'American Pie'

The next 250 years of this republic will be vastly different than the first because of the presidency of Donald Trump; the most corrupt man to ever hold public office, let alone the presidency.

POTUS is both an abomination and an embarrassment, a creature who came to power preying on our weaknesses and exploiting our blindspots as a people. He reflects back to us our defects and moral derelictions.

A man who stands underneath Mount Rushmore and spuriously calls his Democratic opponents ‘Communists’ while knowing full well he has taken a percentage of government deals involving private businesses, such as Intel, and recently ripped-off over a million investors in his meme coin scam which he shamelessly promoted as as President.

Only the latest fraud - in a lifetime of larceny, deceit and depravity.

Trump would make our founding fathers ill, as he encompasses all they feared and - tried to avoid - in crafting our Constitution. I doubt even those men of vision would have a imagined a leader so craven and arrogant he would sell self-branded sneakers and put his face on passports and coins, not to mention his myriad treasonous actions as president.

DJT embodies the antithesis of the values that have guided this nation for two and a half centuries - we must continue to rise up in this moment and reclaim our dominion and destiny.

To counter his many bad deeds with righteous ‘good trouble’ and an enthusiastic embrace of our fellow citizens standing up for democracy and decency. We should mark this moment as one in which we reclaim our power as a people to stand up to tyranny, remembering that bravery is our birthright.

MAGA will use their new ‘Socialist Democrats are all Communists’ talking points as a cudgel to bludgeon the uninformed with tired tropes, which admittedly have a Pavlovian dynamic in the American psyche; so we mustn’t take this new rhetorical strategy lightly but be cautiously aware of its past efficacy and historical horror. The weak always look for witches to burn.

We need to counter this misinformation with truth and illumination. To share how our nation is being run by a corrupt few taking orders from oligarchs and industries that feed on our apathy and fear.

The Trump administration recently rolled back dozens of gun regulations designed to protect us from a firearms industry that values profit over human life. Federal agencies are abandoning discrimination cases and leaving our fellow citizens vulnerable and marginalized - those are not the moves of a regime that cares for this country but one that wants to hold on to power no matter the human cost.

Trump inserts the word ‘rule’ into his public comments instead of ‘govern’ because his aim is not to help or protect the people of this land, he only wants to be a king; artlessly launching an excessive amount of fireworks into an overheated Washington, DC sky, as his ever-dwindling crowds stand stupefied and smiling for the camera, mindlessly cheering for a democracy that is fading as fast as the multicolored bursts falling back to earth.

The illusion of gunpowder and smoke, a forced frivolity that is drifting ever further from freedom. Too many MAGA folks still think they are attending a birthday party instead of a funeral.

On the Fourth of July the Trump administration ended all subsidies for new solar and wind projects in the U.S.A., this heinous and regressive move will cause untold suffering and economic hardship for millions of Americans. One has to only step outside this broiling holiday weekend to see how the fossil fuel industry is destroying our planet.

To turn our back on sustainable energy projects in the midst of an existential climate crisis is akin to throwing your parachute out first before you leap from a plane.

The astronomical profits the fossil fuel companies, such as Exxon (who helped bury climate science and research for decades), are making are enough to bribe Trump and his ideological henchmen like Energy Secretary Chris Wright, to cancel all sensible environmental initiatives in favor of graft and servitude to the oil and gas industry.

It also allows us to fall far behind China in building a national infrastructure for renewable energy. It should be viewed as a national security issue but instead Trump frames environmental sanity as some sort of ‘woke ideology’ and covers up common sense conservation efforts with pablum like ‘unleash American energy’ - which draws cheers from the mindless hordes still laboring under ignorance and denial.

To say this planet is warming is no longer up for debate, to ignore it in this moment is absolute insanity and feeds into the same moronic mindset MAGA has been exploiting for over a decade.

The U.S. Coast Guard removed the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater from the Sail4th 250 Parade on Saturday because it flew banners that read ‘Save the Clean Water Act’ and ‘Indigenous Rights, Racial Justice, Climate Solutions’: the Trump regime is censoring free speech in service of anti-environmentalism and reactionary dogma.

I have personally sailed on that historic sloop several times, often in the company of Pete Seeger himself, who founded the Clearwater Environmental Organization; which is responsible for cleaning up the Hudson and removing much of the industrial pollution put there by companies like General Electric.

Over the course of my lifetime, which has roughly coincided with Pete Seeger’s Hudson River advocacy, the magnificent waterway, which had an outsized role in this country’s initial prosperity and cultural wealth (the Hudson River School of painters such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Church beautifully documented this country’s majestic natural grandeur and inspired transcendentalist thinkers such as Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller) has gone from near death to quite miraculously healthy.

Pete was a true hero (and a better American than Donald ever will be), and we must continue to honor his legacy and speak out on environmental and social justice issues. Eerily, Seeger and Woody Guthrie all but predicted and tried to prepare us for this moment.

Trump will do to this land what he has always done in his life: destroy things. The ideals of living in harmony with nature and the belief in the spiritual essence of untouched and protected natural beauty and wildlife is completely absent from the MAGA philosophy of unchecked industry and unbridled greed.

In many ways, we are the inheritors of what thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson warned us about with the rapid industrialization and westward expansion of 19th century American life.

A monochromatic aspect of our history that Trump celebrated in his speech last night by name-checking a first grader’s list of cultural figures and leaving out the complicated reality and deleterious effects of our national story and its impact on both indigenous populations and our ecology.

Donald is feeding his base a cartoon version of America - where only the dubious achievements of a pre-approved list of heroes is lauded and our true reality is ignored and suppressed. His efforts to remake our cultural institutions, such as the Smithsonian, bear this out: we must recognize how dangerous this is for the health and wellbeing of our nation. His dogma is a weapon - and his rambling speech on the National Mall was an assault on our ethics, not an invocation of greatness; more blasphemy than benediction.

DJT is a man who likes to break stuff, whether its the lives of teenage girls who resemble his favorite daughter, or the folks who stood up to his unethical business practices, POTUS has even turned against members of his own party, who helped him ascend to his golden throne before falling out of favor and becoming victims of his wrath.

Has such a ridiculous and unsubstantial man ever inspired so much obsequiousness in American life? The Republican Party has been hollowed out of any courage or morality over many decades. John McCain was perhaps the last decent member, but it has mostly been made up of the sort of feckless followers who want to manipulate their base and line their own pockets.

The current GOP will use any measure of Christofascist dogma and plastic patriotism to appeal to the kind of folks who can’t turn down a t-shirt with a flag on it and a pickup truck that makes a lot of noise. Our job is to change this narrative and undermine their false culture with real facts.

We have to save our fellow Americans from themselves, guide them back to reality. In recovery parlance this is called a moment of clarity - many of our fellow citizens are in desperate need of one.

We have become a caricature of what a real country looks like, an oligarchy masquerading as a bastion of freedom. Of course this is not all of us, but it is enough of us to have poisoned the well and allowed a spiritual dis-ease to fester.

Trump appeals to the broken bits in the American personality; he offers a sort of Disneyland for the disinformed.

POTUS is a man without boundaries, morals or any sense of ethical decorum. Whether in politics or his personal life, the same instincts that allowed him to walk into the dressing rooms of teenage beauty pageant contestants on ‘Miss Teen USA’ are the same defects of character driving his assault on our Constitution and his prodigious grifting.

He has made over 2.2 billion dollars in the first year and a half of his second term.

This staggering number extends to well beyond 6 billion when you add in the haul that his children and extended family are raking in by trading in on their proximity to power.

A nation that has never been a stranger to folks helping themselves to more than their fair share still has no idea what they are really up against when it comes to the Trump clan. Their avarice and corruption will be a plague upon our country for decades. They will make this land poorer in every way while they enrich themselves. The Trumps are a people bred for grifting - they take to greed like a duck takes to water.

Trump is using all of the levers of his political power and governmental institutions to enrich himself - and SCOTUS just gave him a green light to fire anyone who stands in his way or seeks to reign in the unethical behavior of his Cabinet.

To say the conservative justices on the Supreme Court have acted shamefully would be an understatement. Their own greed and corruption is in plain view. It is quite obvious they are extremely compromised with just a mild understanding of the conflicts of interest and outright bribery involved in the personal finances of Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch.

And lest we not forget the execrable, Samuel Alito, who right now, is most likely shopping his seat to the highest bidder.

If you don’t think billionaires are buying up their robes through the banality and immorality of Donald Trump, you are not paying close enough attention.

This is a time for soul-searching not celebration. This is a gut check moment for our country if there ever has been one. The hardworking immigrants who built this nation and are making it run are not the ones who get to hang red, white and blue bunting over the bannisters of their palatial summer homes.

This week’s heat dome didn’t extend out to Nantucket Island. As always, the wealthiest Americans are able to escape consequence and inconvenience and hide behind the hedge rows in the Hamptons. They have pools and air-conditioned mega mansions ready for relaxation; Land Rovers and lobster lunches.

The dusty, parched lives of landscapers and laborers may not fare so well in the stifling heat and stultifying, sinister strategy of Big Oil-backed MAGA mega-millionaires, the homegrown oligarchs who are selling this republic for their own gain and couldn’t care less about who they hurt in the process.

We are leaving a world for our children that will have problems beyond a scale that most can imagine and it will be a direct result of the two presidencies of Donald Trump and the damage he has done to the United States.

POTUS spent the lead up to the 4th of July attacking NATO at a time when his idol, Vladimir Putin, is committing war crimes against Ukraine and his two ersatz diplomats, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, have all but abandoned the peace process and an unprovoked Russian war that Trump promised he would stop in 24 hours.

It would be a joke if it wasn’t so deadly. The catastrophic conflicts POTUS is making worse are piling up - and I fear that we are just getting started if we don’t stop him soon.

Trump has no idea how to extricate our nation from his unwarranted attack on Iran and which has left the Middle East region in further turmoil and chaos. And in Iran’s case, seeking revenge, as we heard in the chants of the tens of thousands of mourners who gathered in Tehran this week to remember Ayatollah Khamenei.

This geopolitical churn is happening at the same time an unqualified 38 year-old construction scion, Bill Pulte, is serving as acting head of the Office of Director of National Intelligence and firing our career intelligence agents as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to dismantle our counter-terrorism capabilities.

Not to mention the venal plumber from Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, who now runs the Department of Homeland Security. This is vulnerability by design because Trump is, in my belief, looking for an opportunity to declare martial law in the face of a domestic terrorist attack.

In essence, DJT is leaving the door unlocked for the burglars because he is more interested in filing the insurance claim than stopping the theft itself - an inside job if ever there was one. We are being set up by a man with decades of mob affiliations and criminal behavior.

Trump should be tried on war crimes for his incompetence and his self-dealing, but many still view him as their honorable Commander-in-Chief. No man has ever been more unworthy of the title or done more damage to our nation’s military though his corrupt surrogate, Pete Hegseth.

Numb to the machinations of madness, a nation celebrates its birthday at the precise moment it has drifted farther from its founding principles than at any point in its history.

A Supreme Court that sides with Monsanto over immigrant farm workers who put the food on our tables says so much about the state of the U.S.A under Donald Trump and his coterie of oligarchs. A poisoned proletariat has no intrinsic value to the corporate overlords who value money over life.

The political party that recently spent days hosting the ‘Faith and Freedom Caucus’ is the same party celebrating SCOTUS decision to roll back Temporary Protected Status status for Haitians and Syrians.

We are punishing refugees and hardworking immigrants who followed the rules, in favor of racist rulers and corporations who follow none.

The folks who cheered on Donald Trump engorged themselves on hot dogs and Hemi-trucks; hooting and hollering as fireworks exploded overhead while they sweated under a merciless sun, still unable to recognize the true threat they face.

They will become further drunk on the delusion that Trump is selling them as our republic begins its 250th year. Blind to the notion that we are in a moment which calls not so much for celebration, but a reckoning of who we are and who we want to be going forward.

It is our job to sober them up - wake them from their fever dream and bring them back to reality.

As the old Don McLean song goes:

‘Bye bye, Miss American Pie

Drove my Chevy to the levee

But the levee was dry

And good old boys were drinking whisky and rye

Singing this’ll be the day that I die

This’ll be the day that I die’

Keep the faith, America.

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