It was 19 months ago, following the embarrassing spectacle in the Oval Office in which Donald Trump and his then-equally tubby vice president ambushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that I said in this space that it had become clear that Trump was on Russia’s side in its invasion of Ukraine.
The last decade, we’ve been told we have to speak — and speak loudly — or we’re the bad guys. And, of course, say what the mob says or we’re still the bad guys. But silence is often more profound.
Our present preoccupation with living the Boy Who Cried Wolf’s life forces me to write the same column every so often. This week’s column is brought to you courtesy of revelations about President Trump’s secret plane swap forced by an Iranian threat.
Our blowhard, none-too-bright president wanted it to be clear, and he said so on his little message board on March 6: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”
Leland Vittert of NewsNation has been making the point for weeks, but when he said it on a radio program Sunday night, a lightbulb came on for me. He was talking about the Iran war, but it might as well have been about our society generally, a society that has forgotten the necessary task of persuasion on matters that matter.
Pastor Tim has already written about this in light of another assassination attempt on either President Trump or other members of the administration.
Many people are unhealthily and dangerously angry, and it seems like it’s getting worse.
Tonight, I can’t stop thinking, this isn’t the way. A third assassination attempt against President Trump was all too narrowly thwarted mere months after the actual assassination of another national political figure. We need to treat the illness these evil acts are the symptoms of.
It needed to be done, but the adults hadn’t done it, so I thought I would. The result was a useful lesson. One that was painful both to me, who was guilty, and to many others, who weren’t. I never would have supposed that many years later it would become the kind of mistake the president of the United States would repeat on a much larger scale.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it was obvious, wanted to be as far away from this stinker as he could get. He didn’t, it seemed, want to be soiled with whatever the Secretary of Defense (“secretary of war” in his own delusions of grandeur) had been rolling in.
Okay, yes, it was my fault that the propane ran out before I ordered a refill. It was not my fault, though, that the internet went down, forcing me to watch a bit of the Olympics.