Since Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office for the first time in 2017, Americans and the world have become sadly accustomed to bracing ourselves for some new horror burbling from his lips almost every time he opens his mouth to speak. But, no matter how justifiably cynical observers like myself may have become in four years of following his misanthropic, misogynous, and seditious antics during his first term, and, worse all the time, his comportment during this first year of his Grover-Cleveland-second-term, we all too frequently err on the side of potential benefit of the doubt in the hope that, perhaps, he will occasionally demonstrate a glimmer of decency. Alas…
Christmas is the time of year when
people who truly embrace the Christian faith, or who at least posit the
principles taught by Jesus of Nazareth—despite professing other religions, or
none at all— usually try to let bygones be bygones, and seek, at least on that
day, to find it in their hearts to promote peace on earth and goodwill toward others.
US presidents have not been immune to this tradition. On the contrary, most
have gone out of their way in Christmas messages to encompass the true spirit
of Christmas, and its principle of universal love and peace.
During Donald Trump’s first term, there
were still a number of people around him—people in his own cabinet who had
bought into the Trump America First phenomenon, but still retained some
American values and a quota of decency—who probably spent more time trying to
keep him from going off the reservation on an unlawful rampage than they spent actually
being able to effectively execute their day jobs.
Clearly, that’s what is different about
this out-of-left-field second term. He learned from that first term, and from
his frustration at not being able to do whatever-the-hell he pleased, that if
he hoped to be able to ignore the Constitution, thumb his nose at the law,
commit any felonious act he pleased with no pushback and nobody saying, “Huh-uh,
no, Mr. President, you simply can’t do that,” he would need to surround himself
with people as morally and ethically bankrupt, as undemocratic, as unpatriotic,
as ignorant, and as oblivious to the laws and principles of the nation as he
was.
And with the invaluable and servile aid
of his corrupt and hijacked Republican Party, and of an acquiescent
super-majority in the Supreme Court (three of whom he handpicked during term
one), Trump has managed to live the first year of his second term in
office entirely off the reservation and almost completely above the law.
In short, he has morphed into a senile renegade, and has managed to fully indulge his own full-blown
insanity, and his ever more obvious sociopathy (if we’re being nice), and
psychopathy (if we are adhering to the learned conclusions of well over a score
of noted psychologists and psychotherapists).
I’m drawing attention to the president’s demeanor within the context of this year’s holiday season (as opposed to all the rest of the time that he demonstrates clear signs of insanity), because I believe (and I am certainly not alone) that it is more indicative than ever of his encroaching mental illness. While he was never known for his discretion or appropriateness, his behavior over this Christmas holiday speaks volumes of just how far out of his mind he has gone. He is off the leash, running wild, and is hell bent on wreaking misery and mayhem.
Longtime observers of Donald Trump like
myself—as a business journalist in the late eighties and early nineties, I was
already following his misdeeds—never thought him fit for office. Any
public office. But now it is even becoming obvious to some of those naïvely
credulous folks who said, “Let’s give him a chance and see what he does,” that
doing so has been a terrible, once-in-a-democratic-lifetime mistake.
As I say, horrible and detrimental to
American democracy and the Republic as Trump’s first term was, this second one
is proving disastrous. And again, Trump’s outrageous behavior this holiday
season is a quick glimpse at the degree to which he has lost any fleeting sense
of logic and decorum that he ever had.
In his first term, the influence of a
handful of talented and serious people who surrounded him—some, like Marine
General John F. Kelly, who, as chief of staff, managed to put up with him for
three years, or former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, in an effort to
mitigate the damage Trump could do—tended to keep him on script in the most
significant of moments. That didn’t keep him from very frequently slipping
through their fingers, but they were at least successful on special occasions
such as Christmas, in preventing him from demonstrating how completely violent,
vindictive and out of his mind he was. It has to have been a monumentally
frustrating task—one that prompted General Kelly to privately refer to the
president, in a moment of obvious desperation, as “a fucking moron.”
But at least in his first four years,
his staff managed to write him a nice traditional Christmas greeting and get
him to post it without any demented addenda to dampen the Christmas spirit of
the nation. In 2017, Trump’s holiday message to Americans was, “At Christmas,
we thank God for sending His only Son to save us from our sins and from the
darkness of this world.” At Christmas,
2018, the message he transmitted was, “The
true spirit of Christmas shines in the hearts of those who follow the teachings
of Jesus Christ.” In 2019, he was almost kumbaya, posting, “Together, we
celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ and renew our bonds to one another and to
our nation.” And in 2020, even as he was building up to inciting an
insurrection less than two weeks later to try and overthrow the government and
remain in power as a de facto leader, his Christmas message was, “The Christmas
story reminds us that light overcomes darkness, and that hope can overcome
despair.”
Obviously, none of these words were “his”,
in any real sense of the term. They were a sound byte on a teleprompter or a staff
tweet on social media. But his first-term ventriloquists managed to make the right
words come out of the dummy’s mouth.
Even in 2024, after defeating Kamala
Harris and before taking office, the greeting issued in his name was
exceedingly discreet, at a time when he was crowing in triumph and vowing
retribution. The message was, simply, “MERRY
CHRISTMAS TO ALL!” Santa couldn’t have
said it better.
But this Christmas season, it has been
pure, unfiltered and unmitigated Donald Trump, a man with no tact, no empathy,
no mercy, and no moral north. His holiday messages (scores of them that pepper
social media) have been bereft of anything even approaching the Christmas
spirit or, for that matter, Christian traditions and principles. They have been
an affront to decency and an embarrassment to the nation that Trump supposedly
represents.
His official greeting this year (the one
he didn’t write) was completely overshadowed by a veritable social media
diarrhea of an estimated one hundred fifty personal posts—many hate posts—that
he belched out of his bile duct on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Herewith
are some of the most egregious messages that this rogue president transmitted
while Christian Americans were celebrating the holiest day of their year.
“Merry Christmas to all, including the
Radical Left Scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our Country, but
are failing badly.” Hardly a unifying message in the spirit of goodwill toward
all.
* * *
“Merry Christmas to all, including the
many sleazebags that loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him lots of money, went to his
Island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy in the
world—only to abandon him like a dog when things got very bad.”
Wait! Was he talking about himself? I
mean, is he one of the sleazebags he’s referencing? Because, as, perhaps,
Epstein’s closest friend for more than a decade—far enough back that Trump was
a Democrat then—that is exactly what he did. Granted, if you were
somebody who knew Epstein simply because you traveled in the same jet set with
him, but abandoned any contact when it was made clear to you who he really was,
nobody could blame you for giving him the cold shoulder (although denouncing
him would have been much better).
But that doesn’t seem to be the case
with the president. Back in 2002, in a
story headlined Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery,
Trump told New York Magazine, “I’ve
known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is
even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are
on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
That statement seems pretty specific and
raises questions about just how much Trump knew about the “beautiful women on
the younger side” that Epstein kept company with and trafficked. More than a
thousand women (or girls as they are known to non-pedophiles), according to
reliable information
And yet, in 2019, when Epstein was
charged with sex-trafficking, then-President Trump told reporters that he was “not
a fan of (Epstein’s), that I can tell you. I was not a fan of his.” He
also said he hadn't spoken to Epstein in fifteen years. That would have been
2004, when, according to Mar-a-Lago scuttlebutt, Trump banned Epstein from the
resort, not because of the other man’s dark business practices, but because he
caught Epstein luring away young woman working a Mar-a-Lago to groom them for
his own activities. In other words, it seems more like a fight over skirts than
over morality.
* * *
Obsessively speaking even on Christmas
of the Epstein Files, which are becoming a major headache for his
administration and person, he said, “When their names come out in the Radical
Left Witch Hunt, it will be revealed that they are all Democrats, and a lot of
explaining will have to be done.”
Then, bizarrely, he added, “Enjoy what
may be your last Christmas.” Which left everybody scratching their heads.
So which is it? A witch hunt cooked up
by the “radical left”, or a serious bipartisan congressional probe in which
many familiar faces on both sides of the political spectrum are likely to be
revealed? Unless, that is, Trump-surrogate-Attorney General Pam Bondi actually
manages to suppressed any references to her boss and his friends (even if it
means she eventually ends up in prison for obstruction).
That kind of cover-up could well happen.
Still unconfirmed reports indicate that there is an extraofficial team working,
as we speak, in an undisclosed location in Virginia, to scrub all Republican and
Trump-friendly names from the files before the documentation is fully released.
This is clearly the downside to not rigorously enforcing the law, by which the
files should have been released en masse a week ago last Friday. How
long will Congress keep saying, “Release the documents…and this time we mean
it,” and then giving the administration more time? If Bondi and Trump keep
garnering delays, pretty soon not every Jeffrey Epstein will exist in the
files. Only the regime-unfriendlies will remain, which may be what Trump is
talking about when he says the files will reveal that “they are all Democrats.”
* * *
Randomly and apropos of nothing, he
dedicated another of his Christmas posts to late-night comic Stephen Colbert,
who is leaving CBS after corporate threw him under the bus because of Trump. (CBS’s
new owners seem bent on trashing the premier news network in the history of TV
journalism—it’s enough to make Ed Murrow and Walt Cronkite rise up from the
grave). In the spirit of Christmas (not), Trump tweeted that Colbert was “a
pathetic trainwreck, with no talent or anything else necessary for show
business success.” He added, “Now, after being terminated by CBS, but left out
to dry, he has actually gotten worse, along with his nonexistent ratings.
Stephen is running on hatred and fumes ~ A dead man walking! CBS should, ‘put
him to sleep,’ NOW, it is the humanitarian thing to do!”
* * *
Jaw-droppingly bizarre too were his
off-the-wall comments to children with whom he interacted on Christmas Eve.
When Trump asked one little girl what she wanted in her Christmas stocking, she
said what she didn’t want was a lump of coal. What did the president
say? “You mean clean, beautiful coal... Coal is clean and beautiful. Please
remember that, at all costs.”
It's always creepy—for me at least—to see
Trump around young women and kids, but this was beyond weird. Then it just got even
weirder. Each year NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command)
provides reports to children from its “Santa Tracker” operations, keeping kids
abreast of the progress of Santa’s sleigh in its flight from the North Pole to
America.
Instead of just playing along, however, Trump
couldn’t help himself and brought his paranoia about “aliens” into it. (Obviously, Saint Nick isn’t American…even if
he does drink Coca Cola).Trump said, “We want to make sure that Santa is
being good…We want to make sure that he’s not infiltrated, that we’re not
infiltrating into our country a bad Santa.”
Man, it was a traumatic Christmas Eve
for the kids the White House contacted!
* * *
Some of the scores of posts he churned
out over the Christmas holiday were, of course, simply self-aggrandizing lies
and exaggerations. For instance:
“We no longer have Open Borders…”
Not true: Border crossings have continued. Policy enforcement has varied by
agency and court rulings, and it’s true that significantly fewer people are
crossing the border illegally or any other way (not exactly the best time to
aspire to US residency if you’re a foreigner; not, in fact, even a good time to
visit as a tourist, especially if you’re brown). But there is no evidence that borders
have been “closed”, as Trump keeps claiming.
“Record Stock Market and 401K’s”
Actually, markets have hit highs at some points, but gains are uneven and
influenced by multiple factors, not the least of which, certainly, is the volatility
bred by unease over Trump’s personal and policy instability.
“Lowest Crime numbers in decades.”
That’s simply false. Not even data provided by his own FBI and DOJ support that
claim.
“No Inflation.” False. While the inflation rate has fluctuated
throughout the year, it remains virtually unchanged from its level in the last
year of the Biden administration. Clearly, not zero. Just ask anybody who does
the grocery shopping.
“Tariffs have given us Trillions of
Dollars in Growth and Prosperity”
That’s false. It’s a claim contradicted by leading economists, who say that, as
implemented by Trump, it is a disastrous policy. Besides throwing world trade
into chaos, it is mostly Trump’s tariff policy that continues to fuel US inflation,
raising costs for consumers and businesses, and making them pay for a failed
policy. Contrary to Trump’s repeated claims that the tariffs are being paid for
by the countries on which they are levied, most economists agree that they are,
instead, acting as a hidden tax on American consumers, taking money out of
their pockets that they can ill-afford and socking it into the US Treasury.
Even when he told the little girl on
Christmas Eve that “coal is clean and beautiful,” Trump was lying. Every
independent study ever carried out shows that coal is a leading source of air
pollution and carbon emissions.
*
*
*
Perhaps the Christmas pièce de
résistance that Trump delivered to Americans was when he told them that he
had chosen Christmas as the perfect time to bomb the crap out of northwestern
Nigeria.
In a tweet, he announced, “Tonight, at my direction as Commander in
Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS
Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously
killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and
even Centuries!”
He ended the post in a macabre
expression of Christmas spirit worthy of the Zodiac serial killer’s messages to
the press. “Under my leadership, our Country will not allow Radical Islamic
Terrorism to prosper. May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all,
including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their
slaughter of Christians continues.”
Hey, forget all that stuff Jesus said
about peace, forgiveness, loving your enemies and all that other good stuff.
Donald Trump celebrated Christmas by laying waste to the “infidels”.
Quite apart from whether or not
Christmas was an opportune time for such action—always prepared to out-Trump Trump,
MAGA influencer Laura Loomer tweeted, “I can’t think of a better way to
celebrate Christmas than by avenging the death of Christians through the
justified mass killing of Islamic terrorists”—the thinly “biblical” premise on
which the attack was launched was tenuous at best, and improvised, with no
input whatsoever from experts, at worst. Ask Trump or Defense Secretary Hegseth
to explain the ins and outs of the civil strife that has plagued Nigeria in
recent years, claiming more than 30,000 lives in all since 2019, and I’ll bet
you a c-note they can’t begin to give you a cogent, or even pedestrian answer.
But if you believe it’s simply about
Islamic terrorists running willy nilly killing Christians, you’ve been conned.
Trump appears to have been responding to a series of social media posts by certain
far-right evangelical activists lately decrying attacks on Christians in Africa’s
largest country. But the reality of what’s happening on the ground in Nigeria
is much more complex and multi-sided than that.
Strictly religious-based fighting is
relatively insignificant compared to the overall strife in that country, which resembles
civil war, but which can’t be classified as such because of just how
multilateral it is. And in simple tit for tat religious-targeted violence, the
Muslims have fared somewhat worse than the Christians, with recorded casualties
showing 317 Christians killed versus 417 Muslims in the last five years.
However, the motives for Nigerian domestic
violence go far beyond this. First, you have the violence triggered by government
action, through the Armed Forces, police, and security agencies. The State’s
motives include seeking to preserve territorial integrity, maintaining control over
the country’s rich oil reserves and its borders, and striving to prevent
secession by certain regions that could lead to the collapse of the State as it
stands now. Along these lines, then, State security forces are also engaged in
defeating insurgent groups and criminal associations that are seeking to take
over the country.
The State is hampered in this endeavor
by an uneven security presence in what is a very large country with a very
large population (237 million), as well as by its own corruption and human
rights abuses that both tend to fuel further resistance and to create ever
weaker governance.
Countering this State-backed violence,
there is Islamic insurgency—in the person of the armed movements known as Boko
Haram and ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province). These are presumably whom
Trump was talking about when he mentioned “Islamic terrorist scum”, but it is
interesting to note that both of these major jihadist movements operate out of Northeast
Nigeria, and the US Christmas bombings took place, by the president’s own
admission, in Northwest Nigeria.
The goal of these violent Islamic
guerrilla groups is pretty standard stuff: To establish an Islamic state
governed by strict Sharia Law, to reject
Western education, secular government, and Nigerian democracy, and to align
with global jihadist movements as a whole.
In all fairness, they tend to be
equal-opportunity killers, attacking civilians, soldiers, schools, and aid
workers alike, not specifically Christians, but, admittedly, a lot of the
people they kill do end up being Christian.
Anyway, if Trump’s objective was to go after
the jihadists, he messed up (or Hegseth
did) because they bombed an area on the other side of the country.
And then, in the southeastern region of
Nigeria there is the separatist movement, best represented by the IPOB (Indigenous
People of Biafra) and its armed wing known as the ESN or Eastern Security
Network. Their struggle is a lot like
the one waged by the Kurds in Turkey. The seek independence or autonomy for Igbo-dominated
southeast (Biafra). They also want historical redress arising from the 1967–70
Biafran War, while their major complaint is political marginalization and
economic exclusion.
What inspires their violence is a long-standing
perception of exclusion from federal power, disparate infrastructure investment,
the short shrift given to memory of the Biafran genocide and famine, and government
repression of peaceful protests, a factor that has succeeded in fully radicalizing
the movement.
More or less in the middle of the
country, there is an ongoing feud—much like the 19th-century range
wars in the US—between established farmers and free-range herders. Now, at
first sight, to an ignorant outsider, this may resemble religious violence,
since the Fulani free-rangers are predominantly Muslim and the farmers are
mostly Christian. But if there is a religious aspect to the strife between them,
it ranks in priority well under the environmental, territorial, economic and
ethnic issues that are at the base of their long-standing feud that has
frequently led to tit for tat violence.
So, wait a minute…
Who’s in the Nigerian northwest that
Trump bragged about targeting for multiple Christmas Day bombing runs?
Well, that would be a mishmash of bandits and criminal
insurgents. These are some pretty awful people, but they have little or nothing
to do with targeted religious killings.
These are bandits, pure and simple. They
run in loosely organized, non-religious, non-ideological gangs. They have ready
access to a proliferation of arms from the Libya and Sahel conflicts and use
them to generate cash-money from kidnap ransoms, cattle-rustling and illegal
oil and mining activities. The exist because rural security in that area has
collapsed. Poverty and lack of government presence there means that gang rule
is pretty much the norm.
So, if Trump’s Christmas bombings took a
few bandits out, they probably wouldn’t be missed by anybody but their
colleagues and families. But to tell the evangelical base and Americans as a
whole that their president was acting as the avenging sword for the mass
killing of Christians in Nigeria is a complete and utter farse, a performative
lie told by a madman who is growing worse by the day.
If there is a political take that is
appropriate for this Christmas season, maybe it should be that this was the
Christmas when more Americans than ever saw that the emperor has no clothes.
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