'Dawn Patrol'

The Trump we saw address the nation last night was very high. Let’s just get that out of the way at the beginning. We drug test many federal employees but somehow let the President of the United States unilaterally declare war while out of his mind.

Of the many myths he has created around himself, the idea that he is a teetotaler is perhaps the most durable. Anyone who knows what addiction looks like can see it.

Trump needs to be the center of attention at all times. Being kept out of the loop by Israel and not being the principal shot caller in the conflict was more than he could bear. Especially on the world stage, as he was while attending the G7 summit in Calgary last week. The narcissist in him could not take any perceived slights to his power. He also couldn’t take the full day of meetings; POTUS is a lazy man, he possesses zero work effort and has no interest in anyone other than himself and his immediate needs.

So Trump threw a tantrum and left early but in doing so he showed his hand, so to speak, as well as his deep psychological wounds and inexperience in geopolitical affairs.

It is very dangerous to have such an unhinged and incompetent man at the helm of this once great nation.

The entire free world is in jeopardy thanks to his avarice, ineptitude and endless need to be the focus of attention. Our mostly feckless media that willingly repeats the Trump administration spin only exacerbates the problems we face in this awful moment.

For example, Trump’s ‘Evacuate Tehran Immediately!’ online post late into his first and only day at the G7 summit was just a naked attempt by POTUS to insert himself in the narrative. He was clearly just repeating what Israel had already stated about evacuating a certain targeted area but it was instantly refashioned by the mainstream media into a serious dire warning from someone with the highest level security clearance, when it was just typical Trump-reality-show-hyperbole and carnival barker hucksterism.

As if a city of as many as ten million people can be fully evacuated immediately! It showed the same lack of knowledge or care for public safety as did his disastrous and poorly attended parade. Crowds and Trump are not really a natural fit (we had to beg for seat fillers at ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ tapings) despite how much he craves them.

I cannot imagine the potential bottlenecks and chaos he threw into an already combustible situation only to revert back to his, ‘I’ll decide in two weeks,’ which is a go-to for him when he needs a cliffhanger to stretch things out. He clearly was already putting the pieces in place for Saturday night’s bombing of Iran.

I have no doubt that Netanyahu played Trump against his own narcissism to achieve this result. Trump wanted to be seen as the man in charge and he was masterfully manipulated. His arrogance and need to be seen as powerful outweighed any real attempts at diplomacy.

All of this has all been an embarrasing low point in American presidential history.

His complete lack of rhetorical discipline feels like it goes almost unnoticed, as he has so many awful attributes and careless behavior patterns. Many have come to accept his complete lack of responsibility and knowledge of global affairs. There is a big reason that kind of stuff matters, especially in statesmanship and diplomacy. I fear the effects of such utter sloppiness on humanity.

Trump had one goal concerning Israel/Iran: to insert himself into the middle of it and make it part of his reality show. That was the reason he stuck flag poles in front and back of the White House and called for a press gaggle - so they would ask him if the U.S. was gonna get involved and he could coyly reply, ‘Wouldn’t you love me to answer that question…nobody knows what I’m going to do.’ He wants to build suspense and feed his own narcissism in true made-for-tv swagger.

He was clearly planning for the Saturday night prime time reveal of the U.S. bombing of Iran and the screen time as Commander-in-Chief. The MAGA memes will surely be circulating on social media proclaiming his steely leadership - it’s enough to make one ill.

The world must be looking on in horror at the condition of the President of the United States. His entire face seemed to be convulsing as he spoke. The sniffs that were audible throughout his address were the same we heard often in his first term and of which I am all too familiar from my time working on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ when he crushed Adderall and snorted it whenever he had to read from a teleprompter, as he did last night.

He could care less about the millions of lives involved or what an attack on Iran means for the U.S. and the global economy. His friends on Wall Street may tell him but most of them know he’s not concerned with the well being of others, or who has to clean up the mess. He wants to look like a tough guy and serve his narcissistic needs in the present moment. He will become bored of the story line and move on soon, as he did with Ukraine.

Cable news media dutifully plays along of course, even jettisoning the assassination of a Democratic politician from the ‘A Block’ by Monday night, in favor of covering Trump’s posts and his departure from G7. Now they have their prime time payoff.

If you look around at much of this country right now and feel like its institutions are failing you that is because they are for the most part - but that does not mean all hope is lost. In fact it is everywhere, we just have to learn where to look and become aware of who we really are and how much power we have over our own destiny.

Awareness and empathy are the keys to freedom; both of those elements are on display in towns and cities across this land right now. We need to understand that hope is contagious, so is righteousness - there is a real power and strength in the millions of Americans now involved in protests.

We can be our own messengers of truth, ambassadors of empathy and beacons of compassion. The sheer brutality and un-American actions of this administration will be shown in even starker light when more and more of our fellow citizens are exposed to the truth. Trump unilaterally entered the U.S.A. into war with Iran without seeking the approval of Congress, which essentially means he left the American citizens out of the equation. The people who will ultimately bear the cost.

Trump is manipulating the least informed voters with the cheapest form of patriotism. MAGA voters have an almost Pavlovian response to seeing the American flag - and instead of being offended that he left G7 in the middle of his duties as POTUS for a cheap publicity stunt, they will help him celebrate it.

The mindless followers he has amassed or been gifted, both from Fox News and a couple decades of Putin-backed psyops targeting GOP voters, has left a large chunk of the American population so stupefied and numb in this moment as to not see the existential threat that now threatens everything they hold dear.

If your religion tells you it’s ok to shoot a dog, let alone human beings, you are in a cult. A deadly dynamic is in loose in the U.S.A. make no mistake about it. MAGA is a cult that has merged with the White Supremacist and Evangelical Christian movements. The far right is building their own army of domestic terrorists.

It’s well funded by the Kochs, Harlan Crow and a coterie of other billionaires.

Trump’s utter lack of intelligence and emotional (or physical) sobriety are surely a grave threat to the free world but in so many ways he is merely the symptom of the rot that has befallen American ‘red state’ life.

There is a well organized attempt to take advantage of the vulnerabilities our nation faces. The assassin in Minnesota did not come out of a vacuum but was part of a Christofascist movement that has taken root over decades. It’s no accident that his attack took place after Trump has dismantled all of the domestic terrorism investigations at the F.B.I., while restricting any discrimination against white supremacists in our military.

At the same time, he is attacking DEI both in public and at private institutions, along with any Democratic politicians standing up to his ICE deportations.

We are, in far too many places, a loud, angry nation of violent fools and mindless suburbanites waiting for the next Marvel movie or bag of Doritos to inject empty calories into empty lives. ‘Your choices sucked,’ a Trump voter I knew from my high school days wrote on my Facebook page a few months ago, in a feeble attempt to explain his vote for MAGA. He comes from a culture in which voting for Kamala Harris wasn’t even an option and had long ago absorbed the ‘Sleepy Joe’ diatribes from Trump.

It doesn’t matter this guy works a union job and benefits greatly from Democratic policies, as have every member of his family going back generations. Those truths are kept from men like him - and much of our discourse is designed to keep it that way. Now that same demographic could be packing off their sons to yet another costly war in the Middle East. All of them started by Republican Presidents.

Of all the inroads conservatives have made in American life, none has borne more fruit than their embrace of the ‘Blue Collar’ life as being one that Trump himself is protecting. He is not protecting the working man; my friend will most likely find this out one day soon when he starts looking for his Social Security or Medicare benefits.

There will be millions of folks who enthusiastically voted for Trump over three elections that will find themselves left out in the cold when they look to retire. They will have been betrayed by believing in so many red, white and blue lies over a lifetime; by thinking its ok to hurt other people as long as they themselves are protected.

They have failed to understand that the guy who can so easily abuse women, migrants and anyone else who fails out of favor with his immediate needs, will have zero compunction about to doing the same damn thing to them.

Eliminating facts and education and diluting a culture down to the sort of violence-porn, fast-food cartoon landscape of white MAGA dude American life may come at a cost that the entire world may have to bear. Trump sold them the illusion of power with the reality show optics to go with it.

Don’t kid yourself about how entertaining this all is for the folks in favor of brutality.

There’s a reason they sent a professional videographer to cover the CECOT arrival of the migrants deported illegally to El Salvador. That was crucial ‘B roll’ for Episode One; L.A. was supposed to provide a sort of mid-season climax but cooler heads prevailed and protestors didn’t take the bait.

JD Vance flew to Los Angeles to troll California’s politicians including calling a Senator who was roughed up and handcuffed in his own building, ‘Jose’ Padilla. Vance served alongside him in the U.S. Senate, he knows his name. He was performing for his boss and the MAGA base - and it is absolutely abhorrent.

We’ve jettisoned many of the things that matter most in favor of baubles, trinkets and the illusion that ‘American exceptionalism’ affords us. While the oligarchs scheme to take control of our democracy and the world beyond, making the playing field tilt hard in their favor, most of us will never even make it on to the pitch. Let alone become players.

This game is rigged - and too many of us are still sitting in the stands cheering blindly, while we need to be stomping our feet and demanding both justice and equanimity for all.

They are not merely offering us a ‘Let them eat cake’ moment, they are making us become the cake.

Trump is a conman, a convicted criminal and a sexual predator. His reputation as both a huckster and a fraud - unable to run a successful business - was well established by the late 1980s. So were his many ties and involvement with organized crime. Yet he always had the media on his side because of his ability to consistently deliver tabloid-level content.

In many ways he was America’s first big reality show star, long before he actually appeared in one himself. It took awhile for much of our culture to sink to his level but once it did our fate was, in many ways, sealed.

We are not going to get out of this mess until we undergo a personality change as a nation. As in life, one builds self-esteem by doing estimable acts. We need to move past the breathless coverage of his every utterance and look soberly at who this man is and how he is behaving. Otherwise our media void becomes his opportunity to perpetuate his own myths.

Trump has taught his followers to celebrate brutality and extremism. He has made martyrs out of rioters and cop killers - and forced innocent men into foreign prisons for no other reason than tattoos and racial profiles.

He has painted hardworking family men as enemies of the state and appointed alcoholic sexual predators to lead our Armed Services.

He does all this by painting himself in the colors of ‘America First’ and by offering his followers the feeling that they are the good guys, even though they are far from it in this moment.

As they say in recovery, feelings aren’t facts.

We don’t want to see what he has in store for the season finale. Our continued protests and peaceful resistance will be the best way to help our fellow Americans change the channel.

It’s time to cancel this show.