Saturday, December 17, 2016

UNPRESIDENTED

While it is amusing and unsurprising that Trump can't use the word "unprecedented" correctly, the true fucking horror of his morning missive remains his reckless ignorance of world diplomacy. This man will drag us into war, a war that will fatten the pockets of billionaire industrialists and kill the sons/daughters of the very people who voted for him ... at least, that's the best case scenario, since warfare of the 21st Century is more likely to target civilians and physical/digital infrastructure than be fought on far-away foreign shores.

Trump will wake up with a headache one day, read a headline or two and then blast off an uninformed Twitter rant that spirals into holocaust on American soil. It might even be strategic -- it sounds like a far-fetched conspiracy theory but I have never before been afraid that a US president might invite a national disaster in order to declare martial law and gobble up power unlawfully. Some accused the Bush administration of this kind of shenanigan after 9/11, but not many took that seriously. Trump is amoral and venal enough that I don't trust him not to put us all in jeopardy for his own gain.

It's hard to believe such a thing, and I don't want to. What I do believe is that, either through blunder or design, Trump is going to bring destruction to these shores. I don't mean economic injustice, racial strife, religious intolerance or a general tone of ugliness and ignorance to the national conversation. We can expect stateside terrorism to explode and foreign countries drawing their sabres over the next few years.

It was funny when Stephen Colbert introduced Trump as "the last President of the United States" when he appeared as a guest on his late-night chat show. It isn't funny anymore. Nothing is funny anymore.