'All Apologies'

I imagine most folks that voted for Trump are quietly gloating about the cruelty his cuts to foreign aid are forcing upon the world.

He’s hurting the people many of them have been conditioned to dislike.

Black and brown people suffering at the hands of their awful orange king is exactly what MAGA signed up for; being of equally deficient intellect and subpar morality as their leader feels good when your’e dumb enough to cloak it in the guise of patriotism.

The buzz of brutality.

An idiot’s ideology such as ‘America First’ is much more akin to the KKK’s than any geopolitical strategy that would benefit the United States.

It’s intent is to terrorize and intimidate but it is peopled with cowards and fools.

The architects of this dogma have one goal in mind - and that is dismantling western democracy - not just domestically but around the world.

In Elon Musk and Donald Trump they have found men loathsome enough to potentially pull it off - or at the very least, damage American democracy enough that it remains on life support for decades to come.

While the oligarchs that engineered their coup by manipulating the masses through algorithms and micro-targeted disinformation luxuriate on their private jets and skyboxes at the Super Bowl.

Trump was a Trojan horse of sorts; a big, bungling cartoon character made out of salt and fat and too many pharmaceuticals to grind a cohesive thought out of his drug-addled brain.

Much like his audience, he is driven by resentment and ignorance. He possesses no real self-knowledge, education or empathy. His ‘charisma’ derives from the devolution of spirit; his whole essence is an affront to knowledge. Trump’s stupidity has turned into a lifestyle brand for mediocre, white Christian conservatives - and they have embraced him like a messiah and fallen under his spell.

They are the kindling in his bonfire of the humanities.

He reacts to the world like a caveman, hurling rocks at things he doesn’t understand and beating his chest in exhalation, while revealing his hand as the dumbest and most easily outwitted among us. His recent tariff debacle is a great example of his inability to even partially comprehend economic policy - and we’re just getting started.

He’s more flop sweat than human but he’s absolutely the perfect beast if you want to get a bunch of mindless dolts to vote against their own self-interest.

Now the forces he has unleashed, the pilferers and poltroons of his shameful parade, have been deployed; the consequences of their awful antics will soon set their sights somewhere that truly hurts those wasting away in MAGAville.

Like Social Security or veterans’ healthcare. Or ALL of our Medicare.

Put nothing past the overreach of the newly emboldened Trump administration.

A feckless GOP will only cheer him on, dancing and giggling; all of his toadstools like Speaker Johnson will abdicate their roles in any Congressional oversight and clap along while couching his calamity in Christofascist-speak.

One must hope that more Americans who supported him will become aware that the damage being done may prove irreparable.

We’re gonna need them to stand up too if we want to stop it.

This is not what ‘winning’ looks like - nor is it what leads nations to greatness.

On the contrary, history is littered with the broken lives and ruined nations that allowed themselves to be seduced and controlled by men like Trump and Musk.

There is no easy path in the alleyways of autocracy. Those are dark places that great nations aspire not travel through, viewing them cautiously and soberly with reflexive contempt and healthy aversion.

Many in our land have embraced this lurch into the murky unknown guided by their own ignorance and avarice.

All of this weakens our country in ways it is hard to fully comprehend in this chaotic and awful moment. But we must do our best to illuminate them all.

If I were leading China I would be rushing to fill the spaces we are abandoning in Africa and beyond. Our global inroads did not come cheaply; we are walking away from enormous investments in our national security and that of our allies.

Meet the needs that are suddenly not being met by the U.S. and you instantly gain a strategic upper hand. One a smart nation would have done well to hold on to and view as the asset it was for both our well-being and prosperity.

It’s leaving such a gaping hole in our soft power-global efforts - and playing so neatly into the hands of our adversaries - it’s hard to believe it’s not all, in fact, intentional.

One of USAID’s programs was warning developing nations of the usurious rates of interest China was charging for projects such as road and port building along with other industrial infrastructure improvements.

The dismantling of USAID benefits China (as well as Russia) immensely. Musk needs China for his Tesla factories and batteries - and Trump has ALWAYS had financial ties to Beijing (he rented an entire floor of Trump Tower to China’s largest government-owned bank and has many deals with them, as do his children) so it’s hardly a coincidence.

It’s fairly easy to see the overarching strategy here if you are paying attention (just follow the money) but that doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking to witness.

It’s also exceedingly dangerous for thousands of federal employees: Musk & Trump’s erroneous taunts of USAID workers as self-dealing ‘criminals’ endangers their safety and those of the foreign contract workers that have been employed by the agency.

They are putting a target on the backs of folks who tried to make the world a better place - while Musk & Trump try and make it a worse one.

I’ve seen a lot of dark days in my lifetime but its hard to find a parallel for what we are all now witnessing.

When you get past the corruption, self-dealing and blatant criminality of Trump and his cohorts - and their attempts to both dismantle the functioning of the U.S. government and withdraw and weaken our role in geopolitical affairs - you realize that every action at its core is one that enables our enemies and hurts us.

That is NOT by accident.

Isolationism only leads to ruin. You cannot cut yourself off from the rest of the world if you want to be prosperous and secure in it. We are not as separate from our fellow human beings as the folks behind the MAGA movement would have its followers believe.

They will, of course, do all they can to enshrine their ignorance and malignant worldview into the minds of their adherents. When you cut yourself off from the rest of the world you are cutting yourself off from the flow of life itself.

I think in many ways my generation, Gen X, understood this part instinctually (as did many others of course but I can only speak from my own perspective and life experiences). Many of my friends in my Washington, D.C. days went off to work for USAID and other organizations that sought to address many of the scourges of our day. We grew up under the dark clouds of both the AIDS crisis and famine in Africa.

Apartheid and other racial injustices were something we consciously sought to both raise awareness of and defeat - and in many cases we watched an international consortium led by the United States make a real difference in the world.

Doing work that matters became a worthy goal to spend your life pursuing and was in many ways an academically punk rock response to the ‘greed is good’ Wall Street attitudes of the Reagan era and the subsequent recession it caused in the early 90s.

The folks that heeded this idealistic call made a real difference in this world: many of the problems that seemed so insurmountable in our early twenties are now much more mitigated as we sail into our mid-fifties. At least they were until a couple of weeks ago.

In the last three decades tremendous progress has been made, especially concerning the H.I.V. crisis in Africa through the efforts of PEPFAR and other U.S. funded agencies and charities. Not to mention many, many thousands of people who have dedicated their lives to helping others.

Activists, artists, teachers, scientists and the anonymous angels on the frontlines have all contributed to this progress. Many found guidance and support from our federal agencies and institutions.

There is obviously so much work to be done: the dismantling and destruction of this hard-won progress feels like an act of war against decency and humanity itself. Because it will kill many millions of people. Make no mistake about it. And some of those folks will be in the Unites States.

Trump knows this and so do the Republicans that allow him to destroy what we have built up under the guise of going after the ‘deep state’.

It was not Trump or Musk’s to burn down but they are doing it anyway with smug impunity, while men like Marco Rubio smirk and prance to appease their ruler.

Watching the Japanese P.M. suck up to and flatter the mottled oaf at their joint press conference the other day was both alarming and embarrassing.

It highlighted the fact that we are becoming a joke and a threat on the world stage.

As did Trump’s remarks earlier in the week with the execrable Netanyahu, regarding Gaza and ‘owning it’ to build a Trump-branded resort (thanks Jared), showing just how dangerous and delusional the POTUS and his cabinet have become.

Trump is clearly intoxicated with being the center of the storm once again.

I can think of no other man who craves holding the power of life and death over other people and who would wield it as carelessly as Donald Trump.

He does not feel alive unless other people are suffering. As those closest to him know but won’t publicly admit. Look deeply into his eyes and you will sense his malignancy. When I worked around him on sets, service dogs would bark at him. Dogs know.

You could walk into any prison and find a better man to serve as POTUS than Donald Trump. I would take it as a relief personally, to have a random inmate in charge of the country rather than Trump, knowing what I know about him.

I do not say that lightly or to be cute.

He is as dangerous as any threat we have faced in our nearly 250 years as a republic.

Full stop.

God help us all.