Head in the Sand – Government by Whim & Retribution

 

Musk at CPAC, 2/21, with Chainsaw gift from President Javier Milei of Argentina

Head in the Sand – Government by Whim & Retribution

He Came, He Sawed, He Destroyed

We’re being “invaded,” repeats Donald Trump, as justification using “emergency” executive orders for enlisting the military as an essential tool to help manage Trump’s “detain and deport” immigration policy and using the Department of Justice as his personal army of retribution. This is substantially based on the above 1807 Insurrection Act. His logic, he believes, thus allows him to ignore the provisions of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that limits the powers of the federal government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States. All of this follows a rather consistent Trump/MAGA pattern of declaring the existence of a massive problem that “only I can fix” and then employing extreme measures to crush/solve the problem. But repeatedly, there has been a problem: That massive problem requiring a fix did not exist! It was fabricated to create autocratic and justify solutions.

Let’s start with those thousands and thousands of people Trump and friends tell us are crossing our border every day. Apparently however, if you want some serious peaceful alone time, that border area is a good place to start. As the following excerpt from a February 23rd piece written by Texas-based Wall Street Journal reporter, Elizabeth Findell, illustrates: “Border Patrol agents sit in empty parks. Active-duty soldiers drive through fields along the base of a towering black border wall. Military helicopters roam the skies.

“This is the scene lately along the U.S.-Mexico border, where President Trump quickly declared a national emergency upon taking office, rushing thousands of active-duty soldiers here. They arrived to join thousands of Texas National Guard members and state troopers deployed under a state disaster order, plus the thousands of agents permanently working for Border Patrol and other agencies… What are they all doing? ‘A whole lot of nothing,’ one South Texas National Guard soldier said.

“Trump, who campaigned on cracking down on immigration, inherited a border where illegal crossings, after peaking at record levels in late 2023, had been steadily dropping for a year. Before he took office, crossings had returned to the levels of the first Trump administration. Since then, they have fallen even lower, with some days officials making a few hundred arrests across the southern border.” If we are looking for waste in government, why isn’t DOGE all over this?

And why is Donald Trump willing to reverse the US policy of supporting Ukraine, whose million-man army has contained Russian troops, decimated Putin’s tank force and built and deployed over a million drones against Russian advances. Trump and lock-step minions repeat that Ukraine cannot win, cannot ever hope to retrieve lost territory and cannot ever join NATO. What is it that allows Trump to contradict our multiyear policy of miliary support for Kyiv against a brutal tyrannical dictator, clearly sending a horrible message to our traditional allies. Is it Trump’s unnatural bromance with a dictator willing to subject his people to a severely declining currency, the loss (killed or wounded) of approximately 800,000 Russian troops (against Ukraine’s losses pegged at under 50,000), and economic sanctions that have forced Russian to reduce their standard of living?

A September report from the Rand thinktank noted that Russia, largely reliant on oil and gas revenues, pivoted to gold to shore up its economy in the months leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Its reliance on gold has since increased. But likewise those gold reserves are fading fast, as noted in this February 11th article from Newsweek: “Russia's gold reserves fell sharply at the end of last year, partly caused by the country's record-high interest rate imposed by the country's central bank to cool the economy [over 20%]… Citing data from Russia's Central Bank, business outlet RBC [RBC Group, or RosBiznesConsulting] said that during 2024, gold reserves had fallen by nearly half (46.4 percent), or over 33 metric tonnes.” All signs of Russian desperation. But since Trump ascended to the presidency for his second term, that hope has turned into devilish certainty that Trump will sell Ukraine down the river. Trump is following Putin’s settlement wish list almost to the letter.

Kyiv is certain that without NATO or an equivalent and enforceable treaty, Russia would ignore any territorial guarantee Moscow might make, as Russia obviously did when Kyiv relinquished its nuclear arsenal to Russia in the "Big Treaty." This 1997 agreement between Ukraine and Russia had fixed the principle of strategic partnership, the recognition of the inviolability of existing borders, and respect for territorial integrity.

So, what’s really going on here? Back in the summer of 2019, as news of a massive effort by Russia to use mis- and disinformation to tilt the US election, conspiracy theorists maintained that the real disruptive efforts were disguised as Russian but really emanated from a server in Ukraine. Remember that “do me a favor” phone call between Donald Trump and newly elected Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had just defeated Putin’s choice (hence Trump’s preference) Petro Poroshenko, the incumbent president?

So, lets examine a portion of the official, declassified notes from that July 25, 2019 telephonic exchange. In addition to asking Zelensky to find some dirt on the Bidens, Trump wanted to see that server he was sure existed that would be proof that it was Ukraine and not Russia that was the source of all that “purported” Russian election interference. “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.” Red emphasis added. There was no such server!

Trump was impeached (but not convicted) based on that call. It would seem that Trump harbored personal animas against Zelensky, his whim. Why else would Trump leak, directly or through his cabinet appointment that Ukraine would have to give up all territory that Russia occupied, and give the United States ownership of half of Kyiv’s mega-billion-dollar rare earth minerals… excluding Europe (which has contributed as much as the US to Ukraine) from participating… and both excluding both Europe and Ukraine from participating in the US effort to end the war?

The other major prong of Trump’s effort to take total control of the government stems from an unspoken and judicially accepted unspoken belief that keeps criminal courts from any real questioning why a prosecutor brought a criminal case in the first place. Little more than “probable cause” is enough to sustain a prosecutor’s wide range of prosecuting or not prosecuting an alleged criminal defendant. This “prosecutorial discretion” results in the exceptionally high rate of plea bargains and conviction rates (well over 90% when a case goes to trial).

Thus, if the Department of Justice, where the President nominates (and the Senate confirms) the chief US Attorney in each major jurisdiction, if those appointments are not the expected “neutral” prosecutors… like the debacle over NYC Eric Adams’ corruption indictment. NY federal prosecutors appointed by Trump resigned rather than sustain a quid pro quo swap – we don’t pursue the bribery allegations if you let Homeland Security have full access to NYC defendants and convicted criminals… and allow the “detain and deport” policy to apply. For the first time in our nation’s history, the once generally accepted “independent judiciary” assumption – not specifically set forth in our Constitution – is being challenged. Trump has clearly stated that the DOJ is his to control, certainly incented by the Supreme Court’s recent presidential immunity decision. If Trump/Musk are accorded such power, the obviously fading power of the US democracy may just be totally extinguished.

I’m Peter Dekom, and besides a biased Supreme Court that just might not act, we are witnessing a steep plunge in Trump’s approval levels and a steep increase in a rising rejection of both Trump’s policies and his appointment of chainsaw wielding Elon Musk to define our government.