Science Who Needs Your Stinking, Job-Creating Science?!

 

Science? Who Needs Your Stinking, Job-Creating Science?!

When we can slash the budget and coast on free conspiracy theories that are easier to sell.

“Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female… This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.” 

Disclaimer now on multiple government webpages, such as those dealing with HIV, civil rights and healthcare for transgender people.

You do not create significant new manufacturing, or even service, jobs without innovation… which can be a two-edged sword: the innovation may be labor-saving robotics. And except for rarified custom manufacturing (like a celebrity-outfitted motor home or a superyacht), the US is almost never competitive with hands-on labor in other countries. As any competent economist will tell you, the United States is primarily a service economy, heavy into financial structuring, tech design and implementation. But historically, whenever the federal government directly supports sophisticated innovation, the resulting jobs created often redefine the entire nation. Our space program has generated everything from a powdered orange drink (Tang) to the global interconnectivity of our satellites and the navigation/military surveillance or internet-connected commercial systems that drive modern life.

But we live in an era of retribution and resentment by a large cadre of Americans who feel “left behind” by uncaring globalists and financial manipulators. While there is truth in their perception, this MAGA “I’ve never met a conspiracy theory I didn’t like” force is replacing hard medical and other relevant scientific knowledge… and denigrating the people and the research universities that work hard to create that job-creating innovation. In earlier years, we had an expression for that attitude: throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And while “liberal America” owes those, left behind in a tsunami of globalism and technology, a perceivable path to affordable happiness, “illiberal America” should keep in mind that any hope of their prosperity lingers in innovation, wherever it may be born. We still have to deal with the bathwater. As I will explore in future blogs, America has lost its sense of balance and the aggregation of bona fide truly local “communities.”

NASA is ours. After the US 1957 educational and infrastructural explosion, America’s reaction to the first successful orbital launch of a satellite by the Soviet Union, seriously amplified our nation’s resulting obsession with being the best and most technologically advanced nation on Earth. Nuclear weapons secrets were already stolen by the Soviets, and our post-WWII rocket program was built around German rocketeers (yes, Nazis, like Werner Von Braun) in cloisters set in a part of America where a foreigner would stick out like a sore thumb. Huntsville, Alabama, today a small city with an exceptionally high concentration of PhDs.

We’ve come a long way from those early days. NASA conducted or funded innovation – now unfortunately outsourced to billionaire entrepreneurs like Elon Musk (Space X) – spread new technologies that powered everything from GPS systems in our smartphones and care, simulation technology that has been absorbed into videogames and highly focused missile and smart bomb targeting systems to the highspeed supercomputers governing everything we do. AI anybody?

But in a political system that is predicated on wealthy private ownership of what used to be government systems, as conspiracy theorists now occupy major leadership positions in government replacing highly experienced scientists, engineers, medical doctors and researchers, government has paved a clear road for concentrated power to selected oligarchs, now taking over what those government agencies used to do. Ideas, once born in government and university laboratories, think tanks and research centers… which spread the resulting knowledge freely across the land… are now patent and copyright captives to this coterie of billionaires. Yet the funding for their billionaire efforts came from and continues to come from the government, now as vendors (with a profit mark-up) to that same government. Or dumped totally.

After decimation by DOGE and Trump’s misnamed Big Beautiful Bill, Trump is slowly shutting down most university and intra-governmental scientific and medical research as “wasteful,” just as he bolsters the power and importance of his favored oligarchs. Writing for the June 9th Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote: “[The] President insists ‘America will always be the first in space.’ But his budget plan would slash agency’s program funding by half… Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public.

“Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work.

“But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA’s science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%... Superficially, the budget cuts place heightened emphasis on ‘practical, quantitative,’ even commercial applications, [Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society] told me. Programs transmitting weather data from satellites, valued by farmers, remain funded, but studies of climate change and other studies of Earth science are slashed. Astrophysics and other aspects of space exploration also are eviscerated, with 19 projects that are already operating destined for cancellation… The budget cuts will undermine the administration’s professed goals. That’s because many of the scientific projects on the chopping block provide knowledge needed to advance those goals.”

Political realities, beyond the red-blue divide, now define our future progress. What will the Musk-Trump break-up mean for our space program? But fear not, humanity will not see an end to such research. It is painfully obvious that China has stepped into this technological void, just as they stepped into the void left to starving millions in Africa and parts of Asia once served by USAID. China could not have planted a more destructive device detonated against America or a more global influence diminishing Manchurian Candidate than Donald John Trump.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am harshly reminded that we are only 1/8 into Trump 2.0, and the passage of his Big Beautiful Bill will guarantee his unilateral power well beyond the mid-terms (which Trump is also actively trying to control by having the DOJ sue blue state election officials with legally questionable claims).

The Trump Legacy – Weaker, Dumber, Less Competitive, Less Safe and More Isolated

 

The Trump Legacy – Weaker, Dumber, Less Competitive, Less Safe and More Isolated

"For too long, this administration has presented itself as the only defender of Christianity while it engages in merely symbolic gestures like posting Bible verses or publicizing worship services in the White House. Frederick Douglass described this type of performance: 'Religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man.' I fail to see how you can shout glory to God one minute and laugh about the harsh conditions of Alligator Alcatraz the next… Mr. Trump uses money and power to keep people in line… If politicians, countries, businesses or even institutions of higher education go against his wishes, they will pay a financial penalty. Mr. Trump believes in making deals rooted in self-interest. Christians have the resources to resist this tactic because we are taught to model our behavior on Christ, who looked to the interests of others, not himself." 

 Esau McCaulley — a theology professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, July 11th OpEd in the NY Times

We now have the largest immigration police force – well beyond Trump’s private ICE Police, including the IRS, DEA, FBI, DOJ those state police now dedicated to immigration enforcement and detention – currently backed by an infinitely expandable cadre of federal military forces and active-duty Marines. They have openly tracked individuals based on racial criteria, and as courts have found this reprehensibly unconstitutional, are appealing this screening technique up the federal appellate ladder. I’ve blogged about their “secret police” tactics and the judicial responses.

For those of us in California, where crime rates, including violent crime are down, we are constantly battling Republican efforts to decriminalize and decontrol an increased use of guns. California has not been invaded by criminals, and the outbreaks of violence these days can mostly be traced to rather brutal immigration enforcement, knowing that ICE appears to be the best trained provocateurs of violence in recent California memory. For those in other states, not occupied by military-backed ICE agents, they just assume we were ultra-violent in the first place.

As Trump attacks our most prestigious research universities – long the attractant of the best and the brightest from around the world (of which many foreign grads elected to remain here) – he decimates our leadership in STEM research, sending that excellence to other nations, from China to France. As Christopher Mims, writing for the July 11th Wall Street Journal, explains: “Since the end of World War II, federal funding has helped U.S. companies dominate the cutting edge of computing, space exploration and medicine, delivering an economic tailwind for the nation. It made the country a dream destination for aspiring researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs from around the world… Now that’s changing—quickly.

“A March 2025 survey by the journal Nature of more than 1,600 scientists in the U.S. found that three-quarters have considered leaving the country. Respondents specifically cited the Trump administration’s hostility to scientific research and those who practice it… At the Nobel laureate meeting in late June that Arnold was attending when we corresponded, representatives distributed pamphlets touting a program designed to attract researchers to Germany. The flier highlighted the country’s ‘international and welcoming’ climate for both science and business.

“There are similar programs in Canada, the U.K. and China. Nikos Papandreou, a European Union parliamentarian representing Greece, recently told me that while his governing body typically moves slowly, some members are now trying to figure out how to quickly set up and fund a program to attract U.S. researchers, so that Europe can benefit from a potential ‘brain gain.’”

Fabricated charges of “antisemstism” and attacks against the most accurate descriptive terms for American culture – diversity, equality and inclusion – have pushed our once top-of-the-line post-secondary educational system toward second or even third-rate status. That great force towards job creation and upward mobility is now to be stomped on and purged out of our system. Moreover, the loss of research experts gives competitor nations a path to exceed American progress.

As Donald Trump has pledged a new, invigorated military – a force that can contain China’s expansionist aspirations – he has fired most of his top qualified generals and admirals, installed the least qualified Defense Secretary in our history, a former junior officer and Fox News host, an idealogue who has been careless with national security, willing to make major policy decisions without presidential approval… and submitted a budget that focuses on the same old/same old “bigger is better” military ethos.

Our miraculous bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites, with decades-old B-2 bombers, was not an “obliteration” of Tehran’s nuclear capacity (albeit a significant weakening), but according to Israeli intelligence, we left behind a major stash of enriched fissionable material, a number of specialized processing centrifuges and the knowledge of how to use them. Drones (unmanned on the land, sea and air) represent the state of warfare today, and those able to launch swarms of inexpensive drones tend to be able to sustain successful attacks against even the greatest military powers on Earth. As we force NATO nations to hit 5% of GDP to merit our support, we are at 3.5%

TACO Trump’s tariff wars, his economically misplaced belief that trade deficits should define our economic relationship with the rest of the world, have alienated our allies (who got some of the worst tariff proposals) and pushed many of them into new trade treaties with China. He’s pushed the BRIC economies into joining together to isolate the United States further and to develop workarounds to our essential trading systems that have, to date, kept the dollar as the main reserve currency.

Trump’s hold on MAGA voters seems to be based on the worship of a cult leader, without much focus on underlying issues. His and his administration’s litany of lies and fabrications have substituted for underlying facts for some time. Yet the administration’s struggles with the missing “Epstein files” has eroded some of that support. Trump’s mainstay legacy of harsh and rapid purging of the undocumented, his perceived major strength will all voters, seems to be reversing. “Americans' views on immigration took a massive positive swing this year amid President Donald Trump's ongoing crackdown, according to new Gallup polling.

“The share of Americans who thought immigration should decrease – 55% – reached a 5-year high point in 2024. This year, it has dropped to 30%, and positive views of immigration have hit a record high of 79%, according to poll results released July 11. The poll surveyed 1,402 Americans between June 2 and 26… But this year, even among Republicans, views on immigration have grown significantly rosier – 64% of Republicans now believe immigration is a good thing, a 25-point jump from June of 2024. The fraction of Republicans who think immigration should decrease has fallen from 88% to 48% in that time span.” USA Today, July 12th.

And this is before the economic horrors that lower income voters (disproportionately Trump supporters) will face in Medicaid, SNAP cuts plus the massive deficit increase from the resulting gift of lower taxes for the rich, are calculated. Could these finally be “issues” that pull a significant cult-based support of Trump our of that MAGA mindset? Time will tell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and perhaps a cold dose of reality will pull this nation back from the cliff edge that threatens to push us into a full-fledged freefall into dark autocracy.

Donald: The Is No Nobel APeasement Prize!

Zelenskyy White House Humiliation, February 28th

      White House East Room, August 18th 

       

Donald: There Is No Nobel APeasement Prize!

Can Putin Finally Put a Solid Wedge Between Europe & the United States?

"There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.” 

Trump, July 25, 2019, in phone call to Ukraine President Zelenskyy, requesting a full investigation of the Biden family’s dealings in Ukraine, a call that resulted in one of two votes of Trump’s impeachment.

Sometimes I think a very dead Jeffrey Epstein and a very alive Vladimir Putin are setting both our foreign and domestic priorities and policies. On August 15th at the Anchorage summit, Putin declared that vote-by-mail ensures voter fraud (echoing an unproven GOP mantra) and directly reinforced Trump’s vision that the 2020 election was rigged against him. Trump smiled at those words. After the weekend, following years of no meaningful evidence that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud, “President Donald Trump said he will issue an executive order to end the use of mail-in ballots and voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, a move that would spark legal challenges by states.” Newsweek, August 18th.

Good to know that the Russian dictator, not exactly an expert on how to make democracy work but very knowledgeable in manipulating Donald Trump, is Trump’s inspiration for American elections… the same elections our own intelligence experts have uniformly stated, based on hard evidence, that Russian operatives have “repeatedly interfered with.” And yes, as with so many of Trump’s Executive Orders, this too flies in the face of the US Constitution. Indeed, Article I, Section 4, Clause 1, referred to as the Elections Clause, contemplates that state legislatures will establish the times, places, and manner of holding elections for the House of Representatives and the Senate, subject to Congress making or altering such state regulations (except as to the place of choosing Senators), which has been permitted to prevent real election fraud.

As Congressional hearings began (8/18) interviews of highly-placed government officials with possible knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s “connections” to earlier administrations (from Bill Clinton to Trump’s AG, Bill Barr), Trump needed to amp up additional distractions and deflections to keep his MAGA base from refocusing on his seeming betrayal of the inquiry into the “deep state” of high-level pedophiles, an inquiry which Trump seems to have suppressed once it was clear his name was all over those Epstein files. Many believe that Trump’s meeting with Putin and his takeover of Washington, DC based a violent “crime” wave “emergency” (notwithstanding Trump’s own FBI statistics showed a 26% reduction in such DC crimes) were primarily motivated as additional distractions to shift the focus of his own MAGA followers away from that Epstein scandal. That effort seemed to be working.

To make matters so much worse, Trump seems to have ignited a new red state “invasion” of the nation’s capital by inviting hundreds of armed federalized National Guard troops (ordered through red state governors from Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia and Ohio) to join in support of the federal officers, already oversupplied, against DC crime and homelessness. The Republican governor of Vermont did not supply his National Guard troops to DC as he failed to see the requisite “emergency.” As Trump uttered his list of potential targets for his future use of federal and federalized troops against “crime and homelessness,” nary a red state city or state was mentioned. It was just a litany of the bluest cities and states.

The addition of red state troops almost seemed like a stage one launch of a “civil war” invasion of Confederate troops into Union cities. Trump views the federal police forces, particularly ICE, and the military as his personal enforcers. After a failed effort, the Department of Justice has already accepted that under the relevant “home rule” statutes for DC, the DOJ cannot directly take over the local police. The DC mayor and the chief of police have also accepted that they can “coordinate” with the federal government to work further to reduce crime in the nation’s capital, even lower than its already-reduced rate.

Meanwhile, apparently trying to avoid the gang-bang embarrassment inflicted on Volodymyr Zelenskyy by Donald Trump and his senior advisors on February 28th (at the White House, pictured left above), European heads of state (German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Finnish President Alexander Stubb and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen) fortified Zelenskyy’s August 18th White House meeting (above right), notably inspired by Trump’s apparent reversion to his Putin-adoration as witnessed from his August 15th meeting in Anchorage. Having pledged “severe consequences” if Putin did not accept an immediate ceasefire, Trump fawned over the Russian dictator during that August 15th meeting. No ceasefire. No severe consequences. European leaders were shocked at Trump’s return to his early pro-Putin bias and immediately insisted on joining the White House meeting scheduled for August 18th.

Zelenskyy has drawn Trump’s animosity ever since Trump demanded that the Ukraine President investigate the Biden family, which recorded phone call led to one of two Trump impeachments. After understanding that Putin was not interested in a ceasefire or even an end to his Ukraine war unless Russia totally resumed control of the country he invaded… including major territorial concessions effectively ceding control of 20% of Ukraine’s land mass to Russia… Trump fell prey to Putin’s manipulation… again. On August 17th, a White House phone call to Zelensky pressured the Ukraine President to accept Russian territorial demands, in violation of the Ukraine Constitution and wildly unpopular with the Ukrainian people, to effect peace.

Given Russia’s abominable history of broken treaties, the notion of security guarantees to protect a post-war Ukraine from another wave of Russian aggression is complicated. In 1994, one of many examples, in exchange for relinquishing its Soviet era weapons to Russia and Ukraine’s agreeing not to keep or develop nuclear weapons, in what has become known as the Budapest Memorandum, Russia, the U.S. and the U.K. pledged to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.” In 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, and three and a half years ago crossed the border in an effort to take the rest of Ukraine. So much for that treaty.

On August 18th, as Zelenskyy and the European leaders gathered with Trump in the East Room of the White House, Trump faced the reality that if he continued to champion Putin’s absurd demands for peace (which Putin now stated had to precede any ceasefire), Trump well might become the cause of a failed effort to end the war… and he subtlety walked back the Putin-fawning the world has just witnessed. With the possibility of a Section 5-like security guarantee (the NATO provision that if any NATO member were attacked, it would be treated as an attack on all of NATO) lurking in the background, the leaders retired for short period of additional discussions before returning to their home countries. Meanwhile, Putin continued to pound Ukrainian civilian targets, presumably to show his manliness. What will happen? I am not optimistic.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while a sustainable peace to the Russo-Ukraine war still seemed remote, there was a micro-glimmer of hope.

The "Emergency" President & His Pliable Supreme Court

 

The “Emergency” President & His Pliable Supreme Court

Weakness Masquerading as Strength

Can you be clever but stupid at the same time? Can you pretend that you are strong and focused when you don’t have a clue what you are doing? Will your constituents follow you every time you cry “wolf,” noting a huge problem you can blame on others that only you can solve? Are you certain that you can distract your loyal flock, even on their most fundamental beliefs, every time you cannot deliver what you promised? The “clever” part of this equation is always twofold: always blame someone else for the issue (even if you are the source of the problem; demonization requires consistency) and always have at least a little truth in your exaggeration of the problem only you can solve. Or is Trump the very definition of woke weakness?

For those of you who fear a constitutional crisis looming, be advised we are well into that crisis and in the bitter process of doing away with our Constitution with the conniving conspiracy of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Along with Roberts’ unorthodox right-wing “contextual originalist” associate justices, he is able to repeal the plain meaning of that revered document and prior Supreme Court panels’ interpretative decisions… often with seriously flawed logic and miscites of relevant precedents. “Originalism” assumes an inflexible constitutional provision that must be interpreted within the context of society and technology in existence at the time of passage. Thus, in determining the application of gun control legislation applicable to AR-15 military-grade assault rifles, the Court can only apply the Second Amendment within the rules applicable to front-loading, single shot muskets and flintlocks. Not exactly what Jefferson and Madison had in mind when they drafted those early provisions in the hopes of a flexible and sustainable foundation to carry the country forward for years, if not centuries.

But the “only I can fix it” mantra, and the litany of “emergencies” sufficiently persuaded his MAGA cult that even if Trump needed dictatorial powers to effect his “cure,” that was acceptable to them. With an immigration policy that needed a fix since the last time it was amended (in 1986 during the Reagan years, with every effort to update thereafter rejected by the GOP, even on proposals advanced by a Republican president), the border became Trump’s campaign “emergency,” even as 2023/24 was finally resulting in far more deportations than Trump 1.0 could deliver. Trump won the 2020 election on a pledge to deport all those violent undocumented aliens, effectively suspending the Constitution, creating a de facto police state, at least to blue cities and states… with cruel results that devastated our farmers and small businesses. His heavy-handed methodology pushed his national disapproval levels way past his approval levels.

Trump had also produced an impossible-to-understand tariff chart that conflated tariff rates with unrelated balance of trade issues; he somehow found an “emergency” in every nation of the world’s economic relationship with the United States. Enough to usurp the congressional jurisdiction to set tariffs so he could fix them himself. The economy soon see-sawed into chaos, as Trump fired number-gathering bureaucrats for reporting what hundreds of federal workers produced… an expression of a failing job market. He only wanted numbers he liked to be reported. “Tariff liberation day” – with TACO vacillations unending – prices pushed upward quickly… but Trump’s flock “believed.” This tariff distraction was still not enough.

Trump was made aware that his name was in those “Epstein” files, so he amped up his distraction force with one more big move: even as the FBI’s statistics showed a huge decrease in violent crime (26%) in the nation’s capital, Trump declared a DC crime “emergency,” brought in federalized troops and a bevy of additional agents from various federal agencies, and attempted (but failed) to commandeer the local police force… all to eliminate criminals and the homeless from DC. Of course there was still crime in DC, and no one is “pro-criminal,” so he may have shocked at the initial support from DC’s mayor, who still insisted that the local police remain under her control but in cooperation with Trump’s forces. Trump suggested that he might replicate the use of the military in other blue cities as “crime” became his new political mantra. The crime rates in DC already were significantly less than they were in Trump 1.0.

His efforts at distraction needed a little more to turn off the demand for release of the “Epstein files” – more even after trying to fire the head of the Federal Reserve and even as the Speaker of the House (a MAGA Trump lackey) dismissed the House for summer recess so they could not even vote on releasing those files for months. Many in his MAGA flock were turning on him over “Epstein.” Yet there was another headline distraction playing into Trumps’ hands.

Trump is the master of exaggeration and blame and the most susceptible to flattery president this country has ever had. Getting an immediate ceasefire in the Russo-Ukraine war was another headline-grabbing “emergency” opportunity. Anchorage Alaska, August 15th: As we witnessed in this surprising meeting between Trump and “just call him Vladimir” Putin, the Russian leader’s false praise of his American counterpart, confirmation that the Ukraine War “would never have happened had Trump been President” when that invasion began, and that Trump lost a rigged 2020 election since the use of mail-in ballots always enables voter fraud, Putin’s flattery worked.

Most of us, and that does not include Donald Trump, know or should know that Russia is a has-been power with a now rather small economy – despite its size and population, Russia has only the 11th largest economy (even eclipsed by Italy), and like many third world nations, is based on resource extraction for its primary wealth. And while it still maintains an array of sophisticated weapons systems with nuclear capacity, so do India, Pakistan, N Korea, Israel and several European nations. Russia is not remotely the powerhouse it was in the Soviet era… but to Trump, the 1980s defined Russia in his mind… forever.

Within minutes of their initial contact, gone was the Trump bravado (“if there isn’t an immediate ceasefire, Russia will face serious consequences”), his repeated statements of disappointment at Putin’s recalcitrance faded into that old-boy bromance of yore… and as Putin was elevated by Trump to the world stage, he sat with Trump in the presidential limo, and was reverse flattered to the point of embarrassment. Putin got exactly what he wanted: a much-coveted delay (i.e., no ceasefire) with zero consequences, the royal treatment by a sitting American President and a suggestion that it would be Ukraine making the concessions to the invader. With European skeptics watching cowering and obsequious Trump, senior European leaders immediately indicated that they would now be joining Trump in his meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy on August 18th. Apparently, they feared a repetition of the Ukrainian President’s last White House humiliation.

But the “only I can fix it” mantra, and the litany of “emergencies” sufficiently persuaded his MAGA cult that even if Trump needed dictatorial powers to effect his “cure,” that was acceptable to them. With an immigration policy that needed a fix since the last time it was amended (in 1986 during the Reagan years, with every effort to update thereafter rejected by the GOP, even on proposals advanced by a Republican president), still unraveling further during the Biden years, even as the border was Trump’s campaign “emergency,” even as 2024 was finally resulting in far more deportations than Trump 1.0 could deliver. Trump won the 2020 election on a pledge to deport all those violent undocumented aliens, effectively suspending the Constitution, creating a de facto police state, at least to blue cities and states… with cruel results that devastated our farmers and small businesses. His heavy-handed methodology pushed his national disapproval levels way past his approval levels.

His earlier distraction efforts, concocting an impossible-to-understand chart that conflated tariff rates with unrelated balance of trade issues, he somehow found an “emergency” with every nation in the world; everyone’s economic relationship with the United States… enough to usurp the congressional jurisdiction to set tariffs so he could fix them himself. The economy see-sawed into chaos, a Trump fired number gathering bureaucrats for reporting what hundreds of federal workers produced… an expression of a failing job market. He only wanted numbers he liked to be reported. “Tariff liberation day” – with TACO vacillations unending – pushed prices upward quickly… but Trump’s flock “believed.” Was that “emergency” working?

Still, there was nothing he could do to could turn off the demand for release of the “Epstein files” – after accusing Barack Obama of treason, announcing mysterious and questionable tariff deals, trying to fire the head of the Federal Reserve and trying his best to distract the “Epstein” headlines, even as the Speaker of the House (a MAGA Trump lackey) dismissed the House for summer recess so they could not even vote on those files for months – Trump knew he needed an even bigger distraction.

Trump was made aware that his name was in those files, so his amped his distraction force with two moves: first, even as the FBI’s statistics showed a huge decrease in violent crime (26%) in the nation’s capital, Trump declared a DC crime “emergency,” brought in federalized troops and a bevy of additional agents from various federal agencies, attempted (but failed) to commandeer the local police force to eliminate criminals and the homeless from DC. Of course there was still crime in DC, and no one is “pro-criminal,” so he may have shocked at the initial support from DC’s mayor, who still insisted that the local police remain under her control but in cooperation with Trump’s forces. Trump suggested that he might replicate the use of the military in other blue cities as “crime” became his new mid-term election mantra. Even though the crime rates in DC were significantly less than in Trump 1.0. Emergencies were “everywhere,” a dictator’s dream.

I’m Peter Dekom, and even as Trump sandbags the vulnerable, even many of his own MAGA constituents about to lose their medical coverage to accommodate tax cuts for the rich, the one issue he needed to deflect the most was his failure to release the “Epstein files”… and it remains to be seen if Trump has finally found a distraction for that too.

How’s It Lookin’ Under Trump 2.0?

 

How’s It Lookin’ Under Trump 2.0?

Hint: In Trump vs the Rule of Law, Trump is Winning Big; We’re Losing Bigger

Trump’s appointments are a clown car of ineptitude, fawning obsequiousness and a foundation of fabrication and blame that cannot hold the country up. Nobody should be laughing. You can start with the stuff that the headlines keep missing, which just might kill you:

“The number of measles cases has climbed this year to the highest they’ve been since the disease was declared eliminated in the US a quarter-century ago. Still, a record share of kindergartners missed required vaccinations last year, and the vast majority of the 2025 measles cases were in unvaccinated children. As we head into the new school year, exemptions are also climbing — and most are for non-medical reasons.” CNN, August 5th.

RFK, Jr. who may have good notions about nutrition, has replaced qualified medical professionals with so many false medical prophets that the quacking sounds like a huge duck farm. We seem to have a adopted a “freedom to infect others” as a basic right. God help America if another COVID-level pandemic were to invade the United States. With so many cuts to Medicaid and nutritional programs combined with the savings by defunding billions and billions of dollars of productive medical research, our falling life expectancy numbers may well plunge even more. Think of the “bright side;” the rich not only get a huge tax break, but if enough middle- and lower-income people die, falling federal healthcare costs may just make them ever richer.

As bourbon producers in Kentucky (which produces 90% of this spirit) are learning the hard way; the momentary increase in international sales (offsetting Gen Z’s changing tastes) of that beverage is facing the headwinds of retaliatory tariffs and consumer anger at American economic bullying. Multiple bankruptcies among smaller independent distillers reflect the issue. “Beyond bankruptcies and financial difficulties, the American spirits and wine industry has also seen a number of companies cut jobs in an effort to stay profitable in an increasingly uncertain trading environment. In January, Jack Daniel's parent company, Brown-Forman, announced it would be eliminating about 12 percent of its workforce and closing a barrel-making plant in Louisville, Kentucky.” Newsweek, August 4th.

But if you want to watch what is happening to small businesses, farms, meat processing plants and construction sites, the loss of low-cost labor is shutting down job sites, leaving crops rotting in the field, closing small restaurants and creating meat and poultry shortages as meat processing plants are closing for lack of the relevant workers. If childcare was prohibitive before all this, it is untenable now. But for cruelty fans, they do get to watch warrantless brutality in ICE sweeps by anonymous masked “police”… which continue to pick up more than a few US citizens along the way. Despite an injunction against racial profiling, sustained by a federal appellate court, racially based ICE raids have not stopped. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, huh? Good to be an American. That there are politicians proud about our growing construction of “Alligator Alcatraz”-like prisons for a pretty benign cadres of desperately needed workers, is pure cruelty without offsetting benefits. Prioritize deporting the “worst of the worst” has not and will not happen.

On the international credibility front, where we incent treasury buyers to support our massive deficits and push for international investors to place their funds in US companies, we are destroying the foundation of 80 years of prosperity, a time when the United States became the most successful economy on earth. The Great Depression accelerant, the Smoot-Hawley tariff, had been replaced by a long-term move to foster free trade. But as Trump tells you that the foreign countries will pay the new massive tariffs he is imposing, he forgets: retaliatory tariffs, that foreign countries do not pay these tariffs and that US consumers pay in the form of a de facto regressive sales tax. Sure, the government receives this tariff income at the border, but the revenue is more than offset by higher consumer prices and increasing US business failures.

As Trump seeks to control the Federal Reserve, appoint loyal cadres to ensure that bad economic news will never be published, shuts down US data-driven federal agencies that produce contradictions to Trump make-believe “hoaxes,” fewer people everywhere believe us. Foreign governments and international investors, one drawn by the accuracy of these reports and by a predictable rule of law, are instead creating workarounds to replace these tarnished numbers and new unpredictability in cross-border investing.

“European governments are taking steps to break their dependence on critical scientific data the United States historically made freely available to the world, and are ramping up their own data collection systems to monitor climate change and weather extremes, according to Reuters interviews… The effort - which has not been previously reported - marks the most concrete response from the European Union and other European governments so far to the U.S. government's retreat from scientific research under President Donald Trump's administration.” Reuters, August 1st.

The price for all of this Trumpian manipulation? Interest rates on our deficit driven related debt are rising, new international exchanges are being created to circumvent the “standard US clearing house” for international pricing and debt, and numbers from federal agencies are no longer accepted by so many major overseas financial institutions. And if the dollar is soon no longer the major reserve currency (the global value pricing metric), standby for massive increases in all forms of bank interest (from mortgages to credit cards to business loans)… with a concomitant increase in consumer prices.

As the Epstein Whisperer is telling his congressional minions to begin to release selective files on Jeffrey Epstein, the file searching has instead centered around requesting files on settled federal investigation of Russian election interference (ignoring the Russians indicted during the Trump administration)… of Clinton, Obama and Biden. And as Trump gloated over the humbling for foreign nations over much higher tariffs (we’ll see) and what appeared to be solid economic success, the truth began to collapse as the normal release of seasonally adjusted numbers. “Phony” and “rigged” Trump declared as he fired the non-partisan head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But, as the August 1st The Atlantic pointed out, the truth was just plain ugly:

“What had been reported as a strong two-month gain of 291,000 jobs was revised down to a paltry 33,000. What had once looked like a massive jobs boom ended up being a historically weak quarter of growth.

‘Even that might be too rosy a picture. All the net gains of the past three months came from a single sector, health care, without which the labor market would have lost nearly 100,000 jobs. That’s concerning because health care is one of the few sectors that is mostly insulated from broader economic conditions: People always need it, even during bad times. (The manufacturing sector, which tariffs are supposed to be boosting, has shed jobs for three straight months.) Moreover, the new numbers followed an inflation report released by the Commerce Department yesterday that found that the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of price growth had picked up in June and remained well above the central bank’s 2 percent target. (The prior month’s inflation report was also revised upward to show a slight increase in May.) Economic growth and consumer spending also turned out to have fallen considerably compared with the first half of 2024. Taken together, these economic reports are consistent with the stagflationary environment that economists were predicting a few months ago: mediocre growth, a weakening labor market, and rising prices.” If Trump were confident in public support, would he be asking his red state minions to “eliminate Democrat voters” and gerrymander their districts? Exactly!

I’m Peter Dekom, and, without even looking at the DOD, in answer to my title question, as the malignant chickens come home to roost, “not good, actually really bad.”

Rule of Law vs Rule by Law

 

Rule of Law vs Rule by Law

When Autocracy replaces Democracy

When George Washington first led the nation, he was faced with a monumental task, one rather unfamiliar in his era: governing a nation as a democracy. He refused to serve more than two terms, rejected the possibility of being named “king,” and showed a particular distaste for political parties. As the Constitution gave him the power to appoint federal judges for lifetime appointments, he required the “advice and consent” of the Senate… and little more. There were no subcommittee screenings; it was straight up and down Senate vote. Washington believed such votes should only be focused on the nominee’s character (generally assumed to be good), eschewing pollical affiliation and a detailed analysis of the nominee’s political biases. He found the British party-driven Parliament to be deeply antidemocratic.

By the time FDR became president, there were Senate Judiciary Committee reviews, and the generally accepted notion was that Republicans nominated Republican judges, and Democrats nominated Democratic judges. FDR appoint eight Supreme Court Justices over his twelve years in office, the most of any president. While his appointments helped him make wartime restrictions that were hardly democratic, the Court often disagreed with him, frequently limiting the reach of his New Deal, for example.

Today, despite a (mis-)belief of judicial neutrality, a study (reported in the February 20, 2024 Public Law Library) conducted by Harvard Law Professor, Alma Cohen, “examined 630,000 federal appeals court cases from 1985 to 2020. Cohen found that party affiliation had a far-reaching impact on decisions, beyond just controversial issues like gun control or abortion. She concluded that judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents consistently differed in their tendency to side with the weaker party.

“Cohen’s research revealed that panels with more Democratic judges were more likely to make decisions favoring individuals in civil litigation against institutions like corporations or the government. The same pattern emerged in criminal appeals, immigration appeals, and prisoner litigation. In fact, an all-Democratic panel was twice as likely to rule in favor of immigrants in immigration cases as an all-Republican panel… Critics of previous studies that examined the partisan differences among judges argued that unpublished decisions were not taken into account. However, Cohen’s work showed similar partisan effects among both published and unpublished decisions, as well as unanimous and divided panels.”

Who creates the laws, and their reference points and political, legal or cultural limitations determine rule of or by the law. A theocracy, like Iran, elevates Quranic law, as interpreted by Shia’s highest theologians above any laws created by human beings. Germany’s Nazi Party also had a legal system, but its laws were applied to amplify individual power and the party of the Fuhrer himself. When the law emanates from a single leader, one who cannot be contained by a judicial system, that is clearly rule by law. The LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation determined that “rule of” requires examination of four core values, noting that “The stronger each of these components are, the greater the rule of law.

• Equality Under the Law - All people, businesses and governments are accountable, and the law applies to everyone in the same way, no matter who you are.
• Transparency of Law - Laws must be clear, precise, affordable and accessible while protecting fundamental human rights.
• Independent Judiciary - An independent judiciary ensures equality and fairness of law between people and public officials.
• Accessible Legal Remedy - There must be access to timely resolution in a court of law.”

It is little wonder, then, a move to autocracy almost always starts with the wannabe dictator’s attack on the judiciary. It can be personal attacks on individual judges… or attacks on the “integrity” judicial decisions. If a government can simply ignore a judicial decision or appoint judges who are merely rubber stamps to the determination of a unilateral authority, that system of government cannot protect its citizens from the arbitrary application of the law, an essential trait for “Rule of.” Recent decisions of Trump’s reconfigured Supreme Court reflects partisanship on steroids and an overt deference to a single, supreme authority figure: The President.

That Court has handed down decisions that allow the election process to be totally manipulated and distorted by purely partisan forces. Unless an election law names a protected class on its face, in 2019, in Rucho vs Common Cause, the Court ruled that while partisan gerrymandering may be "incompatible with democratic principles," the federal courts cannot review such allegations, as they present nonjusticiable political questions outside the jurisdiction of these courts. This case explains why Trump recently ordered red states to use gerrymandering to protect the GOP’s slim majority in the House. Texas leapt into action.

In 2021, the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee Supreme Court all but repealed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The decision interpreted the "totality of circumstances" language of Section 2 to mean that it does not generally prohibit voting rules that have disparate impact on the groups that it sought to protect, including a rule blocked under Section 5 before the Court inactivated that section in Shelby County v. Holder (a 2013 case that released states with traditional patterns of racial voter discrimination from federal oversight).

A little over a year ago, in Trump vs United States, the Court held that presidential immunity from criminal prosecution presumptively extends to all of a president's "official acts" – with absolute immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate such as the pardon, command of the military, execution of laws, or control of the executive branch. Numerous subsequent decisions expanded presidential authority, at the expense of congressional power, to hold back funds approved by Congress and to have a very free hand in firing individuals in congressionally funded federal agencies under the executive branch. The Court will soon have to test whether the President’s mere statement of “emergency” conditions (without substantiation) would be sufficient to usurp Article I of the Constitution’s grant of setting taxes and tariffs to Congress.

We have also witnessed Trump-appointed administrators and lawyers find ways to twist and squirm to avoid federal court orders, even from the Supreme Court itself, particularly in the realm of citizenship and immigration. To confuse matters further, on June 27, 2025, in Trump vs CASA, Inc, the Supreme Court held that federal district courts likely lack the authority to issue universal injunctions blocking presidential actions nationwide, a ruling that is likely to allow the Trump administration to continue enforcing executive orders or other policies despite legal challenges to their constitutionality.

Politicians follow trends, and judges are supposed to ignore trends and apply the law. Populists often prefer leaders to laws, believing that this path generates necessary efficiencies to effect their beliefs. Yet looking at major variables over time – studies have shown that metrics like economic growth, life expectancy and the encouragement of investment consistently show that democracies always outperform autocracies. Yet the zeal of populists and the frequent submissive inattention of most voters often decimates democracy and its obvious benefits.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is incumbent on those who understand what the rule of law means, to human rights and happiness, convey: it is not red vs blue, but democracy vs autocracy that is at issue today.

The Appeasement Game

 

The Appeasement Game

From Optics to Threats, to Perception of Autocratic Control to Actual Autocracy

Welcome to the rapid transition of the American democracy into a police state where rigging elections through gerrymandering has become a national pastime. While there is a tendency for leaders who truly do not study history to repeat its mistakes, my personal adjustment to that circular view adds a third dimension to account for paradigm shifts not faced by prior generations. The result of that additional variable – which can account for the impact of major climate change, nuclear weapons, crypto, artificial intelligence, etc. – creates a spiral of history. Today’s blog focuses on one oft repeated leadership failure, the fallback to repeating failed policies because the soundbites always appear believable – like if you give rich people tax cuts they will trickle down those savings to create lots of new jobs or if you just give an egotistical tyrant what he wants, he will smile and go away – but litter the path of dire failure under the consistent harsh light of history. Trump has become the “great repeater of historical mistakes.”

The world has struggled numerous times with nations, led by obsessed autocrats, that have collapsed because of unsustainable inflexible decisions. Nations that tamper with statistical reporting – like China, Argentina, Greece, etc. – because autocrats or wannabe autocrats don’t like the numbers, discover the hard way that they cannot repeal global economic rules as their economies plummet into inflation (or worse, stagflation), unemployment and staggering interest rates. Dead messengers replaced by doctrinaire administrators never produce the autocrat’s desired results. Appeasing an autocrat – are you listening House Republicans and the US Supreme Court? – seldom tempers egotistical avariciousness. As universities and major law firms kowtowed to (appeased) Trump’s fabricated “war against antisemitism” to make absurd concessions, they were floored by the next round of massive Trump demands and his expansion to more universities.

Or, as Los Angeles Times columnist, Michael Hiltzik lamented on August 11th: “The rationale for some of Trump’s policies — social and economic — are mysterious. But a greater mystery is why these institutions have given in, sometimes without a whisper of defiance… The capitulation trend has encompassed some American institutions that made their names standing firm against authoritarianism. One is CBS, whose parent, Paramount Global, last month settled a $20-billion Trump lawsuit over the editing of an interview with Kamala Harris at ‘60 Minutes’ by paying $16 million, ostensibly to finance Trump’s presidential library.

“The settlement ‘resembled payment of an extortion-like penalty to the government for the standard editing’ of the Harris interview, Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for Leadership Studies and a leading professor at the Yale School of Management, wrote in the New Republic with two Yale colleagues… As my colleague Meg James reported , critics blasted the settlement, with one calling it a ‘spineless capitulation’ that would only embolden politicians and others to ‘weaponize lawsuits and bring regulatory pressure to bear to silence and censor independent journalism.’” Naïve spinelessness is appeasement’s best friend.

We have a President, who is admittedly not a deep thinker or reader of anything, believing his negotiating skills have produced instincts that make deals happen, counting on his perception of his personal connection to other world leaders (usually just a wishful figment of his imagination) under his whimsical and often random, shifting policies, frequently based on statements of “facts” that, on examination, prove to be totally fabricated. As Trump bobs and weaves, unable to implement his promise to end the Russo-Ukraine war on “day one,” or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza, he is played by savvy opponents on the “other side.” Vladimir Putin has not altered his position one whit since the invasion began, and Benjamin Netanyahu no longer cares what Trump wants, because the US just keeps that weapons flow to Israel unabated.

Sanctions have only solidified Putin’s resistance – Russians have long history of enduring sacrifice to the Motherland – but Trump believes that tariff pressure on Russia’s major fossil fuel buyers (like India) will get to him. As a huge Indian sentiment pushed back on Trump, not Putin, shows, that pressure is unlikely to work… while alienating a major ally and trading partner in the process. If Trump were to supply Ukraine with massive new offensive capabilities and begin the process of considering Kyiv for NATO membership (in very close cooperation with all NATO allies), after an initial Russian level violent showmanship and bluster, perhaps peace could actually stand a chance. Putin is very aware that in search of personal glory, Trump is open to appeasing him more.

WWII, British PM Neville Chamberlin (pictured above with Adolph Hitler) made serial territorial concessions to that German tyrant, hoping for peace, until Germany continued its expansionist effort by invading and conquering Poland in 1939. Chamberlin was out, Winston Churchill took over, and WWII began as a total, out-of-control global conflict. Chamberlain, the appeaser, was replaced by exceptionally well-schooled and experienced Churchill, the pragmatist. Spine won!

Trump depends heavily on perception, noting that most of his policy choices are not aimed at the betterment of the nation but instead are focused with making him look good. His obsession with being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is obviously more important to him than creating pragmatic and sustainable solutions to global issues. His efforts towards increasing the US’ global influence have consistently backfired. Our closest allies are bewildered by his tariff attacks on them. As he gloated about the total “obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program – restarted literally within weeks of the big attack – his statements on the good time for a regime change in Tehran were countered by a huge groundswell of support for the repressive theocracy by every stratum of the Iranian public.

Like most autocrats, Trump is addicted to demonizing his opponents, efforts usually devoid of facts, and embracing using the military, in contravention of the law, to invade blue cities (like Los Angeles and Washington, DC) under clearly false pretexts. A big ($30M) military parade and the visual of federal troops taking over police duties are touted as proof of his commitment to “law and order.” The same President who pardoned insurrectionists who seriously injured and killed federal police officers charged with protecting the US Capitol. The same President who cut $811 billion under his Big Beautiful Bill that would have gone to bolster local police with equipment and manpower upgrades.

Trump’s own cabinet appointments, unqualified apparatchiks – like HHS head RFK, Jr who may just have doomed millions of Americans by imposing his antivaxx conspiracy theory to kill research for the exceptionally successful expansion of mRNA vaccines or DOD chief Pete Hegseth’s open embrace of white Christian nationalism and belief that women should only be allowed to vote as their husbands determine – have increased Trump’s control to an absurd level of destructiveness. Who is he kidding?

I’m Peter Dekom, and perhaps Trump’s new show of force in Washington, DC will finally serve as a distraction from his failure to deflect the Epstein scandal… but that won’t stop him from trying no matter what!

As Kryptonite is to Superman, Truth is to Trump

  

As Kryptonite is to Superman, Truth is to Trump

“If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just did it because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.” 

Retiring Senator Thom Tillis (R/NC) at Trump’s firing of the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for simply reporting job numbers Trump did not like.

Lying with statistics is just a start. It’s why I tell people looking at financial statements that are filed on their favorite companies, even those filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, read the footnotes first! It’s bad enough when Chief Financial Officers of publicly traded companies move income and expenses back and forth from various tax years to make the numbers look good, but when they intentionally ignore a serious financial reality, you often can see that distortion admitted in writing in the footnotes. Trust me, it can take a rosy picture and turn it into a red alert horror show.

We seem to have a proclivity to disguise deception under the concept of transparency. And no one has done it better than Donald John Trump. Maybe that’s just the way real estate developers in NYC have to be. Trump’s voluminous litigation and bankruptcy history suggests, however, that he relies way more than others on denial, blame, deflection and deception – the legacy of being Fred’s son and Roy Cohn’s protégé. Until the Epstein debacle, he was the Teflon MAGA messiah. But today, with Epstein questions raging, he seems to be wrapped in molasses and rolling in dirt.

There’s nothing new in Trump’s approach to facts. He’s addicted to braggadocio and self-aggrandizement and frequently labels as “fake news,” ready to shoot the messenger, any fact that contradicts him or casts him in a negative light. His ultimate prerequisite for someone to be allowed inside his inner circle (I don’t think he has any actual friends), his measure of loyalty is absolute adherence to “whatever I say, even if I contradict myself.” His most cherished inner circle are those able to spin, deflect and disguise facts to create overwhelming proof of his undying correctness. That he has been wrong most of the time of late did not, until recently, matter.

Remember when he was scheduling tariff “Liberation Day,” he pulled out this huge chart (pictured above) of what tariffs should be? Unless you understood the crass manipulation, you could not make heads or tails of the numbers. They certainly did not reflect the tariffs other nations charged on importing US goods; they had this mysterious cast about them. Turns out his lackies figured out how to add a trade imbalance variable into the tariff equation, intending to punish countries where we bought more than we exported to the designated country. Well not always, as Trump actually levied a punitive tariff on Brazil (a country with which we actually had a trade surplus) because Brazil’s Trump-equivalent ex-president (Jair Bolsonaro) was being prosecuted in Brazil for his Trump-like policies.

Well, if you think about a trade deficit in common sense terms, how could any nation that sold us goods at a good lower price, where we actually received those goods, be cheating us? Huh? Like a department store having a sale is cheating its customers by not charging them a higher price? But Trump loves it when his lackies figure out how to spin a huge benefit to Americans as a really bad thing. It’s OK to tariff iron and aluminum big time, even though for every one US iron or aluminum worker benefitted by such tariff, five US workers in industries that used such metal in their manufacturing work lost their jobs. The whole notion that the tariffed nations paid the tariff was also a boldface lie that sounded good. In fact, tariffs are de facto sales taxes.

But what happens when the most basic standards of performance are so distorted that they become meaningless, except for hapless civilians who tend to believe anything if it is in writing. Nothing has bolstered truly fake news and misdirected conspiracy theories like the Internet. And with AI fake imagery and sound, the truth is increasingly difficult to find. And no one has focused on rewriting history and factual occurrences more than Donald Trump. He’s actually convinced a very large part of his base that historical accuracy is “woke.” For example, as reported in the August 1st People Magazine, “After Donald Trump's administration seized control of the Smithsonian Institution's messaging in March, the iconic museum network has been accused of rewriting history.

“On July 31, The Washington Post reported on the recent change to an exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History titled ‘The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden.’ A section of the display is dedicated to the U.S. presidents who have faced impeachment, and includes information about Andrew Jackson, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon. (While Jackson and Clinton were successfully impeached, Nixon resigned the presidency before getting to that point.).” Embarrassed, the Smithsonian suggested that there might be an update soon.

Trump’s most consistent weak spot is “numbers.” Numbers of people attending rallies. Analyzing Jerome Powell and the Fed’s interest rate decisions. And, most recently, the stock market plunged twice in one day (August 1st): one dip because corporate America believes Trump’s tariff and trade war is a disaster for business planning, prices and jobs in this country, and another dip because by simply reporting what hundreds of Bureau of Labor Statistics staffers based on thousand of data points had generated, showing adjusted job losses to be much worse than expected, Trump fired the director of that bureau calling such solid statistics “phony” without a shred of evidence. Faith in transparency in government statistics and the consistent application of the rule of law is precisely why the US economy is (was?) so highly regarded by the international marketplace. But purging anything that looks bad has become the obsession of a man beginning to show some disturbing signs of dementia. Still, his lackies seek to placate him.

For example, even though Gross Domestic Product – the monetary measure of the total market value [1] of all the final goods and services produced and rendered in a specific time period by a country [2] or countries – is used to analyze relative economic success, sometimes politicians may have so distorted an economy that reporting GDP would make Trump look bad. For example, government spending is a huge part of our GDP, but when DOGE shut down government agencies, fired tens of thousands of federal employees and slashed federal spending on non-military costs (often supported by a Congressional affirmation of such cuts), the Trump administration contemplated substituting GDP numbers in a way that would hide the impact of those costs.

Last March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that government spending should be “separated from gross domestic product reports, in response to questions about whether the spending cuts pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could possibly cause an economic downturn… ‘You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,’ Lutnick said on Fox News Channel’s ‘Sunday Morning Futures.’ ‘They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.’

“Doing so could potentially complicate or distort a fundamental measure of the U.S. economy’s health. Government spending is traditionally included in the GDP because changes in taxes, spending, deficits and regulations by the government can impact the path of overall growth. GDP reports already include extensive details on government spending, offering a level of transparency for economists.” Associated Press, March 2nd. Donald Trump is the least truthful US president in our recorded history, and the chickens, ducks and geese are coming home to roost.

I’m Peter Dekom, and what happens when virtually an entire political party knowingly embraces the falsehoods of their party leader, who is increasingly evidencing mental symptoms far more severe than the psychological issues Trump hurled at his predecessor?