A Very Lame Duck with Very Temporary Control Over a MAGA Dominated Congress

 

A Very Lame Duck with Very Temporary Control Over a MAGA Dominated Congress

If there had been any doubt prior to Donald Trump’s 19 minute April 1st speech on the Iran WAR, the resulting market crash, the soaring of oil prices, the continued refusal of our Western allies to join in fighting Trump’s WAR, post speech poll numbers (worse than Biden’s post-debate crash) confirmed what many surmised: Except for MAGA Republicans, representing a minority of voters, the response by the majority of voters confirmed that Donald Trump has been relegated to a quacking lame duck for the rest of his term. There is no off-ramp for a positive spin to the very WAR he promised would never happen. The resulting inflation won’t quickly fade. The nation is tired of paying for Trump’s never-ending litany of very expensive mistakes and his appointment of sub-par, incompetent lacky-loyalists to senior administration posts. America is alone now.

That Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth were living in an alternative reality was underscored, their WAR statements were at best exaggerations but mostly out-and-out lies, when a purported defenseless Iran managed to down two US aircraft in short order: an F-15E and an A-10 Warthog, leaving one man in dire need of rescue… somewhere in Iran. And even Trump has simply deleted his “excursion” descriptor of the conflict, now using “WAR” routinely. The decades of the United States’ facing “asymmetrical” warfare seemed to have been erased from the government’s memory. “Symmetrical” warfare is where two roughly equal militaries square off. Think WWII. “Asymmetrical” warfare, most of what the US faced after WWII, is where a vastly smaller and less well-armed adversary takes on much larger, better armed opponent. In the case of US conflicts, those smaller militaries – often irregulars or seemingly “defeated” organized armies – usually kept us at bay for decades. Like the seemingly “endless” wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Trump has an iron grip on his MAGA elected congressional constituency. That may work in primary battles, but now having lost most of the independents, with Hispanic and “young man” cadres of voters leaving the Trump camp, unless Trump can foist a truly rigged midterm election (still possible) on us, the actual vote tally seems to predict a big GOP loss in general elections.

It’s no secret that Major Pete has little respect for senior officers with decades of detailed leadership training and experience. The ignorant fool always knows better: “The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday [4/2] from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s chief of staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll.

“Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service ‘spit me out,’ he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.” Tom Nichols, writing for the April 2nd The Atlantic.

Further, the extraordinary interference of Secretary Pete in the promotions of two African-American and two women to flag rank only served to confirm Hegseth’s bigoted and ultra-violent commitment to a white Christian nationalist military with disdain for the rules of engagement and the Constitution… but with unquestioning fealty to lame duck Trump, reinforcing Pete’s distorted view that Americans were now a bigger enemy than malevolent foreign adversaries:

““The memo I’m signing today directs installation commanders to allow requests [from military personnel] for personal protection to carry a privately owned firearm with the presumption that it is necessary… Our warfighters are no less entitled to exercise their God-given right to keep and bear arms than any other American… Not all enemies are foreign, nor are they all outside our border.” Secretary of Defense/WAR, Pete Hegseth, April 2nd.

As for Trump, treating the White House and national monuments as his own private property was hardly enough. The political hacks he has appointed to the DOJ would give him complete control over documents containing our highest level of vital national security information: ““MEMORANDUM OPINION FOR THE COUNSEL TO THE PRESIDENT [April 2nd] You have asked whether the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (‘PRA’ or ‘Act’) is constitutional. We conclude that it is not. The PRA is unconstitutional for two independent but interlocking reasons: It exceeds Congress’s enumerated and implied powers, and it aggrandizes the Legislative Branch at the expense of the constitutional independence and autonomy of the Executive.”

Gary Grumbach and Ryan J. Reilly, writing for NBC News, April 2nd, add this perspective: “The Justice Department has issued a legal opinion arguing that President Donald Trump does not have to turn over his presidential records to the National Archives at the end of his administration…. The president ‘need not further comply with its dictates.’…

“‘If the Trump administration chooses to follow the opinion from the office, which offers legal advice to the executive branch but does not set law, he could face outside legal challenges should he violate the Presidential Records Act in the future… The determination is a signal that the president will not turn over his documents to the archives. Trump was accused violating the Presidential Records Act by refusing to turn over documents he kept after leaving office following his first term…. According to federal prosecutors, Trump willfully retained national defense documents at his private home in Mar-a-Lago, obstructed justice and concealed materials, including a classified military map reportedly shown to unauthorized individuals. The case was dismissed by Judge Aileen Cannon in 2024 before he won re-election.”

Simply put, this Trump lawyer sycophant is telling the President that he no longer has to follow a Watergate-era law barring him from holding on to presidential records when he leaves office. Right… it’s now his personal property, just like the Kennedy Center and the White House. As Trump asks for massive new budgetary allocations for his WAR, offering cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP and even Social Security instead, it is clear that support for Trump is unraveling for the GOP and Trump at WARp speed.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you are wondering what a desperate, failing autocrat looks like.