Trump Comes Tumbling Down

A satisfying first step in throwing his legacy in the trash pile.

During the wee hours of the morning on Saturday, in compliance with court orders and having run out their capacity for delay, the government removed the illegal graffiti of Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center.

Unlike their cruel ICE invasions in our cities, they performed this removal in secret, having built a set of screens to save the man himself the public humiliation of seeing his name come down like a Saddam statue.

So what do we do with the pile of letters:

Mr Odd Jut Plan

Darn Dump Jolt

Darn Dolt Jump

PM Don Jut Lard

Told Rand Jump

I’m pretty good with anagrams, but I cannot find a really useful repurposing of these letters. When they spell Donald J. Trump, they aren’t good either. So I believe we should throw them away.

Now the stooges that Trump installed on the Kennedy Center Board changed the institution’s bylaws to say that the board must strip all funding from the Kennedy Center unless Trump’s name stays on the building. That sure sounds like trustee malfeasance. What’s next? A directive that any money donated to that institution go instead to a new Trump grift masquerading as an arts organization?

That is, after all, what happened with the money Congress appropriated to celebrate our 250^th birthday. They set up an organization called American 250. It was bipartisan and meant to bring us together. Forget that. Trump set up Freedom 250 and transferred the money. The result?

He built his claw on the White House lawn for his MMA match. Tickets are being sold at exorbitant prices to ass-kissers and oligarchs. The event is not open to the American public. It will be streamed on Paramount Plus — the network owned by his media allies, the Ellisons, and it requires a paid subscription.

So, there you have it. Donald Trump’s idea of a celebration of our great anniversary is an event not open to the public, where funds are diverted to his friends and allies, and to companies where he is a shareholder. They will be shown in images linked to our national monuments, as if they are the real America.

What do we get? We get to see gold-painted horses outside the Lincoln Memorial.

All of his spectacle and all of his gold paint cannot hide the truth.

Start with Iran, where a deal, now, is finally taking shape. That deal reflects the reality that Donald Trump lost his war. Iran will be far better off than before it began. The entire world will be worse off because of it. And America has not only lost the trust of its allies and friends; it has also lost the credibility to check its adversaries.

Next up is Europe where Donald Trump switched sides in the Ukraine war, promising to impose a Russian peace on day one, but forgetting that Ukraine has a say in its own future. Shouting, “you don’t have the cards,” Trump tried to bully Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to fall in line. He didn’t. Now, with help from Europe Ukraine is pushing back against Russia and winning.

Setting aside, for a moment, that Trump chose a cruel dictatorship over an inchoate democracy, that he chose a military aggressor over a country trying to preserve its borders, that he chose to abandon the idea of an international rules based order, Trump’s decisions mean the free world has moved on without us. It means America is, at this moment, irrelevant to the progress of freedom.

But as he also proved in Iran, we are not irrelevant when it comes to wanton destruction, and the empowerment of bad actors around the world.

One reason he got all of this so catastrophically wrong is that our entire national security apparatus has turned inward as he deploys it against Americans who stand against him. Remember that last September he directed his government to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” a wide range of organizations he accused of being Antifa. The first fruits of that directive include the corrupt indictments of James Comey and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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Last week, instead of protecting us from real threats, Kash Patel’s agents raided the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, they chased down its board members, they confiscated phones and laptops. The organization encourages people to register to vote, but in Trump’s America that’s a crime.

And then there’s Elon Musk. I actually read the prospectus for the IPO of Space X. I recommend it to anyone heading the beach. It is a great science fiction read. The company aims “to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multi-planetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”

Its value is based on three pillars. Space, connectivity, and AI. The company’s AI platform is Grok. About that, they say, “Grok’s deep integration with X enables freshness, relevance, and contextual awareness that we believe is a competitive differentiator. This direct, real-time access to the information and human discourse on X enhances Grok’s truth-seeking capabilities by grounding outputs in up-to-date knowledge and diverse viewpoints.”

Have you been on X lately? The world’s moneymen have just bet trillions on an AI system trained on billions of hate-filled and pornographic posts. This is their idea of truth. This is the consciousness they want to take to the stars.

Meanwhile back on planet earth, where prices continue to climb, where the world no longer benefits from steadying influence of our great democracy, where a madman celebrates our great birthday in a publicly-funded, private party that desecrates our national monuments, it’s at least a nice first step to see his name in trash pile.

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