National Insecurity
Only 1,418 days to go...
On Friday, I had dinner at a friend’s house. We got talking about Trump and Vance’s horrifying and disgraceful debacle with Zelensky in the Oval Office. Neither of us could believe how America’s president would actually side with the aggressor and dictator over the leader of a democratically sovereign nation. I’m still appalled like so many others.
My friend had lived in NY City for many years before retiring to Asheville, so we also started remembering all the fears and anxieties we had after 9/11. She told me her story about “where she was” (fortunately, on the upper East Side) and “where I was” (Chicago) as the events of that week unfolded.
And then I said to her, something I actually verbalized for the first time since January 20, 2025, “I haven’t felt this much anxiety and insecurity since 9/11.”
Even during Trump’s erratic first term and his utter incompetency of managing the Covid pandemic, I didn’t feel the way I do today.
He has put so many questionable, inexperienced and unqualified people in charge of key government functions that are part of our national security thereby weakening our military, our FBI, and our intelligence community. He’s destroying the mechanisms that keep our food and water safe.
He’s firing civil servants willy-nilly.
Trump officials fired nuclear staff not realizing they oversee the country’s weapons stockpile
USDA says it accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is now trying to rehire them
After mass layoffs, some federal agencies are trying to bring employees back
“Many of my friends voted for Trump, and one of the things that they have said to me specifically is that it was not their intention for things to be carried out this way. It was their intention for the economy to get under control, for the debt to get under control. … I don't believe that anybody who voted for Trump was expecting us to be weakened in this way.” ~Bonnie Green, 60, National Science Foundation in Bethlehem, Pa.
He doesn’t care that the interest we pay on our debt is higher than our DOD budget — he would rather just bankrupt the US Government the same way he bankrupted his casinos. He and Congress are doing nothing to reduce the national debt — only looking for ways to increase it — no effort at all to reform the entitlement programs. No effort to increase tax revenues — just disband the IRS and create a trade war with our friends.
The United States President is actually aligning the United States with countries like North Korea, Russia, Belarus, etc. and throwing our democratic allies to the wind. He’s changing America’s foreign policy in such a way, that China is going to eat our lunch.
Putin Is Ready to Carve Up the World. Trump Just Handed Him the Knife
We’ve seen it all before, and that is one of the reasons we are shocked: We’ve seen how it ends. Another is that we didn’t expect to see this happen in the United States.
Hate to admit it, but I’m feeling a lot of national insecurity these days…
Thought for the day …
“The name of 'reform' simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.”
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Must Read Articles:
Trump Is Doing Real Damage to America
President Trump is doing damage to America that could take a generation or more to repair. The next election cannot fix what Trump is breaking. Neither can the one after that… Even if Democrats sweep the midterms in 2026 and defeat the Republican candidate in 2028, that lesson will still hold. Our allies will know that our alliances are only as stable as the next presidential election — and that promises are only good for one term (at most). It’s extraordinarily difficult — if not impossible — to build a sustainable defense strategy under those circumstances. It’s impossible to enact sustainable trade policies. And it’s impossible to conduct any form of lasting diplomacy. If agreements are subject to immediate revocation with the advent of a new administration, will any sensible world power rely on America’s word — or America itself?
Quote of the day:
“This week started with administration officials refusing to acknowledge that Russia started the war in Ukraine. It ends with a tense, shocking conversation in the Oval Office and whispers from the White House that they may try to end all U.S. support for Ukraine. I know foreign policy is not for the faint of heart, but right now, I am sick to my stomach as the administration appears to be walking away from our allies and embracing Putin, a threat to democracy and U.S. values around the world.”
~Senator Lisa Murkowski
What I’m reading today…
Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Offensive Cyberoperations Against Russia
Over the past year, ransomware attacks on American hospitals, infrastructure and cities have ramped up, many emanating from Russia in what intelligence officials have said are largely criminal acts that have been sanctioned, or ignored, by Russian intelligence agencies.
5 Former Defense Secretaries Blast Trump for Military Purge
Five former defense secretaries lambasted President Donald Trump for his Pentagon firings, calling them “reckless.” …Lloyd Austin, Jim Mattis, Chuck Hagel, Leon Panetta, and William Perry, former defense secretaries from both sides of the aisle, called for congressional hearings into Trump’s firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. C.Q. Brown, and other senior military officials. They said the purge was “partisan” by design. “We are deeply alarmed by President Trump’s recent dismissals of several senior U.S. military leaders.”
Trump’s Bad Plan to Make America Argentina Again
But it should give us pause that the United States, the world’s leading economy, is borrowing government reform techniques from Argentina, a nine-time serial defaulter and 100-year economic laggard. Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk and Mr. Milei may share the same anti-state rhetoric and use the same techniques, but they are taking their countries in very different directions. Mr. Milei’s administration is restructuring Argentina’s government for good reason: failure.
Leadership is how we have put America first from the time we became a global superpower. Trump and Republicans want to retreat from that leadership not because they want to put “America first,” but because they want to elevate Russia and China to peer status. And why do they want to do that? Because they think that Russia and China can be helpful with Trump’s internal political project of dismantling democracy and establishing permanent rule. Trump’s “America first” policy is actually about selling out America’s interests in exchange for foreign assistance in putting Trump first.
Today, the United States has a homegrown version of its own Titushky: the Proud Boys and other far-right groups that have declared their willingness to engage in vigilantism, some of which include people who were pardoned or had their sentences commuted by Donald Trump for participating in the January 6 insurrection….a Trump administration official, on his official account, pointed to a gathering of the White House’s political opponents and applied a label to it that is beloved to its most fringe supporters. A few days later, a group of people led by Tarrio—a man who owes his freedom from his 22-year prison sentence to President Trump—showed up and harassed other Americans in a public venue… “Trump is using pardoned putschists to intimidate his in America.”
For the First Time, the U.S. Is Spending More on Debt Interest than Defense
The likelihood of the U.S. actually defaulting on its debt is trivial, since the government prints the currency in which its debt is denominated. But the alternatives to default under the path of continued high deficits all point toward lower living standards. As the government borrows more and more, the cost of money across the economy increases, crowding out private investment, reducing supply, increasing prices, and lowering growth. In the worst-case scenario, the country enters a debt spiral in which government borrowing and interest rates each keeps pushing the other up.
Elon Musk’s deep ties to – and admiration for – China
Tesla was the first foreign automaker permitted to establish operations in China without a local partner, following a change in ownership regulations. The Shanghai factory was constructed with the support of US$1.4 billion in loans from Chinese state-owned banks, granted at favorable interest rates. Between 2019 and 2023, the Shanghai government also provided Tesla with a reduced corporate tax rate of 15% – 10 percentage points lower than the standard rate.
Trump, the draft dodger who got out of the Vietnam War with a reportedly faked bone spurs excuse, taunted the war president’s black sweater and pants (similar to Elon Musk’s Oval Office attire), and informed Zelensky that his country was in “big trouble” before the sit down imploded into a shouting match and was terminated.
Trump said later on Truth Social that Zelensky had “disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office.”
Zelensky was quickly supported in posts on X by the leaders of France, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Finland, Denmark, The Netherlands, Austria, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Canada, Croatia, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic and Portugal, among other nations.
RFK Jr., America’s Leading Advocate for Getting Measles
It is only on account of vaccination, medical care, and sanitation that infections are no longer killing so many U.S. children. Most deaths of U.S. kids today result from external injuries—motor-vehicle crashes, firearms, drug overdoses, suffocation, and drowning. As for chronic illnesses, one of them, hepatitis B, has been nearly eliminated in American children thanks in part to an immunization that Kennedy also criticizes. Another chronic childhood condition—and the most deadly one—is cancer. So far, at least, the fight against pediatric cancers has been set back by the administration in which Kennedy is serving. Over the past 50 years, medicine has made miraculous advances in treating leukemia and other cancers affecting kids, largely due to research supported by the National Institutes of Health. Yet this month, the White House has taken several different steps to interfere with the NIH’s funding. Harold Varmus, who ran the agency for much of the 1990s, and then the National Cancer Institute during the 2010s, has predicted that if the recent political undermining of American science continues, “our envisioned future of longer, healthier lives will happen more slowly, in other countries, or not at all.”
The Real Reason Trump Berated Zelensky
Trump does admire dictators. He does instinctively side with bullies over victims. He does lack any values-based framework for American foreign policy. But many Republicans who acknowledged these traits nonetheless believed that Trump could be persuaded to stay in Ukraine’s corner. They were wrong. The reason they were wrong is that, in addition to his generalized amorality, Trump exhibits a particular affection for Putin and Russia….Zelensky had no good options at the White House. He walked into an ambush with a president who empathizes with the dictator who wants to seize Ukraine’s territory. Everyone who spent years warning about Trump’s unseemly affinity for Putin had exactly this kind of disastrous outcome in mind.
What I am watching…
What I read every day…
