New York
As I write, the month of March stumbles toward April, bleeding all the way. Soon we shall mark seventy-one consecutive days of fascist chaos that commenced on January 20 with the second presidential inauguration of a criminal farce by the name Donald J. Trump. With spring in sight after winter’s final act, I am mindful of sobering lines from “The Wasteland,” the epic poem by American-born British essayist and poet T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)—
April is the cruellist month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land…
What are the roots that clutch,
what branches grow
out of this stony rubbish?
I will show you fear
in a handful of dust…
•
Offenses to American law, the better parts of American culture, and common decency began shortly after inauguration day year as Mr. Trump issued presidential pardons to some 1,500 of his club-wielding loyalists—his Stoßtruppen, variously convicted for their rôles in the attempted coup d’état he inspired five years ago in Washington because he was angry at failing to win reëlection after a first disastrous term in the White House, which I shall call Trump I.
Never mind that Mr. Trump’s marauding bully-boys trashed the Capitol building as they hunted for then-Vice President Mike Pence, intending to hang him in a functioning gallows they had erected. Never mind that one hundred forty police officers were seriously injured, some too ill for return duty. Never mind that five cops died.
None of it matters to Donald Trump, rated by psychologists as a malignant narcissist. Recently, Mr. Trump spent an hour informing a mandatory assembly of staff attorneys at the Department of Justice that he is the “chief law enforcement officer in our country,” that prosecutors who file actions against him are “scum” or “deranged” or “lunatics,” that judges who rule against him are “corrupt,” and news media that write of him unfavorably are “illegal.”
To cap off his tantrum, Mr. Trump said of his detractors: “These are people that are bad people, really bad people…[They] should go to jail.”
Now comes the Geheime Staatspolizei, the chief law enforcement officer’s American Gestapo: burly, machine gun-toting men (and a few burly women) of the U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement Agency, known by an unsettling acronym: ICE. Of late, the ICE mission is to abduct foreign students at university campuses—damn “ferners,” as Trump voters describe them—for lockdown in detention centers far from where they were snatched off the street, or in their dormitories, preferably at dawn.
At the pleasure of Marco Rubio, secretary of state and one-time Trump critic turned obsequious admirer, special visas allow foreign students to reside here in pursuit of academic certification. Thus, the ability of Mr. Rubio’s ICE to snatch is made simple: Visa revocation is in itself grounds for arrest and lockdown, thus serving the foremost purpose of ICE—intimidation.
Latest to be snatched is 30-year-old Turkish national and Tufts University PhD candidate Rümeysa Oztürk, arrested March 25 by ICE agents (some masked) on the street outside her Massachusetts home in the Boston suburb of Somerville.
Like many other students at élite American universities, U.S. citizens or otherwise, Ms. Oztürk was a sometime political activist. Her particular cause was the plight of Palestinians trapped in Gaza as the war between Israel and the terrorist organization Hamas grinds on. To that end, she put her name to an essay critical of the Israeli government under Benjamin Netenyahu. She was not charged with a crime, according to her lawyer, nor has she ever been criminally charged anywhere.
Nevertheless, Ms. Oztürk was handcuffed and whisked away by plane from Boston in America’s northeast to an ICE detention center in the deep south state of Louisiana—a distance of some 1,600 miles (2,575 km).
A passerby provided the Associated Press with a video recording of Ms. Oztürk’s arrest, as seen in this report—https://apnews.com/article/tufts-student-detained-massachusetts-immigration-6c3978da98a8d0f39ab311e092ffd892
•
More than likely, Ms. Oztürk’s lawyer will win her release through courtroom litigation—eventually. Not so for some twenty-five thousand children who migrated to the United States alone, in flight from sex trafficking and gang violence that in some cases resulted in the deaths of their parents or guardians.
One minor among the desperate bunch is but two years of age, the others range from seven to thirteen years. Virtually all are not fluent in English; all are too young to understand their rights under American law. Were they to be deported, these children face near certain physical, psychological, or sexual harm.
Last month, the Trump administration abruptly ended funding that would pair these children with counsel through the non-governmental organization Kids in Need of Defense, headquartered in Washington. It may well be decided, eventually, that such termination violates the Trafficking Victims Protect Act of 2000, by which the government is required, to the “greatest extent practicable,” to provide legal representation for minors.
Not that it matters to Donald Trump, whose grandfather Friedrich Drumpf escaped compulsory military service in Germany by fleeing the village of Kallstadt for eventual prosperity as an undocumented immigrant in New York—thanks to a fortune derived from his time as a brothel keeper during the nineteenth century “goldrush days” in Canada’s Yukon Territory.
•
In today’s New York—and in the western state of Colorado, notably— desperate young men seeking their fortunes include escapees from violence-torn Venezuela. They are Spanish speakers, they tend to be elaborately tattooed, some may be gang members or assumed to be, they are a scarifying presence of undocumented immigrants who practically cry out to be abducted.
Habla epañol, sport some tats on your brown skin, and you’re easy pickings for the burly boys and girls of ICE. Trump-approved media outlets such as Fox Television and One America News Network will happily tout the tats and so forth, thereby feeding a racist impulse deep in the bones of American society.
And so it is that ICE agents have rounded up Venezuelans by the hundreds and disappeared them to the notoriously brutal, torture-friendly Terrorism Confinement Center in remote Tecoluca, El Salvador—known as CECOT, a Spanish acronym for Centro de Confinamiento del Terrismo. Never mind the jurisprudential principle of due process and its central tenet of presumed innocence until uncontestable guilt, niceties afforded to the late Friedrich Drumpf.
The most recent arrival at CECOT was a cargo of scary-looking Venezuelans flown from New York to El Salvador in the nick of time. That is, just before a federal judge here was set to turn back the flight. “Oopsie,” said El Salvador’s fascist President Nayib Bukele in a social media post, “too late!”
During the final week of March, the jailers/torturers of CECOT welcomed a visit from Kristi Noem, the ex-governor of South Dakota and Trump-appointed boss lady at ICE who famously dispatched her pesky female wirehair pointer puppy dog by dragging the animal into a gravel pit and shooting it.
Ms. Noem posed for photographs in front of a CECOT cell packed with the half-naked disappeared. For the occasion, she wore a baseball cap and a gold Rolex wristwatch valued at $60,000 (€55,457).
•
Closing out the first two months of Trump II, as I’ll call the current incarnation of his presidency, are two still-simmering outrages—
¶ A testy White House exchange in early March between Donald Trump and his guest, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, wherein Mr. Trump berated his counterpart for what he sees as insufficient gratitude for American support for Mr. Zelenskyy’s heroic resistance to Russia’s military invasion.
The purpose of the meeting was Mr. Trump’s attempt to once again extort President Zelenskyy with a promise of continuing financial backing in exchange for Ukrainian concessions to Russia’s demands in cease-fire talks. Par for the course as a Kremlin asset.
It would be the second extortion attempt, the first having occurred during Trump I when Mr. Zelenskyy was urged to provide “dirt” on business dealings in Ukraine involving the son of former U.S. President Joe Biden, his successful rival in the election of 2020. That initial attempt would result in Mr. Trump’s impeachment in the lower house of Congress.
During the March exchange, Vice President J.D. Vance piped up to ask the Ukrainian head of state, “Have you ever once said thank-you?” Many times, Mr. Zelenskyy responded in his deep voice. “No, I mean right now—at this meeting here,” squeaked Mr. Vance. Again, Mr. Zelenskyy responded affirmatively.
Whereupon, Donald Trump further humiliated President Zelenskyy by throwing him out of the White House.
¶ An embarrassing internet briefing among Mr. Trump’s simple-minded brain trust involving highly secret detailed plans for a bombing mission that targeted Iran-backed Houthi rebel forces in the ongoing Yemen civil war. Heading the briefing was Pete Hegseth, the liquor-loving former Fox TV host appointed by Donald Trump to lead the Pentagon, seat of the world’s foremost military power and keeper of U.S. nuclear weapons codes.
The meeting was conduct not in a government secured facility or internet hook-up secured by the government, but in a publicly available internet “chat room” called Signal. What could possibly happen?
In this case, Houthi forces might have intercepted Mr. Hegseth’s internet pow-wow and thereby launched advanced to kill the pilots of American fighter jets. After all, Mr. Hegseth’s very own Pentagon warned of Signal’s vulnerability some thirty days earlier.
One listener to the chat room was the startled journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who was mistakenly invited to the briefing by Mike Waltz, national security advisor to a self-acknowledged clueless president.
“I know nothing about it,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “It wasn’t a big deal. Mike Waltz is a good man. Pete Hegseth is doing a good job.”
Back in 2016, former First Lady Hillary Clinton was Donald Trump’s opponent in the presidential election of 2016. Mr. Trump, along with leaders of his Republican Party, made much of Ms. Clinton’s use of a private internet server for email correspondence rather than a secured government server. In the Clinton instance, no classified government business was discussed; the bulk of her emails dealt with ordinary courtesies in social matters.
As for the Hegseth-Waltz-Trump snafu, Ms. Clinton issued a press statement: “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me, it’s the stupidity.”
•
It is disturbingly obvious that capital-S stupidity is the American fashion in these days of Trump II. In this regard, the man in the White House, whose grotesqueries amuse and appall us daily, leads the way. His nervy political agenda is hilarious, with proposals to make Canada the fifty-first U.S. state, take over Panama, invade Mexico—and, oh yes, annex the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland.
This last item is not so amusing in Copenhagen or Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. Anders Vistisen, a member of Denmark’s parliament, delivered a blunt thanks-but-no-thanks message to Donald Trump on the topic that simply read “Fuck off!”
Following that dismissal came the notion of sending Usha Vance to charm the folks in Nuuk. The effort fell rather flat. A Stepford Wife prototype who excels at adoring gazes upon the puffy face of her husband J.D., Ms. Vance was uniformly rejected by Nuuk households when American officials canvassed neighborhoods in hopes of scoring an invitation for a home visit by the Second Lady of the United States (and entourage).
•
On my optimistic days, I enjoy believing that we Americans are every bit as clear-eyed as Anders Vistisen and the dear hearts and gentle people of Nuuk. But soon enough the Awful Orange Visage is everywhere in the press and television news “shows,” as unashamed broadcasters call their program offerings. Soon enough, I begin stewing with irritation that Donald Trump is not behind bars in El Salvador or wearing a straitjacket at some psychiatric institution with strong iron doors.
As if my discomfort is not enough, Mr. Trump reminds us several times a week that he garnered 77.3 million votes in last November’s presidential election. Seventy-seven-plus million Americans—!— voted for a proud adulterer who paid tens of millions of dollars in settlement of lawsuits brought against him, a felon convicted on thirty-four counts of tax and business fraud, an adjudicated sex offender, an inept entrepreneur with at least six corporate bankruptcies to his credit, and a famous golf cheat.
Meanwhile, the felon Trump walks freely among us in elevator shoes that make him appear taller than most other men. From his desk in the Oval Office, meanwhile, he gazes upon the proudest of his wall displays: a framed photographic blow-up of his police mugshot, taken by authorities in the city of Atlanta on the occasion of his arrest there for instigating the deadly Washington insurrection of January 2021.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump goes on and on and on and on and on and on—exhausting us by testing testing testing testing testing testing our ability to resist the normalization of his pathology.
At the beginning of our history as a nation, America was a collection of British colonies ruled by King George III. “Mad King George” was his moniker, mindless cruelty his governing agenda. The venereal disease syphilis his psychosis-inducing medical condition.
Common symptoms of the disease begin with swollen red sores that appear on fingertips—as now evidenced on Donald Trump’s own. We might call the Trump II era Mad King Redux.
•
The other evening on the MSNBC Television news program she hosts, political historian and sociologist Rachel Maddow paused for a moment to consider the zeitgeist. She placed both hands to her head to ask viewers, in an exasperated whimper, “How is this real life?”
As I heard Ms. Maddow’s lament, I thought darkly of a T.S. Eliot epigram: “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
