The slings and arrows of outrageous slurs — “vile ignoramus” has become my latest favorite — appear never to reach the armored, delusional, malignantly narcissistic, and unreachable Ill Trumpolini (another fave). His realm: mafia realpolitik along the lines of “your money or your wife” — or both (plus other “property”) according to Jeffrey Epstein via assorted reportage. This week, he predictably added to his ignominious reputation by offering Putin everything asked for: expanded land assets for Russia; the submission of Ukraine to Russia; the abandonment of Ukraine by NATO to Russia.
My interest: American modern culture and related art and humanism–and expressive of it, my own American neighborhood.
With Donald Trump in power, American may share the feeling of being marched forward into a past characterized by the power of feudal-medieval mafia to (in retrospect, inevitably) destroy themselves.
How many Americans — how many American neighbors — sunk in hunger or pain will quietly dissolve before power into a living death–or death–without a fight for their right to the dignity of their existence beneath the security umbrella of a nation that has their back?
Moscow and its manipulation Palestinian “leaders” have lied to Palestinians for decades as regards their Jewish neighbors. Kyle Orton’s astute observation of plain factual “pro-Palestinian” errors may provide the fuel for a right revolutionary fire against . . . lies, for both Israelis and Palestinians might benefit from the kind of truth that may be questioned, explored with integrity, and affirmed, corrected, or trashed.
The study finds that the Times admitted seventy-two errors in its coverage of the war, forty-eight of them (fully two-thirds) directly against Israel. It is a point that authors do not stress, but should have: there is not a single case of false Times reporting that negatively affected the image of HAMAS. If incompetence was all that was going on here, the “mistakes” would not all be in the same direction. As telling on this point, the “errors were identified by external sources” and when corrections were issued they were often “late, vague, and sometimes evasive”.
Orton goes on to cover bias, deceptions, and misrepresentations in The New York Times‘ reporting on the Israeli-Hamas war.
For denizens of the American Far Left (or Far Right) one would think carelessness with information would be resented–the same informs the equivalent of lies with intent to manipulate popular perception while massaging along the way egos with malign narcissistic, partisan, and ultimately only selfish ends. They are those who worry about how they may look rather than how things are and what might bring improvements in security and in the enjoyment of life.
Criminals, including political ones, advance their interests through coercion (blackmail, bribery, intimidation, and patronage), fraud (misrepresentations), and force (violence). Any in and of the modern west may only wonder how some in and near Gaza may feel about being bullied, essentially, into a compliant posture toward retrograde and vicious power.
Above: Palestinians kill one another during the 2007 “Battle for Gaza“.
The interests of modern societies are not in power but in area-wide qualities of living of concern to the health of environments and of species supported, much including our own. For assorted cavemen, cowards, and criminals, coercive power, corruption, and wealth appear all that matter.
For over twenty years, I’ve spent my life training, studying, and preparing to fight for my country. Even when my country turned its back on our Afghan allies, I, along with thousands of others, tried our very best to “relocate” (IYKYK) thousands of Afghan families to safety. Out of twenty years of futility, it was the only piece of honor that kept many Afghan combat veterans afloat with hope. Now, however, it seems that some of our Afghan allies might be detained and eventually deported – https://www.gcvfriends.com/p/its-not-your-fault.
Donald Trump’s ambition may be to establish his own vast system of patronage in place of the governments of the United States of America, transforming himself into a king and producing a three-tiered state of royalty, financially productive associates, laboring serfs, and dispossessed and disposable slaves. Big crayon? Yes–but he’s dumb and in his hands, power has turned out one big plug ugly crayon for ruling the land by fraud, force, and coercion. That’s the guidance of the world he knows and the world fit to his own malign narcissism. First: bankrupt the state; second: transfer state assets into private hands in the Soviet post-Soviet manner; third: marry criminal methods with state power and produce the American Mafia State to mirror the Russian one.
The two “families” represented by Moscow’s Tsar and Washington’s King will be finally at peace with one another–and the American and Russian people will hate both but have no choice as regards their displacement.
Americans vs. Trump’s Criminal Foreign Infection
Americans in yet unknown numbers will be on the streets of the nation’s capitals today and millions more will be watching through media how protest works where politically criminal power could care less about listening and much less about empathy and reason before their own aggrandizement and greed. Moreover, so I believe, Trump has set out deliberately to debase Americans and bankrupt the nation in a manner that fits his own embattled, isolated, and persecuted image of himself, an image in fact expressive of his own paranoid-delusional malignant narcissism. Whatever the character in numbers and tone the popular protest, state security elements sworn on oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America needs must set their own stance as regards their conscience and honor as well as their purpose in light of the damaged, traitorous, and treacherous usurping power in the White House.
I once joked that Donald Trump never met an enterprise he couldn’t ruin and run into bankruptcy. That wry observation appears to be coming true with the United States of America. At issue and perhaps at the bottom of it all is the mentality of the leader, that delusional and paranoid malignant narcissism so sensitive to the possibility of further humiliation and shame that it needs its insularity in a theater all its own enabled by the crass and shielded by sycophancy. We Americans have been spoiled in the main by responsible and responsive governments that play by the rules, more or less, and if committing crimes get caught by internal investigators, FBI, and whistleblowers. Not this time, my fellow Americans. The darker side of the nation has taken the wheel–and it’s taking us on a joy ride into an archaic, criminal, and feudal-medieval hell.
I have left out some notables on this pass but have worked up a short list with “criminality” in mind–not crimes, per se, but just the mentality that would go along with an incompetent mafia-style leader. Were they students, their folder notes might suggest laziness about homework and wild imaginations drifting off into the most improbable and surreal of private fantasy. Of course, today, they are our “leaders” –>
Kash Patel: “As a co-host of a talk show for The Epoch Times, a media company known for spreading baseless conspiracy theories, a review by NBC found Patel shared unfounded claims about supposed conspiracies aimed at undermining Trump perpetrated by government officials, the FBI, social media platforms, the media and others”– https://www.npr.org/2024/12/09/nx-s1-5213692/kash-patel-conspiracy-theories-fbi.
Linda McMahon: “The suit alleges McMahon, her husband, the WWE and TKO Group Holdings, the league’s parent company, knowingly allowed employee Melvin Phillips Jr. to use his position as ringside announcer to sexually exploit children. / The filing alleges Phillips would recruit children to work as “Ring Boys,” helping him set up and take down wrestling rings at WWE events. However, the job was a guise for sexually exploiting the children, which Phillips would do even in front of wrestlers and executives in the locker area, the lawsuit alleges. He also would often film his sexual abuse, according to the filing” — https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/21/business/linda-mcmahon-abuse-wwe-trump-education/index.html.
Pete Hegseth: “The woman, referred to throughout the report as Jane Doe, said Mr. Hegseth took her phone, blocked his hotel room door when she tried to leave, and sexually assaulted her, ejaculating on her stomach. She said that her memory was hazy, and that she had drunk far more alcohol than usual throughout the day” — https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/us/politics/police-report-sexual-assault-claim-hegseth.html#.
Russell Vought: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma” — https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/10/who-is-russell-vought-trump-office-of-management-and-budget.
Tulsi Gabbard: “Most notoriously, she was perhaps the most prominent US politician to show solidarity with al-Assad after his brutal crackdown on anti-regime protests escalated into a catastrophic civil war, one marked by allegations of crimes against humanity committed by his regime with the backing of Russian forces. / Gabbard repeatedly voiced doubts about well-documented evidence of these crimes. In one infamous incident on a congressional visit to Syria in 2015, she suggested to victims of an airstrike that it may not have been launched by the Syrian military but by the so-called Islamic State group, which has never had an air force” — https://www.euronews.com/2025/01/29/who-is-trumps-intelligence-nominee-tulsi-gabbard-and-why-is-she-so-controversial.
By now, most Americans have caught on to the notion that “Trump-Putin” (on X, #TrumpPutin) is a real thing and the American President not much more than a traitor in fact and in spirit to the United States of America. As an usurper of power obtained through Trumpian lies–start with the whopper that was “Stop The Steal” when he had prepared fraudulent Electoral College ballots for Mike Pence to put in place of authentic ones on January 6, 2021–the unfaithful president has proceeded with the help of his fellow weaklings to degrade America’s Federal Government in the most barbaric and crude fashion. By Trump’s will, Federal agencies and departments from Education to Veterans Affairs have come under the most thoughtless and unstudied attacks on their very existence.
Don’t expect impact studies.
The Trumpian Coup–call it what it is, for Trump infamously lied his way back into power–has turned out a criminal enterprise certain to collapse America’s economy, impoverish millions of Americans (for most locales hosting Federal offices, the Federal dollar is a primary dollar, i.e., a dollar imported from the Federal Government to be spent and spent again locally until partially recaptured in taxes). The Trump Administration appears to care not at all about what it is stealing from America’s cities, states, and regions in relation to massive Federal contraction.
What might Putin want?
For starters, I would suggest an “American Mafia State” mirroring the “Russian Mafia State” with its “Vertical of Power” leader, its corruption, and its oligarchy made so by the favor of Putin–for Americans, by the favor of Trump.
Whatever follows Trump’s degradation, desperation will be a part of it–and an American government deeply downsized and in disarray will not be able to help ordinary Americans just starting to burn through their savings. Perhaps states will rise the occasion. Perhaps not. It’s certain that no one will have solid answers as the bills mount for basic family support, housing, and transportation. Crime will follow as may an American Gulag — an extensive and vacuous prison system for Americans stressed beyond limits. That’s a vision, of course but one fit to a know-nothing president who has had a debt to repay to Moscow and the related state and mafia power that saved his ass after American banks had learned the hard way to refuse his business.
Probably, for a literal show stopper, Putin would be happy with an insolvent America. Musk and Trump appear to be doing everything in their power to make that happen. Between now and that: desperation; enserfment (enslavement for a buck–no dignity, no freedom, no pride — and if not free to choose one’s chains, then prison where choice may not exist).
“On day one, the new HHS secretary is gutting the agencies that would be necessary to make America healthy again,” said Reshma Ramachandran, a Yale health professor who chairs the FDA task force of the nonprofit Doctors for America. |
Democratic lawmakers have blasted the firings as a threat to the government’s defense of public health, with Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) warning Friday that deep cuts at CDC “leaves Americans exposed to disease and devastates careers and livelihoods for the world’s most talented doctors and scientists.”
Other American health institutions with functions degraded by the Trump Administration: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Emergency Preparedness Office; Food and Drug Administration; National Institutes of Health, for a start. Elon Musk’s process has been criminal, not responsible or thoughtful.
In relation to the stewardship of the nation’s beauty and natural resources, mass firings in the Forest Service and Park Service have degraded not only the defense of largely rural American public assets but also produced adverse community-wide financial impacts.
The fired National Park Service members are part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce, USA TODAY reported. At least 2,300 federal workers in the Department of Interior had their positions terminated, including 800 Bureau of Land Management employees and about 1,000 National Park Service workers.
I had not wished to write more about Donald Trump, but his emotional issues and recklessness–and his powerlessness over himself and his assigns–makes him a foreign element within the United States. We are accustomed to democracy and freedom loving responsible politicians, not cons who appear to on a mission for Moscow. Regarding the massive and frankly stupid assault on our nation’s Federal workers and programs–as much amounts to an act of war from an untrustworthy American within. Try to read what’s happening before our eyes differently. I can’t.
Also Related Online
I know my readers have desktops too. Most, I believe, has also the question, “What can we do? What can I do? What will American defense and security services do in this developing confrontation with a deranged “leader” — #IllTrumpolini on some of my X posts — who appears both contemptuous and ignorant of our American Constitution and related ethics, law, principles, procedures, and values? If we have another fair, free, and honest American election — we may not as Dumb King Trump (#DKT) has promised — the Republican Party may be made to pay for allowing the development of the Musk-Trump-(Putin) assault on the nation from within.
On his first day in office, President Trump not only revoked the security clearance of his former National Security Adviser John Bolton, but also his U.S. Secret Service protection.
This was not the first time Trump had stripped the advisor turned critic of the Secret Service detail. In September 2019, after Trump ousted Bolton from his position, he suspended the protection within hours. Bolton was subsequently granted security by former President Joe Biden.
The signatories of the letter wrote that they didn’t know whether the emails were authentic or not but that their emergence has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
But Trump’s director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe — also his current pick to lead the CIA — contradicted that assessment by saying there was no intelligence to support the idea that Russia had anything to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop. The FBI, which was conducting its own criminal investigations into the younger Biden, seemed to back up Ratcliffe’s statement by telling Congress in a letter it had nothing to add to what he had said.
Donald Trump’s shake-up of America’s Intelligence and National Security Communities bodes ill for response to threats to American Democracy–but that would seem to be the point. He has been consistent in his passions, foremost the elimination of the American Election Process–for once, he appears to have said exactly what he meant. The retelling of “The Snake“–one might expect some MAGA to have known what he was when they voted for him . . . or colluded with his “Stop The Steal” big lie. The electric battery or shark question: those might be for the drug dealers whose money his operations haven’t been laundering. And the references to Hannibal the Cannibal from The Silence of the Lambs . . . . Think about that. He sells fear through fabrication — the 2020 election hadn’t been stolen, full stop — and xenophobia through exaggeration . . . perhaps telling more about himself than any true state of affairs.
Now as President Trump, he has targeted our most critical government services in law enforcement and justice and national security, especially the Intelligence Community (IC) though which American Military and State Department leaders may see both present situations and future real threats.
Badgering Trumpian insults to intelligence take their toll on X as may the wayward convictions of the nation’s far white right bigots and “Christian” nationalist zealots so far sunk in their Weltanschauung as to have imprisoned themselves in archaic principles discarded by the nobility of Europe–and of the American South–centuries ago–reference: Thirty Years War, Peace of Westphalia, American Civil War. After all that . . . the latest Ketaminic Sieg Heil salute to Adolph Hitler and remnant white supremacists worldwide:
Trump is an undisputed poster boy for narcissism. He demonstrates in pure form every single symptom described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, which I wrote in 1978. But lots of successful people are extremely narcissistic without being mentally ill — think most celebrities, many politicians, and a fair percentage of writers, artists, lawyers, doctors, and professors. To qualify for narcissistic personality disorder, an individual’s selfish, unempathetic preening must be accompanied by significant distress or impairment. Trump certainly causes severe distress and impairment in others, but his narcissism doesn’t seem to affect him that way.
On X, I’ve asserted the following for guidance: “delusional, grandiose, messianic ideation absent of normal boundaries and limits, i.e., the parameters of normal conscience.” If that’s not part of the DSM, I’d think the volume inadequate for addressing “Malignant Narcissism”, for every related–and above bolded term–may be searched on the web. Also as regards the narcissism of the healthy, the better natured and reparative in character may deserve or have earned a positive regard for the egoism inseparable from their own quest or struggle for success, i.e., the presence of a reparative narcissism along the lines of Maslow’s healthy competence-seeking behavior and self-esteem. When we’re good–or in the vicinity of excellence in our arts and professions–we many not need the limitless public adoration and validation that defines “Narcissistic Supply” and the neediness of the malign.
For additional curiosity related to Donald Trump’s persistent character, one may have a look into “Sociopathy“. Also worth a gander: “Anomie“; and on the other and brighter side of mental health appreciation, evaluation, and judgment–“Abraham Maslow“; “Positive Psychology“.
Has the United States of America been infiltrated, invaded, overpowered by elements either foreign to it, foreign to its character. or in fact opposed to its American Constitutional ideals and intentions?
American Character and Integrity Matter — Truth Matters
Down every avenue of honest nonpartisan inquiry, one finds President Trump a traitor to the United States of America, a convicted felon who has only evaded trials involving American identity and American national security as indicated by indictments for election interference, classified documents abuse, and attempted election fixing, and yet, as of yesterday, he has once again been handed the immense power of the American Presidency. Now comes a new question: have American governments and more brave and earnest American politicians as well as America’s most spirited artists, community leaders, journalists, investigators–all of whom may prefer American truth to American bullshit–the power to defend American Democracy against an apparent usurper and a tyranny of the “majority”? And Trump is a so-called “American President” who has made this bald promise in effect to all Americans: “It’ll be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore my beautiful Christians . . . in four years you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote” (YouTube video, Turning Point Action, July 27, 2024).
American Community
Americans should be American in spirit as well as by geopolitical fact, but what an “American” is today appears questionable. Gone: an all-white polity; forgotten: E Pluribus Unum. The latest generations of American Natives and Native Americans may all claim to have been born in the United States of America, and whether happy with that or not . . . that’s just a fact of life. Whoever we are, we are all here. And perhaps now we need a New American Community, one that affirms its ethics, morals, principles, and values–and some of that may need updating and redefinition to suit the full complement of the nation–and one that rejects the racist and religious wet dreams best laid to rest in some dimming recollection of archaic medieval attitudes, beliefs, and practices.
We are Americans, and our power is not all white, nor need it ever be so again. There is no “Great Replacement” . . . .
Ol’ Whitey–and everyone else–“got around”.
So while we Americans think about who we are NOW and what we should be and mean to be–and not what may be engineered and forced on us by coercion, fraud, and force or the MAGAdumb–well, that has been the character of our Convicted Felon in Chief–we might have to accept a little bit of Moscow’s white nationalist crap at the top of what really has been a long dismissed and lost–and good riddance–America.
X Social Network
Countless hours, posts in the thousands (probably–too many for me to count)–for what? A conversation in public; trolling ladies with barely an X-presence; trolling fakes probably making up lists suited to their own derangement; a great lot of follows–really: the best notables in diplomacy and political science and related fields (most don’t know me, but I’m proud to have come to know of them)–and a pretty good base (still under one thousand) of followers–and God bless each and everything one of them. Apart from that “action”, lol, I live alone in a library. Earnest live and evolving conversations seem few to nil and far between or not expected at all.
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