trump

Putting the hornets back in the nest

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

Regardless of who, why, or how the Trump Iran War started, one thing is certain: we are going to be fighting it and paying for it for a long time to come.

In the first three weeks of the war, 13 US service members have lost their lives, at least four US airplanes have been destroyed, and the US has spent tens of billions of dollars on this fight. In other countries, hundreds or thousands of people have already been killed, the global energy trade has been disrupted, prices have skyrocketed, and the total cost will never be known.

Rational Americans are—quite correctly—demanding to know why President Trump felt the burning need to launch a hot war when he did, and without consultation with our allies (those same allies, by the way, of whom he is now demanding help to keep the Strait of Hormuz open). Equally important is when and how he sees this war ending: the best comment we have on that so far is that he’ll “feel it in his bones.”

And yet, his opinion of such things has proven—time and again—to be absolutely meaningless. His actions scream that he is operating according to his dreams and his view of “look at me, I’m strong and powerful,” with only barest nod at reality. But even if Donald Trump were to suddenly embrace altruistic, rational thought, and realize that we should no longer be fighting this war, that will not end it.

We’ve kicked over the hornets’ nest that was the religious dictatorship in Iran, but we have not destroyed all the hornets in it. Those with access to weapons in Iran have no reason to stop fighting, even if we do. They’ll keep threatening shipping through the Strait. They’ll keep dropping explosive-laden drones on their neighbors. They’ll keep urging their “proxies” to kill and disrupt as much as possible.

And we’re stuck with it.

Even if a new president took office next week, we’d still have to deal with the insanity launched by Donald Trump’s war of “don’t look at the Trump Epstein files.” Just as he came to office saying “no more forever wars,” such as what we did to Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 2001 terror attacks, we’ll be dealing with the Trump Iran War for years to come. Even if Congress somehow manages to cut off funding for this “excursion” of Donald Trump’s, that will only prevent us from inflicting more damage on Iran; it won’t stop the Iranians from a rampaging campaign of revenge for what we’ve done to them in the last few weeks.

So now is the time to figure out—as Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington taught us—how to get over this heavy ground as lightly as we can. I fear the only answer is indeed a land war in Asia, in which we send in thousands of ground troops to root out every last adherent of the ruling clique in Iran, and then—as we did in Japan after World War II—set up a US-run government to enable the country to eventually transition into a freedom-loving democracy. It was long and hard in Japan, but we see the results when we don’t do everything necessary: Taliban-run Afghanistan, and the headache that is still Iraq.

And this is the point where I wish I was smarter. Actually I wish our political leaders were even smarter than that, that they could figure out an easy way out of this morass Donald Trump has dumped us into. I fear there isn’t one, and the only way out is through; a long, bloody, soul-rending struggle that Trump has thrown us into for no reason but to soothe his own ego.

Trump is Pissing on the World

~ ianrandalstrock ~ 1 Comment

Donald Trump is like a dog, pissing on things to claim ownership of them.

His latest is threatening staunch American allies with tariffs if they don’t support the forceful US annexation of Greenland. “We need Greenland for security,” he says. Does that sound familiar? It should. It’s what Vladimir Putin said just before ordering Russian troops to attack Ukraine. That’s the same Ukraine war, by the way, that Donald Trump said—during the 2024 election—that he would end within 24 hours if he won the election. We’re still waiting for that.

Long ago, I wondered if Donald Trump was a stooge working for Putin. Now I realize he’s simply doing his best to emulate Putin. Indeed, Putin gets all this Trumpian love for free.

Trump’s only morality is self-aggrandizement. Everything he does as president seems to have the same goal: to put more money in his pocket, or to put his name on things. In that respect, he’s not unlike a dog, pissing on things to claim ownership. The last major US territorial acquisition was the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867. The US acquired Puerto Rico and Guam due to the Spanish–American War (in 1898; we also got the Philippines, which became an independent country in 1946). And the US purchased part of the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917.

So what happens if the US manages to “acquire” Greenland? He becomes the first president since World War II to increase the geographic size of the United States. Indeed, he also gets to claim to be the president who acquired the largest parcel of territory for the US, and if you’ve listened to any of his speeches, you know “first” and “biggest” are among his holy words. (For comparison, Alaska is about 665,000 square miles, and the Louisiana Purchase [which the US got from France in 1803] involved about 828,000 square miles, while Greenland measures about 836,000 square miles.)

Any other president would measure success in terms of national peace and prosperity; the people’s health and wealth; happiness, amity, and community. But how does Trump measure success? With crowns on his head and dollars in his pocket.

He was talking about his “Board of Peace” this week. It’s key feature? Each member has to pay $1 billion, which he as chairman gets to control. The gold decorations dripping all over the White House are not impressive; they are there to tell him he controls vast sums of wealth. But he looks at the truly wealthy—Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Elon Musk—and he feels his inferiority complex, because his wealth is not on that level. So he keeps grifting, keeps taking what he can.

The first load of Venezuelan has recently been sold, and the proceeds of that sale wound up in a Qatari bank. Why Qatar? Why not the US? Or, for that matter, why not Venezuela? Because this way, Trump has control over that money, can disburse it as he will. It has suddenly become his money.

The Trump Kennedy Center. The Trump Ballroom. The Trump Battleship. The Trump Institute of Peace. The Trump Savings Account. The Trump Special Visa for Rich People. The Trump Southern Border Boulevard in Palm Beach. His face on the National Park pass. And on, and on…

It’s time we told Donald Trump to piss off.

Edited February 6, 2026, to add this link to an article entitled “Everything Donald Trump has tried to name after himself since his White House return.’

How Donald Trump intends to stay in office beyond January 20, 2029

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

Is this all far-fetched, doom-and-gloom, dystopian theorizing? Probably. I hope certainly. Nevertheless, it is a topic of conversation which keeps cropping up, so…

I know how Donald Trump is going to attempt to stay in office beyond the end of his term. It’s Section 3 of the 20th Amendment. Section 3 talks about who shall become President or act as President (two different things) if there is no President elect or if the President elect is not qualified to serve as President. The final clause of that Section reads “the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.” In other words, if the election is somehow prevented from occurring—and despite Article II, Section 1, and Amendment 20, Section 1—I think Donald Trump’s sycophants are relying on this phrase to enable the Congress to “select” him to “act” as President “until a President or Vice President shall have qualified” (by being elected).

This revelation came while I was researching the essay I thought I was going to write, noting that, regardless of what Trump and the Trumpians try to do to the election of 2028, a lack of an incoming President does not enable the current President to remain in office.

I was going to quote Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which says the President “shall hold his office during the Term of four Years”—thus limiting the time the President serves to four years, whether a successor has been elected or not.

I was going to go on to the 12th Amendment, which says “…no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.” Thus preventing the President from becoming Vice President, only to succeed to the Presidency with the removal of the new President.

Then comes the first Section of the 20th Amendment: “The terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.” Repeating and emphasizing the Article II quote above: the President’s term ends, regardless of whether or not there is a successor waiting.

And, of course, the first Section of the 22nd Amendment: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

But then I stumbled upon Section 3 of the 20th Amendment, as I said above. That’s the “well, there may be a way around the Constitution” that the most ardent Trumpians have been hinting at. It’s fairly simple, if we assume they can somehow prevent the next Presidential election. And one doesn’t have to be too creative to figure out ways to do that: declare a state of emergency, ban gatherings “for public safety” during the first week in November, so that an election cannot be held (that’s why they keep pushing to get rid of mail-in ballots and early voting; so that there will be no ballots to count). Or, perhaps easier, would be to look at the fifth paragraph of Article II, Section 1: “The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.” Such an emergency declaration could simply prevent the Electors from gathering to cast their votes in December. No electoral votes, therefore nothing to count on January 6, and no President elect. Blocking that, rather than the general election, would mean that there would still be a new Congress elected who would then be charged with selecting that person who shall act as President.

Therefore, Congress needs to adopt a new law, by a veto-proof margin, saying “No person who is ineligible to be elected President may act as President.”

We Are the Frog

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

I’m starting to feel like the frog in the slowly heating pot of water.

National Guard troops patrolling Los Angeles. A judge just ruled it’s a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, but that ruling doesn’t change much.

The military take-over of the federal district. “Crime is out of control,” according to the White House, though the city’s administration says those figures are a lie. No matter who’s right, we’re becoming inured to seeing troops in the streets.

Talk of next sending the troops into Chicago or some other major city. We’ll survive that, won’t we? After all, New Yorkers have gotten used to heavily armed people in fatigues at major events and gatherings. Those troops may not have chosen to be here, but we still have to thank them for their service.

Pair that increasing military presence at home with the spate of national emergencies the president is in love with declaring: the national emergency over immigration that the administration is using to justify increasing number of deportations. And the national emergency over international trade that was the justification for illegally imposed tariffs. And now there’s talk of the president declaring a national emergency over housing, because people in their 20s and 30s can’t afford to buy houses, because not enough new houses are being built.

Add in the president’s continual whining about that elections aren’t “secure,” that we can’t trust the mail-in paper ballots, or the electronic voting machines, or any other facet of the system, and that the federal government is going to have to take over the machinery of elections, just to ensure that they’re fair.

Do you see where this is going? This is all in the first seven months of this presidential administration. We are being inculcated to the steady stream of major emergencies demanding extraordinary governmental intervention. We are being taught to distrust the institutions of free and open government that have served us so well for two centuries. And we are growing desensitized to the elements of control such as the Army patrolling our cities.

It isn’t very much of a leap of reasoning to imagine we’ll be told we have to respond to some emergency in the summer of 2028, while the government is trying to make our electoral system “safe,” which will require a delay in election day, perhaps “just a few months.”

I think we’re in trouble. I feel the temperature of this water rising, but will we be smart enough to turn off the gas before it starts boiling?

Don’t do as I did

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

President Trump on Monday tweeted about his dismissal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. His “reasoning” is that he claims Cook made false statements on mortgage documents, which was evidence of “gross negligence” and “potentially criminal.”

The evidence he is basing this decision on? Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi accusing Cook of taking out mortgages for homes in Michigan and Georgia in 2021, and telling banks in both cases that she planned to use the homes as her primary residences. Pulte alleges that was a fraudulent attempt to gain more favorable lending terms. Cook has not been convicted of anything, not even been indicted. But Caesar’s wife must be above reproach.

Sound familiar?

In the case commonly known as New York v Trump (2023–2024), the judge ruled that “In order to borrow more and at lower rates, defendants submitted blatantly false financial data to the accountants, resulting in fraudulent financial statements.”

The pot calling the kettle back? It takes one to know one? The crime he’s accusing Cook of committing is the smaller version of the crime of which he was convicted. He says it’s a disqualifying crime (mind you, the accusation; there has been no trial) to serve on the Fed’s Board of Governors, but that the much larger version (which was adjudicated) is not disqualifying for him to serve as president.

I’m embarrassed that he’s the president, and I’m scared of what he’ll do next.

Trump says he’s fired Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook

People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Allen Weisselberg, Jeffrey McConney, The Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, The Trump Organization, Inc., Trump Organization LLC, DJT Holdings LLC, DJT Holdings Managing Member, Trump Endeavor 12 LLC, 401 North Wabash Venture LLC, Trump Old Post Office LLC, 40 Wall Street LLC, Seven Springs LLC

Two weeks, never: whatever

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

Donald Trump left the G7 summit in Canada early, “because he needed to be close to his advisors in the White House, to decide on our course of action with regard to Israel and Iran.” But once he got home, he decided to maybe make a decision… in two weeks. Honestly, no one should have expected anything sooner, because the only things he acts on today are the internal culture wars he keeps fighting. Real policy decision, things of global import, those are the things that are always “in two weeks,” because he doesn’t want the blame for actually doing something. Remember “I’ll end the war in Ukraine on day one”? Remember “I’ll negotiate trade deals with every country in the world”? Remember “we’ll take over the Gaza Strip and turn it into a tourist destination”? Remember “we need to take over Canada, or Greenland”?

As Jen Psaki very clearly lays out in this segment, “two weeks” is Donald Trump’s version of “I talk big, but I’m not actually going to do anything, and you’ll forget about it.” He’s been “two weeks”ing us since he took office the first time.

I’ve been thinking about his two weeks, and comparing it to Ben Bova’s story “Crisis of the Month.” In Bova’s story, the heads of the news media get together when they realize the public’s attention span for any story peters out after a month, so they need a new story with which to entrance and enrage the public every four weeks. Bova wrote it in 1988, before the internet and the 24-hour news cycle. Apparently, Trump has learned that Bova’s one month span has dropped to two weeks or less, so that by the time his “two weeks” rolls around, we’ve already forgotten whatever it was we needed him to say or do, and we’re on to the next story.

It’s time we realized that when he says “in two weeks,” what he actually means is “I’m not doing anything. Forget it, please.” Or we could just look at his record: he’s done a great deal with executive orders, but none of it is the least bit presidential, none of it is what we elect a president for, and none of it can be taken seriously.

Edited June 21, 2025 at 21:50 EDT: Sure, the one time he decides to act in less than two weeks. Oy.

Pump-and-dump, the Trump way

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

While I’m glad President Trump wised up and paused the tariffs, I’d have been much happier if he’d canceled them outright. But the whole activity—indeed, the past week’s worth of financial news coming out of the White House—points out that we don’t have a thoughtful, considerate person sitting in the Oval Office. We have a capricious, egotistical fool. And while such a person is not normally dangerous, the fact that he’s the president of the United States gives his every utterance global import.

I have to wonder how much of his decision process was driven by a recognition of the global pain he’d caused, and how much of it was yet another misuse of governmental power for his own financial benefit. A week ago, he started a global trade war all on his own (on the flimsiest of reasons and with absolutely execrable math to justify it). He continued harping on his attacks for a week. Last night, he told us he was thrilled with how other countries were “kissing his ass” to negotiate lower tariff rates (all class, that president of ours, just not high class). And just after 9:30 this morning, he apparently truthed out [is “truthed” the word for tweeting on his proprietary Twitter competitor?] “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.” He followed it up with “BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!”

Remember, this is the only presidential candidate in a generation to not release his tax returns, and the only president in memory to not divest himself of his non-presidential businesses. Will we ever know how well he and his super-wealthy buddies did today after he “paused” the tariffs and popped the stock markets more than we’ve ever seen before?

I don’t think he knuckled under, and I don’t think he’s stupid. I think he’s an excellent grifter, and he’s just pulled off a brilliant scam for himself and his friends. For those of you not seeing it: he depressed the price of almost every stock in the US by fifteen or twenty percent, in one week, giving his cronies a great chance to buy. And today, he popped those prices back up ten percent.

He’s in the Oval Office to steal as much as he can, and he’s doing a pretty good job of it.

Democrats Can No Longer Afford Moral Purity

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I’ve said it before in a different context: when only one side is playing by the rules, they’re setting themselves up for a moral victory accompanied by a crushing actual defeat.

The Democratic party’s insistence on moral purity is what led them to purge their own Senator Al Franken. It’s what allowed Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat to sit vacant for ten months, while Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s was filled in ten days. And it’s what continues to cause massive headaches for those of us who actually worry about the future of the country.

Chuck Schumer was absolutely correct in his vote for the “continuing resolution” to keep the government funded: voting against it is what the Trumpians wanted. There may have been moral purity in rejecting the bill, but then what? Shut down the government? Declare moral purity by not voting for the bill? That is exactly what the Trumpians wanted.

Indeed, they’re already doing it. Look at what has happened during Trump 2.0: USAID has been shut down. NOAA has been shut down. The Department of Education is nearly shut down. They’re shutting down the government piecemeal while patriotic ex-employees file pitiable lawsuits, hoping to keep their jobs.

Not adopting Speaker Mike Johnson’s continuing resolution would have done in one fell swoop what Trump & Co. are doing slowly, department by department: it would have shut everything down.

“But then shutting down the government would have been the Republicans’ fault,” the purest of the pure cry.

“So what?” respond the rational people. “That’s what they’re doing today. That’s what they want to do.” And that appears to be what the voters asked for.

Regardless of Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s commentary, there was no pathway to negotiate a clean four-week extension. If that negotiation could have occurred, it would have happened weeks ago. But Trump’s minions in the House had no interest in doing so. They have the majority there, so they don’t need to talk to the Democrats about anything.

Had the staunch Democrats succeeded in delaying the bill and shutting down the government, the Trumpians would have been celebrating. And they would have had no reason to negotiate anything to re-open it. We would be suffering through a government shutdown that would last until the next election, all while Trump and Elon Musk determine which pieces of the government are “necessary” and which are not. They would have had the time of their lives, selling off pieces of the government to their cronies at bargain prices, while the Democrats would be mewling for negotiations to fund and re-open the government.

I disagree—vehemently—with almost every action taken by the president and his gang of thieves. I disagree with their policies, their stated goals, and their methods. But the moral purity of the Democrats is a danger we can no longer afford. Adherence to the rules is a path to victory only if both sides are playing by the rules, and if the judges of the contest care about them. November 5, 2024, showed us that a plurality of American voters don’t care about following the rules, and that saddens me. But if we’re going to save our country from the predations of Trump 2.0, we’re going to have to get dirty, get down in the mud with our foes to fight back, hard.

Was Schumer morally impure for allowing the continuing resolution to pass the Senate? Yes. But was it the right thing to do in an attempt to save the country? Also, yes.

Trump is still running… his mouth

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

Tonight, Donald Trump bloviated for an hour and 39 minutes. It was a campaign speech, it was a complaint, it was a brilliant example of verbal masturbation, Donald Trump-style. It wasn’t terribly surprising, and it wasn’t at all unifying.

It took him only eight minutes to get around to telling us that Joe Biden was “the worst president in American history.”

He gave a long list of programs he called “fraud”—which in Trump English seems to be a synonym for “programs I don’t like or disagree with”—including money for a program “in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of.” I’ve heard of it.

And he continued to threaten Panama and Greenland, saying “to enhance our national security, my administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal.” And that the canal was built for Americans, not others. He also encouraged Greenlanders to voluntarily associate with the United States, but then said “we need Greenland for international world security. And one way or another, we’re gonna get it.”

He rambled on about many other things, but frankly, there wasn’t enough new or interesting for me to bother reporting on it again.

One thought I did take away from the speech: whether he’s read the story or not, he seems to have completely embraced the idea in my story “The Necessary Enemy.” Specifically, that it takes a villain to make a hero, that we need an enemy in order to be the victor. Perhaps that’s why he’s always talking about enemies, and why he declared a variety of emergencies the day he was inaugurated. Perhaps that’s why he’s always struggling to “make America great again,” as if someone had somehow made America less. The only one making America less is Donald Trump, as he cedes our position of economic, political, and moral leadership on the world stage.

He doesn’t speak for all Americans

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

28 February 2025

Dear President Trump,

Today, I am ashamed. You sit in office as the most powerful man on the planet, but today, you used that position not to ennoble or uplift. You used it to belittle, to attack President Zelensky, a man who is the president of a smaller, weaker country. A man who was a guest in your office, seeking our help.

It was a shameful performance. A performance that—in hindsight—it appears you and your vice president have been plotting for the last several weeks. The cynic in me wonders how much President Putin is paying you, to so totally upend our history of defending the weak from the predations of the strong and ruthless. Rather, it appears you would prefer to be seen as one of those strong and ruthless.

Any man who must say “I am the king” is no true king. Similarly, any person who must attack a weakling is not truly powerful, and any man who demands obeisance and then belittles is no true man. And any president who takes every opportunity to attack his predecessor is obviously not nearly as great as that predecessor.

Today, I am embarrassed to be an American. That the rest of the world might think I agree with your words and condone your actions today is abhorrent to me. Thus, I make this letter public. Your words and actions in the Oval Office were not presidential, were not the words or actions of a true president, and have brought shame to our country.

In disappointment,

Ian Randal Strock

P.S. – Looking at all the toadies thanking you for “standing up for America” (in https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/02/support-pours-in-for-president-trump-vp-vances-america-first-strength/), I have to wonder who they thought you were standing up to? Do you think Ukraine is such a threat to the United States that you have to “stand up to Zelensky”? You didn’t stand up; you attacked a much smaller and weaker country.