'Limelight'

Powered by Adderall and Ignorance, Donald Trump is the first A.I. president; he’s an avatar of every ugly attribute this nation has ever conjured up.

A man so thin-skinned and small he cannot admit when he’s wrong, and hates others for being right. He hates them even more if they are kind - kindness was seen as a weakness in the stunted household he grew up in

POTUS was reared like a fungus, he wasn’t so much raised as he was allowed to fester. A forgotten peach that rolled under the Cadillac seat, turned bruised and moldy - not that he ever would have been sweet, some folks are just born bitter.

His particular antisocial traits have been allowed to smolder, coddled by unending privilege and the all-encompassing racism of his pedigree. If being an asshole was an endurance sport Trump would be world champion. The core of his dysfunction is a bottomless need for attention.

Self-assured people do not need attention in a such a pathological fashion. While we have always endured powerful men who sought the limelight, none have ever done so with as much immoral baggage and lack of qualifications to hold office.

DJT became an icon for idiocy - and now it is spread like the uncontrollable wildfires that are ravaging our planet.

Trump hasn’t mentioned the fires that incinerated almost a thousand structures in Spokane or Oregon and are far from contained (49 fires still burn and are worsening air quality and threatening lives and property) but he made a big show this past week of offering aide to red states that had climate-related damage from flooding and tornados (without of course, acknowledging global warming as the culprit).

We have never had a more un-American president, one who has no concern for the states and citizens that he doesn’t view as on his team. His VP and Cabinet members behave in a similar way: we saw the results of that during his first term when Kushner and others held back PPE equipment to blue states during the Covid pandemic.

Trump’s brutal tenure in those awful days cost over a million American lives and robbed us all of something we might never get back - a country that stands united in the face of adversity. Trump chose to attack science and reward ignorance because he felt it was a more expedient way to please and manipulate his base.

It may have worked for him politically, but the damage it has done to our nation is incalculable.

POTUS’ rejection of science was a cynical ploy, a further attempt to dumb down his base to blind them to his own incompetence and dereliction of duty. Trump himself (of course) took the vaccine and received state-of-the-art medical care thanks to military doctors at Walter Reed, but pretended like the rest of America would be better off with hydroxychloroquine and bleach.

Now 45-47— is attempting to rewrite the history all together by using his surrogates in the GOP Senate to attack Dr. Fauci and hold the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in contempt of Congress for asserting his Fifth Amendment rights.

An 85 year-old man who spent his life attempting to save the lives of children and adults is being attacked mercilessly by an 80 year-old man who spent much of his life attacking children.

Including but not limited to, the teenage girls he sexually abused and trafficked with his friend and business partner, Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s personal lawyer and newly confirmed Attorney General, Todd Blanche, knows as much and went out of his way to obfuscate for Trump and cover up his role in decades of sex-trafficking.

I am quite sure Trump’s former Attorney General, Bill Barr, was aware of all of these allegations as well and having had his own father so deeply intertwined with Epstein thought the best course of action was to silence the well-connected sex trafficker forever. Trump was not the only associate to benefit from this permanent solution.

The DOJ has done more to protect Donald Trump than it has to seek justice on behalf of women and girls abused by powerful men.

Bill Barr’s own law firm actually defended Jeffrey Epstein between his stints as Attorney General.

Barr essentially spent his life covering up crimes, not protecting the innocent from them or seeking retribution for its victims. He’s been no friend to justice or democracy going back to his role in whitewashing the Iran Contra affair in 1992 at the end of President H.W. Bush’s term. Facilitating the pardons of the six main perpetrators and essentially closing the independent criminal investigation; his justification was that he felt the Reagan era officials had been treated unfairly for political actions. Sound familiar?

Trump’s criminally abusive behavior and compulsive sexual predation was no secret to his family or his business partners; it certaInly was never a secret to his lawyers, Blanche included. Neither was his money-laundering - the Trump Organization was a money-laundering outfit. It still is essentially an organized crime operation, but now they have branched out into crypto currency scams and looting the U.S. Treasury through graft and corruption.

Never have such dangerous men and women gotten away with so much with so little accountability. Trump’s mob ties trace back his entire career in real estate, extending to his father’s developments in Brooklyn and Queens.

The fact that I see zero pushback on Trump using the words ‘military terror’ in his most recent bellicose threats to Iran shows how far he has degraded both our society as a whole and what GOP/USA has come to expect of our armed forces under Pete Hegseth’s leadership.

Pocket Square Pete reportedly blamed his own deputy, Stephen Feinberg, for munitions stock piles being depleted during his disastrous prosecuting of the illegal Iran war when called on the carpet by Trump at Camp David.

Pathetic leadership and the last kind of coward you want in charge of the Pentagon. A man who cannot take responsibility is a man who should not have the power to put our military into harm’s way. Navy sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln are reportedly enduring poor morale, food rationing and moldy showers while they endure a historically long, twice-extended deployment under dubious and dangerous circumstances.

They work incredibly long hours, most without a day off let alone shore leave, and concern has been growing that they may be overworked to the point of mishaps becoming increasingly likely. Troops are going without essential toiletries like toothpaste and their contact with the outside world is limited.

My guess is the military is attempting to cover-up just how bad things have gotten for those deployed in Trump’s impulsive quagmire, much like they have tried to downplay and hide the number of casualties. It does not take military expert to smell disaster looming on the winds of war.

‘Pauli Girl’ Pete has not visited the aircraft carrier operating in the Arabian Sea but seems to have plenty of time to prance around in front of the camera with Trump. He denounced the reports regarding shortages and crew morale as ‘fake news’.

Trump spent the weekend playing golf, again (last weekend he awarded himself his 43rd tournament trophy while claiming to have shot a 70, a ridiculous lie like everything else in his own little land of make believe) at his private club in Bedminster, NJ while the 5,000 sailors on the USS Lincoln passed 260 days deployed.

That’s a long time to be at sea, sailing on the whims of a madman.

My fear is Trump & Hegseth, despite all the patriotic machismo talk about ‘supporting our brave warfighters’, are forgetting about our service members and keeping their abysmal treatment and over-extended tours of duty out of the headlines.

It is beginning to take on a rather Putinesque feel. We need a more pugilistic press, not a bunch of pedantic scribes looking to build followings and compete with news aggregators on social media.

We need folks who can stand up to a Pentagon and President Trump hellbent on turning acts of war into opportunities to profit personally, while turning a blind eye to European allies under nightly siege by a Russian army with North Korean ballistic missiles.

You would think that would be a bigger story - perhaps it will be when it turns into World War III. Just this week a U.S. intelligence assessment warned that Putin is planning to launch a limited incursion, or perhaps a missile strike or hybrid attack on a NATO member state on the alliance’s eastern flank - just to show he can and that Trump won’t stop him.

Trump launched his illegal and ill-fated war with the idea it would make him some sort of virile imperialist (he has reportedly indulged comparisons to Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan). Plundering the world for its oil, he too stupid to understand Iran was not Venezuela. Now Iran will control the Strait of Hormuz as a result of any deal he can cut at this point.

Trump handing a brutal theocratic regime the ability to drive up global oil markets at their whim: to say they are in a stronger position geopolitically than when the war began is an understatement. This is why you don’t need idiots and cowards running our military and country. Trump and Hegseth are obviously both, Rubio may be worse because he most likely knows better but doesn’t care. Marco is looking to take over the whole franchise and expand our predatory operating into Cuba.

The damage they have done is not temporary, most of us will pay higher prices, and not just at the pump, for the rest of our lives. Not to mention the human cost and disgrace they have brought upon our nation with war crimes and punitive tariffs on our allies.

POTUS was elected under dubious circumstances on both occasions; I believe he cheated like he has on everything his entire life (accepting foreign interference or the dark money of oligarchs is a form of cheating). We need to recognize this fact and the threat he poses to upcoming elections.

He and his allies will do all they can to stay in power. Our assignment is to make sure that does not happen. As dire as it may seem now we still have plenty of opportunities to push back on this autocratic regime - and we must continue to do exactly that.

Resistance is not a part time job but a necessity in the face of such horror.

Stay cool and keep the faith.

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