The Witness Chronicles, 4/21/25

Trying to find some kind of warped logic in all this

Color is coming back into the world. Photo by wyman H on Unsplash

There Are No Edges, and Nothing is Finished

A reminder

Ken Burns has a documentary about Leonardo da Vinci and two things in it really struck me about the master. First, as he evolved as an artist he stopped believing that edges had a place in painting. When you look at his later paintings, nothing is sharply distinct from its surroundings.

And the second thing is he rarely finished paintings. You might think this was because he had a short attention span. Maybe, but I think he realized nature never finishes things. Everything is evolving in every moment and an image or idea is just a capture of that moment of change.

Why am I writing this in a newsletter about politics? The answer is simple and incredibly complex. Things look very bad right now, but when people think they have control because they hold power, they are ignoring the nature of life itself. Trying to force a present that obeys your will is futile. Ask Adolph Hitler, lying with a bullet in his head, next to the mistress he just married who is dead by poison, in a bunker under a city being systematically destroyed, at the end of his ‘thousand year Reich’ that lasted 13 years.

A lesson our fearless leaders have chosen to ignore, if they ever had a clue.

Cluelessness will be the downfall of these people. Da Vinci never assumed he knew something based on a theory. He speculated endlessly on paper, but he did not assume that because he was a genius, his theories would work in practice.

But I believe he had a very strong sense of how interconnected everything is, in unexpected ways. And in politics, your actions may result in things going completely haywire, especially when those actions are random, unplanned and based on whims rather than any plan.

Now, I am not suggesting the Trump people have anything more than theories, but they are assuming those theories will work with no evidence that is true. Unfortunately a lot of damage is being done in the name of nutty junk theory. But nothing in history suggests they will work and we are seeing cracks opening all over.

The reality of this administration, just three months into its existence, is that nothing they are doing is working and virtually everything they are doing is illegal. That does not look like a formula for success despite the detailed planning spelled out in their guidebook, the Project 2025 plan.

That tome allegedly was designed to drastically downsize the government and purge anything they saw as ‘woke’ or the result of DEI initiatives from our society. But the reality is that it is a plan to recreate a white, male suprematist society. But there is something the planners did not reckon with.

That is the unbelievable incompetence and willful ignorance of the man tasked with implementing it, Donald Trump. The first sign of that were his choices for his leadership team, choices made not because they are competent but only because they are fawning loyalists.

Add in another factor they did not see coming, the bizarre influence and the actions of Elon Musk who came in with a group of arrogant kids and started creating mayhem across the government, destroying many critical functions needed to manage a huge country and economy.

But the biggest fail has been Donald Trump’s steadfast belief that tariffs are some kind of miracle tool to supercharge the economy. He is so certain he is right that he is not taking the advice of his own counselors and simply shooting from the hip, often unexpectedly. And the results are just what you would expect, economic chaos.

That chaos has resulted in an entirely unnecessary global trade war, paralyzing uncertainty, and an economy that is practically designed to tank, sinking us into a depression or worse. Trump may smile and proclaim success but there is zero evidence of any whatsoever and people are starting to realize he has no clue and has devolved into the psychopathic narcissist he has always been.

Yet he seems to have the ability to strike terrible fear into his own party despite there being no evidence of that ability, other than the threats made by his rabid core supporters. Those threats have exposed what many of us suspected, that our elected officials are only interested in themselves and have little of the respect for our democracy we expect.

You’ll note that I am not separating Democrats from Republicans in this indictment. There are exceptions on both sides and we can hope more come forward to stop this madness. Signs of this are appearing. One of Trump’s threats to his own party was the combination of primarying anyone who threatens his rule and using Musk’s money to crush them in the upcoming elections.

But that money comes with Musk and in his first attempt to sway an important election in Wisconsin he failed miserably, despite throwing $20 million into the attempt. It became a referendum on Musk himself and showed that even the deepest pockets on the planet could not buy an election.

Not coincidentally, Musk quickly dropped out of sight, began defying Trump’s tariff scheme, and shifted his attention away from his government destruction and on to other things, all while trading insults with Trump’s closest allies.

To me, that loss in Wisconsin was the true starting point of the resistance we are seeing unfold. It is also the point where Trump tried to shift all attention to immigration and deportation, the issue he sees as his winning one but he has done it in the most contentious way possible, essentially trying to create a police state.

As a result, even his most popular issue is beginning to scare people, regular people who were often his most fervent supporters. If that is true, the issue he is trying to avoid, prices and inflation, will get pushed into the forefront. Those issues are ones we all confront every day and they make people mad. And they are not partisan issues, they piss everyone off.

Da Vinci was a genius because he focused on the things he was good at and, in his case, there were many. Donald Trump focuses on the things that bring him attention but he is not good at any of them. It’s really quite remarkable when you look at his track record so far. He has signed no laws, has broken nearly every law he encounters, is already losing his people to infighting in the White House, and is now seeing his strongest issue turn against him.

How long can this go on? He may try to declare martial law but that would require the support of the entire military establishment and right now the Pentagon is in chaos with many starting to rebel against Trump Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as he blunders his way through the china shop.

My money is on Hegseth being the first head to roll, given his mind boggling lack of concern for security while at the head of the world’s largest military by far.

I’m going to stop here, though there are endless additional examples of just how incompetent this entire enterprise is. That incompetence is our greatest hope, possibly our only hope, but it is a big one.

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Thank you,

Martin Edic