'No Quarter'

As I’ve said many times before - when all is said and done, Donald Trump will surpass any historical tyrant and rightfully take his place as the worst human ever to emerge from the privilege and relative peace of post-World War II America.

Trump’s withdrawal of the U.S. on climate change initiatives and treaties, coupled with his opposition to environmental conservation and cancelling of renewable energy projects alone will cause untold catastrophes, and compound both economic hardship and human suffering across the globe.

Future generations will inherit a far more dangerous and toxic world than the one we were born into - and many of us had hoped to nurture and improve.

POTUS is an enemy of progress itself: he has stolen over a decade of momentum and innovation while dulling the spirit of scientific and academic excellence - at a time it was most needed for the betterment of mankind.

The irony of it is Donald Trump may destroy what we have come to know as the United States, and much of the world beyond it in the process, and his particular brand of evil couldn’t have been created anywhere else but in America.

His french-fried fascism sprung from the greed and ignorance that men like him have not only gotten away with, they have protected and promulgated for centuries.

The kicker is that his vulgar mediocrity has become a cornerstone of his appeal to the ‘America First’ base and the craven corporations that bent the knee and allowed this awful and obscene autocrat to flourish.

Trump is, of course, stumbling in the dark when it comes to any sane objective or cohesive policy and military strategy in Iran, but the bluster and the bombs seem to be enough to satisfy those who remain steadfast in their determination to protect him.

The President hosted his second MAGA Inc. fundraiser in two weeks on Saturday night at Mar-a-Lago, partying and picking deep pockets, as much of the Middle East goes up in flames and misery.

The poltroons and their puffy-lipped, pusillanimous arm candies will dance in the warm tropical breeze and laugh amongst their fellow one-percenters, as much of America decides how to navigate the storms they have unleashed.

Antisemitic terror attacks and the upheaval imposed by the larceny of the oligarch class will be far from their stunted consciousness as they clasp their Chanel clutches and traverse the moldy carpets, climbing the grand marble staircase in their several thousand dollar stilettos inside Trump’s beachfront battlement.

It is no accident that South Florida, and Palm Beach in particular, have become the epicenter of this new world kleptocracy.

I’m not sure how many of my fellow Americans truly appreciate the amount of corruption that is taking place before us in this dreadful and ignoble moment. Surely the pitchforks would be out if the CNN ‘man on the street’ interviewees were able to gaze beyond the gas pumps and see how grotesquely Trump and his offspring were stuffing their pockets with other people’s money; laying claim to every aspect of civic life and its pecuniary fabric.

From Kai Trump’s YouTube influencer grifting, using the Secret Service for clicks and cash, to her father and uncle’s drone contracts with the Pentagon - there is no aspect of American life where the First Family are not demanding a piece of the action and tilting the scales in their favor.

Trump has demanded a ten billion dollar vig from the new owners of Tik Tok for his part in brokering their recent deal with a consortium of American backers including the odious Oracle owners, Larry and David Ellison. This is in addition to the ten billion dollars POTUS wants to extract from the U.S. Treasury for a partial leak of his tax returns (his complete returns that he promised to share in 2016, we still, of course, have not fully seen and never will).

The second-in-command at the Pentagon, Stephen Feinberg, was brought in at Trump’s behest from Cerebus Capital Management and was a former chair of POTUS’s Intelligence Advisory Board. Feinberg’s private equity firm will make an astronomical amount of money on military contracts, such as Trump’s promised ‘Golden Dome’. Not to mention the munitions that are being depleted in the illegal and unjustified attack on Iran - which has already cost U.S. taxpayers more than seventeen billion dollars in two weeks.

A number made all the more grotesque by Trump’s recent spending bill which gutted domestic social safety nets and will force millions of American to lose their health insurance; including my own plan which stemmed from the Affordable Care Act and which ends on July 1st.

I turn 55 years old this week and have accepted the fact that much of my working life going forward might be dedicated to paying ever-increasing insurance premiums and related costs. And I consider myself one of the lucky ones, with no major pre-existing conditions or dependents.

I cannot imagine the stress so many households are facing right now as a result of Trump’s reckless cruelty and the GOP lickspittles making it into law. As shameful a Congress as I have experienced in my lifetime. Men like Speaker Mike Johnson should live in infamy and shame, and be forced to spend the rest of their days doing community service in the communities they all but destroyed in their reckless quest for power and naked Trump appeasement.

The party that took away free lunch programs from hungry school children has no problem dropping two billion dollars’ worth of munitions a day - on targets that posed no immediate threat to the lives of Americans.

Trump will cause more suffering to those of us living the in the United States than any ayatollah could have ever dreamed up; though we will surely also suffer an increase of domestic attacks, now that he has forced an existential war upon Iran whose extremist regime wields a global network of terrorists and bad actors.

We have already seen an uptick of ghastly violence in the last week, which comes on the heels of a near complete gutting of the F.B.I.’s domestic terrorism unit under Kash Patel, and the reanimation of Tulsi Gabbard’s insanity as Director of National Intelligence, chasing phantom voter fraud in the 2020 election with an eye towards subverting the upcoming midterms in the GOP’s favor. Dark days indeed.

Trump and company are creating a mountain of wealth that it will be hard to get out from under for the rest of us mere financially average mortals. Their appetite for greed and consumption, while so many go without, would make Marie Antoinette blush.

The Trump clan’s greed extends to Jared Kushner (who is now asking Saudi Arabia for another five billion dollars for his Affinity Partners private equity fund - after promising not to raise capital while his father-in-law was back in office and he was serving as his Middle East Envoy), and his entrée into the world of abject corruption, Ivanka Trump.

As soulless a grifter as this world has known, Vanky may be adept at staying out of the spotlight these days, but her well-manicured fingers are all over the indecency we are experiencing. She is well versed in her father’s grift and graft, having rode shotgun with him for much of his lascivious ascent into the world of vice and sex-trafficking.

Vanky was well aware of the front offered up to the public, through Trump Model Management and her father’s Miss Universe and Miss Teen USA pageants, and the nefarious activities they helped conceal.

This duplicity began in her early teens; Ivanka then continued being the face of much of her family’s corruption in ill-fated projects such as Trump Baja, Trump SoHo and Trump’s Toronto Tower - all of which defrauded investors after her well rehearsed dog-and-pony show promised luxury and glamour.

The Trump Soho exploits most likely would have earned the favorite daughter a criminal indictment for knowingly misrepresenting sales data, along with her brother Don Jr., without a well-timed campaign contribution to the Manhattan D.A. at the time, Cyrus Vance Jr. Ivanka knew who her father was and chirpily encouraged his exploits, predation and criminal associations, most especially with Jeffrey Epstein, to serve her own greed and aspirations.

That being said, I have no doubt that she herself has been a victim of his deviant desires and repugnant behavior but seemed to find a way early on to deflect his actions on to others, as a way of both self-protection and serving her own needs.

Her brothers and stepmothers also became very adept at looking the other way. Now the entire family seems to be ‘all in’ on the empire of destruction their patriarch is presiding over - with even Marla Maples reportedly taking up residence at Mar-a-Lago. Any one of these miscreants could have dropped a dime on their old man long ago and brought this entire nightmare to an end.

Instead, they are more than happy to let the lesser associates of Jeffrey Epstein take the fall and public scrutiny that has come with the release of the redacted files. Of which, to a person, they deserve prosecution and public humiliation. Make no mistake about that - but none of them, including Prince Andrew, have the power to start a war as a means of distraction for their sexual predation.

Donald Trump will be the first president in history to use the military and all of its might to cover up for his sex crimes. The fact that his victims in both cases are children only adds to the depravity and horror.

The fact that this comes after a year in which he, and his corrupt Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, used thousands of agents and man-hours to redact and scrub Trump’s mentions in the files - and his name STILL appears in them over 38,000 times.

When the DOJ begrudgingly released an incomplete tranche of millions of pages, under Congressional mandate, it became quite apparent that Trump’s long association with Jeffrey Epstein amounts to largest sexual predation conspiracy ever seen.

The kompromat and ties to foreign actors and governments, international banks and the billionaire titans of the tech industry provide a roadmap to the inner-workings of a global criminal organization of which Trump sat at the center.

There were many clues along the way of course; Justice Kennedy’s sudden retirement from the Supreme Court and his son’s position at Deutsche Bank during Trump’s first term, and former AG Bill Barr’s vigorous role in the cover up and subsequent elimination of Epstein himself, are but two mile markers on the highway to hell we now find ourselves traveling down.

The war in Iran is but the latest distraction employed by POTUS and his malevolent cabal, but it will be the most costly to life on this planet and the world order. Not to mention the global economy, which may be plunged into recession over the fact that the President of the United States is an unabashed and unrepentant pedophile.

May God help us all, or whomever it is you chose to pray to, we know for certain what the men and women who are plunging us into darkness worship: money and power. They have never amassed more of it - and this, above all else, may prove to be our greatest threat and most insurmountable adversary.

If we do not see the greed they represent and foment for what it is, we may never get out from under the calamity they have forced upon us. As we watch bombs explode half a world away, we must not lose sight of whom they are being dropped for and why they are falling.

It is not to promote freedom or protect the American way of life, it is killing for the sake of killing to protect a mad king.

Has murder ever been so gleefully embraced as we see in the eyes of the ever-greasy and execrable, self-titled ‘Secretary of War’, Pete Hegseth? A man whose own mother basically admitted he was a rapist and abusive husband.

If we needed any proof of Pete’s predation, it is there for the world to see in the way he is prosecuting this war. A ‘dry drunk’ dropping bombs on school girls and excoriating the press for reporting on it.

More concerned with how his image appears in the newspapers and on TV screens than the lives of the soldiers he is sending to their deaths in battle. Thirteen U.S. service members have been killed so far, while thousands of innocent Iranians and others across the region have died, as he mirthfully embraces war crimes and audaciously offers up more of the same.

‘No Quarter’ has become Hegseth’s battle cry - and it is an abomination and an embarrassment for our troops.

A desecration of the code and honor our military prides itself on. Our Secretary of Defense is attempting to remove morality in combat from our ‘war fighters’ (Hegseth’s favorite descriptor and a term as toxic as the man himself) root and branch, and replace it with the perverse, mindless aggression and machismo of the ‘manosphere’.

Doing this all while roiled by the defects and extremes of a lifelong alcoholic, without the guardrails and support of a program of recovery, is not only dangerous, it is a noxious brio which will poison our military. It is no surprise Hegseth has pushed out much of the leadership that stood up to him or posed a threat to his remodeling of our nation’s mighty military into Trump’s private militia; a transformation that is not quite complete but has already gone farther that most could even imagine a short time ago.

We killed another six suspected drug traffickers in the Pacific this week as part of ‘Operation Southern Spear’ and it barely received a mention, indicating how numb the media has become to extrajudicial killing under Hegseth’s murderous reign at the Pentagon.

Pete’s alcoholism was on full display a year ago at his Senate confirmation hearing when he compulsively kept reaching for his water glass.

If you have ever been in or among the throes of the newly abstinent, you knew exactly what you were looking at - and to say he was unqualified to be confirmed would be an understatement. The Republicans who knew better, and voted for him in spite of it, now have blood on their hands. Quite a lot of it.

Of course, his alcoholism is just one element in the cornucopia of dysfunction that seems to reside in the Christofascist, crusader-tattooed beast. Hegseth has proven himself to be a truly terrible leader, and easily the worst to helm our military in its 250 years of existence.

May we be free of him and end this awful war soon.

I wish you peace and continued strength for the road ahead.

You are not alone in your outrage and anxiety.

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