The Witness Chronicles, 5/6/25

Now he’s Pope of Alcatraz, or something

Pretty picture here. Photo by Studio Dekorasyon on Unsplash

There’s a Consensus Growing About Trump’s Mental Health

And it’s not good

As Donald Trump does regular interviews and makes middle of the night declarations on Truth Social, a lot of us are not just scratching our heads, we’re starting to wonder what exactly is happening in his mind, because none of it makes any sense.

We wake up in the morning and are greeted with the latest strange idea. This morning it was a wackadoodle plan to rebuild and reopen the prison on Alacatraz Island in San Francisco Bay which for years has been a dilapidated tourist attraction.

It appears that Trump wants his own El Salvador horror prison where prisoners can be held with no due process and simply disappear into his gulag; standard dictator stuff. And when asked about enforcing the law and ensuring all detainees get the due process guaranteed by the Constitution, Trump shrugged and said he did not know and referenced his lawyers.

In fact, when questioned on NBC News about every basic Constitutional right, he simply brushed the questions off as though they were a nuisance to even think about, which obviously they are as he is losing virtually every legal battle since taking office for the second time.

This laissez faire attitude towards the bedrock of the American legal system is either just a reflection of Trump’s basic laziness, or an alarming signal that he is simple abandoning any pretense of following the law, one of many signals he is sending.

And he is backed up by his Attorney General and her Justice Department, whose principal purpose is to defend the Constitution. DOJ has basically become Trump’s private law firm working outside of the law. They have basically declared war on the Judicial system, judges, and courts, claiming with no proof that there is a vast radical conspiracy against Trump.

Compounding this shameful capitulation to this demented President, it seems the defenses DOJ attorneys are writing are being excoriated by judges for their sloppiness and lack of any legal logic. One wonders if these attorneys ever consider what their actions may do to their long careers and reputations.

The only conclusion I can draw is that their long term plan is the end of the justice system as we know it and there is no looking back. So why worry about minor things like the future?

Trump’s nonstop barrage of nutty ideas, paranoia, and justifications seems to indicate a mind gone mad from egotism and that madness appears to have infected every corner of the Executive Branch. Unlike the first Trump administration, this time around there do not appear to be any voices of reason to temper this madness.

Trump purged his first administration of those reasonable advisors and apparently learned a lesson: don’t hire anyone who will question anything you say or do and if anyone shows any sign of doing so, get rid of them as fast as possible.

So, this warped reality has turned the White House into nothing more than a building full of yes men and women who have abandoned any independence or ethical center in order to serve the strange man at the center of it all, a man who very well may be mentally ill and getting worse.

And that mental illness has also infected the Republican Party in Congress, effectively paralyzing their ability to govern or serve as a check on the continuing flaunting of the law and the separation of powers. Since the election they have blocked needed legislation by either not acting or fighting among themselves.

It’s getting hard to catalog all the crazy coming out of the White House and all the hypocrisy coming out of the Republican House of Representatives. But one thing I worry about, out of many things, is whether this has already reached the point of no return? Can we undo the damage? I honestly no longer know the answer. I do know that without bipartisan outrage in Congress, we probably cannot. That is a profoundly depressing thought.

Sharing is resistance

I need to reiterate an idea I wrote about weeks ago. A lot, possibly the majority, of our neighbors and fellow citizens, are not paying enough attention to the damage being done to all of our futures by this administration and its enablers.

In many cases I believe this is because our constant exposure to information has caused many to shut down or view actual news with skepticism. Filtering out the truth if you spend too much time immersed in screens can become nearly impossible. But when you find something that resonates, makes you angry, or makes you question the actions of powerful people, what can you do?

The simple thing is you can share your concerns with others who may, for whatever reasons, not be aware of what is going on. Or don’t think it applies to them. All of the things I write about here, in my view, will directly affect all of us and we need to talk about that.

Resistance begins with dialog. The lone guy on a street corner with a sign proclaiming the end of the world will always be labeled a kook. A hundred people, regular people, with signs on the same corner will at least make people think.

But a one on one conversation, or sharing a news or opinion piece you feel strongly about, has more power and that power has a way of spreading until it has momentum and cannot be ignored. Right now we have to make that happen and simply spreading the word by sharing and discussing these issues is a good start.

Sharing here is incredibly easy. You just click a button and decide where you want to share. I only have a few thousand readers on a good day. But if a hundred of them share something I write, that multiplies my reach and that multiplication keeps going.

Honestly, that is just an example. Share the writing of others with much bigger followings and that multiplication becomes even more powerful. It might even get the attention of our sleepwalking representatives in Congress and wake them up.

We can always hope.

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Martin