Entirely predictable, one year on
One year has passed since Donald Trump raised his hand and desecrated the presidential oath of office for the second time.
Three years of catastrophe lie ahead before a shattered America can throw off the yoke of Trump’s perfidy.
2026 will be the year during which the price of American folly, Democratic appeasement and the delusion of world leaders about how to deal with Trump will come to an end. What lies ahead is one of the most chaotic and dangerous years in American history.
One year from now things will be much worse.
Facing this reality is important.
The wisdom of this paradox offered by Admiral James Stockdale should be embraced by every American opposed to the Trump obscenity:
You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties. AND at the same time…You must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
We will prevail, but first America will suffer in ways most Americans have not conceived possible.
It will be brutal.
A year ago marked the beginning of a national catastrophe, which is still announcing itself day by day. Together, we have inched to the edge of an abyss and started inching towards the blackness.
A year ago, much of the media reacted to Trump’s inaugural address with muffled confusion and tepid criticisms over his radical denunciation of American values, idealism and liberty.
One thing that I didn’t see coming a year ago was Melania becoming a movie star, and getting paid $40,000,000 by Jeff Bezos to appear in her very own biopic.
Exactly one year ago today, I wrote the following after Trump’s inaugural address. I’ll let you be the judge of how it holds up:
There seems to be a bit of confusion about what the world just witnessed.
First, it was a confession of profound mental illness by the afflicted.
Second, it was a belligerent and dystopian declaration of repudiation against American values, in favor of a new manifest destiny where we will make war on small nations like Panama, and NATO allies like Denmark for territory like Greenland — where we already have military bases.
Third, it was a declaration of war against civil liberties in the United States. Trump intends to deploy the US military domestically.
Fourth, it was a signal that he intends to wage a secret war in Mexico, and carry out military strikes on Mexican territory.
Fifth, it was a political trap designed to lure Democrats into another “Pickett’s Charge” of the woke brigade that elected Trump. He baited the hook anticipating the bite.
Sixth, it was a declaration of economic illiteracy.
His tariff scheme has the potential to destabilize the US economy in ways that the media doesn’t cover and his supporters can’t comprehend.
Seventh, it was an assertion of messianic delusion.
The most chilling words EVER SPOKEN by an American president are these: “I was saved by God to make America great again.”
(For the record, there is another interpretation: maybe God sent a warning trying to tell the 78-year-old adjudicated rapist and convicted felon, whose faith is himself and his abuses his calling card, that the clock is ticking down and he should get his affairs in order.)
Eighth, it was an assertion of tried and true catnip for the collapsing corporate media.
Have no doubt that there are no small number of corporate journalists of the Amazonian persuasion, and many others, who think that the news in the speech is the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.
How long will it be until Trump goes into the map business?
Ninth, it was a performance in a theater of the absurd, scored by the Naval Academy glee club with the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Utterly atrocious and deeply ridiculous do not do justice to the birth of the American Empire and the blessings of our new gulf where many fish swim.
In the words of the great Jackie Chiles:
It’s outrageous, egregious, preposterous.
(No, not everything is about you, Laura Sanchez.)
Meritocracy?
RFK Jr.? Tulsi Gabbard? Pete Hegseth? Kash Patel?
Tenth, it was the worst presidential oratory of the modern age.
It was small, uninspiring, political and ugly. Only Donald and Melania Trump — with a little lift from the Princess Sanchez — could strip a dignified event of dignity so vividly, dramatically, and with so little effort.
The Trumps have no grace.
The Trumps are very skeevy, and that should help explain what was seen today.
Trump coin, anyone?
No?
Don’t worry. Melania has one too, and a new hat.
I think it holds up pretty well.
When I post this again a year from now, so will the new preface.
My friends, as Ulysses Grant once remarked: “There are but two parties now: traitors and patriots.”
Here’s what I wrote to one my Senators this morning. I’m copying it to every Rep and Senator from my state and probably every other I can get to: Senator,
Yesterday, the President of the United States wrote a letter to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway. That letter left no doubt about the President’s fitness for office, fitness to make decisions about tariffs, about ICE, about Venezuela, about Ukraine, about Greenland.
Now it is time for you to prove your fitness for office. It is time for every member of Congress to prove their fitness for office.
Are you up to it? World War III — or not — depends on it.
Sincerely,
And to celebrate ICE abducted a peaceful US citizen in Minnesota in the middle of the night. They drug him from his legal house in 14° weather clad only in Crocs, undershorts, and the blanket he took off his sleeping grandson.
Why? They claim to apprehend a sexual predator but only fingerprinted and photoed before returning him still wrapped in a blanket over his undershorts and crocks. A 74 year old man, living here since age 4, naturalized in 1991. If you think you won't be a target, think again.