Who Have Americans Elected to Run It All?

Who Have Americans Elected to Run It All?

Hint: It wasn’t Elon Musk

But Donald John Trump – claiming a mandate with a 1.5% voter margin – has indeed outsourced governmental slash-and-burn to de facto Co-President Elon Musk, so that has to count. I wondered what a Northern Kentucky (as red a state as you can find) journalist might see as what the Trump-Musk presidency has accomplished in the early days of this administration… in short hand:

“Now, considering that our boy has spent his time back in office setting the nation’s constitutional order ablaze, canning the Coast Guard commandant, which also offered him the simultaneous delight of picking on a woman, is small potatoes… The Lord of Mar-a-Lago has fired, in defiance of federal statutes, a host of inspectors general, which raises the question of what good is an inspector general if the actions of the person they’re inspecting can dismiss them on a whim. He has halted enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars American-based companies – including the Trump organization – from paying off foreign officials. He’s pulled out of the World Health Organization. He’s decimated the U.S. Agency for International Development and will look to kill it when the opportunity arises. He has ordered federal government websites to remove references to climate change.” NKyTribune’s Washington columnist Bill Straub.

This, even before the mass resignations of Trump-appointed prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, who could not, in good faith and consistent with DOJ rules, bring a dismissal without prejudice before a federal judge for approval, knowing that there was a political payoff quid pro quo (hey Mayor Adams, we’ll drop the indictment against you if NYC plays ball with our immigration initiative). But Trump has always been a “transactional president,” which is consistent with his demand that Ukraine pay the US with half of the rare earth extraction for the money we spent (Europe wasn’t even mentioned, even though they spent almost as much). Trump had to release a Russian mega-crypto scammer ($billions) serving time in a federal penitentiary to get Putin to commit to negotiate a peace treaty with Ukraine. We also got a tourist schoolteacher with some medical weed back. Huh? Is their method in Trump’s madness?

So the President described by a Kentucky journalist above, having pledged on numerous occasions to lock down a peace treaty over Ukraine in a day, is making sure that what he brings to the table is exceptionally Putin friendly and does not reward Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, whose refusal to accord Trump an earlier “get dirt on the Bidens” quid pro quo that led to Trump’s first impeachment. So he’s got JD Vance telling NATO allies that the best territorial guarantee Ukraine can expect is a US treaty guarantee (we’re so good at honoring treaties, right?), and new DOD Chief Pete Hegseth, announcing before a NATO meeting that the rules have changed, and if the other NATO members do not follow the changes, the US would pull out of NATO, and that our allies can twist in the wind before we honor our treaty commitments to protect them.

To make that point, “Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth invited conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec to travel with him on his first overseas trip this week to visit European allies…Posobic, who is also a podcaster and editor of a website, has made many bombastic statements in speeches to MAGA audiences. At CPAC last year, Posobiec made headlines for declaring, ‘Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overt’hrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.’” Mediate, February 13th citing the Washington Post.

Russia has been doing everything in its power, sacrificing tens of thousands Russian and N Korean soldiers in the process, to set their occupation lines in place (see the above BBC map for specifics)… under the assumption that such occupied territory will be the worst they will do under US mediation. Through Vance and Hegseth, the United States seems already to have sold Zelensky down the river on the only genuine Kyiv could count on – allowing NATO membership – simply stating that would not be a realistic expectation. Trump and his sycophants do not seem to appreciate Moscow’s constant existential threats made against Europe stating territorial ambitions over the Baltic Republics or the direct threats against former Soviet bloc Poland, or the continual sabotage of European under-ocean cables and pipelines by Russian ships dragging destructive anchors with malice aforethought. The US does not share a land border with Russia!

Trump seems to live for “victory” announcements even if the substance of the announcement is either negligible or simply rephrasing what has already been done. Unless it puts glory on his shelf, inflicts painful retribution against anyone who opposes him or puts money in his pockets, Trump just does not care! About our allies. Our treaty commitments. Or our average or less affluent Americans. And as the Trump administration excludes Europe and even the Ukraine from initial talks to settle the Russian-Ukraine war, what’s really going on here? Ah, a blog topic for another time…

I’m Peter Dekom, and Trump is an entire “me-generation” unto himself… and no one else.