We need to cage a President who knows no limits

You open a newspaper, and what you see is conflict between the U.S. government and its agencies against just about everyone else.

It may have been this bad in the past, before any of us were born, but this feels different.

It gives me sadness to say it, but I have never trusted my government less.

That includes the FBI and the Department of Justice, which is designed to work for the people, but has become a tattoed arm of the White House. 

While all my Left friends were screaming bloody murder at her appointment, I was willing to give Pam Bondi a chance.

For me, she has failed.

Ditto Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence.

Each has proved to be a tool of Donald J. Trump, putting his interests above that of the country. Not even party interests, but his personal interests.

It strikes me I have named nothing but women. 

Let’s fix that. 

I once respected Vice President J.D. Vance for his intelligence and his bootstrap rise to success, but I now see him as a shameless bootlicker. Not quite as bad is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who smooches Trump’s ass, but it’s not a french kiss.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth is a preening, bigoted fool, and Secretary for Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is like a weathervane that spins from intellect to bat-shit crazy. Maybe it’s those worms in his brain.

On the positive side, I think Scott Bessent is a dignified Secretary of the Treasury, and Sean Duffy has done well as Transportation Secretary.

I don’t want to go down the rest of the Cabinet, because they are almost beside the point.

Every President selects people who he thinks will be loyal, but Trump has made loyalty the defining issue. Not even patriotism, but fealty to the chief executive.

As I write this, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee is grilling former President Bill Clinton over l’affair Epstein, as it should, but has zero interest in hearing from Trump, whose acolytes have taken to saying he ordered the Epstein files released, while not saying that was only after intense political pressure, and the Department of Justice has failed to release everything that should have been released.

It’s like Trump has his hand up Lady Justice’s dress.

There is no question that Clinton and Trump used to hang with the rich sex felon, but mostly it seems that was before his conviction and so far nothing in the files have implicated either man in Epstein-related criminal behavior.

I don’t particularly like either of them, but I am tied to what is fact, not suspicion or vicious partisan lying.

Getting back to yesterday’s newspaper, we learn that for some reason the Voice of America, supervised by former right-wing TV anchor Kari Lake, has banned any mention of Reza Pahlvi, the son of the late Iran shah, who is emerging as the face of opposition to the ayatollahs.

I thought U.S. policy opposed Iran. In fact, Trump has just started a war with Iran. Kiss the Nobel Peace Prize goodbye.

It is a war that almost no American wants, least of all the MAGA heads who voted for Trump because he said he'd end wars. (He ceaselessly brags about “ending” 8 or 9 or 10 wars, which is a wild exaggeration. He seems unable or unwilling to end the big one, that Russia started, that Trump said he would end in 24 hours.)

Then there’s the story that a federal judge ruled the IRS broke the law by disclosing confidential taxpayer information "approximately 42,695 times” to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Which reminds me, has Trump released his tax returns yet, as he promised to do about a decade ago?

Most seriously, pro-Trump activists are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that would unlock extraordinary presidential powers over voting, as a response to alleged Chinese interference with the 2020 election. 

The FBI has found no evidence of such meddling, and the Constitution hands authority over voting to two entities — the Congress, and the states — not the President. 

Some whackjobs on the Left were wetting themselves with the wild idea that when Trump sent the National Guard into some jurisdictions, he was laying the ground for cancelling the midterm elections in November.

As mentioned, I am tied to facts, and this was Democratic hysteria.

There are so many actual bad things he has done, I wonder why any rational person has to make some up.

Among the worst, to me, was his abuse of the pardon power.

He threw a blanket over 1,600 people convicted for the January 6 riot at the Capitol Hill. There may have been a few mere “trespassers” among them, but many of the convicted confessed to their crimes. Trump also freed drug dealers and white-collar crooks.

He promised to drain the swamp. Instead, he created one as large as his so-called Gulf of America. 

He has fired FBI agents and lawyers for the sin of doing their sworn duty.

He has been consistently wrong, immoral, in finding an equivalency between Ukraine, the victim, and Putin’s Russia, the aggressor. What Trump has to say about the war is mostly untrue, actual Putin patter.

As are Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and that mail ballots (which he has used himself) are untrustworthy, saying “no other country uses them.”

In fact, 34 other countries use them.

As a matter of another fact, 8 states use nothing but mail-ballots, with no outrageous claims of fraud. 

But this proposed executive order is different. It is real, even if embryonic. Hopefully someone who is not a Right wingnut will step in and throttle it.

It is possible the Republicans won’t do it.

So Americans will have to, at the ballot box.

We can brake the madness by giving control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats.

I say that as a self-described disloyal Democrat, who often votes against them, but it’s time to roadblock Trump. He needs to be caged. It is time to vote Democratic in every race, something I have never before done. But we have never before had a President like this.

People may have voted for a disrupter, but I don’t think many voted for a man — a convicted felon — who thinks the Constitution is an annoyance to his exercise of extralegal power. And a man with an unmatched enormity of lies, exaggerations, and half-truths, and a bloated ego that compels him to name buildings after himself. 

I fully realize that voting all-Democrat will lead to the election of members of the Karen Wing of the Democratic Party, the Woke Witches, all of whom I oppose.

They are pretty awful, but we deal with the bigger threat first, then cleanse the Looney Lefties — the people who don’t believe in borders, who oppose jail sentences for criminals, but do believe in participation trophies and free stuff.

I do not believe they are a majority of Democrats, but a majority of Republicans are now MAGA, and the cult of personality needs to be crushed, across the board.

Only by obliterating MAGA can the party return to its legacy of Lincoln, Ford, Reagan.

Yeah, I know a lot of you hated Reagan then, but compared to today, weren’t those the good old days?

I would say the same thing to Republicans about Bill Clinton.

We’ve had many somewhat soiled  Presidents, but only one who was made of mud.