President Donald Trump waxes nostalgic for the United States’ role in shaping the world, but we have news for him: Those days are over; how much fondness for those past times he expresses, “Great America” is not coming back.
He may build luxury hotels in Gaza. But no one will stay there until it is part of the sovereign, territorial State of Palestine based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe may have as many covert actions as he wishes, sending agents to “places no one else can go” and having them do “things no one else can do.” (With which money and with which agents after that South African Billionaire Elon Musk go through the CIA’s budget? But that is Ratcliffe’s problem!)
According to David Ignatius of the Washington Post, Musk’s (illegitimate) Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “service commissars” gained access to Treasury payments data that might reveal the CIA’s deep-cover officers and the assets they recruit. But who knows, the president of the largest, strongest and most prosperous country would have found a way to have all hell break in Gaza by the time you read this.
There are three obvious consequences of this “hell break.” The situation in Gaza may suddenly become much more violent than ever for Trump, the Evangelist, covering Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's back much better than former U.S. President Joe Biden, the Zionist, used to. The Israeli Army may destroy more buildings and kill more Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank because Trump is sending Israel the ammunition Biden withheld. The Gaza Strip will not turn into Trump’s Riviera built and managed by his son-in-law and his father. Never, ever!
Gaza belongs to all Palestinians: Muslims, Christians and Jews; and will remain so.
On the contrary, Trump is going to break all hell in his own home. He is already in a deep hole constitutionally; he is trying to abolish federal departments created by Congress with executive orders that look like they will end not only in courts of law but also in police stations.
Alan Charles Raul, who served as associate White House counsel under President Ronald Reagan and as general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget under two presidents, and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, says Trump mocks two basic tenets of the U.S. government: that we are a nation of laws, not men, and that it is Congress which controls spending and passes legislation. He accuses Trump of not faithfully executing laws and managing the agencies consistent with the Constitution. Raul also reminds us that presidents do not have any divine right or absolute power.
If a president transgresses the bounds of the Constitution, he is not sent to the gallows the next day! A federal court should rule executive actions to be unconstitutional, and Congress should impeach and remove the president. So far, this has never happened, and probably it will not happen now since Trump has the support of both houses of Congress.
But those 145 House Democrats, who voted against the bill to deport migrants, urged Trump to retract claims to own Gaza. It is not enough, but it is a good start showing that Democrats still remember that they are there not for the GOP but for the Democratic Party. But in the end, Raul says, the president is constitutionally stuck with the policies that Congress enacts and appropriates for the federal government: “No one man in America is the law – not even a Trump or an Elon Musk.”
Not only is a constitutional crisis promising to develop, but things seem to be rolling toward the police station! Democratic members of Congress Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico have introduced the ‘‘Nobody Elected Elon Musk Act,” which declares any special government employee in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency “shall be liable for any claim against the federal government relating to activities of the department.” In other words, if Elon Musk’s “DOGE Kids” (aged 19 to 24) show up in your department’s computer rooms, you should call the police.
Another police matter seems to be the return of the Muslim Ban. Last time, it disrupted travel and immigration and raised constitutional concerns. Biden repealed it, but now Trump’s administration is back and trying to find ways to reinstitute the ban. Trump initially targeted five Muslim-majority countries: Yemen, Syria, Iran, Libya and Somalia, together with Venezuela and North Korea – later expanding to Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania. The Supreme Court repeatedly overturned it for discrimination, but the Trump administration eventually pushed through a stuck version. Now, Trump's executive order on “Protecting the U.S. from Foreign Terrorists and other National Security and Public Safety Threats” lays the groundwork for reinstating the Muslim Ban. Moreover, it allows officials to block nationals from countries deemed to have “deficient” vetting processes.
Another hellish issue seems to be afflicting the CIA. Its new director, John Ratcliffe, wants more covert action, “going places no one else can go, and doing things no one else can do.” However, the organization needs more officers, not less, to do this. Trump’s budget director sent buyout offers to CIA officers around the world; the initial reaction turned out to be that many good officers were willing to take the offer. Over 100,000 civil servants in other departments took the offer, thinking that if you don’t take the buyout offer, you end up with sellout actions.
It is not only those “domestic” hells Trump has managed to break so far; he was able to start hellfires internationally, too.
Aleksander Dugin, a Russian far-right political philosopher and former head of the Department of Sociology at Moscow University, asserts that the West no longer exists as a unified entity after Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump finally spoke over the phone last week. Dugin strongly supports Putin, although he has no official ties to the Kremlin. He says that Trump and Putin are reshaping the world order through a conservative revolution, where Canada and Greenland may fall under U.S. control, parts of Eastern Europe belong to Russia and Europe must either accept this and become part of the “Great Divide” or disappear.
Even the BBC agrees: “The current world security order – the catchily named International Rules-based Order – is in danger of crumbling. Some would argue this is already happening.” According to BBC’s veteran security correspondent Frank Gardner, Trump has effectively pulled the rug out from Ukraine's (and the EU’s) negotiating position by conceding that restoring Ukraine's territory to where it was before the first Russian invasion in 2014 is “not realistic.”
Poor EU leaders who slavishly obeyed the three-year freeze in talking to the Russian leader that has been in place since the time of the invasion learned from Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, that Trump had already talked to Putin on the phone for 90 minutes. And all these, without informing (let alone consulting) the Western allies.
OK, Trump is not consulting the U.S. allies in Europe; does he talk to his Middle Eastern allies? Yes, he does! The only problem is that he doesn’t listen to their responses. He tells them what to do. Trump informs the neighbors of Palestine and Israel that he (read his son-in-law Jared and his father Charles Kushner) “own” the Gaza Strip, and the “local residents” (read: the Indigenous people of Palestine) should be relocated to those countries. Only one person in the whole wide world, Netanyahu, a fugitive from justice, listens to those words, smiling. Not his advisers, not his press secretary, not his vice president and secretary of state ... No one knew it was the U.S. solution to solve the 116-year-old problem that had started when the first Zionist group had set foot in Palestine and started to “relocate” local residents! What the genius president of the U.S. is suggesting, in the words of Susan Hattis Rolef of the Jerusalem Post, is “science fiction.”
A movie titled “The Beginning of the End,” a post-apocalyptic story about ... You know, the aliens try to send people to exile, but the people fight back. And all the hell breaks. Or does it?
