Re: “Demolition of the East Wing latest lawmaker wedge issue,” Chicago Tribune, Sect. 2, p. 8. Oct. 24.
Let’s recap some recent events in Trump’s second term: He invited the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to recruit a gang of teenage computer geeks to decimate the American government, randomly firing a huge fraction of federal employees. Crippled agencies were destroyed, and some of the fired workers were rehired to salvage what they could. He specifically has fired a huge swath of experienced government workers with decades of experience, and replaced them with manifestly incompetent people whose only qualification was abject loyalty to their Leader.
At the United Nations, President Trump lectured the representatives of the world’s nations, telling them their countries were being destroyed by environmentalists and green energy. He whimsically declares 100% tariffs one day, retracts them the next, earning the nickname TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).
He appoints RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health & Human Services, a crackpot conspiracy theorist with no medical experience, who gets medical information from Tik-Tok videos, eschews vaccines and whose advice will kill thousands of Americans, according to actual doctors.
He appoints an alcoholic Fox Network commentator with no military experience as Secretary of Defense, who has renamed it the Department of War. Little Pete Hegseth, a national embarrassment, ordered hundreds of top military generals and commanders to fly to D.C. for a pep rally in which he insulted their military expertise and told any who were not white men that they were unqualified and held their positions only due to DEI.
Trump has also demanded to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for stopping “7” wars (none of which he stopped and several of which continue), then went on to claim that no other president in history had ever ended any war. Do Trump fans in Florida and Texas, where public schools indoctrinate kids with fictional “history” books, believe the Civil War is still going on, or have they erased that war altogether?
He has militarily invaded several large Democratic-governed American cities, claiming they are “hellholes” based on seeing 5-year-old Fox News videos that he believed were current. No one around him had the courage to tell him what he was watching. He has sent troops who violently arrest people whose “look” they dislike, whether they are U.S. citizens or not.
He has shut down the federal government, closing National Parks, refusing to pay federal employees.
He has deported innocent Americans to genuine hell-hole prisons in El Salvador, then claimed he lacked the power to bring them home.
Now that all Government Agencies are run by his loyalists, he has demanded $230 million from the Justice Department for having investigated some of his many crimes. Sadly, his loyal appointees will doubtless cave to this extortion and reward him with taxpayer dollars. He pardons any convicted criminal who supports him or who donates a chunk of money to his cryptocurrency scam (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly1qrl9l1qo).
Now he has taken a wrecking ball to the White House itself, illegally of course, without consulting Congress or the U.S. Public, as required.
If this does not convince you that Donald J. Trump is a completely unhinged psychopathic megalomaniac, then watch his AI video in which he fantasizes about what fun he would have flying over the largest U.S. city and defecating on its citizens.
Is there anything he could do that would cause his lick-spittle appointees, the Supreme Court, and the entire Republican Party, to decide that some oversight might be in order? If he enacts another of his fantasies and walks into a busy street with an automatic weapon and guns down Americans at random, would that change their minds?
How about if he bombs the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, and maybe the Golden Gate Bridge? How about if he pulls up to Fort Knox with a convoy of trucks and takes all the gold?
Speaker Johnson and Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt would doubtless fabricate some lame excuse and blame the Democrats.
Tom DeCoursey is a longtime Oak Park resident.