News Round Up - Donal Trumble is President 2: Donal's Nightmare

When I was first thinking of ideas for this blog, I thought I’d do a monthly news round up. I used to like to write about the news sometimes; you know, I’d make some jokes, and then do a little pontificatin' about what I thought was going on, or what I thought folks could do about it. I was probably trying to scratch some sort of latent millennial desire to be Jon Stewart. Anyway, when I imagined doing this for Coxlandia, I was imagining doing it to how the news used to be, in the ancient days of two weeks ago. Where, yes, things certainly happened, but it seemed to be at a slow enough clip that I could basically focus on the one or two big stories and have time to formulate coherent thoughts about them.

That was then. Things have changed.

Here are some of the things that have happened since Donald Trump became President, two weeks ago:

A bill has been introduced to add Donald Trump's head to Mt. Rushmore; a bill has been introduced to eradicate the Department of Education; all references to trans people have been removed from government websites; trans people are no longer allowed to get passports with their gender on it; trans people under 19 will no longer be able to get gender affirming health care; trans people are no longer allowed in the military; references to climate change have also begun to be removed from government websites; the FBI repainted over it's generic corporate "values" mural because it was too woke; Trump has pardoned all the J6ers, though some of them have had to go back to prison for various other unsavory deeds; Elon Musk allegedly gave a Hitler salute at the inauguration; USAID is going to be completely dismantled; a squad of 20 year old computer nerds working for Elon Musk have taken over the Treasury Department and locked all federal employees out; all federal funds have been frozen; and now they've been unfrozen; an e-mail went out encouraging any federal employees to quit if they aren't gonna get with the program, folk, which may or may not involve 8 months severance pay (if you believe everyone was going to get severance pay, I have a Trump University to sell you); federal workers have been ordered to remove pronouns from their e-mails; Trump has ordered Mt. Denali and the Gulf of Mexico have been renamed to Mt. McKinley and the Gulf of America; daily ICE arrests have increased threefold; Trump has attempted to end birthright citizenship via executive order, which has been legally challenged (by my fourth favorite Survivor contestant, as a matter of fact); he's signed the Laken Riley Act; ICE agents are also now allowed to enter into previously off-limits places like schools and churches; DEI programs are under threat all over the country, with federal DEI workers placed on paid leave and some companies just deciding to end their DEI programs even though they have no actual connection to the federal government; two planes have fallen out of the fucking sky, though I guess he didn't actually have that much to do that one; crypto went up then down then up again; a bill has been introduced to abolish OSHA; Trump fired the National Labor Relations Board General Council; a bill has been introduced to allow Trump to run for a third term; they opened Guantanamo Bay back up; he's threatened to take over Greenland and the Panama canal; he put 10 percent tariffs on goods from China, and threatened 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, but then at the 11th hour they reached some kind of agreement in which they, uh, talk about how fentanyl is really bad I guess? You know, all that Canadian fentanyl. He's threatened to deport pro-Palestinian protestors. Oh, and just recently, he has said the US is going to take over the Gaza strip, which would potentially kill untold numbers of people and mire the US in more pointless conflicts, and re-amplify the damn genocide that he was SUPPOSEDLY going to get us out of (and if you believed that, I have a Trump cryptocoin to sell you).

Astute readers might notice a few patterns in here.

One thing is that this is a pretty big fucking list. Half of this stuff is shocking, or egregiously offensive, or so incredibly moronic it makes your brain cells feel like they need to start committing harakiri on themselves. Every day there's three new headlines, three new constitutional crises or human rights violations or threats to tank the entire global economy because they suddenly decided they don't like Denmark or whatever. It's exhausting, and I'm sure part of the speed of it all is intended to overwhelm people.

Number two is that a lot of these things, when followed up on, haven't actually really gone anywhere. They were going to "destroy" USAID, and now it looks like they're basically gonna fold it into the state department under Marco Rubio (I've seen speculation that they're going to end the actually useful parts and keep all the parts that function as an arm of US empire which, yeah, probably....).

At one point it seemed like they were going to get into multiple trade wars with our neighbors to the south and north... but then they reached a dramatic agreement and now it looks like they probably isn't going to happen. Birthright citizenship ending is mired in legal battles, as is the freezing of federal funding. Some of these bills are probably just not gonna go anywhere either (though if that third term one passes, we might be in the WW2 re-enactment universe, which would be verrrrrry bad), or will end up being neutered and compromised until they essentially don't mean the same thing. ICE raids are pretty bad, though that shit happened plenty under Obama and Biden too, and some of the people arrested have been released already.

Another example. Trump wanted to deport immigrants to Colombia on a military plane wearing shackles, among other dehumanizing conditions. Colombia said no, and told him they would provide their own transport for deportees (sans the shackles). Trump agreed, then claimed this as a victory over Colombia. You see, because the deportations will still happen. Except the deportations were never actually under question.

My suspicion going into this was that Donald Trump likes a lot of show and bombast, but at heart is... well, nothing really. He's a big blustering sack of empty air, malleable to whatever dipshit conservative or tech bro happens to be able to flatter his ego at that particular moment. But he likes to throw his weight around and get symbolic victories. This does seem to confirm that some of that suspicion is still true.

The third is that to the extent that he and his goons are doing something that isn't just completely meaningless and symbolic, it's either hateful and cruel (effectively trying to expel trans people from society), or it seems to be essentially an attempt to apply right wing "shock" economics to the US. For those who don’t know, that's a form of right wing economic policy where you essentially wait for an economy to break, such as in a big disaster, or you break it yourself, such as in a war. Then in the resulting chaos, you can do things like privatize services that used to be performed by the government, resulting in a big pay-off to giant corporations. This is usually the kind of shit the US does to other countries.

None of this is good, it is in fact all bad, but I do think it's worth keeping a clear head (easier said than done, I know; with the tariff stuff I was about ready to cash in my IRA for a bunker and 700 cans of refried beans). But I think it is going to be vital that we keep our eyes and hearts and heads as clear and sober as possible, which I plan to do just as soon as I finish drinking this entire bottle of port wine and then screaming for an hour into a paper bag.