The Witness Chronicles, 6/19/25
The quaint melting pot idea, Iran yes or no, crappy pollling
We Were Taught That America Was a Melting Pot. It Still Is
Trump and Miller can claim otherwise but that is just racism
I’m a boomer and it was a lesson drilled into us at an early stage. America is a melting pot of immigrants from many countries, of many ethnicities, and religions that blended together to create a unique country. Our President almost certainly was taught that in school at a young age.
But at home he was being taught another version of reality. His father was convicted of racial discrimination in his rental properties and undoubtedly passed his bias down to his son. We know that Trump worshiped his father and we also know that father could be extremely cruel to his adoring son. Trump desperately sought admiration which may have led to his overriding narcissism.
That’s the extent of my amateur psychoanalysis and I’ll leave it at that. But the melting pot metaphor was idealism in a time when racism and intolerance were still embedded in our society. Labels like spic, mick, wop, and one for blacks we all know, were still in common use in parts of society.
By the time I was an adult you never heard the melting pot phrase anymore but we had partially achieved it in parts of the country. But the bias runs deep and it simply waited for someone to unleash it by making it acceptable among some people. Then along came Donald Trump.
As we know, his history of being openly racist was often masked with his willingness to lie without limits, including pretending he was not what he openly is these days. And it turned out he was not alone, not alone at all.
Trump’s Iran Quandary
Trump is between a rock and a hard place, aka the Israel hawks and his anti-war America First MAGA supporters. “I may do it, I may not do it”, as he said this week, are not exactly the words of a decisive leader. If this was an abstract discussion that might fly but this is a very real situation with people dying on both sides and missiles and bombs raining down on both countries.
But what it looks like is just a continuation of Trump’s unwillingness to commit to any policy or position, perhaps because he is spooked by the blowback from his fail to deliver on nearly every major campaign promise. He was very decisive during the campaign with grandiose claims of solving the world’s major problems on day one.
This is called having your words come back to bite you. The reality is that not one of those Day One claims has happened and we are many, many days past Day One. He falls back on two incredibly lame explanations, first that he was joking, and second that all these things were made harder by Joe Biden, his fallback excuse for practically everything.
The ‘I was joking’ thing is a common Trump trope when his claims come back to haunt him. I don’t know about you but that never works for me. People took those claims seriously, particularly those that promised to bring prices down. He abandoned that one on Day One, merely stating that it was hard.
As for the Biden thing, remember that in the last term everything was Hillary’s fault.
We know Donald Trump always avoids hard things and prefers to cherrypick the easiest issues, elevating them to exaggerated status to make any positive changes he can claim credit for seem more important. The reality is that Donald Trump is an extremely lazy man, preferring to hand off the hard (read: impossible) things to nuts like Stephen Miller and Elon Musk, or toadies like Treasury Secretary Bessent.
Now, two of those toadies, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard appear to be on their way out or at least shunted into the purgatory of Trump’s disfavor. Both are out of the loop on Trump’s (in)decision about bombing Iran. Considering they are supposedly key to national security planning, that should startle everyone, but incompetence is incompetence.
It’s just another example of how dysfunctional the circle around Trump is and that’s his doing. But that dysfunction has led him into the corner he is in with this choice whether to escalate war or back off. Now he is saying it could be a week more which is wildly irresponsible given the circumstances right now. He simply cannot make a decision and that will hurt him with both the America First and the Israel Hawks. Nice.
Finally, yet another word about polls. Today Politico Playbook, the daily roundup of DC scuttlebutt, cites a massive poll that shows Trump’s immigration policy rating higher than any other poll. Except, and this a big one, it was done three weeks before the events in LA. Sorry, but that is not news. Three weeks is an eternity in Trump’s Washington.
This is why I discount these things, though I know DC insiders live and die by this stuff. Just another sign of their disconnect with the rest of us.
Information is power and sharing it is resistance.
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Martin