'Cold as ICE'

Folks wonder how Donald Trump could stand there, smiling his empty smile, and accept a Nobel Peace Prize he himself hadn’t won.

The closest precedent we have for this is Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for the Nazis, accepting the Nobel medal sent to him as a gesture of thanks for an in person meeting by Norwegian author and an avowed fan boy for the Third Reich, Knut Hamsun, in 1943. The whereabouts of that medal are currently unknown but we know how the rest of the story ended.

The 2026 reboot of the Third Reich by a bunch of soulless grifters, led by Donald Trump, will likely met the same fate.

The truth of the matter is that POTUS has never earned anything honestly in his entire life. His daddy, Fred Trump Sr., made Donald a millionaire before he had turned a year old, through trust fund deposits designed to shield the family’s wealth from the IRS and avoid paying income taxes.

The Trump clan are generational cheats and cowards.

Fred Trump Sr. was made wealthy by low-interest FHA loans as part of New Deal era capitalist reforms - and he turned around and ripped off the country that made him a rich man.

When Trump flamed out in normal coed schools for being a disruptive malcontent (punching teachers) and poor student, the family shipped him upstate to a military school where his mediocrity was reinforced with stolen valor and boastful lies.

The future real estate developer once claimed he was scouted by both the Phillies and the Red Sox for his baseball prowess while a high school student; boasting to have been the best player in the state in 1964 and hitting the longest home run ever recorded at New York Military Academy.

He was not, in fact, a standout athlete - the man can barely catch a ball, let alone run the bases.

What he excels at is lying.

Donald’s skill set has always been being so utterly audacious in his voracious greed and overconsumption that those drawn to such a spectacle - bottom feeders in the press, the banking and real estate industry - lined up to go along with his grift and self-aggrandizing ‘glamour’.

DJT was only getting started in the early 1980s, which formed the foundational strategy of his ‘business empire’. Decades of building tacky New York City skyscrapers and awful casinos (then turning them into fronts for laundering money for organized crime), morphed into a television career that seemed to at last marry his rank ignorance with an emotionally stunted MAGA public that became increasingly willing to consume whatever slop he put in front of them.

In essence, he had found his fan base.

The dumbing down of America coincided with the ascent of POTUS’s political career and the reality show ambience of an overwrought nation. Media moguls, such as Rupert Murdoch, saw the patient was sick and swapped out medicine for sugar water - and entire industries went along with the grift.

Much of mainstream corporate media are still working in concert with Trump: we may not recover as a republic if we do not reverse the tailspin.

The horrific situation in Iran is the clearest example yet of the Trump family’s private business interests affecting geopolitical affairs and U.S. foreign policy.

Trump spent a week saber-rattling and tweeting out false hope and encouragement to the brave protestors in the streets of Tehran and beyond - and then left them hanging.

Literally.

Reports from inside the administration are that POTUS was in fact ready to pull the trigger on an American response meant to destabilize the regime - and to at least attempt to save some of the innocent souls being gunned down by Iranian forces.

Then his family’s business partners stepped in, namely KSA, Qatar and Turkey, and told him to stop.

Trump has barely mentioned the ghastly situation since - except for a gruesome post on Friday, essentially thanking the Iranian regime for not publicly hanging 800 people and how ‘impressed’ he was with the gesture.

Without even attempting cyber attacks or other forms of support, POTUS gave up on any meaningful support, after days earlier promising, ‘Help is on its way’.

When he realized an American response would affect his personal financial interests, Trump abandoned any pretense of caring and moved on with his bellicose bluster to attacking Minneapolis.

As I have said before, the American people are as much an enemy to Trump as any foreign actor - and a much easier target for the lifelong coward and predator.

The problem in covering Trump is that we are pretending it is all just caused by him -and ignoring the matrix of corruption that flows out through his family. POTUS’s two eldest sons have created a global spiderweb of insider trading and selling their father’s favors; his youngest sits silently upstairs in the White House and anonymously cashes in on his proximity to power on Polymarket (of which Don Jr. is an investor and board member) and cryptocurrencies.

The first family are making a fortune by shorting stocks and manipulating Wall Street investors - and it barely gets mentioned in light of all the other grift and corruption.

Ivanka and Jared oversee a vast global network of investments and benefactors who have poured billions into their personal economies, while their father throws tantrums on the world stage and wreaks havoc on commerce through his endless abuse of tariffs.

Trump just enacted another round of 10% tariffs (increasing to 25% by June) on our European allies (UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Finland) for their support of Denmark and sending NATO troops to Greenland for joint military exercises.

Our allies took this unprecedented action because POTUS keeps threatening to invade on behalf of his billionaire backers who are interested in mineral rights, and to feed his broken ego. He is trolling and abusing the people of Denmark and Greenland who have always been our friends.

It feels like we are repeatedly showing up to family reunions with a violent and abusive parent who keeps making a scene and embarrassing us in front of our smarter, more thoughtful cousins.

It’s like watching a drunk dad pick a fight with your favorite uncle - it’s embarrassing and enraging all at once.

The damage that is being done in our name is incalculable. Our one-time allies are recoiling in shock and disgust at what has become of the United States in such a short period of time.

I have observed Trump for decades, and while he has always been an awful person (and very much a sexual predator), his particular deviancy has metastasized over the past year to a point beyond parody.

The President of the United States woke up yesterday at Mar-a-Lago to begin a three day weekend. Deciding the cloudy skies and cooler temperatures would keep him off the golf course for the day, he chose to start a trade war with the European Union instead. His latest attacks on NATO could mean the end of one of the most successful alliances in modern history.

The world became a much more dangerous place yesterday due to the whims of a drug-addicted septuagenarian.

If we tested POTUS for drug use, the same way we make hourly workers in the United States submit to drug testing, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Donald Trump is a drug addict and has been for most of his adult life.

I repeat this over and over because it truly matters.

Roiling resentments and character defects are boiling over in the man who is more unsuited for a position of leadership than any previous high office holder in American history.

POTUS is selling pardons and gutting regulations in favor of grifters and goons. He has militarized the streets of this nation with untrained mercenaries cosplaying as Nazi stormtroopers. He has hobbled a once mighty economy and left Wall Street artificially inflated by an AI bubble. If SCOTUS knocks down his tariffs this week by deeming them unconstitutional, my guess is this administration will all but descend into utter chaos and recrimination.

Chief Justice Roberts will all of a sudden become a RINO and Trump’s attacks on the judiciary will increase tenfold.

Trump’s on the ground capo for the abuse of anyone who isn’t white and fully in favor of fascism, is a diminutive little runt who walks around with his own Praetorian Guard when he needs to use a restroom in Target.

At this point, if you think ICE are the good guys, you are probably one of the bad guys.

We are letting the dumbest men and women in this country abuse our citizenry - and the folks who voted for it are still mostly absent from the outrage, choosing instead to stay in their plastic suburban bubble of ignorance and moral rot. ‘Why should I care about immigrants?’ is the mantra they have been chewing on like cud, as they graze in the fields of mediocrity and ethnocentric bullshit.

They have been told President Trump is their savior and has their best interests at heart - the moment they realize this has all been a lie, it will be too late for them.

It is just a matter of time before their own doors are getting kicked in by the roving MAGA paramilitary gangs. Trump is building his own private army, and has been for some time.

POTUS is assembling these troops in plain sight, right under our noses, while the news cycle tilts and whirls at the latest outrage du jour. He has committed so many insane acts over the past year it is hard to keep it all in perspective.

Trump left the G7 Summit in Canada last June because he couldn’t hack the daily schedule of meetings. He is so far gone from functionality, being outside of the bubble of the White House schedule - that takes his addictions and unmanageability into account - was simply too much for the soon to be 80 year old.

The President was also embarrassed by the leadership on display by the other heads of state and his tiny broken ego felt threatened. He knows he is outmatched intellectually by the likes of Canadian PM Mark Carney, or President Emmanuel Macron, or PM Kier Starmer, so he retaliates in any way he can.

In this instance last June, he left the G7 summit early (leaving an empty seat at the table for the United States) and used escalating tensions with Iran as an excuse to head back to Washington, DC.

He then dropped ‘bunker buster’ bombs to ‘obliterate’ Iran’s nuclear capabilities. He did not fully succeed according to many military analysts, but his true objective was to appear as a tough guy in his Saturday night prime time television address announcing the bombings.

Trump had his little cabal of sycophants standing behind him, the three musketeers of mendacity, Rubio, Hegseth and the ever more odious, JD Vance. The same clown car of sycophants that stood behind him as he announced the unlawful attacks on Venezuela (which have already seemingly faded from the news cycle).

I mention this because the Davos World Economic Forum is this coming week in Switzerland and POTUS will be attending. His rhetorical tit for tat with Tehran may escalate once again - and give him the excuse to leave Davos and play tough guy once again on the world stage.

Trump does not travel well, as is the case with many addicts, and his sour disposition and unpredictability will be even more heightened than usual given the cold shoulder he will be receiving from his latest round of insanity concerning the annexation of Greenland.

POTUS will lash out under the pressure, and I think it is not hyperbolic to say, we have never had such an unpredictable figure representing the United States on the world stage.

I have observed this man since the 1990s, both up close and from afar, and I have never seen in him so unhinged and with so few guardrails.

We are the only ones who can stop him. It is not the world’s responsibility, it is ours alone, and we must act on our instincts and stop him before it is too late.

Minneapolis is giving us a brave and beautiful example of what it looks like to show up peacefully and protest this injustice.

We must flood the streets of American cities in much the same way and send a clear and unwavering message to our elected officials, Democrats included, that we will no longer stand for this abuse and authoritarianism.

We must do ALL we can, while we still can.

We are a country that has fetishized freedom and turned badge and flag worship into some perverse pastime. This attitude must shift; we need a clear-eyed and sober view concerning the institutional abuses occurring within our law enforcement agencies.

This ‘America First’ rhetoric was mostly empty pageantry, devoid of any real meaning, as we now can clearly see. Most of the folks lulled into displaying such idiotic iconography are taught not to question authority. MAGA are, at their heart, followers; the kind of people who would prefer someone else to do their thinking for them.

They are quite content with the baubles of fascism - the skull tattoos, long guns and militaristic ‘screaming eagle’ ephemera.

These are the tools that help separate themselves from their own humanity. Totems and trinkets that reduce human suffering and geopolitical complexities to a cartoonish version of patriotism that is eating our country from within like a cancer.

The GOP are accepting of the human rights abuses that are occurring every minute now in the U.S. at the hands of ICE, CPB and DHS. Under the leadership of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, all their actions have the aura of war crimes. Why is it still so hard for so may to see this?

The damage we are doing to our fellow citizens will take generations to heal.

Trauma is real - forcing it upon so many, in such a shocking and sudden fashion, will haunt this land for decades. Our allegiance should be with humanity itself. Borders and flags cannot separate us from higher truths. We are in a battle for the spirit and common decency now - this goes well beyond any nationalistic ambitions.

And even if there was anything to the ‘America First’ movement besides grifting and tax breaks for billionaires, can anyone honestly say this country is getting stronger?

We have never appeared weaker in the eyes of the world.

Or more dangerous.

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