Category History

Things I think that I think you should think too

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

It isn’t any wonder that people are confused, thanks to the ongoing gratuitous lying of TFG, and the lazy characterizations of and headlines about the news of the day. There are so many examples from which to choose, here’s a recent one that’s got me annoyed.

Five years ago amid the protests over the murder of George Floyd there came a movement to end the tributes being paid to those who committed treason by taking up arms against the United States of America during the Civil War. This started with opposition to statues and other monuments to the memory of Confederate war “heroes” across the country — mainly in the states of the former Confederacy, of course — and grew to reconsidering the naming of a number of U.S. military installations, vessels and related facilities which honored the likes of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, the Battle of Chancellorsville and many more. (I wrote about my experience in this matter ten years ago.) Over the veto of President TFG, Congress created what was known as the Naming Commission — known in that way because its full name, I swear to God, was The Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America — with the mandate “to create a list of military assets with names associated with the Confederate States of America and recommendations for their removal.” In January 2023 the Department of Defense leadership ordered the Pentagon bureaucracy to execute the commission’s recommended name changes.

The changes themselves generated protests. Some, like a retired Army lieutenant colonel of my acquaintance, objected to the mothballing of the familiar names of places that they felt had created their own important history, despite the character of the men for whom they were named; I get that. But the real disheartening response was from the very many people who disagreed with ending the veneration of heroes of the Lost Cause, or who dishonestly argued that the change was meant to “change history.” No, the change was meant to stop honoring people who were never worthy of the honor, people who in fact were enemies of America.

Now, along comes a president who has clearly demonstrated, over and over again in the first five months of his second term in office, that he doesn’t believe any laws or other actions of the United States Congress apply to him — a position the Supreme Court has given him some reason to believe. He also (mistakenly) believes himself the cleverest little boy in class, and of course he lies as easily and as routinely as he breathes. In a speech this week, which prompted a renewal of concerns about his improper politicization of the U.S. military, he said “he would restore the names of all Army bases that were named for Confederate generals but were ordered changed by Congress in the waning days of his first administration.” Except, of course, he isn’t doing that at all.

In a statement, the Army said it would “take immediate action” to restore the old names of the bases originally honoring Confederates, but the base names would instead honor other American soldiers with similar names and initials.

For example, Fort Eisenhower in Georgia, honoring President Dwight D. Eisenhower — who led the D-Day landings during World War II — would revert to the name Fort Gordon, once honoring John Brown Gordon, the Confederate slave owner and suspected Ku Klux Klan member. This time around, however, the Army said the base would instead honor Master Sgt. Gary Gordon, who fought in the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia.

The Army is acknowledging reality here, stating that the “new” names just so happen to match the previous names but actually honor other people and not the Confederates who are no relation to the new honorees.

Mr. Trump, however, contradicted that explanation in his announcement, at one point saying that the Army would be “restoring” the name of one Army base in Virginia — Fort Gregg-Adams — to “Fort Robert E. Lee,” previously named for the commander of the Confederate army. The Army said in its statement that the base would be renamed to honor Pvt. Fitz Lee, a member of the all-Black Buffalo Soldiers who was awarded a Medal of Honor after serving in the Spanish-American War.

The president lied, contradicting his own Pentagon. He did it, I believe, to curry favor with those people who didn’t want the names of the traitors removed from the bases in the first place, by telling them he was undoing what Congress and the Biden Administration had done. This is just a late example of something I’ve said about him for years: he will say anything, whatever he wants to be true in that moment, with no regard for its actual truth or even if it contradicts something he himself said previously. None of that matters to him. When it comes to anything he says, I find it helpful to remember, as was suggested some years ago (sorry, can’t remember by who), that he’s behaving as he always has: he’s a real estate developer hyping his latest project, and all that matters is closing the deal.

What I also find so very annoying in this case is how The New York Times presented the story I quoted from just now: the headline is “Trump Says Army Bases Will Revert to Confederate Names” and the subhead is “The move would reverse a yearslong effort to remove names and symbols honoring the Confederacy from the military.” Not “President Pulls a Fast One, Tricks Gullible Followers Into Thinking He Stood Up To The Woke Mob And Returned Glory To White Supremacists” followed by “Bait-and-switch inserts new honorees with same names as dishonored Confederates to make MAGA mob think they beat the libs again.”

I know that everyone gets it, intellectually, that our president is full of it. We all knew that last November, but he won anyway. Still, how come we seem to have to relearn the lesson day after day after day? I believe most people, including me, still start by hearing “the president” say something and think, hmm, that’s interesting, or terrific, or stupid or illegal, but our default reaction to Trump anytime his lips are moving should be, no, that’s not right. Honest reporters of the news do a pretty good job pointing out his “errors” but they must respond to such a tsunami of crap that the constant corrections can blend into the background noise.

On a related issue, I think it’s just wrong that anyone credit Trump himself for coming up with the ideas for the many rotten things being done by our government in his name. He’s not stupid, but he’s not educated enough about how the government works to have figured out how to short-circuit it, to sabotage it, to subvert our national ethos. Those ideas are coming from the smart, educated, devious and subversive supplicants in MAGA nation and the Christian nationalist world who are and have been using Trump as a figurehead to undermine our democracy and turn (or return) America into the nation of white Christians they believe it was and should be again. Maybe we can talk more about that another day.

Petard, hoist away

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Clown-show fascism describes a regime marked simultaneously by hubristic and defiant assaults on the democratic and constitutional order on the one hand and, on the other, a nearly laughable incompetence in just about every other area of the regime’s activity.

Michael Tomasky, The New Republic, April 28, 2025

We can disagree about the goals of any president. In the before times, we all had some point of departure with what every president wanted to do. It was expected, frankly: any honest observer of and thinker about political issues disagreed with the current administration on something, even when it was a president you had voted for (or even a president you worked for!). That’s one reason why the slavish, Stepford Wives-ish acceptance of every grunt and string of incipid cliches out of TFG by MAGA nation is so hard for me to accept.

But whether or not we agree with the goals of a president, or the means by which he or she tries to accomplish them, we all should demand a president who respects the Constitution and the laws and who doesn’t make things worse while trying to implement his plans. And, as is the case with this president, is not blatantly using his office to enrich himself in so many ways “like you’ve never seen before.” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank makes a strong case that “Across the executive branch, in agency after agency, it’s amateur hour under the Trump administration.” The unnerving of the world economy; the chaos at the Pentagon; the threat to Harvard that was sent by mistake; the deportation that was a mistake but we’re powerless to correct it so shut up you federal judges; the firing of thousands of government workers with no plan to pick up the workload — all these and more, and the cruelty inherent in so much of it, have made the whole world nervous about what he might do next.

And let’s not forget the hypocrisy so prominently displayed but never acknowledged at almost every step. Most obvious, at least to me, is the mountain of executive orders. Has this president even tried to get Congress to pass laws to do what he wants? (A Congress he controls, by the way.) I don’t think so. Many self-described conservatives have for years railed any time a Democratic executive implements policies through executive order, screaming about the abuse of power. In this case, both before and during his first term of office, the man who threw a clot over Barack Obama’s use of executive orders

“The country wasn’t based on executive orders,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign stop in February 2016. “Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can’t even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It’s a basic disaster. You can’t do it.”

has proudly done the same thing, but to a greater extent: Fox News reports (yes, that Fox News) that Trump has signed 135 executive orders so far in his second term, smashing the previous record of 99 by Franklin Roosevelt as he began implementing the New Deal. Trump doesn’t want to govern America, he wants to rule it. He wants to issue orders, edicts, diktats, whims-on-paper, and have his wishes carried out…no need to bother the Legislative Branch. (Don’t get me started on Congress’ abdication of its responsibilities.)

Will we get to a point where those who’ve drunk Trump’s Kool-Aid start to see the real world? Maybe: current polling indicates Trump’s approval rating at the end of his first 100 days — 39% — is lower than any president in 80 years, even beating his own record from 2017. Strong majorities believe his economic policies will cause a recession soon, that his administration is trying to avoid complying with court orders, doesn’t respect the rule of law and is going too far to expand presidential powers. As should be expected, “83% of Republicans said they approve of Trump’s work in office, while 93% of Democrats and 60% of independents said they disapprove.” Also to be expected, Trump’s reaction to his poor showing in the polls is to…call for an investigation of the pollsters for election fraud. (Election fraud? There’s no election.) Remember, nothing bad is ever his fault, there’s always some bad person trying to hurt him. So unfair.

What are we to do? Well, you know me — always looking for the positive. I found some in this column in The Guardian in which the foreign affairs commentator Simon Tisdall expresses confidence that Trump will fall victim to himself. (Remember: “I alone can fix it.”)

Policy failures and personal misconduct do not usually collapse a presidency. The US constitution is inflexible: incompetence is protected; cupidity has a fixed term. Trump is in power until 2029 unless impeached – third time lucky? – for “high crimes and misdemeanors”, or else deemed unfit under section 4 of the 25th amendment.

(snip)

This fight has moral and ethical aspects, too – and, given this is the US, prayer is a powerful weapon in the hands of those who would slay evil-doers. Of the seven deadly sins – vainglory or pride, greed or covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth – Trump is comprehensively, mortally guilty. In Isaiah (13,11), the Lord gives fair warning: “I will put an end to the pride of the arrogant and humiliate the insolence of tyrants.” God knows, maybe he’ll listen. Miracles do happen.

Of all the tools in the tyrant-toppling toolbox, none are so potentially decisive as those supplied by Trump’s own stupidity. Most people understand how worthless a surrender monkey “peace deal” is that rewards Putin and betrays Ukraine. Does Trump seriously believe his support for mass murder in Gaza, threats to attack Iran and reckless bombing of Yemen will end the Middle East conflict and win him a Nobel peace prize?

And then there’s his greed – the blatant, shameless money-grubbing that has already brought accusations of insider trading, oligarchic kleptocracy, and myriad conflicts of interest unpoliced by the 17 government oversight watchdogs Trump capriciously fired. His relatives and businesses are again pursuing foreign sweetheart deals. Corruption on this scale cannot pass unchallenged indefinitely. Avarice alone may be Trump’s undoing.

All this points to one conclusion: as a tyrant, let alone as president, Trump is actually pretty useless – and as his failures, frustrations and fantasies multiply, he will grow ever more dangerously unstable. Trump’s biggest enemy is Trump. Those who would save the US and themselves – at home and abroad – must employ all democratic means to contain, deter, defang and depose him. But right now, the best, brightest hope is that, drowning in hubris, Trump will destroy himself.

So keep a good thought. Meanwhile, we’ll have to put up with one of the most annoying aspects of anything that has to do with you know who: his insistence on being the center of attention in all things. As Tomasky puts it today in The New Republic:

Even the gross incompetencies take us into treacherous territory because they contribute to making this all about one man, the man who must be in front of the cameras every day. He doesn’t have policies so much as he has urges, which he must announce to the world on a constant basis in a desperate plea that we keep him front of mind at all times. Some of those urges are cruel; some of them are a joke. What unites them is that they make the story entirely about him.

That is not how it’s supposed to work in democracies. Which we still are, for now, as we reach this 100-day mark. Only 1,361 to go.

It ain’t over unless we let it be

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

The tariff fetishist is starting a trade war with our friends and our foes, and it’s going to mean higher prices for you and me, just as predicted by all sane economists. But he says he “couldn’t care less.”

The leader of the free world is trashing his country’s friendly relations with neighbors and threatening a new era of manifest destiny that is forcing some world leaders to publicly acknowledge they cannot trust America to be a loyal friend and ally. (But TFG suddenly changes his tune when one of them calls him on it.)

The chief of the executive branch of government authorized what amounts to a group of consultants to fire government employees and carry out cuts to government budgets, none of which has been authorized by the legislative branch which is suddenly incapable of protecting its own lawful perogatives. The action is sloppily conceived and largely illegal, and being sold to the public as fulfillment of a campaign promise to lower the cost of government…with hopes it will also clear financial objections to a planned upcoming extension of tax cuts for wealthy Americans. (And today he attacked unions representing federal employees.)

The champion of law and order is allowing the illegal kidnapping of people from American streets and having them held in secret, people whose “crime” was lawfully expressing an opinion contrary to the president’s or appearing to be an undesirable. And the guy who has never shut up about the alleged “weaponization” of the U.S. Justice Department by his political enemies to persecute him has installed an acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia who is accused of threatening his political opponents and supports the president’s ludicrous calls to impeach judges who rule against questionable Trump policies. And, the president has brazenly used government authority to intimidate lawyers and law firms from daring to oppose his actions or represent anyone who does. Or who has at any time in the past. (The highly-respected conservative jurist Michael Luttig believes Trump will ultimately lose his legal fight against the courts; long-time federal trial attorney and columnist Sabrina Haake hopes the chief justice gets a chance to get specific about what presidential actions don’t qualify for immunity.)

The man who harshly criticized a previous president’s use of executive orders as a “power grab” is doing all this through an unprecedented wave of executive orders that is apparently not a power grab at all. Dan Balz sees it as evidence of Trump’s desire to rule rather than to govern: he can’t be bothered waiting for a Congress (that is already controlled by the party he controls) to pass laws when he can act as king and simply issue edicts.

Is all of this part of the MAGA plan? Is all of this what those Americans wanted to have happen, or expected to happen, when they re-elected him? For many of us who did not vote for him, there is a tendency to feel some level of helplessness, which I think is at least part of the administration’s intent with the non-stop pace of activity. But Timothy Noah reminds us that we don’t have to give up.

Surveying this Boschian hellscape, many good people will despair. Yes, Trump is much more dangerous than he was during his first term (which was harrowing enough). He’s more giddily reckless about impounding funds, shutting down agencies, disobeying court orders, and using the government to punish political enemies. But if you allow yourself to tune out this ugliness, you might as well have voted for the man. The president is counting on such demoralization.

(snip)

How can ordinary citizens fight back? To scout the best approaches, I canvassed activists, lawyers, scholars, politicians, and union leaders for advice. Some of what they suggest will lie beyond your abilities, expertise, financial resources, or sense of personal safety—in which case, choose something you can do. Just about everyone I spoke to emphasized that there is no silver bullet—no single arena, not even the courtroom, where Trump’s illegal power grab can be stopped. “There’s no messiah” who will “sweep in and make everything better,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. That’s up to you and me. The good news is there are a lot of us.

Indeed, there may be even more than we can know just yet. Because Trump isn’t careful about whose interests he acts against, Resistance 2.0 has potential to evolve into a bipartisan movement. “Successful authoritarian regimes determine what their winning coalition is,” observed Leah Greenberg, co-founder of the resistance nonprofit Indivisible, “and then they work very hard to keep that coalition together.” Trump lacks such discipline, and as a result he frequently screws over natural allies.

Trump alienates the military by installing as defense secretary Pete Hegseth, a boozer and womanizer who called an officer of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps a “jagoff” and, after he was confirmed, fired the top JAG officers in the Air Force, Army, and Navy. Trump alienates Big Pharma by installing as health and human services secretary a recovering heroin addict, womanizer, and (according to his cousin Caroline Kennedy) “predator” who less than two years ago said, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” As HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recommends treating measles with cod liver oil and letting bird flu spread unchecked through poultry flocks. Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says, “I’m not worried about inflation,” and “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” Trump, meanwhile, terrorizes Wall Street with market-killing tariffs and stray threats not to honor the national debt.

No matter who joins this fight, it won’t be won next week, or next month. Barring impeachment and removal, Trump will be president for four long years, and not even his allies expect him to become less authoritarian and kleptocratic. So pace yourself. But the sooner you join in, the more effectively we can limit the damage.

The article goes on to outline a number of ways that each of us can do something, the best each of us can, to be part of the resistance, from protests to lawsuits to just staying informed. Don’t give up: the fight isn’t over.

There you go again

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…we believed that after repeated clear demonstrations of the knowing falsity and deliberate deceptive intent of a politician’s claims, most Americans would grow tired of that politician’s attempts to mislead – and the implicit lack of respect for the voters that those attempts show – and they would turn their backs on the liar.  It was a more innocent time, one in which we never imagined that the lie was what so many Americans really wanted to believe.

Today, the official presidential firehose of lies was re-opened.  And the lies came so quickly, one false statement after another serving as bogus premises upon which to build an even bigger lie.  A performance by surely the most treacherous, perfidious president in American history, living down to a standard he himself established and which no one (I hope!) will ever challenge.

Our friends at PolitiFact live fact-checked the inaugural address, and found among other things:

–Trump made the case for his plan to enact tariffs: “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”

Our reporting has found that most economists disagree tariffs will “enrich” Americans, and real-world examples of tariffs working that way are rare. Consumers in the tariff-levying country are on the losing end of the deals through higher prices, they said.

–Trump criticized the Biden administration’s response to natural disasters, including Hurricane Helene in North Carolina in 2024 and the Los Angeles fires that started this month.

“Our country can no longer deliver basic services in times of emergency, as recently shown by the wonderful people of North Carolina,” referring to Hurricane Helene, Trump said. Trump added, “or more recently, Los Angeles, where we are watching fires still tragically burn from weeks ago without even a token of defense.”

The Biden administration provided federal funding for both disasters.

–Trump repeated the campaign claim that people “from prisons and mental institutions … illegally entered our country from all over the world.”

Pants on Fire. There is no evidence that countries are emptying their prisons, or that mental institutions are sending people to illegally migrate to the U.S.

–Trump, who repeated his goal of taking back control of the Panama Canal, misled about the canal’s operations.

“And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal,” Trump said.

That’s false.

The Republic of Panama has owned and administered the Panama Canal since Dec. 31, 1999, when Panama took over full operation.

Panama Canal Authority, an autonomous government entity, governed by an 11-member board of directors manages the waterway.

China does have influence in the canal.Three defense experts who carried out fieldwork in Panama — Carla Martinez Machain of the University at Buffalo, Michael A. Allen of Boise State University and Michael E. Flynn of Kansas State University — wrote in a Jan. 13 article that Trump’s Dec. 25 claim that Chinese soldiers are operating the canal was false. However, the experts wrote that Chinese companies do have a stake in the waterway.

Check out the site for more, including something I just discovered: the MAGA-Meter, where they plan to concentrate research on the new Administration’s progress in keeping campaign promises.  PolitiFact, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker and CNN’s Daniel Dale have led the charge to hold Trump to account; I applaud their work, and refer to them regularly.

But even their effort to relentlessly chronicle what is and is not true wasn’t enough to get the scales to fall from the eyes of enough Americans to prevent this new assault on truth.  OK, America, don’t say you weren’t warned.  We are about to get what we asked for.

EDITOR’S NOTE: And as my gift, this free link to the Washington Post’s fact check on the second Trump inaugural.  (Hint, it finds even more of what you’d expect!)

In the matter of the new-but-same-old president, I have a few thoughts; let the sharing begin

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Presidential inaugurations are historic moments. I watch them all, even when it is a president I didn’t vote for, and I’ll watch this one, too. Here are a few things I’ll be thinking about.

The man who will take the oath of office as president of the United States this Monday has the support of only one-third of Americans who were eligible to vote in the last election.  The other two-thirds either voted for someone else (most of them for Kamala Harris) or didn’t vote at all.  According to data gathered by the University of Florida Election Lab, and neatly organized for even easier reading here on Wikipedia, the 156.3 million Americans who voted in November are less than 64% of all those Americans who were eligible to vote in that election.  The majority of citizens who did cast ballots, 77.3 million, voted for Donald Trump; that number of people is only 31.59% of the Americans who were eligible to vote in that election.  To Trump’s credit, there have been only three winners of presidential elections since 1980 (the period covered by this research) who got a higher percentage of votes from among all those eligible: Joe Biden in 2020 (33.78%, from 81.2 million voters), Barack Obama in 2008 (32.58%, 69.4 million votes) and Ronald Reagan in 1984 (32.47%, 54.4 million voters).

The hardest truth, I think, is this: 88.3 million Americans who were eligible to vote…didn’t.  Put another way, of those who had the right and privilege to participate in their own governance, 36% did not…either could not vote for some reason, or could not be bothered to.  That’s more than who voted for Trump, more than who voted for Harris.  Even though that is still the second-best participation rate in the period studied, trailing only the 2020 election.

Some of the youngest folks who voted this past November would have been as young as 10 when Trump was elected the first time, so they wouldn’t have been paying attention to the 2016 campaign or maybe remember some of those highlights. I found this handy reminder list on Twitter, and share it here as a public service.

Although the announcement came from TFG (now meaning “the felon guy” rather than “the former guy”), I do not believe for one instant that the man who eight years ago lied about the crowd size at his first inauguration to protect his fragile ego is the same guy who now made the very sensible decision to bring this year’s ceremony indoors to protect people from the cold.  In fact it is the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies which plans and executes these events, and I can completely see it not taking public credit for this choice so as not to be seen as bigfooting an incoming president, especially this one.  I’m not buying that the guy who four years ago encouraged Americans to risk their safety to commit violence at the Capitol as part of his attempt to overturn an election is the same guy who is looking out for others when he says “I don’t want to see people hurt, or injured, in any way. It is dangerous conditions for the tens of thousands of Law Enforcement, First Responders, Police K9s and even horses, and hundreds of thousands of supporters that will be outside for many hours on the 20th”.  Also, I think it should be “it will be dangerous conditions” rather than it is.  And also just by the way, who taught this nitwit the rules of capitalization?

— George Conway (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2025-01-17T18:54:25.940Z

It was disheartening to see the tenuous relationship with the concept of “truth” exhibited by some of the Trump Cabinet nominees during confirmation hearings.  To be fair, Republicans and Democrats are just as adept as MAGA persons are when it comes to the kabuki dance of non-answer answers to pointed questions, finding it a preferred alternative to perjury.  I accept the validity of politely refusing to provide a speculative answer to a hypothetical, or for judicial nominees to refuse to express an opinion about a case that might come before them some day.  But to say, for example, that some of Pam Bondi’s responses strained credulity is to really streeeetch the definition of “strained.”  Am I really expected to believe that Bondi did not/does not know certain facts of life, as reported by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:

  • Did she hear Donald Trump’s telephone call to Georgia’s secretary of state asking him to find more votes? No, she never listened to it.
  • Did she hear Trump’s comments about prosecuting Liz Cheney? She never heard that.
  • Does she know about Trump’s pledge to prosecute Jack Smith? She does not.
  • His threat to go after Merrick Garland? No idea.
  • What does she think of Kash Patel’s much-vaunted enemies list? Oh. Did he say that on TV?
  • Patel’s threats to shutter the FBI? She doesn’t know.
  • Pardons for those convicted for the Jan. 6 insurrection? She dare not judge a matter that may come before her.
  • And did Trump lose the 2020 election? Biden is the president.
  • No really, did Trump win the 2020 election? She saw some STUFF on the ground in Pennsylvania.You have NO idea.
  • What does she know beyond a shadow of a doubt? There was a “peaceful transition” after the 2020 election.

Or her flat-out refusal to acknowledge that a part of the law is in fact a part of the law:

Padilla: Will you defend birthright citizenship as the law of the land?Bondi: I will study birthright citizenshipPadilla: You're asking to be considered for Attorney General and you still need to study the 14th Amendment of the Constitution?

— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 2025-01-15T18:29:45.201Z

I really wish that in cases like this senators would at least stand up for themselves and the prerogatives of the Senate even if they won’t call bullshit on behalf of their constituents or their country. Some day, when a nominee refuses to answer a direct question in these ways, I would love the senator to respond by saying “Thank you. The lack of candor displayed by your refusal to respond to my question, and your refusal to participate in this Constitutionally-mandated procedure in good faith, means I will not vote to confirm your nomination and I urge my colleagues to do the same. Thank you for coming.”

TikTok

— Nick Anderson – political cartoonist (@andertoon.bsky.social) 2025-01-17T22:16:24.157Z