The Witness Chronicles, 6/2/25

Disgust and action

“Where Are The Incentives in Congress to Be Brave? There Aren’t Any”

Jake Tapper said it and it is devastating

My regular readers know that beyond my disgust with the Republicans under Donald Trump, there’s not much respect for Democrats either. Complaisance these days is a crime in my view. But I also know there is not a lot they can do with Trump majorities in both houses of Congress. But those majorities are razor thin.

The Big Beautiful Bill, aka the Republican budget, passed the House with one vote. That’s a frail lead, to say the least. But in Trumpworld any majority is a mandate from heaven to do anything their great leader desires. Because you know, he might do something bad to any dissenters.

The threats are dire. Trump might back another person to primary them, and pour Elon Musk’s bottomless budget into their political pockets. Except Musk is now out and Trump’s primary candidates have a dismal record, partly because they are often extremist and incompetent ideologues. Despite Trump being the embodiment of that description, his voters have not been very tolerant of others that extreme.

If you do the math, Trump’s actual power on the Hill is far more limited, but the Democrats are not taking advantages of that. They are not taking advantage of anything, including the one power they retain, the power of public opinion. Why? They appear to be priortizing protecting their jobs over preserving the democracy.

And they are hearing about it if they dare to face their voters, loudly. The same goes for the right but they have chosen a pitiful way of dealing with voter feedback. Avoid it by not holding meetings with voters. This is known as burying their heads to the sand. If they don’t hear the anger, it does not exist.

We want action and we are not getting it. They know this but they’re paralyzed and it is not from fear of Trump, it is from fear itself. The level of sheer cowardice in this Congress is stunning.

I realize that anyone who defies Trump gets death threats to them and their families. That environment was entirely manufactured by Trump and therein lies the paradox: If you don’t fight back, the extremists keep winning and things get worse. This is not going to blow over.

What can they do? Speak out and be the voice of those angry voters, the ones booing and yelling at town meetings. Build a movement, a resistance movement that threatens their Republican colleagues at the polls next year. Talk to the more reasonable Senators and Representatives across the aisle and work to help them take the risk of voting against things they find repugnant. God knows there are enough things that fit that description.

Americans tend to like the underdogs and, in Trump’s eyes, we are all underdogs. We need to remind others that ultimately his only priority is Donald Trump and always will be. The message is simple. Donald Trump is setting himself up to be king while enriching himself as fast as he can. The examples are blatant and everywhere.

There is another potent story here that mainstream media seems to go out of its way to avoid. That is the outright white male suprematism guiding every decision coming out of the White House. The deportations, the importing of white Afrikaners with baseless claims they are being discriminated against. The ongoing destruction of women’s rights.

The list is endless yet no one in DC seems willing to point out the obvious. And no, white male supremacy is not the secret desire of the majority of Americans. We are not a Jim Crow society anymore. Ask any Gen Zer. They could care less about ethnicity, sexual orientation, or being priveleged above others by an accident of nature.

Ever wonder why Trump and his cronies are so vehemently opposed to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs? They worked. They purged an entire generation of much of the prejudices that preceded them. They did it by normalizing being different and exposing those differences to young people so they could see how inconsequential they really are.

That scares the hell out of racists like Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller. I know the type. I live in a posh urban neighborhood in a northeastern city and I know people who are afraid to set foot in that city just a few miles from where they live. They describe my neighborhood as a dangerous hellhole.

Tell that to the developers who can’t build expensive apartment buildings fast enough and who have snapped up and repurposed virtually every distressed property in our downtown. Those people who live in fear don’t even know what the place they fear looks like. They’re the ones who bought into Trump’s vision of an America on the brink of self-destruction.

That was an intentionally fabricated myth created by people who want a country where the wealthy white people live in gated communities while the rest of us fight amongst ourselves for scraps. Not exactly a visionary picture of the future and not anything resembling reality, thank God.

But once certain people get into power, it gets its grip on them and they start to become detached from reality. That, I fear, is the problem with Congress. Why rock the boat when you’ve got it made?

Every day I hear about more corruption, more flaunting of the law, more police state actions, yet I am not hearing outrage, not on the scale we need. Public opinion does matter to this President because he does not just want power, he wants adulation. His determination to be the center of a national spectacle will unfold next month in DC as he gets a big beautiful military parade on his his birthday.

That parade, estimated to cost as much as $70 million, will cause damage to DC’s streets, another estimated $16 million as massive tanks grind their way through the city in service to this man’s pitiful need for attention at any cost. In his first administration he wanted that parade but the Pentagon was still run by serious leaders who resisted his childlike demands.

Not any more. We have another overgrown child running things over there now, a bro covered in racist tattoos with a major drinking problem and a hatred of women. The new normal. Again, where is the outrage?

When historians add up the accomplishments of Trump’s first six months it will be a record of carnage and promises forgotten as soon as he made them. Of ‘deals’ that never existed, and of prominent men and women who bowed to phony power in hopes of something, something future citizens will wonder at. Because from any outside perspective, there was never anything there.

For me there is a saving grace and that is the lovely unfolding of late spring and nascent summer, the sheer lushness of it all. I find myself simply going outside to some green corner and sitting, letting all this go and just being. When I do think about it, I wonder if these people in DC or their ivory towers ever do the same?

There’s power in that, power that is missing in their world, and it is not soft power, it is true power, something our President has never known and never will. And that is a truly sad thing to say about anyone.

Information is power and sharing it is resistance.

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Martin