Trump hands the world to China and Russia

 The greed and corruption of the Trump regime was already well on the way to knocking the United States to at least the third spot in the world order, before his adventure in Iran sealed the deal.

Trump and Hegseth treated our weapon stockpile like a Hollywood six-shooter that always has enough bullets to outgun the bad guy. Their orgy of violence in Iran burned through a couple of wars' worth of expensive munitions that they can't just order on Amazon with overnight shipping.

In addition to the military depletion, our country has been reduced diplomatically to the foot-stomping and whining of a spoiled rich kid. This regime was put in power by pissed-off simpletons. As such, it is perfectly representative of its constituents. The rest of us just got dragged along.

The pissed-off simpletons include the ones who voted directly for the vile, bigoted, lying grifter and the ones who sat it out in a snit in 2024 because the Democratic candidate wasn't perfect enough.

Whether Trump is formally a foreign asset or not, he has acted perfectly on their behalf, with the full approval of most of the office holders in the party he captured in 2016. We can neither fight nor bargain our way out of the shit swamp that the entire passel of clowns have dumped us into.

The failure of Soviet communism wasn't communism per se. It was the power-mad, sadistic liars in control of the government. The same right wing people who continue to bleat about communism have no problem with the Russian heirs to the same power-mad, sadistic liars exerting control to this day. And now we have our own power-mad, sadistic liars in control of what remains of our democratic government.

We have one needle's eye left that we can squeeze through to oust the power-mad, sadistic liars and resume our zigzag march toward the inclusive and imaginative powerhouse that this country could be. It happens in November, 2026, when one imperfect party stands against a party monolithically devoted to stamping all that out and settling grumpily into their rightful place below a former communist empire and a current one. Because that's how it will be. Tough talk. Threats of global holocaust. No real leverage. But we can stay home and dominate our women and pick on minorities and paint the walls with our own shit, for all that the rest of the world will care.

5...4...3...2...weeks

 In a welcome but still annoying version of snatch-the-football, the Supreme Leader of the United States has agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran. He has progressed from promising things like a health care plan and an infrastructure plan in two weeks to promising to delay starting World War III for two weeks.

Two weeks. the magic time span. Anyway, we can all breathe a sigh of relief while acknowledging as usual that a madman remains in charge of the country, at the head of a cabinet of similar amoral maniacs, most critically the one in charge of military forces.

Bear in mind also that a ceasefire is only as good as the cooperation of the combatants  to maintain it. The regime in DC might decide that it would be clever to sucker punch the Iranians. Or they could be better businessmen about it. Actually obliterating the country would be a very bad move economically, even worse than all of the really bad economic moves the regime has already made. Maybe we have two weeks. Maybe we don't. Most likely nothing happens tonight, but even there it's a not a zero chance.

The United States is being held hostage by violent extremists. About 37 percent of the population is still exhibiting Stockholm Syndrome, believing themselves to be allies and comrades of the kidnappers. The sadistic extremists enjoy demonstrating their power to inspire fear and anger in a populace they consider powerless to stop them. With just a phone and a social media account, the supreme leader can agitate the entire world. No one dares say for sure that he is full of shit, because he is still the commander-in-chief. He can order atrocities the way we regular people could order a pizza, back when we could afford it. If you don't believe it, let's meet in the East Wing of the White House and talk about it. About the only thing the regime is good at is destroying beauty and leaving a crater.

Massive war crimes in 5...4...3...2...

"A civilization dies tonight?" And the entire Republican Party is fine with that, or at least enough of them to present absolutely no check on the upcoming abomination?

Of course Trump does have the track record of blustering and then backing down, but he also authorized the already committed and ongoing war crimes of his elective bombing of Iran, so we know he likes to see things blow up and people suffer.

You'd think that the plutocrats who have kissed his ass for tax cuts would want to curtail his destruction of the global economy that makes them wealthy. Maybe their accountants have already figured out that they can absorb some losses now to cement their position at the tippy top of the economic pyramid after Trump has died and left the machinery they put in place to run more smoothly in the background.

The ultimate goal of progressives is a long-term prosperity in which everyone does modestly well indefinitely. The ultimate goal of uber-capitalist conservatives, white supremacists, and aspiring cyborgs in the tech sector is much crueler and more exclusionary, not to mention fragile and self-destructive.

No long-term goal of humanity is served by bombing anyone. Few productive short term goals are served by it, either. Good luck getting that across to the vindictive bastards who hug their emotional support munitions before raining them down on selected targets.

We're in the mess we're in because the entire Republican Party and significant factions on left and right have devoted themselves to various forms of ethnic cleansing and philosophical purification by fire. Right now, the Republican congress is complicit in war crimes and in the abuse of power domestically. They could stop the abuses of ICE and Border Patrol in this country and the mass murder of Iranians. They don't, because there's something in it for them, regardless of who gets hurt. When it blows back on them they will act surprised and try to rally the whole country the way they did after September 11th. Blame radical Islam! Blame anyone but them.

Millions of us should be in the streets right now, converging on DC and surrounding congressional representatives and senators wherever they are, to proclaim in a massed shout loud enough to be heard over bombs detonating that we do not endorse this murderous, lawless regime. We won't, of course. It's too hard to arrange. Americans are always leery of mass gatherings. For any congregation of true believers, whether at a Trump rally or No Kings, or Black Lives Matter, or Woodstock, there are many more regular folks who just wish people would simmer down. They're embarrassed by demonstrations and focused on their own day to day needs. Indeed, the need to demonstrate against authority's excesses is a gross imposition on the people that authority -- particularly the government -- is supposed to serve. 

The Secretary of Defense has already purged senior military leadership of the officers who would respectfully disagree and advise against committing atrocities in the name of Capitalism and Jesus and the god-king Trump, under the hijacked banner of the US flag. Don't expect the military to refuse to carry out the orders that will mark our nation forever as one of the worst in history.

The presidential legacy

 Lyndon Johnson inherited John F, Kennedy's barely-started Vietnam adventure. President Vance will be inheriting Donald Trump's far worse blunder in Iran.

President Johnson faced the global scourge of communism. It was an organized threat based in established nations, with clear ambitions for global expansion using conventional military forces or the threat thereof. Military might determined success. Small nations succumbed to Soviet expansion and growing Chinese influence. Something had to be done.

President Vance will be handed a much more nebulous proposition. Whether he buys into the biblical horseshit that Pete Hegseth foams at the mouth about remains to be seen. The powers behind the current regime have a couple or three overlaid apocalyptic visions, none of which are good for human survival. And they control the largest military force in the world.

No one with a shred of rationality would have started the mess in Iran, but clearly we are at the mercy of office holders who live in their own fantasy worlds. The tech bro contingent sees a humanless future of machine domination. The religious nutjobs like Hegseth see a chance to bring on the Second Coming through a glorious holy war.

After September 11, 2001, we were saturated with the message that radical Islam would stop at nothing to obliterate our free (and Christian) nation. The flip side is that radical Christians will stop at nothing to obliterate Islam, and the radical Christians running the United States military now have every horrific weapon at their disposal.

Donald Trump is a decrepit old pervert who likes golf, gold, and women who make themselves look like they have balloons stuffed in their shirt. He requires constant validation and praise for his achievements. He has no ideology. But the inheritors of his power do. Unfortunately, Trump's death is likely to rehabilitate the image of the Republican Party because his excesses have made him the personification of evil. The problem is that evil does not die when its personification does. The willing agents of destruction who make up his entire cabinet and nearly all of the Republican Congress represent decades of effort from well before Trump was a factor.

Religious fervor is a drug in itself. Look at Hegseth's tattoos, and his ponderous language when he utters his threats. In the name of the Prince of Peace, I nuke thee! We're constantly hearing about pastors who are high on their own supply, committing fleshly excesses against parishioners. They're not perfect, just forgiven.

The tearful apology is part of the cycle of abuse. Confess. Repent. Re-offend. Rinse and repeat.

As a nation post-Trump, we stand a high risk of being the global equivalent of a terrorist wearing a bomb vest. We're at risk of it now, because of the putative chief executive's complete detachment from reality and his lifelong need to look tough. The risk increases when President Vance is trying to control the Secretary of Defense while also choreographing the plunder of national resources and throttling voting rights, with his own eye on the goals of Peter Thiel.

Maybe the tech bro influence will tamp down the war fever. It's hard to set up your artificial intelligence apparatus to control all of humanity when an angry drunk with nukes is peeling the crust off of the planet. While that seems like a relief, as long as the tech bros are in power they will continue to enact their dystopian sci-fi on us. The strip mines of the twentieth century in rural America will be replaced by the data centers of the twenty-first. The folks round about will still live in trailers and work for the big outside money that tells them to be grateful for their jobs. And the data centers will employ far fewer of them than the strip mines and coal caves did.

As much as I would rejoice at the news of the Big Beautiful Obituary, Donald Trump dying is his final escape from any consequences for his many crimes. I've read articles that assert that his death will expose his underlings to the justice system, which will regenerate itself from the few surviving shoots in the scorched field where it once flourished, but we're in the grip of a regime that has no shame and no conscience. They still control the agencies that would bring them down, and the Congress, unless they are pushed out in the midterm elections.

My fear is that Trump will die before the midterms and a bunch of conservative voters will think that it's safe to vote Republican again. The party has been parasitized by the worst elements of greed and fundamentalist religion. My father was a lifelong Republican, but he died a registered Democrat. He also voted across party lines when a particular non-Republican candidate seemed like a better choice. It's completely possible to vote your conscience and your intelligence while registered for one party, and even donating to them. Ultimately, he couldn't stomach the degeneration of the party he had favored for his entire voting life.

It's hard to keep everything straight in your mind when you're busy being a good worker. Most of us pick up little morsels of information, or find a news source or an informed friend that we trust. It's more than just information silos. It's a world view. You have a vision of the world and you look for people who will advance it. Confirmation bias just comes along for the ride. Information that doesn't fit the visualization just becomes noise, or an irritant. All of that matters now because a lot of  voters will need to make difficult choices in November and in 2028. 

With no Trump, the evils of "Trumpism" will still exist. They aways existed. In classic Trump style, he just rebranded them with his name. With him gone, they will be harder to collect and stomp on without the bloated vulgarian himself as the big statue to topple. It will be much harder to get conservative undeclared voters to vote against the party that has always advanced their repressive social agenda against the freaks and weirdos and foreigners who are destroying the monoculture of this great nation. The propaganda falsehood that Republicans are better for the economy will see a rebirth when the candidates can throw Trump's body under the bus and lay all of the economic and global woes on him. They might get away with that, even though the party's office holders and judges always had the power to stop him, and refused to use it. Don't forget that, and don't let them forget it.