The submission of the US Senate
These are historic days. Sixty-four days from now Donald Trump will take political power in America, and a great tragedy will commence.
It has already begun.
It will get much worse.
I want to show you something. This is the US Senate map for 2026:
Chuck Schumer has played checkers for the last three election cycles and lost.
He spent a total of almost $1 billion, while ceding most of the states to MAGA/Republicans.
The George Custer of the US Senate has encircled his colleagues using his arrogance, cloistered perspective and perfect SAT score as a compass. Now, they are defeated, powerless and incapable of stopping Trump’s assemblage of wack jobs for whom “diversity” means that there is room for the militia thug and the neo-Nazi, as well as the religious fraudster speaking in tongues, nihilist, conspiracy theorist, pure demagogue, purebred quisling, and just plain old-fashioned grifter.
Trump and his gang are locusts, and they are hungry. They will take as much as they can for as long as they can. Consider this: Trump’s son-in-law has taken in at least $112 million in income since 2021 from the Saudi government through his investment company.
Trump holds all the cards for now. He knows that the Republican Senate will not say no to the most unfit group of people ever nominated for high office by a president — even though they know they can, and know exactly how unfit they are. They won’t.
Trump knows this, and knows the rubber-stamp Senate will not impede his will on any issue. He can do as he wishes. After all, he has nominated:
Matt Gaetz for Attorney General
Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense
Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence
Kristi Noem for Secretary of Homeland Security
Robert F Kennedy for Secretary of Health and Human Services
He intends to smash the US government, not reform or renew it.
Four years from now what will be perfectly clear is that Trump could demolish in months what was the work of decades.
All of the cabinet nominations are awful. Each is preposterous, unqualified and disgraceful.
Tulsi Gabbard is as unqualified to be the director of National Intelligence as Kimberly Guilfoyle or Barron Trump. This is not classified information, and the way that our allies will protect themselves all over the world is to dramatically curtail intelligence-sharing with the United States because the lives of their citizens and intelligence officers will be put at risk. She is also a practicing member of Science of Identify Foundation, a cult that holds that yoga is the key to interpreting truth, which is exactly what any nation should hope for in its director of national security.
Kristi Noem is a sadist, dog killer and Corey Lewandowski’s mistress. She will soon preside over a vast and sprawling domestic law enforcement archipelago on the strength of her sycophancy, cruelty and creative gift-giving. She was the only governor to give Trump a scale model of Mt. Rushmore with his likeness on it:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is more suited for work in a petting zoo than leading HHS. Though I won’t be one of them because I know what he is, many Americans will be killed by him. This story from Samoa is a taste of what is to come.
Matt Gaetz is a moral and ethical Chernobyl, whose perversions, decadence and arrogance will be laid bare in the House Ethics Committee report that the Christian nationalist speaker of the House is trying to suppress. His service as attorney general would be a farce, a tragedy and ruinous to the US Justice Department. He will turn it into a kangaroo agency that punishes dissent, seeks retribution, investigates free speech, harasses opponents and abuses civil rights and liberties without a care in the world.
Yet, somehow, despite Tulsi Gabbard’s vapidity, RFK’s depravities, Matt Gaetz’s sexual predilections and taste for young girls, and Kristi Noem’s sociopathic cruelty, it is the 44-year-old FOX News morning TV host with white supremacist tattoos who stands like a veritable Zeus of unfitness — morally and intellectually — to lead the American military that is the most troubling. He is a hyper-partisan clown and public narcissist, Botoxed and blowdried into a plasticized version of what FOX News producers think American men look like. They don’t.
The idea that this fool would be responsible for America’s fighting men and women — their lives, families, well-being and safety — is as grave an insult towards them as Trump’s desecrations at Arlington National Cemetery.
It represents a deep unseriousness and an awful lack of responsibility from Trump towards the men and women he will soon tragically lead again as commander in chief.
It wasn’t always like this.
Once upon a time there was an era during which the American people could count on the people who led the American military to protect their sons and daughters. They could count on the judgement and rectitude of America’s five-star officers.
Take in this open letter to the American people that was printed on the cover of “Life Magazine” in 1945:
Now take a minute to appreciate Donald Trump’s pick to lead the trillion-dollar Department of Defense:
There is a truth about history and death, suffering and war. Each century of humanity has been more deadly than the last. The 20th century was by far the deadliest in human history, but the overwhelming amount of the killing took place in the first 50 years before mankind held in his hands the power of Armageddon.
The United States is burdened for the first time since secession with a political party that is utterly, fundamentally, and absolutely incapable of governing. The MAGA/GOP is a hive of corruption, madness, malice, incompetence, grift, fraud and irredeemable dishonesty. It is led by a rogues’ gallery of unfit, self-interested, proudly ignorant, and despicable cowards, who have abandoned every previously stated principle and piety with acts of servility, cowardice, arrogance, duplicity and submission.
The 15th century was deadlier than the 14th, as the 19th century was deadlier than the 18th, 17th and 16th. The momentum of human suffering and death was driven by the Industrial Revolution through the birth of the atomic age, and the dawn of an era in which mankind possessed the power to cause its own extinction and trigger its own Armageddon.
The 20th century cannot be forgotten because it was so lethal and demonstrated the savagery of which human beings are capable. It was a century of unequalled blood thirstiness and madness during which the greatest horrors and crimes ever recorded were committed.
When it ended, two nuclear powers stood at the brink of destruction for 45 long years. They fought against each other in vicious proxy wars all over the world, but the deadly momentum of warfare that killed more people in the next war than the last was held back.
Ultimately, the Soviet regime, built on the principles of totalitarianism, crumbled against the superior system led by the United States. There was even a book that proclaimed we had arrived at the “end of history.” Francis Fukuyama, its author, was celebrated and acclaimed. Today, it looks like a boast reminiscent of the arrogance of the White Star Line that played along with the hyped rhetoric that declared, “Not even God himself could sink this ship.”
The collapse of the Berlin Wall was so sudden that it took on the trappings of the miraculous during the moments of excitement, liberation and possibility.
Perhaps the most stunning achievement since its collapse might be the fact that for multiple living generations it seems like it never existed at all.
The older I get, the more I realize that next chapters are carved on the edge of forgetting what came before.
The first global war began in August of 1914.
There was no comparable event in human history to which it was comparable. It killed 16 million people, and among them were 116,000 Americans in a spasm of violence between 1917-1918.
The war destroyed the Austro-Hungarian empire, Ottoman empire, defeated and humiliated Imperial Germany, redrew the boundaries of the Middle East and Arabia and beggared the British and French empires. The horror of trench warfare and the protracted stalemate triggered a search for meaning in the cause within the democracies whose societies were being shattered by the losses. The cause became a “war to end all wars.” Nobody in the moment could imagine worse. How could they?
The next war would start slightly more than 20 years after the “war to end all wars” ended. The Second World War would kill more than 85 million people around the world.
Most historians label its beginning as September 1, 1939, and end on September 2, 1945. The truth is that the killing began in the mid 1930s with aggression by fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan. The world looked away until it was too late.
When the Second World War ended, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, a highly-decorated veteran of the First World War and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, accepted the surrender of the Japanese Empire aboard the battleship USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay at the beginning of the atomic age.
Unlike the unconditional surrender of Germany, which was done in private, the surrender of the Japanese was the most listened to global broadcast in history on that September day in 1945.
MacArthur’s comments were divided into two parts, separated by the signing of the surrender documents by the defeated Japanese representatives and victorious Allies.
Here is what he said during the first part of the ceremony:
We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored.
The issues involving divergent ideals and ideologies have been determined on the battlefields of the world, and hence are not for our discussion or debate.
Nor is it for us here to meet, representing as we do a majority of the peoples of the earth, in a spirit of distrust, malice, or hatred.
But rather it is for us, both victors and vanquished, to rise to that higher dignity which alone befits the sacred purposes we are about to serve, committing all of our peoples unreservedly to faithful compliance with the undertakings they are here formally to assume.
It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past -- a world founded upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish for freedom, tolerance, and justice.
After the surrender document was signed MacArthur delivered an address that spoke to the realities of the new era during which mankind held the power of extinction over the entire planet.
Here is what he said:
Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won...
A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war.
Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn have failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. We have had our last chance. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.
There are few words that have ever been spoken that are more profound. They should be considered at a moment when public character has been disintegrated in a vat of MAGA acid, and one of America’s two political parties has been seized by an extremist cause that combines recklessness, stupidity, malice and dishonesty into an ideology of nothing that could cost everything.
There is a simple question that deserves contemplation. Is humanity’s most deadly event in front of us or behind us? Has the centuries-long escalation of violence come to its end, or will the 21st century become the deadliest of all?
What right-minded US senator with any sense of responsibility could conceivably vote for a clownish TV character to stand at the head of a chain of command that controls the most awesome weapons ever imagined by the mind of man that could kill millions in a day — in a flash?
I have two question for the US Senate:
Are you to be Trump’s cowed Politburo?
Do you ever think about the boomers? I encourage you to read this essay that I published in August 2023:
What type of sick society would ever invest that power again in a man like Donald Trump?
Ours.
What type of broken media would pretend the powers of the office don’t exist?
Ours.
What type of Senate would vote to confirm the most unqualified people in history to positions of life and death responsibility?
Ours.
What type of people are we?
It’s a fair question.
In the end, we will know. America gets the chance to vote on its own euthanasia over and over again until there is nothing left to vote for — or no vote at all.
All Americans need to contact their Senators offices and Denounce these MISFITS! WE CAN CALL, EMAIL OR USE THEIR SOCIAL MEDIA SITES TO PUT ON THE PRESSURE EVERYONE! COMMON LET'S "GIT ER DONE!!!" THAT'S RIGHT!!!
Steve, I beg you to stop focusing on the horrendous position we are in so you can help steer us into action. I suspect all of us who subscribe are well aware of the horrendous things Trump is doing. While it's true no one can express the threats to democracy better than you, I don't need to have my anger turned up to the boiling point every day. It immobilizes me.... Just the opposite of your intention, I"m sure.