GUEST POST BY DAVE MILLER

 

What do we do?

 

The twin phrases “we’ve never been here before” and “we’ve never seen anything like this” are out of date almost as soon as they are spoken or written. Think about it. In just a few weeks here’s what we’ve seen, in no particular order.

 

•  The US is bombing small boats and killing people in the Caribbean suspected of, with no direct evidence, transporting drugs to the US.

 

•  The Trump Administration continues to order and deploy US troops to cities across the country, mostly over the objections of local city and state leaders and in violation of the US Constitution.

 

•  Hundreds of US Military leaders were brought to the US for essentially a photo op so President Trump could drone on about his predecessors Obama and Biden.

 

•  The Department of Defense has been renamed the Department of War.

 

•  Russia is regularly bombing civilians and flying incursions into NATO with nary a word from the US.

 

•  We’ve restored medals to the perpetrators of the massacre of hundreds of women children at Wounded Knee.

 

•  Healthcare prices for 2026 are starting to roll out and the news is not good. Seniors and others are seeing increases of over 20% due to reduction of support from the federal government.

 

•  A grieving Christian woman, Erika Kirk, forgave the killer of her husband and urged others to do so while leaving hate behind because it’s commanded by Jesus in scripture and it’s “what Charlie would want”. Immediately afterwards, a US President, at the funeral says “I disagree”, “I hate my opponents” and “I don’t want what’s best for them”. All the while, his supporting Christian leaders remained silent and cheered him on.

 

•  A MAGA supporting man shot and killed numerous worshippers and firebombed a Mormon church on the same day another man shot up a waterfront restaurant in North Carolina.

 

•  At the Ryder Cup golf tournament, a US announcer egged on fans by using the F-word as they cussed at and threw beer on the wife of European golfer Rory McIlroy. Meanwhile on the course, other US fans heckled and abused competing golfers as they simply tried to make their shots.

 

•  A US President is demanding a publicly held US corporation, Microsoft, fire an executive because that person, Lisa Monaco, has criticized him.

 

•  The Dems continue their wilderness sojourn with no plan, no new ideas and nothing to motivate their base, let alone gain new supporters.

 

•  A US Attorney General has said certain speech in the US in not protected under the First Amendment. Few GOP political leaders spoke up in opposition to her statement or the president’s support of her.

 

I’ve lived through the political violent spasms of the 1960s, Watergate, the Reagan drubbings of the Dems, the balanced budgets of the Clinton years, a stupid war in Iraq, a financial meltdown in the aughts and the disastrous Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Never in my life have I felt our country was coming apart at the seams, until now. And it is not just evidenced within our political leadership. It has filtered down to the personal level as even people with whom we converse daily have decided honorable, fair and legitimate dialogue is no longer valuable. Instead in its place, we get juvenile nicknames, snark, whataboutisms and few serious ideas on how to really improve America.

 

Meanwhile, rather than focus on the real issues, the US Congress and President Trump, unable to come up with a budget plan for all America, have decided to shut down the US Government.

 

But hey, we're owning the other side, and apparently, that’s what matters.

 

I don't know who wrote this.

 "Donald Trump walked into Quantico Tuesday expecting a rally. He got a funeral.

The generals sat in perfect silence, faces locked in the kind of grim stillness that comes from years of watching idiots talk and choosing not to react. Trump, of course, couldn’t handle it. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he confessed, his voice trembling somewhere between wounded pride and panic.

Then came the kicker, “If you want to applaud, you applaud.”

This wasn’t leadership. This was a washed-up Vegas act begging the crowd to clap. The Commander-in-Chief turned into the Clapper-in-Chief, reduced to prodding the nation’s top brass like a sad carnival barker who forgot his punchline.

A campaign rally in uniform.

Instead of strategy, Trump delivered his usual medley of grievances: Barack Obama ruined everything, Joe Biden ruined it twice as hard, and only Donald J. Trump, self-proclaimed “two-term, maybe three-term president” could save America. It was less a military briefing than an episode of The Apprentice: Pentagon Edition.

The generals, trained to withstand battlefield chaos, sat stone-faced through the barrage of nonsense. They have endured artillery fire with more enthusiasm.

Enter Pete Hegseth, America’s Pastor-in-Arms. Trump’s “Secretary of War” took the podium with the intensity of a man who thinks Tom Clancy novels are actual military doctrine. He promised “fire and brimstone,” called for purges of “fat generals,” and announced he wants the next war to look exactly like the Gulf War, because apparently it’s still 1991 and CNN is running that same grainy footage of tanks in the desert.

But Hegseth wasn’t done. He led them in prayer. Yes, prayer. The nation’s top generals, summoned by presidential ego, now folded into a forced altar call like extras at a megachurch revival. The separation of church and state? Obliterated. Constitution? Shredded. Jesus, apparently, is now Commander-in-Chief. Trump can play Vice.

Weakness on parade.

Trump likes to brag about firing generals who “aren’t warriors.” But on Tuesday, the real firing squad was silence. Not one clap. Not one cheer. Just the steady hum of contempt vibrating off the brass like feedback from a dead microphone.

These men and women have seen actual combat. They’ve buried soldiers. They’ve lived with the weight of real command. And now they’re expected to cheer for a man who brags about moving “a submarine or two” like it’s a toy in a bathtub, or who lectures about “two N-words” as though nuclear strategy were a stand-up routine.

No wonder they didn’t clap.

The pin-drop presidency.

What happened at Quantico wasn’t just awkward. It was diagnostic. Trump’s presidency is a hollow shell propped up by applause, and when the applause disappears, so does he.

And Hegseth? He’s the zealot-in-chief, delivering sermons about war and Christ in equal measure, a man confusing the Book of Revelation with the Pentagon’s operations manual. Together, they make quite the duo: one desperate for claps, the other desperate for amens.

The generals gave them neither. Instead, they gave silence, the most cutting judgment of all."

Trump calls American citizens the "enemy within."

Trump declared that American citizens (most likely those who don't agree with him and his policies and who exercise their right to protest his government) "the enemy within," and added that they are harder to "take out" because they don't wear uniforms.

Trump is speaking about Americans in American cities.

What do you think the phrase "take out" means? 

I wasn't sure the word "treason" was appropriate in the meme below, but the definition says this: 

"In the U.S., treason is defined in the Constitution as levying war against the United States."

Threatening to "take out" (which means, in a threat, to kill, destroy, or incapacitate a person) American citizens, for whatever reasons Trump decides on, is levying war against his own citizens, i.e., the United States. So, it would appear that "treason" is an appropriate word there.

We've never heard such mortal threats against U.S. citizens, from their own president. Ever!

Our fellow Americans are NOT the "enemy within." Only a deranged tyrant would say such a thing.

Qualms From Quantico?

Qualms From Quantico?

by Bill Kristol

“There was little that was surprising in yesterday’s speeches at Quantico from President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. We already knew that Trump is a demagogue whose clownish solipsism shouldn’t mask the danger of his authoritarianism. We already knew that Hegseth is a Fox & Friends personality whose pathetic desperation to want to appear tough shouldn’t overshadow the damage he can do to our military.

Their speeches were predictably depressing and dangerous. My fellow Bulwarkians and I discussed them here and here. And JVL analyzed some of the implications of Trump’s speech here.

So I won’t dwell today on how alarmed we should be by Trump’s wish to deploy the military to fight a “war” against the enemy “within.” And I won’t dwell on how repulsed we should be by Hegseth’s apparent yearning for armed forces that resemble the Soviet military more than the American.

Instead, I want to mention a couple of aspects of yesterday’s news from which we can take some hope.

First, the general and flag officers at Quantico rose to the occasion. They listened in dignified and even stone-faced silence to Hegseth and Trump. Retired Army general Mark Hertling wrote ahead of the gathering that he hoped “the loudest message” the senior officers send “is no message at all—only that they have the quiet, disciplined silence of professionals who know their oath is to the Constitution, not to a man.”

That was the message they sent. It was impossible not to see it. And it was impressive.

I was also impressed by the many younger veterans who stepped up afterwards on social media to express disapproval of what Trump and Hegseth had to say. I was particularly struck by this post from a leader of the group Veterans for Responsible Leadership, reacting to Hegseth’s boast that “America’s warriors . . . kill people and break things for a living.”

This is a disgraceful message. There was a soldier that I served with in the army that later was killed in Mosul, Iraq that said the reason he joined the military was because he believed that it was the greatest force for good that the world has ever known. He said the military not only taught its soldiers to be lethal, but it also taught us to be compassionate and empathetic and care about not only the American people but also freedom-loving and -seeking people from all over the globe. This is the true warrior ethos that so many of us veterans know and love. I’m thinking about him a lot tonight and will be damned if sons of bitches like Trump and Hegseth will transform our great military into something resembling the Russians’. His memory and service must not be in vain.

Obviously, there are post-9/11 veterans who have been sympathetic to Trump and Hegseth. But I’m confident that many understand, especially after yesterday, that Trump’s vision of America—and Hegseth’s of the military—is not what they and their comrades-in-arms signed up and sacrificed for.

Yesterday also saw a notable contribution to our public discourse from a veteran of a different generation, a man who served a tour in the Army over six decades ago and then continued his public service with a distinguished career as a U.S. federal district court judge. William G. Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the federal bench in Massachusetts now a senior judge, wrote a long and careful opinion in American Association of University Professors et al. v. Marco Rubio, finding that in one of the early ICE arrests this year the Trump administration had trampled on the free speech rights of an immigrant.

But Young chose to go beyond his important legal analysis of free speech jurisprudence to discuss the larger meaning of “our magnificent Constitution.” And so he addressed the practice of ICE agents’ wearing masks:

Can you imagine a masked Marine? It is a matter of honor—and honor still matters. To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police. Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.

This remark was especially striking in the context of the speeches by Trump and Hegseth. For what they want, in a way, is to turn the U.S. military into an institution more like ICE: an internal police force, unconstrained by many laws or norms, bullying and intimidating people here at home on behalf of the current administration in Washington.

I have considerable confidence that the current crop of general and flag officers do not want a kind of a military that looks like or behaves like ICE, and that they would resist it. But what of the military leadership three years from now? The Washington Post recently described efforts by Hegseth to shape the next generation of senior officers. “Even at the one- and two-star level, the secretary’s team is scrutinizing old relationships and what officials have said or posted on social media, as they determine whom to send forward for a higher rank or assignment,” the paper reported.

What will the officer corps look like in three years? Can we be confident that Trump and Hegseth won’t succeed in turning the U.S. military into something more like ICE? The thought seems incredible. But that ICE would be doing what it is now doing on our streets would have been shocking just a year ago.

The opinion of Judge Young and the silence of the generals at Quantico offer some grounds for hope. But military officers and district court judges alone won’t save us. And it’s perhaps worth noting that neither the judge nor the senior officers were elected to their offices. At the end of the day, free government can’t be preserved without the commitment and courage of elected officials. So the question is: Can more of our elected officials rise to the occasion? Which means, can more of the American people rise to the occasion? That’s the question with which Judge Young concludes his opinion:

I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected. Is he correct?

Is he correct?”

WORDS FAIL ME.

 

Trump yesterday addressing America's military brass: 

 "We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, the president of the United States said."