Online/cable media, once springboard for the Ugly Trump Bamboozle, turns sword of Damocles, dramatizing MAGA’s open war against America, rife with endless betrayals, cruelty, imbecility and dotage.
Here is truly a national watershed moment and, if not resolved, augurs worse to come. Who knows whether the six Congressional heroes designed their video – on the mandate to disobey illegal orders – to provoke idiotic, death-dealing screams from the outlaw president. If so, that public service win proved (again) that Trump hasn’t a clue about free speech, special protection to Congress members, the nature of “sedition,” or the terror when any Commander-in-chief acts like prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. Warring equally against due process, his manic fury – that only hanging ‘em high fits his delusion about crimes against the state (sorry, against Trump) – is the greatest threshold yet in his feckless reign. Up huge siege levers, I say.
Who knows whether Trump’s tin-pot scourge to purge foes is more (or less) outrage on display, another cynical ploy to distract from the rot sinking his presidency: self-induced, jumpy inflation, perpetual Epstein scandals, or plunging approvals making humiliatingly low, first-term rejections look good. By demonizing law-abiding officials (now forced to be bold), then calling for death sentences, he revives the infantile. impulsive madness of Lewis Carroll’s imperious Red Queen, “Off with [their] heads.” With one tweet, Trump acts the absolutist emperor whose every whim decides life or death.
Do dire threats not invoke Justice Sotomayor’s shrewd question on full presidential immunity? She fretted that any president for personal reasons would get away with assassinating a “rival” (if decoyed as an official act)? There’s blood spattering the Supreme Court when a clownish, legal pygmy has the right to demand mortal purges of legitimate, honorable critics who, unlike Donald Bone-spurs, served their country.
Survival demands provoking the manic bear
Whether this primal scream takes the cake as the most bellicose Trumpian war cry ever – consider the vast competition – pales next to unlimited gall demanding “absolute” command (however fabricated). Who cares about the Military Code of Justice? Who cares whether WH orders make sense, let alone qualify as legal? Who cares if six elected reps are eradicated for free speech in the service of justice? What’s “absolute” here is the blatant, death saber-rattling, the ultimate in bizarro MAGA folly. Oddly, Trump deflects from mounting economic and political disasters, pedophile scandals and reckless foreign belligerence, only to publicize his law-busting role as instant DEO, Destroyer of Elected Officials. The force and clarity of this barbaric veto of justice and civility is so huge, only impeachment or the 25thAmendment fits the peril.
The drastic fallout should spur all abused Americans with microphones to initiate an epic, non-stop provocation parade and reinforce a daily drumbeat: total contempt for justice is beyond the pale. Either the media exposes this Unqualified and Indefensible Freak Show, becoming a political 9/11, or we confront the next chapter in the harsh brutality of the Unchecked and Unwoke. Never Trumpers must dramatize just how far Trump will go (and has gone) to protect unmerited power, sneering modes of command, or his grift to max out his money cons. That Trump was never a blue-collar buddy, nor a middle-class defender, nor a patriotic American, needs maximum focus, offsetting the pathetic MAGA bullshit pushing his war against America. Media that made Trump the phony populist can unmake a raving tyrant.
Either America shortcircuits a president who refuses to accept that law, functional institutions, even that other elected people exist, have obligations and rights to speech – or the next bloodthirsty president screams, “kill my personal critics.” All for questioning the divine rights of Trump’s feckless military orders. The brilliance of the provocative video by the ex-service, Savvy Congress Six, is that it never had to specify which laws GIs should or can disobey, only that illegal orders must be refused. They deliciously hit a potent bullseye without having to specify the perfect target.
The other good news is the magnitude of Trump’s super-thin skinned, knee-jerk sensitivities. He’s easier to rile than a frenzied Jack Russell. Guaranteed to incite more terrifying responses are: assaults against his manly braggadocio, self-evident dotage/vacant energy, lost charisma, “perfect” health/MRI/medical boasts, plunging approvals, hypocritical contradictions, chronic failures, or his greatest of all lies, that he’s a straight shooter who “tells it like it is.” When aptly bedeviled, Trump is the frog lurching from electric shocks. Bingo! So predictable and so revealing of a defective madcap leader ripe for immediate intervention.
Polling nosedives explain rank desperation
When a winning politician loses nearly one third of his loyalists in ten months (50 to 36%), that means well over 1.4 % per month of former fans have rushed the exits. This is an historic, devastating slide, all the worse for being wholly self-generated. That leaves only hardcore MAGA yet to jump ship (though many have) while confirming that millions of ambivalent centrists, let alone right-minded Democrats, have cemented their disgust. Mammoth falloff proves that a huge majority now openly rejects MAGA Trump and policy errors as bad for their lives, bad for law, bad for America, and bad for the world. How long before only 30%, even 25%, cling to the remnants of the most disruptive, neo-fascist gang in our history?
The brilliance of the Savvy Six protest video nails Trump’s weakest point – his mafia-like addiction to illegality, to the letter and spirit of the law. That’s how pinpoint PR protests the murderous missile attacks on unindicted, unknown folks in fishing boats off of Venezuela – now no longer the invisible elephant in the room. What Trump demonstrates (and will never change) is 1) how berserk he gets at any inkling that his authoritarian orders will be defied; and 2) goes ballistic (so to speak) by slamming the heroes exercising their legal obligations as “seditious,” deserving death sentences. By going public, and identifying the obvious (and the covert), provocateurs made their point with edge, focus and context.
Trump gulped the bait – hook, line and sinker, showing to all what a mafia-style, criminal outlaw he is, insensitive to killing more innocents (as Putin does daily in Ukraine). So, not only can Trump not force soldiers to execute his illegal (stupid) orders, he can’t justly punish them – only bellow bloody murder and throw a tantrum. Either the military follows its own Code of Justice or it disgraces its well-established honor and duty. Trump then ends up a commander of recalcitrant troops who must default to legal experts before committing some atrocity. Just as it should be, and in the meantime, display MAGA menace in its totality.
Actual law and order, written in the stone of the Military Code of Justice – does more need be said? This phony commander-in-chief is wholly ignorant of the rules of engagement that dictate warfare.
P.S. Per Google AI, US service members must only obey lawful orders, with the duty to disobey orders that are “manifestly illegal”. Unlawful orders violate the Constitution, U.S. or international law, or what defines a war crime. Service members are legally obligated to refuse orders that are clearly and obviously illegal, like committing intentional crimes against non-combatants. Examples of unlawful orders:
- Ordering a soldier to commit a war crime
- Falsifying official documents
- Intentionally targeting civilians
- Misuse of resources for private purposes
If ordering the destruction of unidentified sailors in non-military ships NOT threatening US forces or property is NOT an illegal order, what is? If premeditated bombing of unindicted non-combatants overseas is not a war crime (already with 80 victims), what is? In fact, officials in Congress and the military are obligated to publicize that this Commander-in-chief, and his slavish Defense Secretary, have likely already issued illegal orders.
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