The Witness Chronicles, 1/26/25

That was the week that was…

Photo by Nikolas Noonan on Unsplash

Cracks in the Onslaught?

Mitch McConnell takes a stand, and other stories

I would have thought it would be a cold day in hell when I would have anything good to say about Senator McConnell, who is arguably the reason the Trump circus got to DC in 2016. But yesterday he joined Murkowski and Collins in a mini Republican revolt against the confirmation of Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary.

Hegseth was confirmed, but McConnell signaled that Trump’s grip on the Senate may not be as solid as he’d like. Trump fired a slew of Inspectors General across the government, people whose role was to serve as agency watchdogs. The action was illegal as these positions were confirmed by the Senate and require Senate approval to be terminated.

The question now is whether any Republican Senator will realize there is an opportunity for a power play by tipping the scales against Trump. It would be a dangerous thing to do but we constantly hear that many in the Party are privately aghast at the scope of Trump’s actions in just his first week in office.

He has essentially shut down the entire health and science segment of the government, cut off foreign aid across the board, approved illegal raids to round up immigrants, both legal and illegal, and that’s just a small part of it. Most of his actions are a direct challenge to the Senate, which controls major budget changes. There will be a flood of lawsuits challenging virtually everything this President has done.

As I’ve noted before, many of Trump’s scattershot actions will negatively impact the states that he carried and will be very unpopular when they start affecting things back home. The phones in congressional offices will be ringing. This week farmers with orchards awoke to find no workers anywhere to be seen with crops ready to be picked. Iowa cattle and corn farmers are already complaining about labor losses, though how they didn’t see this coming is hard to fathom.

After all, Trump told us ad nauseum what he intended to do, yet these midwesterners overwhelmingly voted for him. There was a lot of that going around. The question remains whether these voters will turn on him as they gradually start to understand what they have unleashed.

Auto executives know. The threatened tariffs on Mexico and Canada would essentially shut down auto production as there are no cars or trucks entirely made in America. Their thousands of parts come from all over the globe. And it’s not simply a matter of raising prices, though that will certainly happen and the cascading effect of that will be, you guessed it, rapid inflation.

And that’s just one example out of thousands. I don’t know who the financial geniuses are behind Trump’s harebrained economic ideas but they appear to be determined to destroy everything for those who elected him.

And yet his Party lays down and confirms a dangerously unqualified man to run the largest part of the federal government, the military. The only words that come to mind are shameful, disgraceful, treasonous, criminal…and for what, that guy?

On the other side, the Democrats are in disarray, apparently victims of the shock and awe being hurled at them every hour of every day this week. Leadership is nonexistent and the only voices I’m hearing are from AOC and Bernie. But the reality of Bernie Sanders is that he has never accomplished anything during his years as a Senator, other than loudly sticking to an outdated sixties progressivism.

AOC is the likely emerging leader as she moves to the center and gradually gains seniority in the House, but her age and, sorry to say it, gender are a problem right now. The Trump years have seen the return of the old white guy power center, like it or not. Disclaimer: I am an old white guy.

Watching David Brooks and Jonathan Capeheart doing their weekly analysis on PBSNewsHour this weekend, I picked up on a point I had not considered. The reason Trump is going all in as fast as he can is that he really only has about eighteen months to destroy things. The midterms are unlikely to help him and at the rate he is going he could lose big. Maybe even impeachment big.

We can always hope.

Finally, a more personal note. I consider my readers, friends, and this has been a rough week for those of us paying attention. But there has never been a more important time to not only pay attention, but also to keep a dialog going at every opportunity.

That dialog is why I’m still doing this. A lot of voters checked out this past election, ignoring reality or simply giving up on their responsibility as citizens. The results are what we see this week. Criminals being hailed as heroes and Trump breaking every promise he made to MAGA voters except for his racist immigration war. The escalation of climate change danger and destruction as he gifts the fossil fuels lobby everything they asked for and more. And on and on.

My guess is the country is rapidly getting sick of seeing arrogant billionaires flaunting their rise while doing nothing to benefit those in need. And encouraging the rise of neo-Nazism, media bias, and exorbitant price gouging. These guys have everything but they seem to have an addiction to more, more, more.

I’m hanging in there and I hope you are too. We have to if we have any respect for the future of this place we call home and a place the world once saw as an example of how freedom can work, messy as it is.

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Thank you,

Martin Edic