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Like Biden did, our other former presidents should step up, and so should we. Despair is not an option. We need to fight with every cell in our bodies.
He does it every day, often several times a day. He’s walking out to his Marine helicopter, or he has reporters into the Oval Office while some president or prime minister is visiting, or he gives a speech like the one in Quantico a couple of weeks ago, and he says something or he does something that gets a headline because it’s outrageous and unprecedented and sometimes there are Constitutional consequences.
Today on Air Force One during his Asia trip, Trump once again “mused,” as the mainstream media calls it, about seeking a third term. He did the same thing last February, and in March, and after telling NBC News that “a lot of people” were asking him about it, he said he “was not joking.” It’s in the Constitution that he cannot serve a third term. He may think “his” Supreme Court will help him out, but mostly, he wants us to worry and get depressed that somehow, it might happen.
But it isn’t just his trolling or baiting the media. It’s everything else, and I mean everything. It seems not a day goes by that there isn’t another horror. Over the weekend, he had the USDA announce about the SNAP program on its website that “the well has run dry” and “there will be no benefits issued on November 1.”
That is not true. By law, the Department of Agriculture must maintain a reserve to pay SNAP benefits during times that there are unusual stresses on the system, and there is $6 billion sitting there in the treasury for just that purpose.
But the “law” doesn’t matter to Trump, and that is another part of his despair campaign. The Supreme Court unleashed the maniac with its decision in Trump v. United States, and he takes full advantage every time he can.
Let’s run down just what he’s done recently. He demolished a third of the White House without going through the mandated process, not just for federal buildings owned by the taxpayers, but for the White House itself. His Department of Defense shot yet another so-called “drug boat” out of the water without providing even a scrap of evidence that the boat was carrying drugs or headed for the United States. He has denied emergency federal funds to two counties in a blue state, Maryland, while providing the same sort of aid to red states, and he came right out and said that was why he was doing it. He is attempting to send National Guard troops from the state of Texas to two states where they have no business being, Illinois and Oregon. His deployment of masked federal “agents,” who refuse to show their identities, to arrest and deport undocumented migrants has inevitably rounded up U.S. citizens in their dragnets and denied them their rights under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.
He threw a tantrum over a television ad aired in Canada that accurately used footage of Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs, and he restarted an already insane trade war with our ally by imposing yet another tariff on them. He ordered the movement of an aircraft carrier group from halfway across the world to the waters off Venezuela, obviously in contemplation of an invasion of that country, just because he could do it.
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.
You can read Lucian Truscott's daily articles at luciantruscott.substack.com. We encourage our readers to get a subscription.
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