While anxiously waiting for Trump's next move on his dictatorial juggernaut I found two small things to be pleased about. By Hal M. Brown

 

..

I was looking at my friend Sabrina Haake’s Facebook page.  She writes the Substack The Haake Take.

This is what I saw:

I wrote the following comment:

Last night watching Stephanie Ruhle's MSNBC show with her talking to Jon Meacham about LA and Trump, and at the end of a long segment she (I'm paraphrasing) said we should get alarmed yet and he (again parphrasing) said it is acceptable to be alarmed. On Lawrence O'Donnell's long first segment about this, I was pleased that for the entire time he had this photo on the screen. Trump is known to watch the show and I suspect this was done just to piss him off. I'd seen the photo on the lower left but not this one. (click image to enlarge) I still haven't decided what to write my Substack about - this is hardly a big story but I am tempted to share it if I can't think of something else. Here's an article about the tripping video going viral. (The photo I posted with my comment is on the top of this page.)

I wonder whether there was any debate among staff at Lawrence’s show about which photo to feature. The photo of Trump’s face is one of the least flattering I’ve seen recently, but the one from the back shows how badly he tripped. Lawrence showed a video of Trump walking up the stairs to Air Force One and said that this was the video Trump did not want you to see.

Back to Jon Meacham and what he said to Stephanie Rhule.

I’ve referred to the impact Walker Chronkite had on LBJ and the country when he editorialized about the Vietnam War and how this is considered by historians to have been a seminal event leading to the United State’s withdrawing from Vietnam.

Excerpt:

It may be hard to believe in the current era of declining media credibility and amid President Donald Trump's bitter condemnations of "fake news," but mainstream journalists once were trusted figures in society who could sway public opinion in a major way.

A historic example occurred 50 years ago this week: the stunning commentary of CBS anchor Walker Cronkite on Feb. 27, 1968, in which he dissected the U.S. role in Vietnam, stepped away from objectivity, and came to a very negative conclusion. He crystallized public opposition to the Vietnam War and dealt a setback to the credibility of the U.S. government.

Today we don’t have any one person with the influence and credibility of Walter Chronicle. If I could chose one it just might be Jon Meacham.

Of course, back in the Chronkite days we didn’t have cable news. There were three networks. Of the three networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC, in the 1960s and 70s, CBS News was widely considered to be the best in the business (reference).

For those too young to remember here’s an article:

Note that the above article is from CNN and entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner (who was married to Jane Fonda for 10 years) didn’t launch the first 24 hour news network until 1980.

With all the horrible news at least I was pleased to see how Lawrence O’Donnell may have sent a message to Trump that would piss him off, and I was glad that Jon Meacham gave permission, of a sort, to Stephanie Ruhle and her audience not only to be alarmed, but basically said that they should be alarmed.

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Eventually Trump will say "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead," only for him the torpedoes will be nothing more than Nerf balls.

 

Trump may or may not know that it was David Farragut (pictured in the old drawing used in a WWI recruitment post, shown above) who is alleged to have said “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” or something like this. (You can read the history of this here and also here. 

During the Civil War water mines were called torpedoes. 

Farragut was fearless and when leading the Union fleet in the Battle of Mobile Bay, which the Union won, he demonstrated bravery.

Suffice to say that Donald Trump is no David Farragut although he likes to identify himself with real and fictional heroes.

There are many true stories, and certainly fictional ones, of soldiers and sailors prevailing even though they were against overwhelming odds.

Rambo and other make believe characters dodge machine gun bullets and Trump actually had a real bullet miss him. While he didn’t dodge a bullet, he had the presence of mind to turn the near miss to use this advantage by striking a defiant pose.

Currently Trump is testing the limits of his power. He says that he’s not sure whether he has to obey court orders. He can’t wait until he knows orders that go against him aren’t worth the paper they are printed on.

With a GOP controlled Congress he doesn’t have to worry about defying this branch of government. He intends to make sure his power is so absolute that even if the Democrats control Congress in two years they will be a paper tiger.

Today he wanted to come across as a man of the people by putting on a show as someone who cared about people struggling with high drug prices. There will be a time when he doesn’t even care about bothering with such performances. I can see an advisor suggesting that he do something to remind the people what a great president he is and him saying he’d rather play golf or fly in his palatial Air Force One to some country where he’ll be treated like royalty. I can see a time when Trump tires of governing and even faking that he’s doing this.

As far as public opinion, for him this is already like water off a duck’s back. If millions of people take to the streets and protest as long as they stay away from his properties he may not even order his armed thugs to deal with them.

There will be a point in the next year or two when Trump realizes that the torpedoes fired to thwart his dictatorial ambition are nothing more than Nerf balls fired from a plastic gun.

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If you're reading this in the US it is highly likely that if Trump becomes president you will be "Royally" or dictatorially "effed"

By Hal Brown

My original title was as follows: If you're reading this it is highly likely that if Trump becomes president you will be "Royally" or dictatorially "effed" but in recognition that by far I have more readers in Singapore which has many American expatriots and students living there (5,750 blog readers this week), China (1,400 this week), Germany, and at various times in Russia and other countries I changed it to add "in the US."

If someone is keeping track of even the most minor anti-Trump bloggers so that if Trump gets to be president and Agenda47 (not Agenda 47 with a space) is initiated people like me will join the prominent critics in new American gulags, or suffer worse fates. If you are reading this today sometime in Trump's administration this blog will be offline because I'll be sleeping on a narrow steel bed in a cell with no Internet let alone my trusty laptop.

Want to be depressed and not a little frightened? Read this:

"Trump's plans to become a dictator — denial will not save you" by Chauncey DeVega in Salon.

Here's enough of an excerpt to justify my point. 

Trump and his advisers are actively creating the infrastructure for him to follow through on his plans to be a dictator when/if he retakes the White House in 2025. Trump's Agenda 47 is a plan to radically remake the presidency and American government (and American society) in service to his neofascist vision that includes such goals as ending birthright citizenship, criminalizing migrants and refugees, putting homeless people in camps, instituting national stop and frisk laws, restricting freedom of the press, ending academic freedom at the country's universities and colleges and other institutions of higher education, replacing quality public education that teaches critical thinking and the country's real history with a form of fascist "patriotic" indoctrination, ending environmental regulations, more gangster capitalism and power for the richest Americans and corporations, reversing the progress of the civil rights movement and the Black Freedom Struggle, taking away the rights of gays and lesbians and other queer people, further restricting women's civil and human rights, and ending US support for Ukraine.

Project 2025 is a strategy that has been developed by right-wing think tanks and interest groups such as the Heritage Foundation. The main focus of Project 2025 is to launch a blitzkrieg assault on the American government by ending career civil service and replacing it with Trump loyalists with the goal of eliminating any internal opposition to the Trump dictatorship. In essence, these Trump loyalists will place his vision above the Constitution and the rule of law.

This is Vega's article about Trump's Agenda47.

Be very afraid: Trump's "Agenda 47" is no joke

 It is subtitled: "This is not a joke or funny: You should be very afraid of Trump's fascist Agenda 47 plan."

Here's an excerpt: 

Agenda 47 would consist of an end to birthright citizenship, further criminalizing transgender people and the LGBTQI community more broadly, expanding the thought crime and other censorship laws to end the teaching of "critical race theory" and to defeat "Woke" and "Black Lives Matter", attacking academic freedom and replacing it with "patriot education", implementing a national stop and frisk law, pardoning the Jan. 6 terrorists, putting homeless people in camps or some other designated area under threat of arrest, building high tech "freedom cities", ending the professional civil service and replacing it with right-wing political appointees and other such partisan agents, gutting the Department of Justice and other parts of the government that opposed Trump's attacks on democracy and the rule of law, executing drug dealers, starting a trade war with China, and making "peace" with Vladimir Putin by withdrawing support for the Ukrainian people and their freedom struggle. In many ways, Agenda 47 is a continuation of the fascist and other authoritarian policies Trump put in place during his first regime but now made even more extreme and cruel.

The "you" referred to above is you (unless you are a secret agent of Agenda47) the reader of this blog, and it is certainly me, the writer of these words.

I think I was in denial because I was puzzled why this was called Agenda47. I was wondering where the number 47 came from. I actually had to do a brief web search to find out it came from his plan of what he'll do as the 47th president.

Trump's Agenda47 is real. You can go to his website here for more details, but I doubt you will. I'll share screenshots for those who don't want to give him a click. Here's how the page opens (click to enlarge, does not link to Trump's website):

Above: Agenda47:
Ending the Nightmare of Homeless, Drug Addicts, and
 Dangerously Deranged on American Streets.

One might note that Trump's use of the term "dangerously deranged" (above) defines someone who is a malignant narcissist poised to become president of the United States.

Without going to the Trump website you can read the top of the website featured "plan" Ending the Nightmare of the Homeless, Drug Addicts, and Dangerously Deranged on American Streets by clicking here. It should be obvious none of this was written by Trump. You can also read it by scrolling down this page and clicking "Read more" which is a part of this blog on a second page.

Scrolling down his website this is what you see:

You can click each image to enlarge - this will not take you to Trump's website. You can read a very brief summary under the titles but to really see how chilling these plans are you have to go to his website.

 

On page two of Trump's website here's some of what is explained in detail:

• Preventing World War III, 
• Reversing Biden’s EO Embedding Marxism in the Federal Government, 
• Protecting Americans from Radical Leftist ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) Investments, 
•  Plan to Stop the America Last Warmongers and Globalists,
•  Plan to Protect Children from Left-Wing Gender Insanity, 
• Plan to Save American Education and Give Power Back to Parents, 
• Calls for Probe into Intelligence Community’s Role in Online Censorship, 
• Total Ban on Taxpayer Dollars Used to Free Illegal Aliens and Criminal Penalties for Administrative Noncompliance, 
• Free Speech Policy Initiative

You really have to read each of these to see why Agenda47 means that Trump's vision of America is that it will become a dictatorship where nobody but a favored group feels safe from oppression and disenfranchisement.

We all know the meaning of "fucked" in this context - it has nothing to do with sex. It means to be in a really bad situation. Preface this with "royally" and it means to be in a really, really, really, really bad situation. Capitalize royally and it means not only to be in a really, really, really, really bad situation but to be fucked over by royalty, or in Trump's case, by a dictator.

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