What Would Nellis Say?

Darkness approaching

By Rick Stiller​​​​​​​

 

Trump’s chaos is swirling through our lives, imparting a new clutch of horrors to flood the media every day to overwhelm and dull our senses into believing that this madness is normal and acceptable. It’s not. 

 

Let’s start with hundreds of thousands of vital jobs eliminated and career civil servants dismissed in Musk’s demonic annihilation of our government’s vital services - expertise and experience discarded by teams of zoned-out teenagers with no understanding of or respect for government functions, purpose, or procedures. 

 

Musk is bowing out, after promising to expose waste and fraud and boasting that he could save the taxpayers at least $2 trillion in the process. Actual savings, little or none of it the result of fraud, was estimated at below $150 billion, although his team has yet to produce documented figures to support their claims. No one knows the actual cost the DOGE team billed and bilked from the government. And…Musk’s squad walked away with hundreds of hard drives containing private information about every citizen in the country. How’s he going to turn that into profits?

 

The reality for the rest of us is costs for basic necessities are soaring in direct relation to Trump’s egocentric and moronic tariff proclamations, financial markets bobbing like apples floating through a hurricane, and a pending budget that will slash Medicaid protections by at least $700 billion, eliminating coverage for millions of elderly and lower-income citizens and closing nearly a third of rural hospitals. The bill will also cut $300 billion from food supplements like SNAP (which actually pays six dollars a day to feed a hungry child), and defund child care and support for early learning for millions of children to help cover a $4.5 trillion tax cut for Trump’s wealthy cronies and…

 

Buried in a dark corner of the thousand-page tome is a provision: “No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued….”

 

Contempt citations have been used to rein in the Trump administration’s excesses, and plaintiffs are rarely required to pay a bond when they sue the government in federal court. 

 

That short provision removes the judiciary’s capacity to hold officials in contempt, which would cripple judges’ efforts to stop the illegal and immoral deportation of detainees, by holding Trump’s attorneys in contempt for repeatedly ignoring the court’s orders. 

 

This administration refuses to be restrained by the laws governing limits on executive power or Trump’s blatant corruption, which was on full and open display during his recent three-day trip to the Middle East. 

 

He returned with a $400 million plane, and deals for the family business to construct a Trump tower in Dubai, a luxury golf resort in Qatar, two real estate projects in Riyadh, and another skyscraper in Jeddah, in addition to commitments for significant investments in Trump Media’s plan to raise $2.5 billion to fund $Trump’s cryptocurrency business (Trump owns just over 50% of the company and will profit from unidentified foreign investors pouring funds into the scheme to secure his favor), and opening an exclusive club in Washington that will require a membership fee of $500,000 to join. 

 

Jeff Bezos will pay Melania Trump $28 million for the rights to her life story, and son-in-law Jared Kushner collected an investment of  $2 billion from the Saudi family fund shortly after Trump left office. He has been inking deals with the UAE, Qatar, and Eastern European countries ever since.

 

No president in our history has used the Oval Office to enrich themselves, let alone on the massive scale of the Trump family’s gorging.

 

All of that is just a distraction from the destruction being wrought by Russell Vought, former vice president of the Heritage Foundation and co-author/editor of Project 2025. He runs Trump’s Office of Management and Budget and is dedicated to consolidating and expanding “Executive Power,” purging the civil service, and eliminating the agencies that protect Americans' rights, health, and environment. He is the strategist directing the assault on the basic principles of public service, equality, and checks and balances to advance his own Christian nationalist policies and transform the presidency into a dictatorial monarchy.

 

Cruelty was the point in snatching babies from migrant mothers’ arms with no intention of reuniting them during Trump’s first term, and “America First”  founder and Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller is now the driving force behind ICE Czar Tom Homan’s Gestapo’s cruel, blatantly racist program to seal the borders to people of color, harass and kidnap people off the streets, and ship thousands of detainees to the most dangerous prisons on the planet (claiming they’re rapists and murderers…when most have not been charged or convicted of any crimes and are living and working in this country legally, while others are American citizens whose only offense is publicly disagreeing with the president’s policies). 

 

Miller is also directing Trump’s retribution campaign against perceived political enemies, ending birthright citizenship, and suspending habeas corpus – the constitutional protection against unlawful detention, in addition to authoring hundreds of unlawful “executive orders” that the president has signed since taking office. 

 

Add to those outrages a barrage of unwarranted and un-Constitutional attacks on higher education, banning visas for foreign students, blackmailing prominent law firms, and cutting funding for our most prestigious museums. The soon-to-be-demolished Department of Education is supporting rewriting history books to glorify “white” achievements by denying that the Civil War was fought to eliminate slavery, and claiming that those slaves benefited from their servitude. The “new” propaganda ignores the holocaust, the civil rights movement, and imposes “Evangelical Christian” doctrine in the curriculum of public schools. 

 

Under the direction of Vought and Miller, the administration is dismantling many agencies that protect and inform the American people, like NOAA, FEMA, the FAA, the EPA, and many others, as well as disengaging with our allies, NATO, and the European Union, and forming alliances with former enemies. The president has abandoned contributions to Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion and supports Netanyahu’s starvation tactics, while supplying the bombs that enable Israel’s genocide against the civilians trapped in what remains of the Gaza Strip.

 

In any previous administration, all of these examples would have seemed outrageous and impossible, and congressional hearings and impeachment proceedings would have been well under way already.

 

We are witnessing the transformation of our democracy into a fascist kleptocracy, where the richest of our citizens have bought and paid for an illegitimate presidency, control of both Houses of Congress, and a Supreme Court that follows orders rather than defending legal precedents or the Constitution.

 

After he took office, Hitler only took thirty-one days to seize absolute control of Germany’s government, military, independent press, and the economy. Enacting Project 2025, the thousand-page Heritage Foundation playbook will take a bit longer, but the steps leading to total domination are being checked off the list, and we are nearing a point where reconstruction of our democracy will take generations.

 

We can not allow ourselves to be lulled into acceptance and acquiescence by the constant and persistent torrent of outrageous and, in many cases, completely illegal moves being made by the Trump administration to demolish our democracy, the free press, our educational system, our international status and responsibilities to our former allies, and the basic concept of government protecting and serving its citizens.

 

We are a nation that elects a government of, by, and for all the people, not just the richest or most racist few. The stakes are too high to allow this political demolition to continue until the mid-terms next year or the next presidential election. It is time for the American people to rise up to demand an end to this highly choreographed insurrection through every legal means we can muster, including shutting down the country until the fascists are removed from office and their sponsors brought to justice.

 

Stand up, speak out, and make a difference. The nation’s future is in your hands.

 

Thanks for your support. I look forward to your thoughts!

 

Visit www.rickstiller.com for more of his essays, novels, and music, and www.rickstillerart.com for a brief respite in the beauty of his garden.

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