'Rich Man's War'

For me, the crystallization of this perilous past year is the juxtaposition of Pete Hegseth literally powdering his nose (as reported by The New York Times), before meeting with Ukrainian leadership in Europe earlier this year - after taking it upon himself to slow Pentagon military aid and intelligence sharing to the embattled and brave war-torn nation.

As Trump spends a lavish and long holiday in Palm Beach pretending he is General Eisenhower - while real men and women fight and die in the frozen trenches of the frontlines in Ukraine, where their brave battle for democracy and our current lack of support illustrates just how far America has fallen.

Our political and pro-Trump military leadership is not only an embarrassment, it’s an insult to so many who have sacrificed on behalf of this once mighty nation.

We are not only dishonoring ourselves, we are turning our backs on the values so many have fought and died for over two and a half centuries.

We must not descend further into this abyss.

Trump and his Cabinet are criminals. Their dereliction of duty and fealty to one man -over upholding the U.S. Constitution - is worthy of an exile to Elba for all involved.

The fact that Trump didn’t even bother to fly back to the White House to oversee his middle of the night regime change commando raid/arrest and extraction of President Maduro of Venezuela, but just basked in his ‘Commander-in-Chief’ status from the musty Palmetto Room at Mar-a-Lago tells you all you need to know about the Temu Teddy Roosevelt and his band of buccaneers.

This is a POTUS who with a straight face uttered the words ‘Donroe Doctrine’ before taking his place behind the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General ’Razin’ Caine (a man with a sobriquet so irresistible to toxically-masculine clowns like Hegseth and Trump, it is the only way they now refer to him), then nodded out like he had just crawled from an opium den into the bright morning sun.

The fact that Trump’s international trade chaos vis-à-vis tariffs has now morphed into Monroe Doctrine eralike-American imperialism should not just give us pause, it should engender full scale global panic.

Trump and his associates have spent the last year rearranging the international order in terms that suit their private financial interests. The National Security Strategy document they released recently was a repudiation of all America stood for on the world stage for most of the Contemporary Era.

It was also very much a moral retreat - we are seeing the results of that now in Venezuela.

Trump’s Cabinet and his children are all in on the grift; nothing will make the United States’ mighty military lose credibility and standing faster than the emerging reality that our soldiers are being used as sub-contractors and private security to serve one family’s economic interests. POTUS does not have the right to dishonor our Armed Services in such a fashion. He exclaimed at his presser, when asked about U.S. forces occupying Venezuela that, ‘We’re not afraid of boots on the ground’.

That is because it won’t be his kids doing the fighting, just like it wasn’t him serving, when he lied about bone spurs and received five deferments to evade the draft during the Vietnam War. Trump is a coward who talks tough and plays with other people’s lives. He is the last man on the planet you want to allow to use the military for his own personal gain and to do the bidding of oil companies.

Greenland, Canada and any nation that doesn’t submit to the willful greed of an angry and unhinged dictator may soon find themselves in the crosshairs.

This is not hyperbole or hypothetical.

Trump crossed a line with his illegal attack on Venezuela - and it may be one we do not come back from. At least not while he remains in office.

The first order of business for Congress when they return should be drawing up articles of impeachment. The failure of men like Mitch McConnell to hold Trump accountable for his attempted coup five years ago has now bled out into the rest of the world and is causing lasting damage and destruction.

This is not the way to peace or prosperity - it is the road to perdition.

At least Bush and Cheney had the decency to pretend the United States’ invasion of Iraq was about freedom and prosecuting the war on terror.

Trump just came right out and said we struck Venezuela to get back ‘our’ oil.

He made no mention of free and fair elections or restoring democracy.

He said the U.S.A. would ‘run’ the country so our ‘great oil companies’ could take back what is rightfully theirs and increase production - and it would all be ‘great’ and everybody was gonna make a lot of money. His usual carnival barker’s rap of empty promises and outright lies.

Of course, Trump and the oil companies that financed his last election will probably make a huge fortune and U.S. troops sent in to protect Koch Industries building a new pipeline (I’m sure Halliburton/KBR will get a nice cut as well) will at least get weekly paychecks while doing the bidding of energy oligarchs. The people of Venezuela however, will only be exploited and made to suffer further under U.S. occupation. They will not profit from nation building by a foreign power - and certainly not one being led by Donald Trump.

We have seen this story before - it never ends well for the population that has been invaded.

My grandfather, Harry S. Casler, was in Nixon’s motorcade when it was attacked in Caracas in ’58. He had warned the Vice President about animosity towards the United States for granting the recently overthrown (via popular uprising) dictator Marcos Péres Jiménez exile, and suggested in advance a different route from the airport to the U.S. Embassy.

V.P. Nixon, in his conceit, brushed his warning aside.

My grandfather screamed at the Vice President (calling him a son of a bitch, according to family lore) as their motorcade fell under attack from the unruly crowd - that he may never see his kids again because of Nixon’s arrogance.

Nixon failed to heed warnings from the C.I.A. station chief, the U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela, as well as U.S. embassy staff, who had all advised against the visit. He foolishly thought he knew better and failed to understand the political pressures and dynamics within the country. The roiling resentment at U.S. imperialism and our years of backing dictatorial leaders doing the bidding of American business interests, most especially Texaco (now operating as Chevron). Sound familiar?

Does anyone think occupying and ‘running’ Venezuela from Mar-a-Lago is gonna be a cakewalk for the crack team of diplomats Trump has assembled?

Will the cartoonish and downright silly Pete Hegseth be able to withstand the pressures of leading an occupying force when they invariably come under attack from guerrilla fighters or pro-Maduro paramilitary militias within the country?

To paraphrase Thomas Friedman, ‘Some countries implode when they are occupied, Venezuela explodes…’.

Imagine the refugee crisis this new round of instability will create, not just for surrounding countries, but for us as well. Not to mention the various factions and militants that will now compete for control in the various regions. We have handed a people who have already endured more than their share of suffering a fresh nightmare.

That is not what great nations do, that is the business of rogue states - Trump is making us into one in the eyes of the world.

Will the folks who so ignorantly and enthusiastically supported ‘America First’ withdraw their mandate when they see what it really means? That American military forces are now being used as the enforcers of corporate oil and gas interests.

What happens to the planet when the American oil and gas conglomerates ramp up their production of the world’s largest heavy crude deposits?

How many more millions of tons of carbon emissions enter the Earth’s atmosphere after the ‘Drill Baby Drill’ guy delivers the vast Orinoco Belt back to Chevron in perpetuity?

We may have not only just lost our ability to prevent our country from backsliding into imperialism, we may be coming to a point of no return in battling climate change as well. We don’t often think about the ecological impact of all this madness - and that is by design. That doesn’t mean the emergency we face lessens.

The United States of America should be leading the world in protecting the environment and developing renewable energy, not retreating from the fight and shutting down innovation.

Let us not forget the ‘stocking stuffer’ Trump already gave the oil and gas industry this Christmas; shutting down offshore wind farms along the East Coast (eliminating good paying union jobs days before the holiday) and cancelling tax breaks for green energy projects nationwide.

The corporations who backed Trump did so because they knew he would deliver results (there is no CEO in America right now who doesn’t have firsthand knowledge of how much of a loose cannon he is and has always been).

That is why they don’t care about Epstein files (which Trump has successfully pushed from the front page once again), and still happily cut him checks for his gaudy and grotesque ballroom.

The slow drip of documents being released by DOJ, and the obfuscation about how many documents actually existed in the first place, employs the classic Trump strategy of running out the clock to avoid accountability.

DOJ didn’t just ‘discover’ another million documents on Christmas Eve.

They strategically released them when most folks couldn’t give them the attention they deserved - and then Trump followed up with an unnecessary bombing in Nigeria to distract further from the Epstein headlines and change the narrative.

DOJ is no longer an institution working on behalf of the American people in the interest of justice - it is a pro bono law firm for the world’s most famous pedophile.

The U.S. military is not being used to protect and serve the interests of the American people and our allies with this latest strike. They are being deployed as if they are a private mercenary force punishing the perceived enemies of the most corrupt and compromised man to ever hold public office.

The killings of the Venezuelan fisherman in boats labelled ‘narco-terrorists’ by a dry drunk-Fox News morning show host (who very likely would have faced trial himself for a California sexual assault if he hadn’t worked for Rupert Murdoch at the time), are a stain on our rule of law.

Murdoch basically only hires sexual predators - and works paying off their victims and hiring lawyers into his operational budget. A practice he has in common with Donald Trump. Do you think Roger Ailes’ behavior over decades was a secret in the C-suite? It was not, and neither was Pete Hegseth’s. I spent enough time working in network television to see how far execs will go to protect their on air personalities, and more importantly, their profits.

I happened to be working at NBC (on the televised Christmas tree lighting in Rockefeller Center) the morning Matt Lauer was fired in 2017; in fact, he was supposed to be our host for the broadcast that evening. Suffice it to say, nobody who worked at the Today Show (as several of my friends still do) were shocked; surprised it finally happened, certainly, but shocked, not a chance.

The revelers at Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve, which included Israeli Prime Minister and world pariah, Benjamin Netanyahu, should have been hanging their heads in shame instead of sipping champagne and stuffing Costco shrimp into their rubber-lipped mouths.

The Botox and bonhomie flowed, as the military plans took shape away from congressional purview.

When Marco Rubio was asked if he informed Congressional leadership ahead of the strikes he called it a ‘trigger-based mission’, while Trump insinuated Congress could not be trusted so they were not informed in advance.

When in fact it is the Executive Branch that has lost all trust: an act of war without Congressional approval is nakedly illegal.

The mildewy stench of money and mediocrity wafting around the gold-ceilinged predator’s playground this past holiday may never wash out of this nation’s conscience. Those who were there were at the epicenter of all that is wrong with our world in this moment.

The way Zelensky was summoned to Palm Beach (and not greeted upon arrival at the airport by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as is diplomatic protocol) and then summarily dismissed - because Putin got to Trump first with a phone call and undid any potential progress on a peace plan with a well-timed but completely untrue piece of propaganda aimed at Donald’s addled and demented brain is not how things should be run.

Ukraine did not attack Putin’s residence, but Trump no longer has an effective apparatus around him - to help the 79 year-old severely diminished man distinguish fact from fiction. POTUS bragged how he ‘ACED’ a recent cognitive exam the day before he announced military strikes.

Is Tulsi Gabbard even still a member of his Cabinet? Not that she would be a trusted source, given her own history as a Putin-enabler and purveyor of Kremlin talking points.

From a leadership standpoint we have never been so vulnerable.

If only I could talk to my grandfather Harry today, who began his career serving the U.S.A. in WWII in a bomber over Germany, and ended it after decades of foreign service, including Vietnam - where he ultimately left his diplomatic career after fighting with Henry Kissinger over the bombing of Cambodia. As I have written before, he was incensed that Nixon would only listen to Kissinger at that point in the Vietnam War and was willing to engage in illegal bombings to help his re-election chances.

My grandfather saw up close what corrupt politicians seeking self-interest over the interests of the American people and democracy at large could do to a nation. He moved to Ireland as a form of personal protest where he lived out his days, not bitter but perhaps hard-bitten. I believe he would caution us to begin to view our own leadership as we have viewed that of our adversaries.

Trump is not a man who deserves the benefit of the doubt - and he certainly doesn’t have the best interests of the United States at heart.

Millions are beginning the new year by losing their health insurance or watching their premiums more than double, including myself.

Our federal government is a shell of its former self; generations of institutional knowledge have been forced into early retirement or fired.

NASA is shutting down the Goddard Space Flight Center library and throwing many irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind materials in the trash. (A magical place for me when I was kid; my mom even worked there for a time, feeding analog punchcards into giant mainframe computers that took up entire rooms).

We are throwing out the work of brilliant researchers and dedicated civil servants because Trump has appointed right wing podcasters and anti-vax kooks instead of experts in his Cabinet.

Law enforcement agencies have become infested with pro-MAGA zealots that we as a people can no longer fully trust, let alone be proud of, as citizens.

ICE alone is as close to a Gestapo-type force as we have ever known and Trump has plans to increase National Guard presence; troops will be trained in civil disobedience and deployed in the United States beginning this April. This will be in opposition to a recent Supreme Court ruling - and will perhaps force another Constitutional crisis upon us.

A ‘wartime’ president may be tempted to consider suspending elections or declaring some sort of martial law that would make going to the polls impossible for many.

Trump will use every method at his disposal to intimidate voters and overturn election results he finds unfavorable.

But don’t just take my word for it, look back on what he did five years ago this week.

Mitch McConnell could have put and end to all this on that cold and chaotic January day and the weeks that followed. He instead took the coward’s route, as did so many of his GOP peers.

When the ball was back in Democrats’ court, DOJ lost precious time in attempting to hold Trump accountable for his crimes, with a feckless and foot-dragging Attorney General, Merrick Garland.

With each misstep we see clearly how the consequences increase. How much farther down the abyss do we need to fall as a nation before we truly realize the emergency we are in?

We must take stock in this moment - and take seriously the threat Trump poses to our allies and the NATO Alliance itself.

POTUS’s threats regarding taking Greenland from Denmark and making Canada into the 51st State are not simply jokes or boastful trolling. They are in fact his intentions, which he always compulsively broadcasts.

Take him at his word, even if his words always sound crazy.

As the great Maya Angelou once said, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’

Happy New Year. And please know that whatever we face in the coming year, we will not face it alone.

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