The Witness Chronicles, 1/21/25
The aftermath
The New Republican Swamp
Filled with wealthy gators and pythons
I was able to sustain interest in the inauguration for about five minutes until the sight of Trump surrounded by moneyed wealth and political lackeys was enough.
You don’t hear much about draining the swamp these days and for good reason- there’s a new swamp in town, and despite their collective wealth and power, they still stink to high heaven. It is a swamp after all, with all the mud and sludge and creepy things hidden in the muck.
Actually, they are no longer hidden. The Republicans on the Senate Armed Forces committee unanimously voted to recommend approval of Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary despite the fact that he is possibly the worst and least qualified Cabinet nominee ever nominated. And a drunk, an accused sexual abuser, and has a record of financially awful management when he did run something, spending non-profit money on strip clubs and drinking.
Highly qualified indeed and the Republican Party thinks he can run the largest piece of the federal government. Pure swamp.
This ride is already a rough one. Trump went ballistic with executive orders yesterday and most of them were either meaningless or vindictive, including pardoning all the January sixth rioters who tried to take over the government. The message sent by that action tells us all we need to know about this president.
Frankly, I can’t write about all the things he has done already. I highly recommend you read Heather Cox Richardson to get all the bloody details. But one thing stood out and that is the $Trump crypto coin he issued, which makes it possible to funnel bribes directly to him without anyone knowing anything about it.
Our president is for sale to any bidder and he doesn’t care that we know it. Let that sink in. It’s the Wild West all over again, not the romantic cowboy stuff, the murderous bank robber stuff. Go ahead and shoot someone down in the street for no reason, Trump will have your back.
It’s hard to know how to respond to the madness dumped on the American people yesterday. It’s far worse than anything even I could imagine. Elon doing Nazi salutes, crypto corruption, shameless ass kissing by members of Congress, and the endless spectacles of Roman style distractions designed to keep the masses of MAGA happy while Trump burns everything down.
He would be king, even if it means reigning over the ashes of a once great country. And the real failure? Look who surrounds him. The ultra wealthy who know they have their puppet and are now empowered to do anything they can imagine.
Any talk of resistance is empty right now and for good reason. Given his immunity from any consequences of any official act he can do anything, order anything, say anything, and disappear anyone and there is not a damn thing we can do about it.
And that is our own fault. At least the fault of those who fell for his baloney and gave him that power, that unchecked power. The question right now is how far can he go before someone takes him out, if such a thing is even possible. I do not advocate any violent action on any terms but I’m not what he needs to worry about. He is going to seriously anger a lot of people.
I have written hundreds of these newsletters in recent years, offering my little group of readers my take on political reality and unreality. I’m not going to stop but finding a way forward is going to be hard. The Trump takeover of the Democracy is already pretty airtight and unless there is a big exodus and rebellion by the Republicans in Congress, he will crack down harder every day, if only because he enjoys it.
Our President is a smiling sociopath. Let that sink in. It is not an exaggeration.
Writing is a lifeline of sorts for me and I won’t stop. And I do not intend to despair, though this may be as close as I get. We cannot give in to despair and we cannot forget who we are and what we believe in. That is what he wants and needs, for most Americans to simply give up and accept his mania as normal.
Trump will work hard to keep us in the dark about the biggest existential threat the world faces, global warming. It’s not an accident his first actions were to declare an energy emergency and undo as many of Joe Biden’s green energy initiatives as he could in one day. Voters may have forgotten his offer to oil executives to sell out the country for a billion dollars, but I have not.
And yesterday he delivered on that offer and created a means to pay him billions with no oversight. It is a form of mad genius straight out of a comic book. But climate change can’t be ignored, it’s way too late to put that genie back into its bottle. Trump will be the disaster president and there is nothing he can do about that.
The problem is that he won’t care. He is old, he shows no interest in his family’s future, and his time will run out. He will leave a huge mess, which is what he has done his entire life. And we will pay and pay.
I’ll try to be a little more upbeat next time I write. At the moment I need to sit and meditate. An empty mind sounds pretty good right now.
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Thank you,
Martin Edic
They all deserve to hang for treason.
Martin, I was reading somewhere in the last few days (can't remember the source), about Grover Cleveland who was another two-term president with the opposition having a term in between the two Cleveland terms. The point of the story was that Cleveland was a wholesale failure in the second term by insisting on maintaining the gold standard. The particulars in that case aren't important, but it's a certainty Trump will be a catastrophic failure in some arena. We just don't know where. Will it be another public health emergency? The economy? An international war? It's early days so we don't know. That said, you can never go wrong stocking up on toilet paper!