The Witness Chronicles February 3, 2024

Is Trump bonkers? And the Republican Border failure. Sad, so sad.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Lots of nuttiness out there including the Taylor Swift conspiracy, Trump’s mad ranting, and the shameful hypocrisy of the Republican House who seem to be at war with the Senate now. Guys, you’re on the same side, remember?

---

The Crack Up, a Vast Conspiracy of Unprecedented Dimension

Or maybe he is just losing it

My favorite prediction for the 2024 election is The Crack Up, where we watch Donald Trump disintegrate into a babbling mass of paranoia and victimhood. It’s looking more and more likely every day.

He has already claimed to be the biggest victim in American history, surpassing Abraham Lincoln, who by the way was assassinated by his enemies in public and who lived through watching half the country leave the Union.

Yes, things are far worse for Mr Trump.

Then there is the Taylor Swift thing, which started when she was named Person of the Year by Time Magazine, an honor Trump always thinks should be his, because who else can be Person of the Year, ever?

As the knuckledraggers on Fox, Newsmax, and all those other media meatheads rank on Taylor, declaring her to be a part of a Pentagon psychological operation to rig the Super Bowl so she can declare her endorsement of Joe Biden after a triumphal win by the Chiefs, he claims to be more popular than Swift.

(Sorry for that ridiculously long sentence but I couldn’t get out of it)

Polling shows 50% of all Americans are Swift fans, if not diehard Swifties. That cannot be allowed.

Satire aside…wait these are actual real things that get discussed on TV as though they are real things. And the crack up of Trump is also a real thing and it’s really no wonder. Anyone would bend under the strain of maintaining his homebuilt mythology, egotism on the grandest scale.

The factors contributing to this public display of dementia are understandable. Losing his first two civil cases and facing as much as $400 million in fines, and the dissolution of his businesses, are just the start of the stress train.

How does $74 million in legal bills sound? Unlike the ambulance chaser crowd, these bozos get paid even if he loses, which he seemingly always does. Yes, he has managed a wonderful grift there by getting his followers to pay those bills with money raised to win the election. 

I guess lawyers are a little more important right now than elections, with multiple federal criminal indictments and an endless series of court appearances before Judges who are going to get sick of his mouthing off in court. 

But he can’t give up on running for President because then he would be a loser, again. And he can’t give up because of his last desperate grab at a Get Out of Jail Free card in his fantasy of pardoning himself after the election.

There are a lot of fantasies packed into that man and they ooze out in the strangest ways and places, often garbling his speech into a weird mishmash of whatever passes for thinking in Trumpland. We’re barely into February and that mishmash is getting more and more bizarre, a kind of Tourette’s Syndrome of paranoia.

It’s not hard to wonder how he sleeps at night. The internal dialog must be terrifying. What if I run out of money, what if I go to jail, what if I don’t win, what if Taylor Swift is elected?

In a related story, MSNBC commentator and former Biden White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki notes that Melania Trump’s stylist is being paid $18,000/month for strategic advice. By the Super Pacs of course. I wonder if his donors know their money is being spent on that?

What a nugget like that tells us is that he is being advised by some equally crazy folks, giving us a glimpse into the nuthouse another Trump White House would be. 

I try to avoid going off on unhinged rants like this one, but scanning the news each morning I’m seeing more and more indicators that we may be watching a man disintegrate in front of our eyes, not just a man, an ex-President.

That’s no joke. This has a distinct possibility of being real, an actual madman in the race for the most powerful position on the planet. When you consider what the real President, Joe Biden, is dealing with right now, it becomes a matter of life and death that Trump be stopped and shuffled off to somewhere quiet with cushioned walls and a daily handful of pills.

His own sanity aside, the really scary thing about this is that one of our two political parties has bought into this man’s ego trip, lock, stock, and barrel, and they are joined by millions of Americans.

It feels like some kind of mass hypnotism, not unlike Jim Jones and his koolaid-swizzling death wish cult. Remember them? They all died because he told them to.

If this continues through the coming year, and there is no sign it won’t, a lot of us are going to be desperate for something resembling normal politics, which is weird enough as it is. Wouldn’t it be nice if we did not have to see Trump’s mug sneering and glaring at the cameras every morning with our coffee? Or those weasels on Fox commiserating about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce?

One can dream.

---

Border? What Border? The New Republican Policy: Do Nothing

Blame it on Biden and hope we don’t notice their flip flop

I’ve been wanting to write about cowardice in politics, particularly Republican politics. There are plenty of examples, but this week provides a glaring one, one even cynics like me find appalling.

For the last year we have heard endless rants about the border and immigration crisis from the GOP, all targeting Biden as though he is the first President to face a challenge there. Those rants are pretty hysterical. Rapists, murderers, and drug dealers crossing by the thousands. Countries emptying their lunatic asylums and sending them here.

It’s interesting how these criminals and crazies include large numbers of families and children, children so evil that the Trump administration took them away from their parents. Some were never reunited because of chaotic or non-existent record keeping.

Oh wait, the problem was so bad before Biden that Trump had to do truly demonic things to innocents? 

The reality is that Congress and many White Houses have kicked this can down the road for decades. You can’t point to a Republican or Democrat policy that started it because the causes are far more complex. People escaping terrorist gangs, hunger, political oppression, and the desperate need for a better life, are the drivers of this river of humanity.

It is a global problem as people leave bad places to try and find good places. And we all know it is a real problem and a hard problem requiring hard choices, often involving saying no. But what these people are running from is far worse than being stopped at the border. So they keep coming.

All of this is why we have been avoiding reality at our borders for years. Add in the fact that those borders are thousands of miles long, often desolate territory nearly impossible to patrol, and definitely not possible to wall off, and you see how big this problem is.

So, the right wing this year, facing an election in which they have no accomplishments to run on, and a candidate battered by endless court appearances for alleged crimes against the nation he seeks to lead, jumped on immigration. They declared, with no basis in reality, the Joe Biden is responsible for all of it.

Then they demanded a border and immigration package that required complete closing of the borders, 100%, an impossible standard. And Biden is calling their bluff and offering his own harsh plan, just what they claimed to want.

But now that huge problem is no longer a priority for the Republicans, because their leader sent lightning bolts down and killed their resolve so he could keep shouting about it.

Biden is giving them what they want and now they don’t want it anymore. 

Watching a House of Congress and a once respected Party give up on desperately needed legislation because a politician needs an issue is a low point in our history. A stunning example of political cowardice.

But it gets even worse and, somehow, more cynical. They tied aid to Ukraine, a sovereign country fighting for its independence (sound familiar?) to getting a border bill. And now that they have decided that border bill that they asked for is no good, they are cutting off aid to an ally and helping an enemy.

This, frankly, is chickenshit politics of the lowest order. And I have not even addressed how aid to Israel, which they claim to support, is also tied up in this mess. All because their guy made it so.

This is the blame game taken to deadly levels and it can backfire spectacularly against the Republican Party and Trump, if the American people are not the idiots they seem to think we are. We aren’t, not all of us. And they are discovering that their easily manipulated MAGA base is not even close to a majority.

We want and need border security and immigration reform now, not in some undefined future. Biden clearly stated that he will immediately shut the border down when they pass the bill coming their way. Immediately.

But now they say, what’s the hurry? Why now? And if that bill dies, killed by political partisanship, they will once again remind us how much we need to do something.

They think we are all idiots and they are making that clear. How is that for serving the people and the Constitution? 

~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a place for my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free, however this is how I live and I strongly believe all writers and creatives should get paid, if we provide value. Your upgrade to a paid subscription helps make that happen. 

If you want to show support but don’t want to commit to a subscription, you can always buy me a coffee!

Believe me, it makes my day. M