Photo by Diane Picchiottino, Unsplash
Photo by Diane Picchiottino, Unsplash
This is no longer a democracy. It is a dictatorship. We are living every day in this country with an invading army in our midst.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
This week, our president announced that he would like the nation’s defense budget, which already stands at $1 trillion, to be increased by $500 billion, or $600 billion. It’s hard to know which is the real number, because he changes the amounts whenever a new whim is making its way through his excellently-focused mind.
I refer to Donald Trump’ mind as excellently-focused, because he emphasizes it all the time. He has claimed to have “aced” a simple cognitive test that is regularly administered to aging adults by geriatric physicians. During an interview with four reporters from the New York Times on Thursday, Trump allowed them to listen in as he conversed on his speakerphone with Colombian President Gustavo Petro. Afterwards, Trump made a point of asking the Times reporters if they thought Joe Biden “could do that.” This conversation took place days after Trump called Petra an “illegal drug leader” and a “sick man” and warned that he might be kidnapped “next” after he had kidnapped Nicolas Maduro and his wife from their home in Caracas, Venezuela.
Trump is very determined these days. He is especially determined to bring the world to heel. He told the New York Times reporters, who must have been clutching the arms of their White House chairs in astonishment, that he doesn’t “need” international law. Asked if there were any limits on his powers over the world, Trump responded, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Trump currently has one trillion dollars in his defense budget—I guess these days he would call it his “war budget” since he and Hegseth have renamed the Department of Defense as the Department of War—to fund attacks he wants to carry out on various enemies such as Houthi rebels in Yemen, alleged nuclear facilities in Iran, the Islamic State in Somalia, and more recently, 36 so-called “drug boats” in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, and the country of Venezuela. Military Times reported on December 31 that since Trump took office last January, he has ordered 626 air strikes on targets that he did not want to exist anymore.
But Donald Trump has another budget—we’ll call it his dictator budget—that he has been using to bring to heel the citizens of the United States, most especially those living in states controlled by Democratic Party governors. He has not been spending money from this budget in Mississippi or Alabama or South Carolina or Arkansas. No, he has been spending it in Illinois and Minnesota and California and other blue states.
Trump’s dictator budget is the money appropriated in the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed last year as an increase to the budget of the Department of Homeland Security, which he is turning into his Domestic Department of War. $170 billion dollars was appropriated in what they called immigration and border enforcement funding. Let me tell you how much money that is. The country of Great Britain has a defense budget of $83 billion. France’s defense budget is $74 billion. Combined, those two European nations spend $13 billion less on their defense against foreign enemies than Donald Trump and his Republican Congress think needs to be spent in this country to do things like conduct an assault on an apartment building in Chicago and arrest 37 people without a warrant. Not one of those people was charged with a criminal offense, even though they were all detained in jail. Among those detained without warrants and not charged with a crime were several U.S. citizens, including one veteran of military service.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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