'The Story'

Times like these have a way of showing us what we are made of - and for that we should be grateful.

Not for the calamity, cruelty and unrelenting violence perpetrated by masked federal ICE agents, but for the courage Americans of all shapes and sizes, colors and creeds, displayed on Friday, in temperatures that were downright Arctic, to show the world that no amount of frigid air could extinguish the fires of freedom and flames of compassion.

Not the caricatures of patriotism that MAGA has pushed on the mindless lemmings that have gone along with Trump’s grift for a decade. The empty calories of hate and xenophobia that fuels the cosplay cowboys of the ‘America First’ movement. But a righteous accelerant that is being fanned by the brutality and injustice ICE is fueling in Minnesota, and beyond.

The true patriots are the ones standing toe-to-frozen-toe with their oppressors; raising their voices and their righteous actions in solidarity with their friends, neighbors and fellow human beings.

Peaceful protestors are providing not just an example to the rest of us of what an uncompromising and fierce resistance looks like, they are becoming a beacon of hope in unbearably dark times. Bear it we must, though we can take comfort in the fact that we are much stronger in our resolve than our adversaries have surmised.

It was no accident that Friday’s protest was answered with Saturday’s murder of Alex Jeffrey Pretti.

Trump is a coward who lives in a bubble. He assumes everyone will fall in line because that is what the professional ass-kissers around him have always done. His enforcers ratchet up their brutality to please their mad king and his minions, like Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino, who are essentially performing for an audience of one.

The violence meted out to Democrats and progressive Americans is being organized and encouraged by Stephen Miller, who has carte blanche when it comes to punishing Trump’s perceived enemies. Both men believe brutality will bring blue states to heel. AG Pam Bondi went so far as to send a letter yesterday, in the aftermath of yet another killing, offering to remove ICE agents if the state handed over their voter rolls.

Extortion and murderous voter intimidation with Trump’s very own army of brown shirts. For that alone the entire cabal should spend the rest of their lives in prison. They are gambling that they will take over the entire country before anyone holds them to account.

POTUS is unfamiliar with folks that have a backbone because he spends most of his time in Palm Beach, Florida - the land of looking away at the perverse crimes and misdeeds of others as long as they’re filthy rich.

The monster that was Jeffrey Epstein, for example, could only have existed because of the privilege afforded him by his fellow billionaires and predators. Of which Trump was not only an acolyte but a purveyor and partner. His retinue has always been the lazy, deviant and entitled of which there is no shortage in corporate America and Republican politics, but their days are numbered and nobody understands this better than Trump himself.

Trump is a predator but will shrink from forces stronger than him; through his languid stupor and lifeless eyes a glint of panic and a heavy dose of fear is emerging.

Donald is a man who in his heart-of-hearts knows he will never truly measure up. His life has been one of lashing out at his own mediocrity, and dearth of skill and competency.

He has sired a talentless brood, separated from their own empathy and imagination. They have no real aptitude for self-expression beyond the coked-out rage of Don Jr. on his spittle-inflected podcasts or the robotic and vapid nonsense Vanky spews out of her frozen face to the world when she climbs out from behind the hedgerows to grace her father, and the world beyond, with her presence.

Ivanka married a marionette for the oligarch class, a fellow scion of a criminal and a fraud. Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, had a big appetite for male prostitutes, perhaps the worst kept secret in his real estate developer circles at the time he accepted a plea deal in 2004 from Chris Christie, then US Attorney in New Jersey, rather than risk his own peccadillos coming out at trial. (Most billionaires don’t take plea deals, they can easily afford white shoe law firms who live for trials; Kushner was playing the long game).

Charles Kushner’s attempted entrapment of his brother-in-law, for which he received both prison sentence and a Trump pardon, was projection of his own tastes and proclivities. Kompromat was the coin of the realm. It still is and he knows it; I imagine his ambassadorship to France and Monaco are proving fruitful for future endeavors.

Kushner’s real estate empire was built on the backs of the working class whom he exploited and ripped off with their substandard housing, much like how the Trump clan themselves operated under the grifty tutelage of Fred Trump, Sr.

Vanky is an apple that didn’t fall far from the tree. For much of the relationship I observed between her and her father, she was always eager to look the other way at his abuses of others because it served her own ambitions and greed. Her marriage is a further reflection of her dubious values and duplicity.

It may not appear to be the case, especially in the face of the latest murder by ICE agents of an innocent observer, but the MAGA movement is on its heels at the moment. Trump is bumbling on the world stage, and his aggressions are quickly collapsing under the weight of organized resistance.

Often it was unspeakably ugly and embarrassing, but this was the week the world woke up.

Leadership, in the form of eloquent statesmanship, intellectualism and courage arose from our neighbors to the north and amongst our historic European allies abroad. Allies who have been ridiculed and derided by a man too ignorant and unmoored to truly comprehend what a fool he is making of the United States in the eyes of the world.

Prime Minister Mark Carney and the leadership of the U.K., France, Denmark and Greenland, along with most of the European Union, stood up to Trump - and he not only backed down from his war footing regarding acquiring Greenland, he withered on the world stage.

Trump showed up jet-lagged and stoned - and he slurred his way through a soporific speech at Davos that will go down as a low point in American history. It may also be viewed by historians as the moment the United States fully surrendered its role in geopolitical affairs to the more sober and sane leadership of PM Mark Carney and his cohorts in Europe.

Their statesmanship in reacting to the danger of this moment and the disillusion of the American experiment is both welcome and painful to witness.

There is no substitute for education; Trump’s lifelong learning disability, raging addictions and mental diminishment have left him unfit to serve another week, let alone to the end of his term.

POTUS would of course already be out of office, if not for a Republican Party peopled with lickspittle sycophants and slimy little toadstools like Speaker Mike Johnson and former majority leader, Mitch McConnell. They do not have the courage to do the right thing but even so, Trump knows to bring most of his cabinet along on official overseas trips so they cannot meet in his absence and invoke the 25th amendment.

This is not to say that JD Vance wouldn’t continue to carry out the ‘America First’ agenda being prosecuted by Stephen Miller and Russell Vought - he would indeed. Vance’s self-discipline and smarminess may make it all the more lethal to our republic.

I am not suggesting we accept the lesser of two evils, but instead realize we are truly in a battle for the soul of our nation. We must train our awareness of the full scale of the audacious horror they are imposing on us.

At a time when this country most needs real patriots, it has cowards and poseurs.

Clear-eyed compassion, the sort of steely resolve that sends people out into single digit temps to stand on behalf of all that is good in the face of so much destruction and corruption, is necessary.

The fact that another innocent soul is lost to this world is beyond maddening. That Alex Jeffrey Pretti was coming to the aid of his fellow protestors and documenting ICE when he was attacked and murdered illuminates not only the tragedy of this situation but how wantonly deliberate our federal agencies have become in killing Americans.

Mr. Pretti was an ICU nurse, Minnesota resident and a U.S. citizen, as well as a registered gun owner, though he did not brandish a weapon towards ICE agents as Trump and DHS immediately asserted in the moments after his murder. His firearm was removed by ICE agents during their assault on him BEFORE it escalated into his murder by multiple gunshot wounds as he lay helpless on the ground. As cold-blooded an execution as we have witnessed since Renee Good lost her life in the same fashion two weeks ago.

The lying and gaslighting is intentional; we must do all we can to wake up the reactionary citizens in our midst that are still under his odious spell.

The Christian nationalism that allows MAGA supporters to turn a blind eye to such widespread corruption and authoritarian violence has done more damage to this country than any extremist bad actors from overseas could ever dream up.

To be truly free of Trumpism we will need a complete personality change in much of this country. MAGA’s billionaire backers in media know that change is highly unlikely given our current climate of reactionary online pundits and a mendacious White House. It is no accident the press corps of the White House and the Pentagon have been replaced by partisan podcasters and online trolls.

When you have men and women that lie with such casual disregard for morality, hiding behind crosses and the bleached blonde tresses framing ‘Mar-a-Lago’ faces, we are in deep trouble. There is a lot of money to be made being awful; Trump understands more than most how to use people’s greed against them.

DJT has created his own perverse ecosphere which is designed to serve his desires and avarice - and shield him from any accountability for a life of criminality and decades of sexual predation.

As the nation reeled from yet another senseless murder by federal agents funded by U.S. taxpayers, Trump and Melania hosted corporate donors at the White House for a private screening of accused sexual predator Brett Rattner’s film ‘Melania’, for which Jeff Bezos’ Amazon paid the Trump clan forty million dollars. Myth making and money laundering/bribery all rolled up into one. (I’m sure the film does not delve into how Melania made her living in NYC before she married Trump).

The folks that vote for Trump want to be lied to if it lets them keep believing the myth that they are in fact the ‘good guys’. They are willing to turn a blind eye to evil to stay safely ensconced in their suburban bubbles.

Trump’s insults of our NATO allies that capped off his disastrous Davos trip should enrage every American. To diminish the loss of life among the troops that sacrificed and served along side of us in two wars that were started under false pretenses is beyond the pale.

Post 9/11 U.S.A. was essentially given the benefit of the doubt by our allies who very much to their credit, suited up and showed up when we needed them most and invoked NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause after the heinous terrorist attacks twenty five years ago this September.

Will they even trust us next time, let alone take up arms on our behalf?

These ridiculous statements are even more maddening coming from a man who has never served anyone but himself in his long and miserable life. I have met most of Trump’s immediate family and there isn’t a brave bone in any of their bodies. They are plastic people who melt under pressure.

The only reason they have gone this far and done all this damage is that we have allowed them to - while the ignorance they purvey has festered.

We have allowed things at times to ‘go back to normal’, when they are in fact anything but normal. When I left live television to speak out about Trump in 2016, many of my colleagues thought I was crazy. They couldn’t understand why I would walk away from a career that took over two decades to build. My answer was that knowing what I know of Trump (and what many of them did too, though they chose to honor their NDAs and stay out of trouble) was that there was nothing on the other side of a Trump presidency.

POTUS’s bungling of the COVID pandemic bore out my concerns, as my industry and many others shut down for the better part of a year or more. I feel the same way today, now that he has completed his first year of his second term. There is nothing on the other side of this if we do not stop him soon.

Trump marked his one year anniversary by attacking a sovereign nation, kidnapping its leader and leaving an authoritarian government in place so he could steal their oil - depositing the proceeds in a Qatari bank.

He has threatened Greenland with invasion, imposed tariffs on our most loyal trading partners, and insulted their service members and heads of state.

He has torn down the East Wing and turned much of the White House into what I imagine a river boat casino gift shop looks like. He has given false hope to Iranian protestors and left them hanging, while he plays golf and posts memes about his desire for a third term. He will attempt to stay in office and subvert the midterms.

Trump has done all of this under the obvious and increasing mental diminishment and urgent medical conditions he continues to hide from the American people. To say POTUS cannot be trusted is the understatement of the century.

The question before us now is can we be trusted to rise to the occasion and truly recognize the threat he poses to democracy and the world order. I believe we can, but we have to understand this is anything but business as usual.

We need to follow the lead set forth by the brave folks in Minnesota.

We need mass protests and general strikes and we should encourage our allies abroad to boycott America and apply pressure any peaceful way they can.

It would be an excellent year to skip attending the World Cup; Trump does not deserve to have the ego stroke that international tournament will provide.

It is also, as a practical matter, incredibly unsafe for foreign tourists to be in the United States while masked gun men prowl our nation’s streets.

This has become a matter of life and death. The era of appeasement has ended.

It’s time to fight back as hard and as fast as we can with all of the non-violent and economic tools at our disposal.

We not only owe it to each other, we owe it to people we have never met. Such as the cherubic five year-old boy, Liam Ramos, stripped from his family in Minneapolis, used as bait to lure others from the home he may never see again and sent off to a detention center in Texas.

As shameful and as heartbreaking an action as I have seen this country do - until what I saw done in our name by ICE agents on Saturday morning.

Enough.

Resist. Now.

While we still can.

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