.5 trillion in military spending, after a $200 billion request for the Iran conflict, is half a trillion more than last year and more than the next 9 largest defense budgets in the world combined. By the end of the fiscal year he will have added as much to the national debt as Biden did in 4 years, with a pandemic.

We are in the National Debt express lane apparently.

For reference, it took 200 years to rack up the first trillion dollars in debt. We will have quadrupled that by the 250th celebration.

To get that money, everything else in the budget would be cut by 10%, everything that is in any way discretionary, science, space, food, housing, agriculture, the environment, justice, everything.

But of course one multi-billion dollar Pentagon contract will go to a manufacturer of drone components called PowerUs. Two prominent investors are Trump's sons, Uday and Qusay.

But that's just par for the course these days. In January the New York Daily News offered this observation...

It is time to acknowledge what has become tragically obvious: the Trump administration is essentially acting as a massive criminal enterprise. It lies, steals, extorts and murders — all while cloaked in the awesome authority of the state. It is on a crime spree that puts Al Capone to shame.

This is not hyperbole or hyperventilation. It is our reality, as the facts amply demonstrate.

And as I finish this piece on Tuesday, D-Day in Iran, the President has threatened to eliminate an entire civilization if his deadline isn't met by tonight. There's a word for that. It's on the tip of my tongue. Let me reread the Nuremburg trial transcripts, and I'll remember it.

The noted scholar on US-Russia relations, Timothy Snyder has posited that something resembling a coup may be in the works in an attempt to cancel the midterm elections. His contention is...

"Trump tells us that he is chiefly concerned with the permanence of his own comfort and power (think about ballroom and bunker), much of which he will lose when his party is defeated decisively in the midterms. He regularly declares his intention to meddle in the elections. His party backed a bill which would have turned elections into a sham. Trump wants to increase the defense budget by nearly 50% without any review of what the money is for; this is strategic nonsense, and has to be understood as a payoff for the men who, as he imagines, will help him install a dictatorship. Hegseth is meanwhile purging the highest officer ranks of people of principle."

With gasoline hitting new record highs, tariffs taking their toll on other products, public sentiment must be worrying for MAGA. Do I think there will be a coup? No, not really, as much as I admire Snyder. But could there be a ginned-up excuse to delay or cancel an election? Not out of the realm of possibility, although really, is anything anymore? From the New Yorker...

To help that along, the FBI is opening a new office that reminds me of the Tom Cruise movie about pre-crime called Minority Report (2002), a sci-fi thriller directed by Steven Spielberg. Cruise plays a police chief who runs a specialized unit that uses psychics to arrest murderers before they commit crimes in 2054 Washington, D.C.

The new FBI-led center is dedicated to “proactively” hunting Americans the government thinks might ultimately become so-called domestic terrorists. What will they look for? Here is a list of suspicious beliefs that are actually, publicly available in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) signed in September...

• “anti-Americanism,”
• “anti-capitalism,”
• “anti-Christianity,”
• “support for the overthrow of the U.S. Government,”
• “extremism on migration,”
• extremism on “race,”
• extremism on “gender,”
• “Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,”
• Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on “religion,” and
• Hostility towards those who hold traditional views on “morality.”

How do we define all those things? Hey, leave that to the experts. Do we punish people for believing any of these things? Well, if Joe McCarthy were still with us, we could ask him.

It's all beginning to feel like the trial scene at the end of The Caine Mutiny. Captain Queeg goes on about defective equipment, disloyal officers and stolen strawberries. If Trump pulls a pair of ball bearings out of his pocket and starts rolling them around, I'll really get worried.