Why did four million Albanians take to the streets to protest a corrupt land deal engineered by President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, while Americans who face far greater threats from the president and his family spent the weekend barbecuing and at the beach?
Why do Ukrainians fight Trump’s Russian allies even though the odds are against them? And even though the costs in life, human suffering, and economic terms are immeasurably high while Americans passively accept the far greater threat that Trump poses to our national security and that of our allies?
Snap out of it, America!
Give yourself a good hard slap across the face. Douse yourself with ice water. Wake the eff up!
Henry Kissinger once said the most powerful force in Washington is inertia. The same could be said of the entire country. We’re too comfortable. The proof is in how disproportionate our response is to the threat Trump poses to our country.
The problems are piling up under the demented and incompetent leadership of the president and his cronies. Gas prices are up. Food prices are up. Millions of Americans are unable to afford healthcare.
And the evidence of far greater problems to come is abundant.
We are in the midst of a national crisis that is every bit as much an existential threat to the nation and the well-being of its people as any battle we have faced since Appomattox.
The president is literally decaying before our very eyes. Not only can he barely walk or stand, he cannot stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s not an exaggeration. We all saw it last week in an Oval Office meeting in which he slumped in his chair and passed out while the aides around him, on live television, pretended to ignore it. Pretended, just like tens of millions of Americans do every day.
It’s Weekend at Donny’s: The Oval Office Edition, and far too few people seem to give a damn. (Who’s surprised? In the last election, despite knowing Trump was our worst president ever during his first term, far more people chose not to vote than voted for either Trump or Kamala Harris.)
We have seen the president unable to maintain a coherent thought. He couldn’t remember the name of the Washington Monument. He regularly can’t control his anger. He threatens wars and demands payoffs for insurrectionists around the clock. He posts AI slop glorifying himself as a god or a warrior or as a heavily-muscled football icon with half-naked young men dancing in tribute to his manliness.
This weekend, on the anniversary of D-Day, he launched attack after attack on Americans and the world and not once saluted the sacrifices American soldiers and sailors made to defend the democracy he is destroying.
His dimwitted lackey at the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth, compounded the offense by appearing at D-Day commemoration ceremonies and attacking our allies and equating the flows of immigrants into Europe with the threat posed by our WWII enemies. Our European friends were disgusted.
On Sunday, we saw Trump blow up during a Meet the Press interview with Kristen Welker when she did what too few journalists do and fact-checked him in real time. He lost it. He stormed off the set. Watch the video. Read the transcript.
He is not in command of his emotions. He is a threat to those around him. He belongs under the care and constant supervision of mental health professionals.
Yes, he’s a madman. But, yawn. Let’s post something on X or Bluesky about it and go to a rally every couple of months. Maybe put up a yard sign.
Never mind that Trump can, on his own, launch a nuclear attack where, within a couple of minutes, missiles will leave their silos. Never mind that we have already seen him launch multiple illegal wars, resulting in the loss of thousands of lives and the destabilization of the world and the global economy. Never mind that he is promising more such wars. Never mind that he is lying about their consequences and then following the lies by saying he doesn’t care what they may mean for the lives of average Americans.
Never mind that he has appointed a man with zero intelligence experience to lead our intelligence community, or that he says that man’s mission is to gut our intelligence resources and help undermine faith in our elections. Never mind that his Secretary of Defense has done the same to the Pentagon—firing scores of talented top leaders, shutting down vital programs, and making the place less transparent to the public than ever before. Never mind that he has allied us with war criminals while undermining our crucial relationships with our friends. Never mind that he is appointing insurrectionists to sensitive national security positions.
Never mind that I am only listing attacks on our national security that have occurred in the last week alone.
That’s right. Each and every week, he is weakening us and strengthening our enemies. Each and every week, he is squandering resources on vainglorious, dangerous, or corrupt projects. Each and every week, we become more vulnerable to overseas threats even as he conspires to create greater ones at home—threats to our elections this fall, threats to our fundamental freedoms, threats to our way of life.
He’s doing all this while gutting our healthcare and leaving it in the hands of a no-show, deranged ex-drug addict and his friends who advocate junk science. All this while raping the environment and seeking to destroy free speech at our universities and in the press.
All this while stealing, stealing, stealing and ignoring the law, obstructing justice, attacking the courts, protecting pedophiles, and granting pardons to undeserving felons.
Imagine you read about such attacks on any country anywhere else. You would say it was not only at war with a dangerous foe but losing, losing rapidly, losing precious ground with each passing day.
But that war—a real war with a real toll waged by real enemies with help from foreign adversaries—is invisible to most Americans.
Most of us, you see, can still afford to shrug it off. We’re a rich country. Most of us are not really suffering yet.
We lived through his first term—except for the 1.1 million who did not because of how grievously he mismanaged the COVID pandemic. We’ve lived through a year and a half of an even more twisted version of Trump—unlike the million who have died worldwide due to DOGE-Rubio cuts to U.S. aid flows, or the perhaps 13 million more who will die in the next few years, or those who will die of Ebola and other epidemics because we have cut funding for the health services that protect us, or those lying dead in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, or elsewhere in the Middle East because of wars founded on lies or at the service of a foreign power like Israel (which we have just learned is ramping up its spying efforts…against us).
In Albania, they took to the streets because their country is poor and collapsing. Millions are going hungry and unable to get basic healthcare or enjoy services Americans take for granted. So of course, when spoiled oligarchettes like Ivanka Trump try to scoop up an island and turn it into a resort for the rich in ways that will hardly benefit Albania at all, naturally, the people are angry and won’t take it. They realize that squandered resources cost them.
We’re too rich as a country to feel that yet.
But watch this space. At the rate we are going, we will.
In Ukraine, they fight because the alternative is to lose their country to the Kremlin and the aging war criminal at its helm. We don’t fear such things. After all, we weren’t invaded. There are no missiles obliterating our schools and hospitals.
No missiles. No drones. Just Supreme Court rulings that strip away the right to vote or that grant ever greater power to the rich or more latitude to an out-of-control chief executive. Just an administration that scoffs at the Constitution, arrogates all power onto one man, and shows blind loyalty to him even as he descends into madness.
No bombs going off. Just the gradual destruction of our national security apparatus. The NSC is effectively gone. Most ambassadorial appointments remain unfilled. Thousands of State Department, FBI, and DOJ jobs that protected us are gone—the ones that protected us against foreign election interference, foreign corruption, terrorism, and key nuclear threats.
Some of the best and brightest at the Department of Defense have been kicked out or silenced. The same is happening in our intelligence community. The officers who remain in place have had to do so at the cost of their reputations, agreeing to fight illegal wars and violate international law.
No bullets flying.
How would we know if they were flying anyway? The president has his friends buying up key media outlets and his FCC and DOJ and State Department intimidating the others.
The reason it was shocking to watch Trump lose it with Kristen Welker, in part, is because so few journalists are willing to do the bare minimum their jobs require. Heck, the White Correspondents Association—even in the face of Trump’s war on the First Amendment and unceasing attacks on its members—is going to hold its annual gala again in July to accommodate the president, the man committed to destroying truth in America.
We have an election coming up. At least we think we do. That could offer the chance to reverse some of these trends. That could give us an opportunity to stand up for our rights as a people. But we know the president is mobilizing his entire government to ensure those elections are not free and fair. They are cheating right now, before our eyes. They are gerrymandering. They are seeking voter rolls. They are positioning troops and others to go into the streets. They are seeking to end mail-in voting. They are questioning legitimate election results.
It may be that November is our chance to emulate the citizens of Albania and Ukraine and other freedom-loving people everywhere.
Maybe. Or maybe November will be too late. Maybe when a country is facing threats like those we face today—and we’ve never faced threats like these before—maybe we should see the red lights flashing, maybe we should realize the crisis is now. Maybe every journalist should fact-check the president. Maybe every one of us should be doing more, thinking about how we can do more, giving more time and money, and taking more risks.
Maybe it is time we realize the fight is not somewhere else, it is here—not at some time in the future, but that it must be now.
