How Well did These Hold Up?

 

A look back at posts I have written on politics since Trump won the election in 2024.  This will be part one of two, the second to be published in one week.

 

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

What’s Next?

How did he win?

It is clear that if the democrats wanted to, they could have swung a few votes in key districts to change the outcome, and the media would have said “fairest election in history.”  Not sure how the right would have reacted, but there it is.

So, why media and democrat silence?

Call it the aftermath of October 8, 2023 – the day that genocide began.  I don’t think I wrote out any thoughts on this, and I mentioned it to one or two people, but it didn’t sink in enough for me to write it out.  But it should have been obvious: the left is an unstable base for Zionist support; the right is not.  Sure, at the top of each party, the support is there.  But the base?  We have seen the answer.

In any case, republicans offer a more stable base for the support of Israel and its genocidal actions than democrats currently do.

Hence…Trump.

So far, more spot on than I even imagined.

However, let’s look on the bright side: people like Musk, Ramaswamy, RFK, Jr., Gabbard, Homan, maybe even Gaetz – in the positions for which Trump will place them.  Can you envision – in the real world, not in the world of libertarian wet-dreams – a better outcome on the national level?

A few of these lasted only days or weeks.

Can they withstand the administrative, bureaucratic, and industry pressures of trillions of dollars arrayed against them?  The fight for turf, the desire for war, the wishes of poisoning the population for profit?

They could not.

Will Musk and Vivek find the $2 trillion reduction necessary to move the country away from either insolvency or funny money.  Will Gaetz reign in the DOJ, including the FBI?  Will Homan be successful at deporting the hundreds of thousands or millions of criminals that have been welcomed in by previous administrations?

They did not.

Will Gabbard get control of eighteen spook agencies? Tamp down their dirty deeds?  Will RFK, Jr. shut down the pharmacy and food industrial complex?

Will congress even allow any of this – much of which will have to be approved by congress?

No, no, and no.

 

Thursday, December 26, 2024

One Way DOGE Might Work

DOGE can work if the DOD and the spook agencies want it to work. … If the DOD and spook agencies see that the only way they continue over the next fifty years is for all other aspects of government spending to be drastically reduced, well, that’s just what will happen.

It didn’t work.  My previous post asked the questions that answered themselves, but I guess I was trying to find a bit of optimism here right around Christmas.

 

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Treating the Symptom, not the Cause

What a brouhaha about H-1B visas within the MAGA movement.

Remember that one?  Vivek posted that the need for these Visas is due to an American culture that embraces mediocrity.

Now, the culture he and Elon and the tech wizards that have joined MAGA [care about] (do they really care about what working class Americans care about) is the culture of STEM, and I agree fully that this is an important culture for an industrialized, division of labor economy.

We see now why the tech wizards joined Trump.  If you don’t worship AI, you just lack a decent IQ.

 

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Are We Winning?

This was written a week into Trump’s term.  A flurry of executive orders, DOGE actions, etc., all corresponding to many of the key campaign promises that gave some hope.

Are we winning?  Or, to put it another way: have some things, at least, moved in a better direction?  I say, yes.  But it all comes down to the “how.”

We will get either an even more dictatorial president soon enough – whether on the right or on the left.  I will not consider that we are winning, either way.

But, given that I have no say in the matter, I know which evil is lessor. 

In hindsight, “the lessor” evil is the wrong lens to use.

 

Thursday, February 6, 2025

The Third American Civil War

Something was different this time.  There was little talk coming out of the Trump team between election night and his inauguration.  Sure, we heard the words: DOGE, end the wars (but not the slaughter in Gaza), nominees including RFK, Jr., Gabbard, Hegseth, Patel.  No, not saints, but a sea change from what I have seen in my lifetime.

Since inauguration?  Every day, actions are announced and changes made – almost every one of which is far better for the country than anything any president has done since…what, Andrew Jackson and shutting down the bank?

USAID.  If there is one sign that Trump is serious about taking on the Deep State and the malevolent oligarchs, what is being done here is it.  Yes, it may survive in the State Department.  But even this is more oversight and control than the current practice. 

None of that aged well.

 

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Violent, Proud Boasters

I return to the story of Trump’s first few weeks in office.  Really an unbelievable start, with a major exception being the black mark of openly espousing genocide and forced displacement.  But as Trump has done so often – even beginning eight years ago in his first run – the only difference between him and most politicians is that he says the quiet part out loud.

 

Thursday, February 20, 2025

But Why?

This in regards to the effort of exposing, in more detail than ever, the corruption to be found in the spending of the United States government.

But why?  That’s the question I keep asking myself.  Why this effort?  Why now?  Why is it happening?  Why, so relatively speaking, quietly?

For once, we have the billionaires on our side.  Not strategically, but tactically.  And if that’s all I can get (as if I have a say in the matter), I will take it.  The next 12 – 18 months will tell the tale.

The tale has been told – they weren’t even on our side tactically.  What a dumb thought.  It is clear that in the first month of Trump’s second term, I had no idea what to make of it.

 

Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Bring Your Friends Close…and your enemies closer.

Well, Gabbard has completely flipped (have you seen her defend the bombings in Yemen, and her nonsensical comments about Signal-gate?), and RFK, jr., it seems, posts primarily about how antisemitism is a health crisis.  Meanwhile, Patel and others are rounding up individuals for speech, carting them off to prison, with who knows what fate, and when.

Then there is this:

This is what’s happened to American values.  The United States is supporting an apartheid state that’s engaged in genocide.  Do you need to know any more?

-          John Mearsheimer, on Judge Napolitano’s podcast

MAGA is going to be torn apart, and torn apart from within.  These issues divide very neatly the MAGA base: the Christian Zionists are, no doubt, a strong supporter of MAGA and many of these neocon actions – probably the most significant bloc of MAGA support.

That took me a little over two months.  Relative to many (Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, etc.), that was pretty early.

 

Friday, June 13, 2025

As Good a Time as Any

When Trump 2.0 began, I wrote that we would know which way we would head within 12-18 months (or I wrote something like this).  I think it is safe to say, there is no off-ramp.

A couple of months’ ago, I asked some friends: in four years, do you think we will be in worse shape than today because Trump was president?  I think the answer is a clear YES.

Whatever comes after Trump, it will be tyranny.  Trump has further opened that door for the left, if the left wins; and if the right still doesn’t get what it wants from Trump, and the right wins, they will want an absolute tyrant.

Conclusion

Of this first part.  The next section begins with Trump engaging in the Twelve Day War, so this seems a good place to end part one.

Taking Royal Hostages

 

Historically, a militarily defeated country was required to provide hostages to the victor to ensure compliance to whatever treaty came into force after a war.  The defeated king would be required to send members of his family to be kept in the imperial household of the victor.  Thereafter, any violation by the defeated power would result in, among other consequences, the death of these hostages.

Thinking about the current situation in the Middle East and the Gulf, it seems so logical that the Gulf countries, whose economies depend on oil and gas infrastructure and whose people depend on desalinated water and also electricity for air conditioning would want to cut a deal with Iran for peace.  It is clear that Iran can target and hit any such facilities that they choose. 

So why haven’t these Gulf countries come to some sort of mutually agreeable terms to keep the Gulf open for shipping, sustaining life, etc.?  To my knowledge, the United States isn’t holding hostage any crown princes of the various Gulf monarchs.  But the United States is, in fact, holding countless billions (trillions) in wealth from these same monarchs.  Investments in US assets, investments held at US institutions, and investments denominated in US dollars. 

Is the US capable only of confiscating Iranian or Russian assets?  Of course not. 

These monarchs are between a rock and a hard place: watch their countries and, therefore, the source of their wealth destroyed, or watch their accumulated wealth confiscated.

MAGA Update

 

Well, let me start with a big “if”: if what we are reading about this MOU to end the war in Iran is accurate, or even approximate, it represents a total capitulation by Trump and the United States government.  Of course, there was no choice but to capitulate, because it would have taken total annihilation of Iran to avoid this – and total annihilation of Iran would have meant half the world’s population dies.

Another big “if”: if the agreement can hold….  Because too many powerful forces with the means to ensure it doesn’t hold don’t want it to hold.  Obviously, I am not talking about Iran – as, assuming the terms we read are somewhat accurate, they come out a big winner.  There are players in this game who aren’t bothered at all with the prospect of half the world dying.

With those caveats and concerns in place, two thoughts:

First: poor JD Vance.  He is the one being sent out to sell the deal.  Not Trump, not Rubio, not Hegseth.  Why is that?  Trump is too embarrassed, and neither Rubio nor Hegseth ever had any hope at all of capturing the working-class base of what was MAGA in any future election.  So, making them take the fall is meaningless because the working-class base of MAGA would never support them in the future anyway.

Vance did have some hope of doing that – carrying that part of the base.  If you want to ensure Vance destroys any possibility that he can carry that ball in a couple of years, get him to go out and defend the war and then defend how the deal is good for America. 

It is his Kamala Harris moment: “I can’t think of a single policy of Joe Biden / Donald Trump where I would do something differently.”  Oh…not even the strategically stupidest decision in US history to launch this war against Iran?

Second: I have commented on this before, but I think it is far more evident now.  Many who voted for Trump – again, call it his working-class base – wanted the US out of foreign wars, bring the troops home, shut down the foreign military bases, get out of these international institutions like the UN, the EU, NATO, etc.

Trump is doing that.  I certainly don’t like the way he is doing it, but what if he is doing it the only way it can be done in Washington: give the neocons and all associated with wanting more war everything they want? 

Could he get US troops out of the Gulf otherwise – if the bases hadn’t been destroyed by Iran?  Could he have ensured that the other power centers in the world gained strength at the cost of reducing the position of the US without this war?

Probably not.

So, who knows if this was by Trump’s design.  But it certainly looks like it will be one effect.  With that said, I still don’t see this empire dying without a fight.  It remains very dark before the dawn…if we survive until dawn.

Not to say that Trump and this administration hasn’t failed elsewhere.  They have failed at almost everything promised, and many of the things they are succeeding at really stink for some sort of movement toward sanity.