'Breakdown'

Much of the motivation behind my years speaking out against Trump has been to contextualize his actions and provide some insight into just how deviant and depraved he truly is; how outside the boundaries of normal human behavior his actions lie.

It’s also personal. He has hurt people I care about - and I’ve witnessed his abominable behavior up close.

I’m still surprised so many others chose to stay silent instead of speaking the truth back in 2016. Trump’s racism and sexual predation were no secret. His lies, malfeasance and prolific incompetence in business were already in public view - if you were even mildly aware of his history in New York City.

Often it feels as if mainstream media has a very short memory. They react to the President’s daily outrages without providing insight into the patterns and proclivities that have guided him his entire life.

Tearing down the East Wing with construction excavators - in a tantrum over the the ‘No Kings’ protest - did not come out of the blue or occur in a vacuum.

It arose from the same violent impulses and broken personality that allowed him to tear out a chunk of his first wife’s hair in 1989 and proceed to sexually assault her because he didn’t like the scar the plastic surgeon she recommended left on his head after a scalp reduction to help conceal his baldpate.

Donald’s narcissism and god complex were under attack and he lashed out viscously at the mother of his young children. This came after subjecting her to years of his public infidelity and demeaning behavior.

The same kid who threw rocks at the neighbor’s baby and punched his teacher is very much alive and ‘well’ in the current (and perhaps last) President of the United States. The entire world should recognize the threat he poses instead of continually seeking to appease his darker instincts.

In so many ways his defiling of the White House is a harbinger of things to come - and as shocking and as visceral as it feels, it should not surprise anyone.

Least of all those who have paid attention for all these decades. When he tore down the historic Bonwit Teller building in New York City to make way for his eponymous tower he did so with undocumented labor - Polish nationals, many of whom were seeking asylum and citizenship. Trump provided them no protective equipment and paid them four dollars an hour, in 1980, for working twelve hour shifts. Then he stiffed them on their pay.

Our ‘Builder in Chief’ later begrudgingly settled a lawsuit brought on the workers’ behalf and was forced to pony up a little over one million dollars.

The art deco friezes that were on the facade of the building had been promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (as part of a permitting deal for the site itself) but Trump reneged and had the workers destroy them with jackhammers during the demolition.

That is who he is and has always been.

A man who lies with impunity and would rather smash a piece of art to bits - just because someone else thought it was pretty.

It also speaks to his gaudy tastes and cultural resentments.

Trump was always shunned by the more refined, old money types (though he longed to be a part of that world) and had a huge inferiority complex about his unpolished, albeit privileged, upbringing in Jamaica Estates, Queens. His father had blackface lawn jockeys on his front lawn and Corinthian columns framing his home’s entrance. Donald from the start was wannabe royalty. Also racist and tasteless with a big bank account.

His ‘new money’, plaster-everything-in-gold aesthetic, that he has always found so desirable, is now on full display in the White House.

One can only shudder to imagine what the gilded ballroom will look like upon completion. The bathed in gold renderings he has shared so far look like something that would have made King Farouk himself proud .

Trump is a man who cannot appreciate real beauty or understated elegance because to do so would require both empathy and sensitivity.

To foster a real appreciation of aesthetics and nature, to allow art into your soul, is to become vulnerable; to let in both the delicate and the sublime. It involves surrender and acceptance, and the ability to allow yourself a sense of wonder.

We become childlike in the face of excellence in quite a healthy way - awe is a necessary component of creativity.

It’s the reason roses make poets weep, and admirers fall silent in front of works by Vermeer, Michelangelo and Georgia O’Keefe, along with the great holy structures of the world.

It’s why we still line up to hear Mozart or even Metallica.

We want to be moved by forces bigger than ourselves and to be reminded of what we might achieve if we allow ourselves to take flight on the wings of inspiration. We came here to soar - and we will always have a need for those elements that remind us of that.

Art and beautiful architecture is not armor for the indoctrinated, but the removing of artifice to illuminate the humanity underneath.

Truly meaningful buildings do not so much keep people out, or protected from the elements, as much as they invite people in and meld with their surroundings in both shape and proportion. In that way, the East Wing in particular was a key addition to our national heritage and the ‘People’s House’.

We feel something because we see ourselves in it, our aspirations and our collective history or national story. That is what Trump is seeking to destroy and remake in his own twisted vision, much like a Taliban or a Third Reich - only this time the destruction and desecration has corporate backers and gold-embossed nameplates for the ballroom.

To admire the creation of a force beyond ourselves, whether fashioned by the mysterious beauty of the universe, mankind or the music of a songbird, requires a selflessness that Trump will never posses. It is why all the portraits that hang in his homes, and now in much of the White House, are mostly of himself.

When he was building Trump Soho in 2006 (a project where his beloved daughter Vanky helped defraud investors and was given a pass on a pending prosecution by Manhattan District Attorney, Cy Vance, after daddy made a campaign contribution) the project was put on hold during the excavation phase due to the discovery of human remains.

The site had once belonged to a well-known 19th century abolitionist congregation, the Spring Street Presbyterian Church and the burial vault contained the bones of over 200 formerly enslaved African Americans.

Instead of pausing construction and allowing archeological experts and preservationist authorities access, Trump improperly stored the remains for many years. They did not receive a proper re-burial in Brooklyn’s Green Wood cemetery until 2014.

That’s Donald Trump.

His monstrous ballroom, and its gargantuan proportions in relation to the rest of the White House campus, are meant to convey a singular message: I am bigger than your government and your history belongs to me now.

He is telegraphing his desire to place himself as superior to anything came before. Trump’s attacks on higher education, the Smithsonian Institution and Kennedy Center follow the same narrative.

It was the same philosophy that he brought to New York City real estate with his garish black and gold towers that stood out like a bunion on a ballet dancer’s foot.

I am bigger than you.

Of course, only small men say such things, not in stature but in mettle and merit.

It is why he had a compulsive need to always claim he had the tallest buildings; from the phantom floors on Trump Tower to his boast in the moments after two hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center that he had the tallest building in lower Manhattan now.

When his fellow citizens were caught in the fiery remains of the Twin Towers, placing last calls to loved ones in the face of unspeakable shock and horror, or leaping to their deaths for one last breath of fresh air and the hopes their families would at least have the closure of identifiable remains to bury, Trump was only thinking about himself.

He could only proffer the same insecure and awful boasts he had always perpetuated.

On the campaign trail, years later, he added a fictitious, Islamophobic slur about Muslims rejoicing on rooftops in Jersey City.

That 9/11 interview should have been the end of his public life right then and there but in many way it was just the beginning. NBC offered him a contract just three years later and the modern remake of this country’s worst real estate developer began.

Now Trump has set his sights on the world beyond - we would all be wise to revisit his track record and that of his family for clues as to what’s to come.

Don Jr. is now advising ‘Secretary of War’ Pete Hegseth on military matters and sits on the board of a drone company that has just scored a multimillion-dollar contract with the Pentagon.

Trump is targeting folks in the waters off of South America and killing them with impunity. In an escalation of these illegal actions, he sent an aircraft carrier strike group to the Caribbean Sea on Friday.

Our military is also being partially paid by now billionaire Trump supporters (Thomas Mellon, a reclusive nut job and big Trump and RFK Jr. supporter and financial backer), to avert any fallout from missed paychecks due to a government shutdown that shows few signs of ending anytime soon.

To say we are in uncharted waters would be to understate the urgency of this moment. And the danger.

It is indeed not only a travesty but a horror show - and it will only get worse until we fully recognize what we are up against. I know many of you reading this already do; my thoughts are for those who have not yet joined in the outrage and committing themselves to non-violent action and activism. That can be whatever you want it to be but we better make it mean something.

Speak out, walk out, boycott and protest. Last weekend’s ‘No Kings’ rallies clearly got under the GOP’s skin; we must pursue whatever momentum those gatherings provided with vigor and a steely resolve.

There is no time to waste, or sit around and wait for the next one.

It was revealed this week that plans have been circulating at the Pentagon for a National Guard force being prepared to deploy to protests and to put down ‘civil unrest’ by April 2026.

We must not allow Trump to distract us from his criminality and authoritarian plans with his continued manipulation of online media, along with his A.I. generated trolling and outrages du jour. They are designed to deflect.

This week it was reported the President has ordered the DOJ to pay him 230 million dollars in damages.

That is not the action of a freedom-loving POTUS but the larceny of a despot - I promise you it will not stop there. We must not allow the media and our fellow Americans to become numb to it; lulled into a lethargic stupor by the sheer volume of his corruption, as has always been his modus operandi.

One of his go-to tricks has always been to make the unacceptable appear normal by sheer repetition. It has been an effective device for him both rhetorically and behaviorally.

Ask anyone who ever witnessed his outrageous behavior on the sets of the beauty pageants he owned. He would routinely ‘inspect’ the teenage contestants in full view of the production crew - who were on the union clock and very expensive.

Trump would waste valuable rehearsal time for TV camera blocking. Instead of producers standing up to his lascivious behavior and pulling the plug on such a grotesque venture, they built it into the production schedule in the following years.

Production coordinators, on orders from executive producers, built it into the ‘run down’ and gave the DGA crew an hour off. The item was listed as ‘Trump inspects contestants’.

POTUS has a way of doing the unthinkable in plain sight and cajoling those around him into letting it fester.

In his own words, ‘When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.’

What we are witnessing now is learned behavior from Donald Trump, who has spent a lifetime of pushing the envelope of what is morally acceptable behavior in our society - and getting away with it.

Now he is remaking the world’s most prominent democracy into his personal fiefdom and piggy bank. It cannot go unchecked - so far it has gone wholly unstopped. His tariffs alone should have sparked global outcry instead of the syrupy attempts of world leaders at appeasement, in the hopes of protecting their respective economies from his bluster and brutality.

This not the right approach with a bully, especially one with a mobster mentality - because the boss always demands more when you give in to him.

Trump is at heart a coward, and exceptionally ignorant and uninformed - when you stand up to him he will flinch.

Even more so if it is done in large numbers. We need world leaders to stick together and stand up to him if we are gonna get out of this mess.

As Americans, we must do the same. I am not unaware of the sacrifices and personal hardships that might entail, but we cannot turn our backs on the sacrifices so many who came before us made on our behalf.

We must honor their effort by increasing our awareness and capacity to communicate - and consecrate this moment in our collective history.

We owe it to ourselves and we owe it to this once mighty republic.

Rise up and resist.

Make time for good trouble and good deeds.

We drive out darkness with light. We counter hate with hope, enmity with empathy, and soullessness and greed with compassion and gratitude.

Get busy. You are not alone.

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