America Is Living in the Trumpian Darkness Now

In the next week or so, multiple food banks in New Jersey will be having a huge grocery distribution event for furloughed and unpaid federal workers in the parking lot at MetLife Stadium, the place where the Giants lose. That's everywhere in America now. The food banks are bracing for the massive surge in need when Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits run out at the end of the month because of the government shutdown. When SNAP is gone, millions of families will face what one NJ food bank official called "No Meal November." People will starve, including kids. That's America now. Add to that the cost of health insurance as much as doubling for those in the Affordable Care Act Marketplace due to the end of tax credits that reduced premiums, and we will have many more sick and starving families very, very soon. That's America now. 

Meanwhile, in Chicago, untrained Immigration and Customs Enforcement goon squads are using tear gas to terrorize neighborhoods, including one that was about to have a children's Halloween parade this weekend. The goons are violently swarming homes and businesses and streets, all to arrest people for the misdemeanor of being in the United States without proper documentation. Chicagoans have organized so that they try to block ICE or blow whistles to warn others that they might be rounded up and torn from their families. Kids in schools are afraid their parents will be gone; parents are afraid their teenagers will be disappeared. That's America now, and it's happening everywhere, sometimes with the help of National Guard troops, and it was has the blessing and frothing encouragement of the president and the majority of Congress.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military is building up its forces in the Caribbean and off Venezuela, with an aircraft carrier carrying advanced bomber jets, ships carrying forces for land invasions, and many, many more ships, vehicles, and troops, readying for a ground and air attack on Venezuela and likely Colombia. It is, frankly, madness, and it's the prelude for what seems like an expansive view of US hegemonic power in the region, wielded violently and harshly. Apparently, Trump is going to meet with congressional leaders to tell them about his war plans when he returns from Asia, and the GOP members are fine with putting troops in harm's way because of delusions about drug cartels, regime change, and, let's face it, oil. That's America now. All this is occurring as the US continues to drone missile boats in the same seas, murdering people without charge or trial, under completely unproven suspicion of carrying drugs for cartels, as if Trump was tired of "the drug war" not being a shooting war. That's America now.

Meanwhile, the Republican-run Congress has ceded all of its constitutional authority to Trump, allowing him to do whatever he wants with funding that Congress passed, depriving states of infrastructure spending, depriving schools and institutes of research funding, depriving so many others of money they were budgeted and expecting. Trump today called himself "the speaker and the president," meaning that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is, at best, a marginalized figure, and, at worst, Trump's enthusiastic semen depository. The shutdown is happening because Republicans refuse to restore funding for Medicaid and Medicare that was cut in their savage recent bill and refuse to continue those ACA tax credits, and Democrats in the Senate won't allow a vote on those principles. But it doesn't matter, really, what funding is passed because Trump can simply cancel or redistribute funding under the broad banner of "national security" and his enthusiastic semen depository won't even squeak about it. That's authoritarianism in its purest form, when all power rests in a single dictatorial figure, and that's America now.

Meanwhile, we are waiting for myriad cases making their way through the judicial system on everything from deportations to tariffs to the extortion of universities and law firms to reach the corrupted Supreme Court. Almost certainly, the radical right-wing majority will go back to its obscenity of a decision in Trump v. United States and restate that the only actual check on a president is for the Legislative branch to impeach and remove the president and that otherwise Trump can wage lawless warfare on the American people and the world as much as he wants. And, well, the aforementioned semen depository won't budge on impeachment. That's America now.

On and on this could go, with the attacks on medical science and food safety and education and so much else, the gutting of everything that made America America, the reduction of this country to a shadow of itself in less than a year, a diminution that will continue as we face, quite literally, starvation, war, and disease. We are in dark, dark times. That needs to be acknowledged. We are in a great deal of trouble, and waiting and hoping that somehow the 2026 midterms will bring us back to the light is putting a great deal of faith in a system that hasn't been able to prevent any of this from happening so far. 

I know you're waiting for the happy part, the part where I tell you that we need to just keep marching like we did last weekend (which was absolutely a good thing), but that's not going to be enough. I don't know what the next steps are. The wealthy and powerful people who could speak up are afraid of Trump turning his government against them, afraid of his MAGA idiot hordes coming for them. Yes, there are some Democrats putting up a fight, and it's great when Democrats have decent messaging, which they often don't. But it just seems like flea farts in a hurricane. If I were to offer any idea, it would be a general strike, but I'm sure they're hoping for that so they can call it an "insurrection" and unleash the military on us. Mostly, I'm writing this to have a marker of where we are right now, to say, "This is how dark it is now. You want it darker?" (Yeah, I know, it's a Leonard Cohen line.)

Yeah, I know I haven't mentioned the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, although it's perhaps more important historically that the East Colonnade, which dates back to Thomas Jefferson, was razed. That's because, at this point, the symbolism is so thuddingly obvious that it's embarrassing. We are a shameful nation, but we are led by the brazenly shameless, and they don't care what they wreck as they turn this America into their golden ballroom where there are only those dancing and those serving the dancers as the world outside the gilded walls burns from fires they started. That's America soon.

Random Observations on a Day of Joyful Protest in a Terrible Time

1. I had to be on Staten Island on Saturday, the Trumpy borough of New York City, where a bunch of immigrants and their descendants from Ireland, Italy, Russia, Albania, and elsewhere pretend that they are more American than the newer immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Syria, Liberia, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, but I didn't want to miss out on the No Kings protest. So I headed over to the gathering outside the office of Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, in a nondescript building on a main drag. 

About 600 people were on the sidewalk, blocking a couple of parking lots, across the street from the office. With no speakers and no real organization beyond "let's meet here," it was an organic effort, with the expected well-made signs and the expected but no less delightful people in inflatable animal costumes. Goddamn, I love the inflatable costumes. It's such a gleeful, absurd fuck-you to the raging dickscabs screeching about "hate rallies" and how the left is filled with, as Trump spokesass Karoline Leavitt snarled, "Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals." Lady, we're wearing frog and unicorn outfits and dancing. Calm the fuck down. Joy and liberation are the antidotes to hate and repression.

2. I've heard and seen some complaints on the social medias along the lines of "We gathered, we made signs, we chanted. So?" Lemme see if I can explain it: Sometimes you just want to hang out with 7 million like-minded people and not feel so fucking lost and alone. Yeah, I get it. The day didn't end in a revolution. It wasn't going to. Sometimes you go to your regular bar just to have a drink with people who are like you. And sometimes you end up hooking up with some hot dude and fucking the night away. But the fact that you don't do some fucking every time you go to the bar doesn't mean you can't just like being there, drinking, talking shit, meeting old friends and new people, simply allowing yourself to say, "Okay, okay, here, right here, I feel safe and like myself and all that fucking shit going on out there, all the people who are actively trying to fuck my life up, all the assholes who make it their job to ruin everyone's day, none of it matters for the little while I'm here."

Lemme put it another way: You know how empowering it is to see that hundreds of people in Staten fuckin' Island were ready to stand outside, with the NYPD across the street, and yell at the office of a shitty member of Congress? You know how important it is in places that are even filthier with Trump-humpers, like Cookeville, Tennessee, or Gulfport, Mississippi, or Idaho Falls, Idaho (where 1200 people gathered), that anti-MAGA protesters showed up and marched or chanted? Every single time these events happen, the movement strengthens. So, yeah, it's necessary. And if you're gonna say that this was all just preaching to the choir, well, as I've said before, the choir deserves to get preached to. That's why they go to church. To be inspired and to stay inspired. 

3. The weirdest fucking response to the incredibly peaceful protests, other than the assertion that these were going to be terrorist events or whatever threatening thing the hyperbolic right huffed and puffed about, is the insistence that Trump is not a king, so it's stupid to have a "No Kings" rally. Trump himself slurred that to his favorite media garbage dumpster, Maria Bartiromo. Meghan McCain embarrassed herself in typically moronic fashion, tweeting, "I don't understand how Trump is a King when he won every single swing state, the electoral college and popular vote in a democratic election." Are they really all such dullards? They're the most literal-minded motherfuckers. Boy, yeah, you got us. Trump is not officially a "king." Now shut the fuck up and listen to all the fucking ways that he's acting like one. 

Note: Although, if he were king, it'd be hilarious to see how his terrible children try to kill each other to see who gets to be next in line.

4. Trump's response to No Kings was perhaps the closest we're gonna get to him admitting how he really feels about the people of the country he "leads." The AI video he reposted of himself in a fighter jet named "King Trump," with a crown on his head, dropping tons of non-metaphorical shit on the heads of protesters is the kind of childish idiocy that MAGA freaks masturbate to because they think they've so owned the libtards. I mean, they might be fecal freaks, but keep your kinks to yourself. 

But, god, it's just so fucking boring. Get a new fucking act, you hacks on the right. We get it. You can make little cartoons where Trump does outrageous shit. It doesn't bother us as much as it just makes you seem pathetic and worthless. Now try something really surprising. If Trump had posted how he was glad that Americans peacefully asserted their right to free speech, that would have shocked the hell out of us. We wouldn't have known how to react. Instead, he's just who he always was: a cretinous little baby-man who desperately needs people to love him, even if they are, truly, the shittiest people ever.

Trump's done us a favor. One of the things that traditional and dumb Democrats have said is that they do things like show up at White House events or congratulate Trump for his (now-failed) Gaza ceasefire out of "respect for the office" of the presidency. But Trump doesn't respect the office. And neither should anyone else, least of all those who he wants to shit on.

Note: Axios says the video shows Trump dropping "a brown substance." NBC, the New York Times, and others said it's "what appears to be feces." It's shit. Just say it's shit, you fucking babies.

Democrats Can Control the Narrative on Immigration

Two things need to be stated again and again when talking about the Trump administration's unleashing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to brutally attack immigrants, legal and undocumented, in this country. First, there is only one reason any of this is occurring, and that's because Trump is allowing it to happen. Yeah, yeah, squamous Stephen Miller is the slithering snake in Trump's ear, like Sir Hiss in that Robin Hood Disney cartoon. Ultimately, though, it's Trump's call. The other thing is, rhetorically, just as important: The only "crime" committed by most of the people being beaten and torn away and zip-tied and disappeared and warehoused in hellholes is some misdemeanor violation. Or it's a draconian crackdown on immigrants who committed some minor crime years ago and are being deported because Miller only gets an erection when at least 3000 people are rounded up a day.

In any case, ICE isn't using drones and helicopters and flash bang explosives and dozens of agents in military gear to round up murderers. If you zip-tie naked children and leave them on the sidewalk for hours, you're the bad guys. It's fucked beyond fucked, and anyone who approves this kind of action or participates in it should face prosecution while anyone who condones it should be treated like the piece of shit they are and never allowed to show their depraved faces in public again.

Democrats are starting to show some spine in talking about what bullshit these raids are. But that's not enough. Most of the time, unless it's someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrats in Congress will hedge and say that, yes, they agree something needs to be done about the border or about undocumented migrants, but not like this. That's the wrong approach. It's allowing Republicans to control the narrative about immigration, and, you know, fuck them. Fuck them hard with the spiked dildo until they're begging you to fuck them harder.

It's been that way for a long time, with Republicans freaking out about some surge in immigrants (which, yes, did happen during the first part of Joe Biden's presidency as a reaction after end of the tightened border in Trump's first term which was then closed completely during the Covid pandemic). The GOP then works in tandem with its fucking crazies in their media, social and news, which makes the public reaction seem so much larger than it actually is. And then Democrats immediately say that they can solve the problem that Republicans have brought up, which means they are playing on the GOP's home turf. It's time to set the terms of the argument and fucking ignore Republicans on it.

What I mean is that the only story that Democrats should be telling is how immigration benefits this country. That should be front and center and not enforcement. Polling on immigration is all over the fucking place, which means that there is room for new dominant narrative. I mean, the hell with saying, for instance, "Obama deported more people than Trump has" as some kind of sign that Democrats are serious about immigration. No, instead, offer example after example of how immigrants, including those who were originally undocumented, have made life better for the country. 

You know where I'd start? I'd throw Ronald Reagan's corpse at Republicans. Fuck Reagan generally, but the motherfucker actually did one or two things that weren't cruel and destructive. His 1986 amnesty for undocumented immigrants was imperfect, but it did allow for 2.7 million of them to gain legal status, with about a million eventually becoming citizens. The financial benefit of millions of people who had been living in the United States for at least five years suddenly able to fully participate in the economy was huge, from the taxes on the higher wages they were able to earn to the houses they bought to the investments they made and more. You can get specific and talk about immigrants who went from undocumented and scared to proud citizens no longer living in the shadows. Make today's GOP disown Reagan. 

It won't be easy when the GOP meat grinder accuses Democrats of open borders, but that story is getting old. That story is being supplanted by kids being torn out of the arms of parents and armed assholes slamming young women to the ground and kneeling on their necks when not just threatening to kill them. Don't take the fucking bait. When pressed on things like crimes that undocumented immigrants have committed, it's easy: offer the story of the immigrants who built businesses that employ Americans and others. Don't play their game.

Take back the story of immigration in this country. It's a beautiful one. It is who we are. It's one that everyone used to love and one that has been tarnished by the hate that Republicans demand we all have. Instead, react with the love and the lack of fucks of an anti-ICE protester in an inflatable frog costume being shot with pepper balls and then dancing, dancing, dancing, with a joy that those assholes with the guns will never understand.

Trump and Hegseth Make the World Weirder and More Dangerous

I'm not particularly sympathetic to military officers, but I had to feel a little sorry for whatever generals made the 15 hour flight from South Korea to Washington, DC, to have a pissant little TV bitch tell them that they're fat and then watch a barely awake president blather about his signature and his problem walking down stairs when he wasn't talking about how awesome it would be for troops to kill Americans in the city streets of the United States. I mean, beyond "this could have been a fucking Zoom call," imagine spending your whole life immersed in the ethos of the military, of the (at least theoretical) discipline and respect for the Constitution, and you gotta travel until your ass is numb to listen to two dumb motherfuckers say you should forget all that and just fuck shit up because the bulbous orange blob man is ordering it.

The speech by Secretary of Defense (sorry, it's not really the Department of War until Congress makes the change) Pete Hegseth, a drunk who beat his wife, for the forced-gathered leadership of the US military yesterday veered between embarrassingly masturbatory Patton fantasies and genuinely disturbing shifts in policy. Mostly, he wasn't really speaking to the generals, who were there as set dressing for a reel on Instagram. He started by announcing, "The era of the Department of Defense is over... the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: war-fighting, preparing for war and preparing to win. Unrelenting and uncompromising in that pursuit. Not because we want war. No one here wants war, but it's because we love peace." Which is kind of confusing. If you're the "Department of War," that seems to indicate you're going to start, you know, wars; whereas, the Department of Defense would be more concerned with maintaining peace than waging war. I know it's all nuance and bullshit, but the fucking chest-thumping is completely ludicrous. And when was the mission of our military not "war-fighting"? Isn't that what all the guns and bombs and training are for?

Of course, every single person sitting in that room knew that, had lived that, and understood that this fucking shit-for-brains telling them that was a goddamned insult. 

So much of what Hegseth said was childish, ignorant, and deranged. "You kill people and break things for a living," he chest-pounded. "You are not politically correct and don't necessarily belong always in polite society. We are not an army of one. We are a joint force of millions of selfless Americans. We are warriors." Goddamn, he sounds like an incel desperate for likes while live-playing League of Legends on Twitch. Again, this fucking amateur, this pretender, this boy in grown-up clothes is saying this to hundreds of men and women who used to know exactly what the mission was but had that all scrambled for them. And let's be clear: the vast majority of people in the military, like 80-85% (if not more) are not frontline fighters. There's support staff, intelligence, logistics, maintenance, medical personnel, and more, and that's not counting the warriors whose job entails sitting in a trailer in the Nevada desert, piloting drones remotely for recon and for blowing shit up. Oh, and the IT departments that keep all that running.

Hegseth was wantonly, flagrantly insulting, whether it was his fat-shaming rant or his even stupider attack on beards (I guess those religious exemptions don't matter). And he said, "We fight not because we hate what's in front of us. We fight because we love what's behind us. You see, the Ivy League faculty lounges will never understand us, and that's okay because they could never do what you do." This moronic bitch doesn't get that a number of veterans are on Ivy League faculty, including former generals. And just calm down there, princess. It's not like defending the country is the hardest fucking concept to get your head around.

Now imagine the admiral who had to travel 20 hours from Manila to DC just to listen to a sleepy, deranged commander-in-chief talk about walking down stairs. No, seriously. Nearly an hour into his truly bizarre, disturbing, dementia-driven ramble about, fuck, I guess "stuff," Trump mocked Joe Biden for falling down stairs, which led to this extended...something...stream of consciousness? Inner monologue said out loud? Haints in his head he's having a conversation with? Honestly, I don't know...but this is really the president of the United States:

"I'm very careful when I walk downstairs, I'm on stairs like these stairs. I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall because it doesn't work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don't want that. You walk nice and easy. You don't have to set any record, be cool, be cool when you walk down. But don't bop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs. I've never seen him. Bop, bop, bop. He'd go down the stairs, wouldn't hold on. I said, it's great. I don't want to do it. I guess I could do it. But eventually bad things are going to happen and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president."

That's the guy who told the leaders of the military, who have had it hammered into them and hammer it into the soldiers they command that, as very clearly stated in the US Constitution, the US military doesn't wage war against Americans on American soil, that they will wage war against Americans on American soil. Trump said, using the quaint colloquial term for the n-word, "In our inner cities, which we're going to be talking about because it's a big part of war now, it's a big part of war."

Trump described the future battles this way: "The Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places. And we're going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too. It's a war from within...Last month I signed an executive order to provide training for quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it's the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won't get out of control once you're involved at all."

Every single one of those cities has seen a drop in crime. In New York City, shootings are lower than they've ever been. Murders are down. Robberies are down. If you send in troops, they'll just be picking up garbage like the National Guard soldiers are forced to do in DC because there's nothing else to fucking do because the police actually have a handle on the crime situation. Fuck reality, though. Fuck it raw.

One thing I don't get is why police unions aren't pissed off about all this talk. Yeah, we can say a lot of shit about how terrible cops are (and we should), and there are plenty of reasons that crime is down that have nothing to do with policing. But the president saying that troops need to invade cities in order to bring order is a fucking insult to the police in those cities. It's saying that they aren't doing their jobs. I mean, Christ, they already have all the military equipment they could want. It's redundant to send the actual army in. 

Unless, of course, your goal isn't to stop crime but to pretend bad shit is going on so you can take over the cities and intimidate the population and be the mad king you were always destined to be. 

It probably doesn't need to be said, but one thing that our military is not trained to do is be police (except for the ones trained as military police), and every general there knows it. I'm sure there are military leaders who are batshit crazy and would love to use "inner cities" as a "training ground" to attack "the enemy from within." But most aren't. Most know that if they are ordered to, it will be time to decide whether or not they are loyal to the obvious dementia-sufferer-in-chief or to the Constitution and the country.

Trump and Hegseth essentially undermined everything the United States is supposed to stand for, and they admit they don't give a fuck about history, about stability, about the rest of the world. In their very weird and very disturbed way, they have made life more dangerous for everyone on earth.

And now that Trump has declared that we are in an "armed conflict" with drug cartels, that's going to be his and Hegseth's and squamous tumor Stephen Miller's excuse to level what's left of the country they have already wrecked.