The Witness Chronicles, 5/7/25

The threat is very real, and very crazy

Photo by Lily Miller on Unsplash

You Are a Citizen of a Great Experiment That Needs Defending

Are Americans taking this for granted?

There have been times when I questioned my allegiance to my country. Vietnam was a hard test. Watergate. But nothing like this. What we are seeing eclipses any threat to our democracy. Our freedom is on the line.

If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you may know I was startled when a genealogy search revealed that my father’s family emigrated here around 1620 as religious refugees fleeing persecution in Lutheran Germany. They were Catholic. I am not but my grandmother was hardcore and stole me away from my parents as a baby and had me baptized.

My two younger siblings didn’t get that honor. My mother was Methodist and was appalled at the entire thing. Needless to say relations were tense. But that is not the point.

The point is I have a family history with this democracy, a history I know little of. But I feel incredibly defensive of this place and the freedoms it offers. I’m a citizen and even Trump and ICE can’t take that from me. Trump is only second generation American born here, so his hypocrisy regarding immigrants is a rewrite of history. No big surprise there.

But those who support him, and those who simply can’t be bothered to understand what he is doing, do not deserve the right of American citizenship, a right earned with the deaths and sacrifices of untold numbers of real patriots, not those people wearing red hats and mindlessly cheering Trump on while he destroys everything he pretends to protect.

The destruction he is pursuing is trickling down to them but denial is powerful. Eventually they will realize what is going on but it may be too late. The Trump loyalists are acting fast and breaking things in the process and that is intentional. It is confusing and distracting. Meanwhile the damage is getting worse.

But my concern right now is the slow reaction we are seeing from the average citizen. Citizenship is a right that was hard earned and requires vigilance. But I’m not certain that reality will resonate with those who see themselves as victims, a mindset Trump is counting on.

Resistance is not futile, to use a Star Trek meme. As a narcissist, Trump is still influenced by his popularity, both in polling and with those he actually respects, the billionaires and business leaders he would elevate to an oligarch class. Fortunately not all of those business leaders are on board as they watch his beserkers’ financial strategies unravel the economy.

Just as a rising sea raises all ships, a sinking economy sinks all ships equally, including those of Trump’s supporters. This is where the bizarre faith of Trump supporters defies logic, and that is his weakness. Tariffs are a disaster and he is doubling down, believing he can use them to extort the world to do his bidding.

It’s a huge miscalculation.

The easy example is Amazon. 70% of all products sold on Amazon are imported from China, which now has 145% tariffs on almost everything, including the cheap stuff we take for granted. Those tariff will cripple the company and this is where Trump starts caving to the demands of his new oligrarchs.

But it will be too late. And, compounding this, our trading partners are not taking the bait. They are holding, betting Trump will fold. A reminder: weeks after ‘Liberation Day’, not a single real deal has been signed, not one.

After claiming hundreds of deals were in the works, Trump is now saying we don’t need to negotiate because other countries will simply present us with signed deals. I think his advisors may be telling him the word ‘deals’ isn’t gaining any traction with the public because there aren’t any ‘deals’.

This tariff thing is nothing more than a Trump fantasy, an extremely dangerous one.

This is the time to put the pressure on Congress, our Congress, whose mandate is to serve the interests of the people who voted for them, and the country, not to be subservient to an out of control President. Outrage is our best weapon as citizens.

Harshly worded letters from men like Chuck Schumer are not the weapons needed in this resistance. Trump throws them in the trash without reading them. This is a reality a lot of Democrats seem to not understand. We are not being polite parliamentarians here, we are in a fight for existence.

It’s about time for all of us to understand that.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that he wants to fire twenty per cent of the senior military leadership (generals and admirals) and ten percent of all military personnel across the board. Meanwhile India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers, have started attacking each other over a terrorist attack in Kashmir.

At this point it appears that the US military has little leverage to tamp down any conflict as it appears to be in total disarray due to Hegseth’s utterly incompetent leadership. In most of the government under Trump and his devotees, the prevailing feeling is hopelessness and fear of the future.

It’s really quite remarkable how quickly Trump was able to cripple the government of the most successful nation in history. The ability of a small group of anti-government zealots to create chaos should tell us our problems have been building for years. To be exact, since the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

It would not have happened without the indifference and selfishness of too many Americans, who put their own desires above the greater good and elected the most unqualified man imaginable to lead the country, a professional grifter.

If we don’t stand up and resist, we join them and he succeeds in his quest for revenge on all of us. Revenge for what? I have no idea.

Want to help me keep this going?:

Small one time donations: Buy Me A Coffee.

Upgrade to paid to support my take on the greater political and environmental world: The Witness Chronicles (see below)

Your support means more than you can know. Thank you.

Martin