America's Death Wish

Go Ahead, Put a Traitor in Charge of Our National Security...Again

The reason that motorcycles get sold is that there is a large community of idiots in the world who think to themselves “I’ve never been killed on a motorcycle before, what could go wrong?”

But, on the other hand, there is the wind your hair and the freedom of being at one with the open road (or something like that), so I get it. There’s an upside.

What’s the upside of saying, “Donald Trump is a demented traitor who did not destroy America and the world the first time, so let’s give it another go?” How is it possible that given what we know—just the facts, stripped of political or policy biases—anyone would say, sure, let’s put Trump in charge of our national security again?

Are you not paying attention, America? Or is it that, like many of the assholes on motorcycles you see speeding between lanes on the interstate, you have a death wish?

Because that is the only conceivable “justification” there could be for the fact that right now, Donald Trump is more likely than anyone else to be the next president of the United States.

A Terrible (Terrible!) Record

Confoundingly, it is not just that Trump has a terrible record of contempt for America’s security, cuddling up to our enemies, and, well, you know, stealing nuclear secrets, but he reminds us of how dangerous he is every day. He revels in it.

For example, take his meeting Thursday (today as I am writing this) with well-known authoritarian and Kremlin fanboy Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Orban spent last week canoodling with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin and Xi Jinping in Beijing.  Who’s next on his tour? Trump. Together the two of them are counterprogramming the NATO Summit in Washington despite a.) Orban’s Hungary being a member of NATO and b.) Trump being a private citizen and therefore not supposed to be undermining U.S. foreign policy.  

This is Trump putting it out there yet again—in bold face and red letters—in case you missed it the last several hundred times he did it—that he is not only Putin’s poodle, but that he now leads a political party that is pro-Putin, pro-Russian, pro-aggression, pro-war crimes, pro-authoritarianism and anti-NATO, anti-Ukraine and most importantly, anti-American national interests.

Dude is the enemy. He is telling you he is the enemy. He is hugging and kissing other members of the enemy. He is expressing his admiration for the enemy. He is helping the enemy in any way he can. He stood in the Oval Office and gave representatives of the enemy classified information. He publicly embraced the enemy and said he believe whatever the lying enemy leader said rather than the conclusions of his own intelligence and law enforcement communities. He said he sent love letters to the most deranged of the princelings in the enemy alliance. He has done business with the enemy. His family and a potential future Trump Secretary of State are currently working on a real estate deal that includes a memorial to the victims of…our allies and alliance.

He has been on the record saying the enemy could do whatever the hell they wanted with our allies. He has attacked those fighting to defend freedom and democracy from the enemy and blamed the innocent victims of the enemy for the enemy’s aggression. He has tried when president to pull US troops out of Europe in a move that would have been so dangerous that his own aides put the kibosh on it.  His own chief of staff said he had no use for alliance that came together to protect us from our enemies for the past 75 years. (NATO, the same alliance he is trying to upstage with his little public love fest with Orban.) His own national security advisor said he feared Trump would pull us out of that alliance if reelected. Other experts believe he will almost immediately upon being reelected pull the plug on the vital defense of Ukraine, thus opening the door to further Russian attacks on Europe in the years ahead.

He Couldn’t Get a Security Clearance

But let’s set all that aside. Let’s set aside the fact that a man with his criminal convictions would never be given even a low level security clearance much less be put in charge of the entire U.S. national security community. Let’s set aside he gave high level clearances to his relatives even though the intelligence community recommended against it.

Why don’t we just focus on the fact that he stole massive numbers of highly classified U.S. secrets from the U.S. government? We know he did it. He admits he did it. We have pictures of the documents. We’ve all seen them. We also know that the place he stored the documents was a low security hive of spy activity. (Every spy agency in the world was of course, trying to penetrate Mar-a-Lago where it is known sometimes Trump would hold court and have discussions about national secrets in the dining room or by the pool.)

Now you might say, the courts have yet to find him guilty of this. And that is undeniably true. Because for some reason the U.S. Department of Justice sought to bring the case against him for thefts in a place where it was not only likely a corrupt and incompetent judge would be assigned to it…but where that actually happened. And that judge, Aileen Cannon, has done everything in her power to delay the case against Trump in the hope that he would be reelected and then could pardon himself or drop the case or do both and then do Lord knows what with the new classified intelligence to which he would be given unfettered access as president.

Just think of it, now that presidents have been granted sweeping immunity by the also corrupt right wing majority on our Supreme Court, this serial traitor—who actually led a rebellion against his own government—will be able to do literally anything he wants and if he can claim it was an “official” act—he’s off scot-free. “Hey Vlad, want to come over to my place and have a Top Secret Codeword Clearance Slumber Party? I’ll show you my intel community’s family jewels if you show me yours.”

But, see, here’s the thing. While we know Judge Cannon is going to try to bury the classified documents case against Trump, we don’t have to. The American people actually have a power she does not have. They can elect someone else president. Then Trump can’t traffic in national secrets ever again. (Unless he digs up the ones he buried with his first wife or somewhere else.)

In fact, if Trump is rejected, he can’t threaten our national security ever again. He can’t undermine our alliances. He can’t help our enemies. He can’t push for new “more useable” nukes as he wants to. He won’t have the ability to end the world with a touch of a button, just a few minutes after he decided he wanted to do that.

All we have to do is wake the fuck up. All we have to do is recognize that we are the ones who finally determine who is in charge of our safety.  All we have to do is open our eyes, refresh our memories, see the evidence of the danger he poses everywhere, listen to what he is saying to us every day and then instead of doing the clinically insane self-destructive thing, do the thing that might not result in global disaster.

Sounds easy, right? And yet…and yet…sigh…and yet…