Updates On The Ever-Improving Perfect World
In Trump Fantasy Land, America’s aspirational (thus far) dictator and Nobel Peace Prize earner has just brokered perpetual peace in the Middle East. In reality, of course, which never looks very much like Trump’s imagination, a hostage exchange has taken place, though at the point when there were very few Israeli hostages who had not already been killed; and a temporary ceasefire agreement has been signed, at a point when there was almost nothing left in Gaza for Israel to destroy. Trump’s great peace deal, which is merely a Trumped-up promissory note for further negotiations, has essentially done little more than give Hamas shame cover before the Islamic world for their temporary surrender before Israel’s superior firepower, while giving Benjamin Netanyahu shamelessness cover with the West and his own population in the aftermath of two years of ruthless obliteration of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and their neighborhoods. The truth, however, outside of Trump Fantasy Land, is that each of the two main players in this “peace deal,” Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu, has a very strong vested interest in the continuation of the war. Indeed, for both sides, their future prospects depend on its continuation.
Somehow, baked into this non-peace deal in the Middle East, there rose the specter of a permanent Qatari air force “facility” planted in Idaho, complete with its very own signing ceremony hosted by Trump’s Secretary of War Paint, Pete Hegseth. The optics here are particularly awful in light of Trump and his family having recently been the recipients of the largest and most overt personal bribes in U.S. presidential history, from Qatar. On top of those awful optics — or in spite of them I suppose, since the MAGA crowd are seemingly proud of Trump’s ability to swing the biggest grifts, as they are of all his other biggest improprieties — many of the faithful were perturbed at the thought of a shaky and disreputable Arab ally being granted training space on American soil. So within two days of Hegseth’s big announcement came J. D. Vance’s mop-up duty, declaring on Fox News that this whole Qatari air force facility thing was just another pile of fake news — in spite of it having become news at all entirely by way of a formal signing ceremony and announcement presided over by one of Trump’s most loyal bootlickers/appointees.
Trump is on the edge of employing the so-called Insurrection Act as a means of overriding court orders in order to send U.S. troops into American cities, on the basis of nothing remotely warranting such an extreme measure according to all historical precedent — although his goons are clearly intending to incite enough isolated violent events to “justify” the plan. He is making a routine of ordering the U.S. military to blow up foreign boats at sea without warning, based on unsubstantiated accusations that the people on these boats (all of them? some of them?) were drug traffickers — as though (alleged) drug trafficking were a summary execution offense. He is sending unidentified masked enforcers into residential neighborhoods to tackle, jail, and deport people not engaged in any immediate wrongdoing, often in front of the people’s own children, in lieu of any sort of civilized or even semi-rational “immigration policy.” The individual Trump employs as his entire brain trust, Stephen Miller, apparently responsible for the above-mentioned “policy,” is a fearmongering rabble-rouser who speaks of non-white people from less advanced countries as lacking the innate capacity for living in a civilized society, and calls everyone who opposes Trump’s wishes an insurrectionist or terrorist, which language is no mere hyperbole, but rather carefully chosen rhetorical support for further tyrannical impositions from America’s temper-tantrum-in-chief. Trump’s cuckoo secretary of health insists that circumcision results in higher rates of autism, while his attorney general and FBI director have spent their recent official hearings before the U.S. Congress firing scripted sub-Trump personal insults at the country’s elected representatives, as though their only public duty were to their boss’s id.
In other news, there is still a war in Ukraine with Trump’s favorite tyrant remaining on the offensive, while Trump dallies, profiteers, and cries “stolen election” over his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize — while blowing up private boats at sea and trying to send troops into U.S. cities in response to utterly manufactured emergencies, or rather in a desperate attempt to instigate emergencies in order to justify further power grabs. And as per usual, after weeks of playing the American media into dreaming of “a tough new tone with Putin,” Trump has hosted Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, apparently for no other reason but to slap him in the face yet again, seemingly denying him the Tomahawk missiles he had been dangling before him as a publicity stunt. When push comes to shove, as always — and anyone who ever doubted this for one second is as gullible as the most gaga MAGA cultist — Trump melts like a swooning schoolgirl before the mere thought of his absolute all-time biggest hero, Vladimir Putin. This time he is falling back on the hoariest excuse, the fear of “escalation,” as though Putin were not operating at full escalation mode already. If a United States president wanted to de-escalate the current situation in a hurry, he would need both Harry Truman’s steel nerves and sense of stakes in the face of history, and Ronald Reagan’s political wisdom and unflustered assurance in the face of Russian bluster. Sadly, America’s current occupier of that high office is neither knowledgeable enough to spell Truman or Reagan, nor man enough to shine their shoes.
Of course, one thing could truly change Trump’s mind about Putin, since Trump is at heart a confused coward with his finger in the wind, forever in search of strong men (or mobs) to protect him and enhance his reputation with the weak-minded. That one thing would be finding out that Putin is not so strong as he pretends, but is actually on the verge of losing. Then, in keeping with his character and history, Trump would likely jump bandwagons and immediately declare that he has been on Zelensky’s side all along, and was merely playing up to “the loser” Putin to see if he could talk any sense into him.
