What Would Nellis Say?

 

The demolition of the East Wing of the White House is testament to the transformation of our country from the relative sanity and stability we enjoyed eighteen months ago to total domination of every news cycle by a self-absorbed, diaper-clad, morbidly obese, incoherent, semi-illiterate, vindictive, and racist narcissist who has broken every promise he made during his three campaigns and is in obvious physical and mental peril.

 

The policies of this corrupt and incompetent administration are driven and announced by dozens of nonsensical and unhinged Truth Social posts that appear late each night, filled with threats and calls for vengeance against his enemies, promises of the annihilation of civilians in countries he’s trying to intimidate, and tenuous economic proclamations, mixed with relentless boasting and persistent lies.

 

Trump’s rambling speeches and disjointed press conferences offer recurring displays of a deranged and mentally incapacitated tyrant who has lost touch with reality and is leading our country to division and ruin on impulse and whim rather than logic, ethics, strategy, or planning. 

 

The former fraudulent businessman, convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, who bankrupted every business he ever started, has increased his personal worth to as much as  $6.5bn since taking office, including an estimated $2.25bn in realized profits from foreign payments, corrupt oligarchs, and others. Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling hundreds of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.

 

Estimates suggest that his family has pocketed nearly $9.7bn from foreign development contracts, shady crypto schemes, and unethical U.S. government and military contracts. Donald junior has publicly stated that they intend to be the richest family in the world before his father leaves office. Unprecedented corruption on steroids worthy of criminal investigations, convictions, and life sentences.

 

Meanwhile, the president filed a lawsuit against his own Internal Revenue Service for $10bn, according to his legal team, “The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people.” Basically, as Chief Executive of our government, he was acting as judge, jury, and signatory on a check he would be writing to himself. 

 

Today, he made a settlement with his IRS to drop the lawsuit in exchange for a $1.776bn (clever, don’t you think?) political slush fund he created for himself with our tax dollars to pay off his personal militia of violent rioters who attacked Congress on January 6th and allies who were convicted of felonies during the previous administration’s attempts to overturn a legitimate election. In addition, his government is dropping existing audits and granting lifetime immunity from investigation or prosecution to Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization!

 

He is hellbent on constructing monuments to himself in Washington, including the billion-dollar ballroom (that donors were supposed to pay for), a 250-foot-tall “Triumphal” arch between the Arlington Memorial Bridge and the Arlington Cemetery, renovating the reflecting pools between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, added his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (which resulted in cancellation by major artists and events scheduled this year, and the two-year closing for “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete rebuilding”. 

 

The president is having his portrait inserted into American passports and on National Park passes, having the mint produce a Trump commemorative coin for the nation’s 250th anniversary in July, adding his signature to dollar bills, having giant banners of his scowling face hung from government buildings (including the Justice Department), and renaming the Palm Beach International Airport to President Trump International Airport. After attempting to defund and shutter the U.S. Institute for Peace, he changed the name to the Trump Institute for Peace, and announced plans for a new fleet of ‘Trump-class” battleships, which will be “vulnerable to blistering missile attacks, the way once-mighty traditional battleships were to attack aircraft.”

 

His Big Ugly Bill granted outrageous tax breaks for his billionaire buddies, while igniting inflation in the price of gas, groceries, and housing, demolishing supplemental healthcare coverage for more than 20 million citizens, and bankrupting farmers and ranchers by trashing international trade agreements and instituting his tariffs, which are a tax on Americans and an impediment to our formerly ironclad alliances. 

 

He had no qualms in admitting that he doesn’t care about the cost of gas or soaring inflation that are bankrupting families and businesses as a direct result of the war he and Bibi Netanyahu started without defining any goals for the attack or any strategy or plan to end the confrontation that has thrown the entire world into chaos. What he does care about is leaving his face and his name on everything he sees, like a mangy dog lifting its leg to mark its territory.

 

While the contemporary Republican Party has always represented white supremacy and pseudo-Christian nationalism with a wink and a nod (and, please, there is nothing “Christian” or patriotic about the bigotry and hate that binds voters to Trump), today’s Republican Maggots have abandoned all pretense of participating in the defense of our democracy to embark on a coordinated and determined campaign to take our country back to the inequitable discriminatory terrors that preceded the Civil War.

 

With the blessing of the six bigots who dominate our racist, illegitimate Supreme Court, those justices finished gutting the Voting Rights Act with their recent disgraceful decision to justify institutional racism. Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida wasted no time passing brazenly discriminatory legislation to suppress and deny the rights guaranteed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to our Constitution, enacted during Reconstruction and ignored during a hundred years of Jim Crow hypocrisy.  Those historical intentions finally blossomed into actual rights enacted as a result of the deadly struggles of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. 

 

We can anticipate similar gerrymandering and brazen voter suppression in the other Confederate/Red states to stymy, intimidate, and deny black and minority citizens’ right to vote before the coming elections…in a desperate but highly coordinated and well-financed campaign to cling to power by disenfranchising women and minorities.

 

Our democracy is defined as a system of government where supreme power is vested in the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives. The word is derived from Greek roots meaning "rule by the people." It is characterized by sovereignty, equality, the freedom to participate in our governance, and the protection of our individual rights.

 

Nowhere in that definition or in the documents created by our founding fathers are those privileges confined exclusively to white “Christian” men. It grants the right to personal freedom, uncensored expression, and true liberty and equality to We The People…all the citizens who populate our country, no matter their race, color, creed, religion, or country of origin. Nowhere does it grant exclusive dominance to male people of northern European ancestry, nor does it exclude any citizen born in this country or legally naturalized.

 

For the ignorant Maggots who were so fired up by hate and bombast to blindly ignore the details and intentions of your authoritarian despots before voting to erase everything this country stands for, Russell Vought (Director of Management and Budget who controls the government’s purse strings and is directing the demolition of most executive agencies that provide services and protections for everyone) edited and published Project 2025, a $22m thousand-page manifesto detailing the establishment of institutionalized racism that will rescind all the rights and benefits granted during the past one-hundred and fifty years. 

 

It was published online and available to the public more than a year before the last elections…but Trump’s voters didn’t care about the published intentions of the tyrannical monster they were backing. He gave them permission to hate and provided convenient targets for their wrath.

 

You cheered and laughed at Trump’s outrageous and disgusting speeches, offering up violent racial rage as a sacred creed to bind you into an alliance dedicated to suppressing the legitimate rights of women and minorities. And, ladies, you failed to grasp the extensive and open plans in Project 2025 to deny your reproductive rights, your voting rights, your right to independence or a career, and replace your independence with an obligation to submit to male dominance in your home and our society. The white nationalist authors of this tome expect you to return to the kitchen and to produce as many white babies as your body will tolerate.

 

The Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department are demanding detailed voter rolls from Democratic states that voted against Trump in either of the past two elections, with the intention of eliminating citizens who might vote for real democracy rather than supporting an illegitimate election in support of an authoritarian dictatorship. They are also seeking records of everyone who was or will be employed or volunteering to work the polls or tally the results, threatening prosecution if any are even suspected of making a mistake or violating the law.

 

Congress recently passed “The Save Act” falsely claiming that the bill will ensure “election integrity” and prevent “non-citizen voting”, which is not now and has not been a problem in any election in recent history. If the bill passes through the Republican Senate, any person wanting to register or to move to another voting district will be required to present a passport, a birth certificate paired with a photo ID, a naturalization certificate, or a Consular Report of Foreign Birth, and proof of residency in person at an election office. Many rural offices have been defunded and closed for “government efficiency”. Married women will be compelled to produce birth and marriage certificates, and court documents granting a divorce or a name change. 

 

More than half the population (particularly minority and lower income citizens) do not have possession of these documents or access to them without considerable expense (a passport costs $150 and can take months to process. A certified birth certificate costs between $10-50 depending on the state). Think of this as a modern-day ‘Poll Tax’, which is illegal in this country, aimed at suppressing or eliminating the rights of voters.

 

The radical Republican Congress passed Trump’s Big Ugly Bill, which provided $75bn (which is a third more than the budget for the Marine Corps) to fund ICE – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement - Trump’s private police force, to increase detention, deportation, and enforcement operations to round up and ship out people of color to protect the sanctity, dominance, and privileges of our white population. 

 

As we have witnessed during the past year, ICE claims to be arresting “the worst of the worst” when, in reality, they are targeting anyone with brown skin or who speaks with a foreign accent, regardless of their legal status or citizenship…including thousands of children…without a warrant, legal representation, or due process in the most brutal and inhumane system in our country’s history. The vast majority of those arrested have no criminal record or outstanding warrants, and many are U.S. citizens.

 

While ICE’s operations have not been at the top of the news lately, they are busy deporting thousands of our neighbors every month from every city in the country. DHS is building concentration camps and buying enormous warehouses to house as many as 150,000 prisoners at a time, with Stephen Miller’s ultimate goal of deporting one million human beings every year until the United States is racially pure.

 

The only difference between Hitler’s massive theatrical rallies in Germany in the 1930’s, where he preached Aryan supremacy and condemned the Jews, and Trump’s racist rants to thousands of rabid supporters during his last campaign was an outstretched right arm in salute and a loud worshipful “Sieg Heil!” 

 

Hitler and his imitator, Trump, mastered the art of transforming the fears and anxieties of their audiences into unity of purpose by casting them as victims of a grand conspiracy to replace white “patriots” with “others” who were responsible for the nation’s problems. 

 

To solve the problem and guarantee a golden future for the devoted disciples of this cult of hate, the offenders must be removed from society and punished for their crimes. The Germans shipped millions of Jews to concentration camps that were actually industrial death machines that murdered an estimated 11-17 million people. Trump’s government is accosting and disappearing hundreds of thousands of “illegal” refugees to internment in brutal confinement in our own ghastly concentration camps and gigantic human warehouses awaiting deportation to prisons in third-world countries they’ve never visited. There is absolutely no difference.

 

The Merrian-Webster dictionary defines Fascism as “a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition with a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.”

 

Our democracy is being demolished to make way for an authoritarian dictatorship (as prescribed in detail in Project 2025), driven and financed by a small group of billionaires and a shrinking cadre of white nationalists. The only way to defeat the powers behind this campaign is to grasp the reality of their demonic intentions and envision the hell-on-earth our nation will suffer should they succeed. Stop being polite or “correct” and call it what it is – Fascism.

 

Stop electing Nazis.

 

Stand Up! Speak Out! Make A Difference!

 

 

Visit www.rickstiller.com for my novels and essays, www.rickstillerart.com for portraits of the flowers that grow in Kelian’s Garden