This essay is the result of more than three and a half years of corruption, incompetence, and most of all, a betrayal of the American ideal; the likes of which this country has never seen. I remember my reaction the day donald trump announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. I said to myself: “What, does he think he’s going to do, waltz into the White House and be CEO of the United States?” That answer, as we all know now, is “yes,” that’s exactly what donald trump thinks he should be able to do.
I recently had a short conversation with a good friend about the plans for this essay, and her reaction was that her concern is not so much for the preservation of this republic, but for the damage being done to mankind’s hope for building a world called for by God and His Christ, and for, as Jesus taught us to pray, bringing the kingdom of heaven here. This was proper, because she is, I feel, at the core of her soul, a godly, spiritual creature. I, on the other hand, am, at my core, a political creature, and my concern is for the preservation and survival of this republic, and the chance to realize what this great American experiment in self-governance can be; not only to America, but to the world.
The American republic, my dear readers, is under attack and we, as citizens of this republic, are secretly sworn at birth to “defend it and the constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.” We all know that there are foreign enemies of the United States, but the most dangerous enemy, and the one that is the greatest threat to our republic now is the president of the United States.
Spreading Our Legs
In the summer of 2018 Donald Trump traveled to Helsinki, Finland to meet with the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin. This meeting was, essentially, the event that laid before the American people exactly how unsophisticated and uninformed Donald Trump really is concerning the complex nature of international relations. This is particularly true regarding the ends which Putin seeks for both the United States and the world.
I find it difficult to fathom what Donald Trump could have possibly hoped to have accomplished in his two hour and ten minute, one-on-one, unrecorded meeting with Putin, other than compromising an entire treasure trove of classified US intelligence on a host of subjects. Thankfully, most of the facts uncovered by the highly sophisticated and informed US intelligence and law enforcement communities regarding Russia’s successful operation to secure victory for donald trump in the 2016 American presidential election are not known to Donald Trump, as they are part of an investigation into his criminal collusion with a foreign power to secure political office in the United States.
As payment for Russia’s assistance, the trump administration refuses to act upon the evidence laid before it regarding Russia’s attacks on the American republic. They refuse to assist in securing future elections against foreign interference and, in fact, have threatened to remove the security clearances from those within the intelligence community that have been the most vocal critics of the administration’s lack of willingness to protect the American people and their democratic institutions from the likes of Putin and his gangsters in the Kremlin.
Donald Trump is spreading our legs before the insatiable sexual-political appetite of Vladimir Putin, and his cowardly enablers in the republican party refuse to step in and put a stop to it. As cover for their collective cowardice, they claim to see the issue as one of policy and not the survival of the republic. They are also, for some ungodly reason, scared of donald trump..
In March of 2018 the Department of Homeland Security and The FBI issued an alert with the following title: “Alert TA18- 074A: “Russian Government Cyber Activity Targeting Energy and other Critical Infrastructure Sectors.” The message of this document is that the Russian Government continues to target strategic American infrastructure (this includes our oil and electrical systems, and nuclear facilities), as well as both governmental and non-governmental institutional and organizations.
Neither the republican-controlled Senate, nor the White House has acted on this information. Why is this? The only answer can be because the republican party is now no longer the party of fiscal conservatism, but the party of trump and his ‘they’re stupid, so say anything’ populism. Republicans the country over are now somehow beholden to him and his base. They feel they are beholden to trump as we know trump is beholden to Putin. trump and Putin are the same; each of them cares only for themselves.
I realize that many Trump supporters and apologists will be offended by my last statement, but the evidence is too compelling. Aside from Trump’s subservient and borderline traitorous performance in Helsinki, the following incidents lay Trump’s pro-Russian–anti-American agenda bare before the American people and the world.
However, before I outline these incidents, I want to offer a few bare, numerical statistics which are very relevant to the situation in which we now find ourselves. The numbers below are pre-pandemic:
- The US annual GDP is approximately twenty-two trillion dollars (US) in goods and services produced.
- The EU annual GDP is approximately nineteen trillion dollars in goods and services produced.
- The Russian Federation’s annual GDP is approximately one point three trillion dollars in goods and services produced.
What these numbers make clear, in a nutshell, is that Russia has absolutely nothing that the United States needs or wants; they produce no products that can compete in our domestic marketplace, and they have no domestic consumer marketplace for American products. The European Union, on the other hand, not only has goods and services which the American consumer both needs and wants, but it also has the domestic consumer marketplace that desires American products in vast quantities.
Now I shall review several incidents introduced prior to that information:
First, before, during, and after, trump’s important meeting with our European allies, which preceded his personal humiliation in Finland, he continually harangued and insulted our closest allies and largest trading partners in the world. He actually went so far as to call our closest European allies our “foes” in an official statement delivered through his Twitter account. All of this was done to please Putin, who needs a fractured and dysfunctional NATO alliance if he is to realize his plans of reabsorbing large portions of Russia’s western frontier back into a post-Soviet greater Russian Federation.
Most experts in these matters believe that his first targets will be the Baltic States of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. The Russian Federation has all the land it could ever want. What it needs (as it has always needed) are western ports, and vast buffer spaces against Western militaries.
Second, before this rancourous display at the NATO summit, President trump publicly called for the re-admittance of Russia back into the G7, once more making it the G8. Russia was expelled from this group of the world’s largest economies in retribution for their invasion of the Ukraine and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Of course, with an annual GDP of only 1.3 trillion dollars, they don’t really belong there, anyway.
Of course, no one in the US government had any idea that President Trump would make such a ludicrous suggestion and state, publicly, a complete reversal of a core American foreign policy developed over decades of cooperation with our sister states in Europe. Not only does this reversal possess no benefit at all to the United States, but it actually creates a more dangerous global environment for the United States and its allies. It is, of course, of great benefit to Vladimir Putin.
Third, both during and after transition from the Obama Administration to the trump administration, the State Department was given the directive of finding ways to lift economic sanctions on Russia, return diplomatic compounds, and ease tensions with Moscow.
Fourth, In May of 2018 the Trump Administration, under orders from new National Security Advisor, John Bolton, eliminated the position of Cyber Security Coordinator from the National Security Council. It is well known within the various wings of our national security apparatus that John Bolton has virtually no cyber-security knowledge or experience, and now this country has no single coordinator of the most relevant and immediate threat to our national security to assist him in advising the President.
The reasoning given for this move was to help streamline the government’s response to cyber-based threats emanating from our adversaries in the world. However, you don’t have to be a political scientist to realize that when you disperse responsibilities in this manner, you act against the very concept of streamlining. The United State’s cyber-security functions will now be coordinated by two individuals with differing responsibilities.
Fifth, to date, after three and a half year in office, the trump administration, to the chagrin of Congress and the American electorate as a whole, has neither devised, submitted, nor, apparently, even considered any plan to protect the American democratic electoral system from foreign cyber attacks. It is obvious that they have no intention of either developing any such plan, submitting any such plan to Congress and the people, or even enacting any sort of ad hoc plan to protect our sacred democratic processes from foreign interference.
Instead, they intend to spread our legs before the greatest adversary of the United States; Vladimir Putin. This intent to undermine American democracy by the trump administration extends beyond the aspects above, they are also pursuing it in a backdoor manner such as the incidents below:
First, on the same day the the indictment against Russian national, Marina Butina, was unsealed, charging her with, among other things, using the NRA to funnel Russian money to republican candidates and conservative causes in the United States, the US Treasury Department, under orders from the trump administration, announced that the NRA and other similar entities will no longer have to reveal to the IRS the identity of their donors.
Second, during the Transition process from The Barak Obama Administration to the donald trump Administration, Jared Kushner held a secret meeting with the head of a Kremlin-linked Russian Bank currently the target of US and other international sanctions. The president of this bank has personal ties to the Russian Federal Security Service and Vladimir Putin.
This list of offenses against the American republic could go on almost indefinitely, but I must end them in order to move to the next section of this essay.
The Man who Would be King
Donald Trump admires the strong man, the autocrat, the dictator who can have people murdered with a wisp of his breath. Men who are above the law in their countries. Unfortunately for him, he is in the United States, and will never realize his dreams of being able to rule by decree — okay, so that may not be entirely true, since the republican controlled senate is unwilling to operate as part of a separate and equal branch of government. So let me rephrase — Unfortunately, he is in the United States, and there are limits on the point to which he can rule by decree.
This is no secret. It is why he praises them above those weak presidents and prime ministers of Europe who respect that cumbersome and unnecessary rule of law. Trump has no idea why they seem to relish the restrictions put upon them by their nations’ laws, history, constitutions, and the basic precepts of democracy. It is why he is drawn to monsters like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. It is also why, while he attended the NATO summit, he spent a great deal of time associating with President Erdogan of Turkey; a man who was not only almost overthrown by a coup d’état in 2016 after having himself declared “president for life,” but has also moved his country so far from the democratic principles of the European states with which it is aligned, that Turkey is in danger of being expelled from NATO, and sanctioned by the European Union.
It is why, when Erdogan was reelected in a non-contested presidential race — his most competent and vocal opponents were in prison — in which he essentially had himself named president for life, that trump called him personally to congratulate him on his electoral victory. I should mention that he did this over the strong objections of his foreign policy advisors. He also called Vladimir Putin after he was “reelected” in 2018 in one of the most corrupt presidential campaigns in history, again, over the strong objections of his foreign policy advisors.
Donald Trump wants to be a dictator and feels slighted by an unfair world because he is not. Kim Jon Un can have his own uncle accused of treason and then taken out and shot! Why can’t Trump do that with Mueller? This democracy thing is nothing more than a nuisance!
Trump loves and admires the dictators of the world so much that he will do almost anything to curry their favor. In March, 2018 in Singapore, president trump agreed to cancel joint military exercises with our close ally, South Korea. Believe me, that was one big gift to his new dictator friend. However, neither South Korea nor our other major ally in the region, Japan, nor even critical actors within the foreign policy sections of the American government were aware that such a concession was even being considered by the White House until it was announced at the end of the meeting.
The US Secretary of Defense had no idea that such a dramatic change in US National Security policy was even being considered. No one with any expertise, or position of responsibility in the complicated world of international relations was consulted. No one, that is, except donald trump’s boss, and the man whose interests donald trump serves; Vladimir Putin.
In the aftermath of president Trump’s many and still unknown concessions to North Korea in his private meeting with Kim Jong Un, it has come to light that in 2017 Vladimir Putin, in a private call between him and president trump, suggested that the US-South Korean joint exercises should be cancelled, indicating that such a move would be a good way to ameliorate Kim Jong Un’s aggressive rhetoric. Such an act would also, of course, drive another wedge between the greater global alliance among the world’s democracies, which Putin needs to be fractured in order to realize his greater plans.
Perhaps Putin was right. Since the Trump/Un summit the North Korean dictator’s public bravado has been a great deal more, shall we say, ameliorated, but his regime continues to develop nuclear weapons, and the United States’ intelligence community has just released a report detailing the facts that North Korea’s nuclear program has continued unabated. In fact, according to the NSA, they are now developing a new generation of intercontinental delivery vehicles capable of striking any target in the continental United States. The response of the Trump administration to this new research was, and I quote: “North Korea no longer poses a nuclear threat to the United States.” That was their entire response. This, of course, is the “Art of the Deal” at work: bankrupt six times over.
UnAmerican Activities…There Ought To Be a Committee
For what, exactly, does the United States of America stand in this world? This is not a rhetorical question, for the answer points to the heart of what America is; not only to its own citizens and the non-citizens who have emigrated here, but to the people of the world as a whole. The United States, more than any other country on this planet is a symbol, and in that sense it is supposed to be a symbol of what can be achieved by humanity if the whole of the planet comes together to work on a project dedicated to lifting the human spirit.
Corruption and cronyism are part and parcel of human politics. They always have been and they always will be, for that is the nature of human, coercive power over another. It is, in many respects, the water that nourishes a politician’s tree of power. This, however, does not mean that we should or must accept its presence in our political system. After all, maybe the greatest prospect of a republic is its innate ability, if acted upon, to minimize, if not defeat corruption.
The corruption emanating from the White House under the direction of donald trump is like nothing ever seen in American history. What is remarkable is that the president doesn’t care, because he knows that his base of uneducated white men with racist views don’t care. As far as they are concerned, as long as they can watch football, drink beer, and use the word “nigger” when among their other uneducated, white friends, trump can do whatever he wants.
The rest of us are not so simple, and we see that the corruption of the trump Administration is in its greater part a threat to America’s place in this world as a symbol of humanity’s common goal. I agree that we are a nation of laws, but since we are the United States of America, we must always first be a nation of compassion. When the law and compassion collide, the law must be circumvented or loosely interpreted in some manner that will allow our natural sense of compassion to win the day. Without this prerogative, we cease to be anything more than just another country.
Family Separation
This country continues to suffer through one of the most horrible episodes in its history. It does not not, of course, compare in any way to the genocide to which the white, European interlopers subjected the indigenous peoples of this continent, nor to the horrors of forced enslavement of millions of African hostages and their children, nor to the Holocaust, but it is, to contemporary America, no less humiliating. This stated policy of the trump administration is one of the cruelest things any state could do to a family; forcibly take the children away from their parents mere moments after the family has appealed for that which must separate America from all other countries: mercy.
Try, if you can, to place yourself in the shoes of these people for just a moment. You have uprooted your family from their home, and all they know and hold dear, because of conditions that make it impossible to stay. You are poor, uneducated, have no idea at all how to navigate the bureaucratic matrix where you are, so you and your spouse decide that if only you and your children can make it to America, you can make a better life…and so you set out on this journey into the unknown.
That, my dear readers, is absolutely appalling, and perhaps the most unAmerican thing any administration could do, short of mass slaughter. Please remember that this was not the actions of some small group of bigoted zealots acting without authorization from their superiors. This forced family separation was the stated policy of the trump administration and it carried out bu agents of the United States Government. When asked by a reporter about the solution to this open hatred at the White House, Trump said, and I quote: “You want a solution? Don’t come to our country illegally!” Our Embarrassment-in-Chief never fails to live down to the world’s expectations of him.
The Muslim Ban
Bigotry has many roots in a person’s heart, and every one of us knows that it simmers just beneath the surface in all of us. Most of us, however, are able to see this innate human bigotry, recognize its darkness, and keep it confined, like a genie in a bottle, deep in the core of our existence; minimized and marginalized as it should be.
Unfortunately, in recent decades there have come the voices of men and women of the Christian and political far right who have sought to loose this evil genie that rages against its confinement in us all. After years and years of preaching to those weakest souls among us who were susceptible to fringe principles, they finally found the fool who could rub the lamp in the hearts of so many who have had their souls distorted by the human racism menace; the fool’s name is donald trump.
One of the most prominent and characteristic properties of both Mr. trump and his base is a basic lack of knowledge of history. I have never met a person who possesses a deep and abiding knowledge of, or love of, history to have been as openly bigoted as those who’s voices are so loud today in American politics. It doesn’t happen because people with a knowledge of history possess a consciousness of the suffering that bigotry and fear causes in a nation.
Also, another aspect of this insanity of the “Muslim Ban” is that it is not borne out by the statistics associated with it. The fact that the only terrorist attack by foreigners who came into our country for that sole purpose was on September 11th, 2001. Since that day, the number of people killed in terror attacks by people of the Muslim faith in the United States number only sixty-four. That’s nineteen years.
Note: Since 2007, a minimum of 283 people, including 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School have been killed in mass shooting terror attacks by whites (280 by men, 3 by a woman) in the United States. Hundreds of others were wounded in these attacks.
Each of these Muslim perpetrators was a legal resident of the United States who lived peaceably among his and her neighbors for years; until, of course, people of the Muslim faith and Islam in general began to become vilified by American society as a whole. These ordinary people found themselves living in a society which, under the auspices of the right-wing press, no longer allowed them to be just people, but labeled them as terrorists, one and all. Eventually, there will be those among them who become susceptible the message of groups like ISIL, or Al-Qaeda. Of these people, a small percentage will look for a way to strike back at those who have marginalized them and hated them simply because they are not white, evangelical christians.
Closing
This essay could go on until trump is either voted out or forcibly removed from office, but I must end it. I will close by stating clearly that donald trump is the greatest threat to the American Republic since England’s King George III. This man, of course, was King of England during the American war of independence. He had not only the means, but also the desire and the will to destroy the United States of America. Hitler posed no such threat. The Japanese Imperial war government of the 1930s and 1940s posed no such threat. Donald Trump poses such a threat.
As Americans; a nation to whom this world looks for leadership in the cause of freedom, we must reject the trajectory on which we now find our country, and realign ourselves with the western democracies with which we have so much in common.
We must, each of us, go to the polls when called.