Stroll into Submission

It started off with something awful, an anecdotal incident that to the President was the last straw, apparently.

This young guy who is known forevermore as “Big Balls” whose real name is Edward Coristine was carjacked by a couple of teens. The former staffer with the Department of Government Efficiency was essentially an excuse for what President Trump seeks to do: take control of everything. Crime is bad, the man at the top says despite numbers coming out of the FBI that says otherwise.

Homeless are everywhere, he claims in the same press conference as another reason. We’re going to clear them off the streets. Anecdotally true – depending on where you live, people who find themselves living on the streets can be one guy living in the woods all the way up to encampments in major cities that block sidewalks or take over buildings that have been empty for years. Depending on where you live, those squatters might have more rights to stay than the building owner has to evict them.

Homeless numbers have gone up annually during his past administration, the Biden administration and this year as well. People are stressed more than ever by tariffs – making the other country pay – is just like the same promise made when the President claimed Mexico was going to pay for the wall.

Sure they are… He fires the Bureau of Labor Statistics head because he’s unhappy with the numbers. He bullies and threatens, opens new detention centers for illegal immigrants with the same glee as opening a theme park.

We seem to be content as a nation to just stroll into submission when it comes to President Trump’s actions, essentially frozen in place over everything from tariffs to clearly quid pro quo deals with Qatar, to sending the military in to police the streets.

In fairness on that last particular point: the military has been used in the past in enforcement roles on American soil. People tend to conveniently forget this fact when it comes to boots on the ground. It was fine during Katrina to send in the National Guard to patrol the streets of New Orleans, or in Little Rock when enforcing desegregation in the 1950s, or in American cities when rioters are loose and burning businesses down to the ground. We’ve used the military to quash the Whiskey Rebellion, the riots in New York City after Gettysburg, even dropped bombs on then the “Black Wall Street of America,” the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa. The military demanded the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.

I could go on forever, but no one should be under the pretense this is an unprecedented move that American troops are called up and suddenly thrown into patrols on the streets.

If anything one could argue that Eisenhower sending the troops to Little Rock to enforce the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling was the moment that putting American troops on the ground in a protective role was when we accepted the fact that American troops could be used in any capacity. Including at some point law enforcement roles.

Which is what President Trump has done with the Marines and California National Guard deployment in Los Angeles, and the National Guard and Federal Agents in DC. And the support for this is coming from other states now: Governors from Ohio, West Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee have pledged troops to the effort as well.

But why are we accepting this at all? Fear? Complacency? Ignorance?

It has been a long, drudging hike into where we are as a nation today as Presidential power has grown over generations, not in just a few months time. If anything it started with President Woodrow Wilson in World War I, got worse when FDR took over and through World War II, then with the threat of nuclear annihilation at every moment it became imperial, as the Commander-in-Chief is the only one with authority to hit the red button and end the world on behalf of the United States. Thanks, President Truman. (Another sidenote on this particular item: Truman essentially had no choice in the matter, because General MacArthur was threatening to use them against the Chinese and North Korean troops early on in the Korean War, and as a FIVE STAR GENERAL believed he had the authority to make that decision as the theater commander, as I remember the situation, which I made sure to look up before making this side note about the issue.)

Presidential authority has been stretched and stretched to incredible bounds, with Nixon completely going past the point with the Watergate scandal badly enough to force him to resign instead of face impeachment, but otherwise? His actions only set the “limit” of Presidential power, which was exceeded then at every turn possible. Give the President unilateral authority to go into combat without Congressional approval? Sure. Let’s do that George W. Bush. Give the President the opportunity to spy on anyone in the world using tools created by the NSA? Thanks, Barack Obama.

Pardons are political now? Sure, President Trump in the first administration. And President Biden during his term too. Executive Orders that counteract the will of Congress and the Judiciary? Both past and present administrations have been guilty as sin of those.

Every line that can be crossed is being crossed, is my point.

And this isn’t a modern problem. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, JFK… all of them have taken some new power under the executive during their administrations.

Yet it all seems like crickets out there in the world. Mainstream news outlets are going crazy every other day about a new issue or problem, and it has been so overwhelming to the general public that I guess Americans have just decided enough is enough. Tune out. Breathe and let it all just… go.

You, me, your neighbors and friends, family and foes alike – we are all just stuck in this singular place in time right now where NOTHING seems to matter anymore. And the Democratic Party?

Crickets.

With exception to the redistricting fight happening in Texas, and now states like California and Illinois with state parties taking on the GOP and gerrymandering their seats out of existence in liberal states, it seems like the party of the left is now essentially gone from the national scene in a way that would make their empty rhetoric about What Trump is Doing NOW sound small and pathetic. DON’T HURT ME BAD ORANGE MAN!

Ugh.

Honestly, I can understand where Americans are when it comes to fighting over governance in the United States. Everyone feels like the game is rigged against the people living here who aren’t in the upper echelons of wealth or political power anyhow, so why does it matter who is in charge? Prices are still going up. The world isn’t any better off than it was five years ago. Everyone is still bickering about which way the ship should turn heading into the rest of an already stormy century, but only when it comes to social issues instead of the fundamentals.

Somehow, it got WORSE during a Monday press conference with President Zelensky from Ukraine during these recent “try to end the war” back and forth talks that President Trump has been trying to broker.

During the press conference, a reporter asked about Presidential elections in Ukraine. They can’t hold elections during this current war due to public safety concerns (essentially the Russians launch a missile strike while everyone is standing around waiting to cast a ballot.) Zelensky mentioned that as soon as the war was over, an election would be held in his country.

President Trump in this moment went “wait, you suspend your elections during war?” and then went onto say that could be the case 3 1/2 years from now. (I’m paraphrasing, President Trump weaves his conversations around and I’m not going to bother directly quoting whole pages of text.)

You know what is coming up in 3 1/2 years from now? A presidential election.

First he put Troops on the street in Los Angeles. He pushed the boundaries again with deployments in DC. Now maybe we just start a war to prevent having to leave office?

This is bad, America. Very, very bad.

Time to stop strolling and take a look around at the situation at hand, friends. But: expect things to get worse at this point before they get any better. Maybe that is the medicine we need to all wake up to the core issues our nation now faces.