How to Mark an Anniversary.

February 24, 2025.

Today marks the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This time. On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine from Belarus, Crimea, and the Donbas, in what Russian President Vladimir Putin termed a “special military operation” to “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine. Depending how you count, it was the 6^th or 7^th time dating back to the 17^th century that Russia and Ukraine have done battle.

Leaders from 13 Western countries met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv to mark the anniversary and signify their support for Ukraine. The US was noticeably absent. The commemoration was low-key, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posting on X, “Eternal gratitude to the fallen heroes—the gratitude of Ukraine, the gratitude of all free nations.”

The anniversary comes just days after a war of words between US President Donald Trump and Zelensky. Zelensky’s response to reporter’s questions included the comment that Trump, “Lives in a world of disinformation.” That sent Trump into a tizzy. He responded by calling Zelensky an unelected dictator. He also claimed that Ukraine was responsible for starting the war.

In a post on his own “Truth Social,” Trump, the former reality TV star, posted, “Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle,” Mr. Trump wrote.

Also today, the US voted against a UN resolution condemning Russian aggression and calling for withdrawal of Russian forces. The resolution passed 93-18, with sixteen abstentions. Countries voting with the US included Israel, Hungary, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Niger.

It remains to be seen if the third anniversary of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine may also serve as a convenient marker of the US rapprochement with Russia and abandonment of Ukraine, NATO, the EU, and perhaps democracy.

Notes.

https://www.history.com/news/ukraine-timeline-invasions

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/feb/24/ukraine-war-live-zelenskyy-hails-three-years-of-resistance-on-anniversary-of-russian-invasion

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/world/europe/ukraine-war-anniversary-zelensky.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/world/europe/europe-ukraine-anniversary.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/world/europe/ukraine-zelensky-trump-russia-war.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/world/middleeast/us-eurpe-russia-ukraine-un.html

Raising an Army.

February 23, 2025.

NJ Senator Corey Booker, my Senator, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press today. When asked whether democrats should be arguing that we are facing a constitutional crisis, he responded that his focus is on how President Trump is hurting real people. That’s nice, but falls short of what’s at stake.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker got it right. “We don’t have kings in America,” he said. If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”

This weekend, President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth carried out a purge of America’s top military leadership, dismissing the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the chief of naval operations, the vice chair of staff of the air force, and the three military judge advocates general.

The dismissed generals were all supporters of DEI and had been under fire during the presidential campaign from Trump and Hegseth as leaders of a “woke military.” To replace them, Trump nominated retired three-star general Dan “Razin” Caine to become the new chairman of the joint chiefs.

Caine does not meet the position’s prerequisites, such as being a combatant commander or service chief, but he meets one requirement that may be more important. He is a Trump loyalist. In a CPAC speech last year, Trump recalled meeting Caine in 2018 in Iraq when he was visiting troops. “He said, ‘I’ll kill for you sir,” Trump said. “Then he puts on a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat.”

Irony is in abundance these days, but it is still remarkable to consider that the following occurred in this order in just one month’s time. 1) Trump outlawed DEI on inauguration day in favor of “meritocracy.” 2) Hegseth was confirmed by a narrow party line vote despite his questionable qualifications. 3) The military leadership was fired for their support of DEI. 4) For Caine to be confirmed Trump will have to provide a waiver, since Caine de facto does not meet the job requirements.   

Any good magician knows that a successful illusion is accomplished through sleight of hand, which depends on the use of psychology, timing, misdirection, and natural choreography to accomplish a magical effect.

In his first term, Trump was frustrated after discovering there were limits to his control over the military. General Mark Milley bore the brunt of his anger, with Trump eventually saying Milley should have been executed.

He won't make that mistake again. Those arguing that the military firings are about DEI are master magicians. Abracadabra, Trump is taking over the military.

Notes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/us/politics/hegseth-firings-military-lawyers-jag.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/us/politics/trump-fires-cq-brown-pentagon.html

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/who-is-dan-razin-caine-trumps-pick-to-be-the-next-joint-chiefs-of-staff-chairman

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/22/g-s1-50348/dan-caine-new-chairman-joint-chiefs

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5162682-trump-rejects-questions-on-caine/

Richardson, “Letters from an American,”  February 21, 2025.

The Art of the Deal.

February 21, 2025.

"The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration, and a very effective form of promotion."

That quote is from the 1987 bestseller, “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” by Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz. The book made Trump a household name and cemented his reputation as a high flying deal maker.

Except Trump did not write that passage or any of the book, according to Schwartz, Trump’s handpicked ghostwriter. Schwartz spent 18 months shadowing Trump to write the book. As time went by, he came to regret his role in boosting Trump’s brand.

“Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz said. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true. He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it. It gave him a strange advantage.”

The ironic pair of co-author quotes presents an apt miniportrait of Trump. The intersection is his passion for the deal and his self-aggrandizement. The only rules that matter are his rules. There is nothing he won’t do to win. And, according to Trump, he always wins.

Notes.

https://www.amazon.com/Trump-Art-Deal-Donald-J/dp/0399594493

https://bernoff.com/blog/donald-trump-art-deal-ethics-ghostwriting

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/23/us/politics/trump-alternative-reality.html

Brave New World.

February 20, 2025. 

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” 

-                        -- Aldous Huxley, "Brave New Word.”

Bookey.app says Huxley "imagines a future world in which the population is divided into five classes, each of which lives in a different part of the world and is subject to strict social and technological control.  Through a combination of scientific and psychological manipulation, people in this world are conditioned to be content and docile, never questioning or challenging the system.”

Elon Musk has read the book. In a May 2024 talk at Vivatech Paris, Musk said Huxley’s vision might not be far off. “We might be headed to a bi-modal human intelligence distribution like in Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World where you’ve got a small group of very smart humans, but the average intelligence drifts lower over time," he said. "It is inevitable that human intelligence will be dwarfed by machine intelligence. Digital intelligence will be more than 99% of all intelligence in the future. Hopefully, the computers will be nice to us.”

Once AI kicks in, Musk envisions the elite group and the robots will do the heavy lifting. He doesn’t see much of a role for us dummies. "Probably none of us will have a job,” he said.

Huxley wrote Brave New World as a warning. Space man and futurist Musk sees it as a viable option, or at least an inevitable result of advancing technology. In the book the masses are pacified by “soma,” a drug that allows them to live detached from reality.

Musk’s vision for the unemployed lower group is “there will be universal high income, not universal basic income. There will be no shortage of goods or services, everyone will have access to as much in the way of goods and services as they would like." You may work, if you want to, like a hobby, but you won't need to. Sounds a bit like soma. 

Musk has long been a critic of government. Any government. At the WSJ CEO Summit he said the best thing governments can do is “Get out of the way,” and let industry do its thing. “I think it is a false dichotomy to look at government and industry as separate. Government is the ultimate corporation, a monopoly that can’t go bankrupt, or usually can’t go bankrupt.”

Today, as a Special Assistant to Trump and (maybe) head of DOGE, Musk is preparing for his Brave New World. On February 13, in a livestream talk to the World Government Summit in Dubai, he said, “An inevitable consequence of a long period of prosperity is that you're going to get more and more rules and regulations over time. The normal force for getting rid of rules and regulations is some kind of existential war to force a reset in order to avoid being defeated.

“In the absence of that, every year you get more laws and regulations until eventually everything is illegal, and nothing is permitted. That's the sort of situation we have these days. The aspiration is a reduction in regulation and government spending so that the economy is able to grow faster.”

“Ending is better than mending,” Huxley wrote in Brave New World. Musk agrees. Entire government departments need to be ripped out “like weeds,” he said. “There are so many agencies and regulatory authorities that they actually step on each other's feet. There are roughly 450 federal agencies. How many agencies do you really need to run a country? Ninety-nine? I’m pretty sure it’s not 450.”

In tech talk, an Easter egg is a hidden code within software. Musk went on to deliver a little Easter egg to his international audience, signifying his alignment with the administration’s foreign policy just one day before Vice-President JD Vance delivered his shocking address to Europe. A byproduct of  downsizing the US government would mean, “there is less interest in interfering with the affairs of other countries. A lot of times the United States has been kind of pushy in international Affairs. I think we should, in general, leave other countries to their own business and America should mind its own business.”

Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump in July 2024, shortly after they engaged in a two-hour Twitter-thon and almost immediately after the attempted assassination of Trump. Musk went on to spend $250 million in less than four months to help get Trump elected. He has also turned his attention on supporting right-wing movements in England and Germany.

The richest man in the world and the once and future president seem to have bonded in pursuit of one grand plan, with Musk’s somatic vision of oligarchic elitism and isolationism melding nicely with Trump’s embrace of Project 2025.

Notes.

https://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0060850523

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEMcgiC6goY

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/10/elon-musk-government-is-the-ultimate-corporation.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsDnCXlxGi8

https://thefulcrum.us/business-democracy/department-of-labor-doge

Project 2025.

February 20, 2025. 

Candidate Donald Trump promised action beginning day one of his presidency and took office prepared to fulfil that promise.

Trump’s blitzkrieg approach to his first 100 days appears carefully planned. “Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise,” is a 2023 document funded and produced by the Heritage Foundation. It outlines four pillars a new conservative president should follow.

Pillar I is an outline of how “federal agencies must be governed.” Pillar II is a personnel index for potential appointees at all levels of government. Pillar III, the Presidential Administration Academy, is a teaching tool for adherents to the program. Pillar IV is “the Playbook” for “forming agency teams and drafting transition plans to move out upon the President’s utterance of ‘so help me God.’”

Mandate for Leadership is better known as Project 2025. In April 2022, speaking at a Heritage Foundation event, Trump said the team drafting Project 2025 was “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” But after Democrats publicized some of its controversial elements, Trump reversed course. During the September 2024 presidential debate, he disavowed the plan. “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. That’s out there. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposefully. I’m not going to read it”

The authors of the plan nevertheless appeared confident they would have the new president’s attention. In the preface, “A Note on Project 2025,”  they write, “one set of eyes reading these pages will be those of the 47^th President of the United States.”

On February 14 the New York Times reported that more than 60 major moves taken by the administration align with Project 2025. Time and CNN independently found two thirds of executive actions mirror Project 2025.

Perhaps it’s not a surprise that the Playbook is being followed whether the President has a dogeared copy or not. Russell Voght, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Border Czar Tom Homan have been cited as architects of the plan. They join many other high profile members of the administration with ties to Project 2025, including Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller; Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt; and FCC Chair Brendan Carr.  

Notes.

Chromeextension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf    

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-project-2025-will-lay-groundwork-for-second-term/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-i-have-nothing-to-do-with-project-2025-trump-says  

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/14/us/politics/project-2025-trump-actions.html

 https://time.com/7209901/donald-trump-executive-actions-project-2025/

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/31/politics/trump-policy-project-2025-executive-orders-invs/index.html

Sticks and Stones.

February 19, 2025. 

On August 23, 2024, Vice President and candidate Kamala Harris was asked in a CNN Town Hall event if she thought Donald Trump is a fascist. “Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” she said.

Harris’s comment made headlines and sparked a debate, not so much about what Trump was doing, but because fascist is such a hot button term. Those objecting to Harris’s “name calling” did not seem to have a problem with Trump routinely calling Harris and Joe Biden some combination of radical extremist leftist socialist and communist agents of the deep state. Sticks and stones.

The term fascist carries a lot of baggage, stirring images of everything from Mussolini to 70’s radicals. Harris’s comment was quickly dismissed as overzealous campaign rhetoric instead of focusing attention on Trump’s authoritarian statements and tendencies.

After Harris’s comment, Jason Stanley, author of “How Fascism Works, the Politics of Us and Them,” told NPR, “The road to fascism does not start with an act of oppression. It starts with people freely surrendering their rights.”

Autocratic governments almost always follow the fall of a democracy, he said. Typically, a strongman emerges and convinces people that he and only he can solve their problems, if only they give him unlimited power and control over a country’s institutions.

On February 18, President Trump issued an executive order claiming control over agencies that Congress had established as independent, including the SEC, FTC, FCC, and NLRB. He has already fired at least 17 inspector generals and the Director of the Office of Government Ethics. He has placed a loyalist in charge of the Justice Department and the FBI, sparking senior level resignations at both. He has vowed retribution and is taking action against people he feels wronged him, past and present.

Democrats are apoplectic but helpless. Republicans have stepped aside as Trump takes on responsibilities previously reserved for Congress.

The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Trump appointed three of those justices during his first term.

He has a rabid base, who spring to his defense and cow opposition. Among them are the January 6 rioters he pardoned, including far-right activists convicted of sedition and those convicted of violence against police officers. Symbolically and practically they comprise a militia pledged to do his bidding, and a warning to anyone who might think about crossing him.

So, is Trump a Fascist? You decide. Consult the chart below. Feel free to mix and match authoritarian options.  

Authoritarian Forms of Government

Authoritarian governments are regimes in which power is concentrated in the hands of one individual or a small group of elites. In this kind of government, the leadership has no constitutional obligation to the people. Authoritarian governments restrict civil liberties and demand the blind submission of their citizens. The chart below lists some of the various types of authoritarian governments. These types are not exclusive, meaning that a government can be a combination of more than one of these types. For example, a dictatorship can be an autocracy or possibly an oligarchy, and it could also be a tyranny.

Type of government	Description
Autocracy	An autocracy is a community or country ruled by a single person with unlimited authority. An autocrat is one who exercises unlimited power.
Oligarchy	An oligarchy—as opposed to an autocracy—is a country ruled by a small number of people with unlimited authority.
Dictatorship	A dictatorship is the arbitrary rule by an individual or junta who is not constitutionally responsible to the people or their elected representatives. Dictators usually eliminate all opposition and rule through a single legal party while maintaining strict control over the military and the media.
Absolute monarchy	Monarchy is a form of government based on the rule of a single person who is normally chosen by hereditary succession to rule for life. In most surviving monarchies (e.g., Japan and Britain), the monarch has no real political power and serves only as the figurehead of government.
Communist regime	In theory, communism opposes authoritarian rule. In practice, however, all of the world's communist regimes are authoritarian in nature, with an autocrat or oligarchy made of members of the Communist Party controlling politics and restricting citizens' civil liberties.
Illiberal democracy	An illiberal democracy is a country that has many of the procedures of a democracy, such as legislative elections, but is essentially led by an authoritarian leader. For example, it may have an elected legislature, but the legislature has no real governing power.
Fascist regime	Fascist regimes are extremely nationalistic. Under this type of government, country is far more important than the individual, and society is strictly controlled. These governments are led by a dictator, who tends to be quick to use violence to quiet the opposition.

Entry ID: 2230729

Notes.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/kamala-harris-calls-trump-fascist-argues-dangerous-unfit-office-rcna176713

https://campuspress.yale.edu/jasonstanley/

https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2273786

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302481/trump-independent-agencies

The First 100 Days.

      February 16, 2025,

On March 4, 1933, FDR was inaugurated as the  Great Depression raged. He immediately summoned Congress to a 3 month special session. During that session, he signed 15 major bills, issued 9 executive orders, and Congress passed 77 laws. On his 100^th day in office, FDR gave a radio address in which he coined the term “the first 100 days.” Since then, a president’s first 100 days has come to serve as a measure of an administration’s early success.

In her January 24, “Letters from an American” newsletter, Heather Cox Richardson said, “the dismantling of that system” that made America a post WWII power “is happening all at once.” In just three weeks in office, President Trump signed 65 executive orders, a pace faster than any president in US history. He also:

• Attacked allies and made outreach to direct adversaries.
• Halted and eliminated DEI programs at the Federal level, including removing references to DEI and use of the word gender on government websites.
• Neutralized the opposition Democrats while demanding and receiving complete loyalty from Republicans, usurping powers previously reserved for congress.
• Abandoned traditional norms that served as guardrails for presidential power by installing loyalists to lead formerly independent departments and institutions, most notably the Department of Justice.
• Carried through on threats to seek retribution from domestic political opponents, including removing security clearances and Secret Service protection details, while his appointees fired and/or gathered information on Justice Department attorneys and FBI agents who participated in investigations of him.
• Began deportation of illegal aliens and sent thousands of troops to the US Mexico border.
• Directed Elon Musk and his non-employee, unelected and unappointed “volunteers” to fire thousands of federal employees, freeze spending, and eliminate government agencies; in some cases, it is unclear if DOGE workers have been vetted, trained, or filed disclosures.
• Escalated his war on the press by opening investigations of PBS and NPR, reinstating complaints against NBC, ABC, and CBS, and granting White House Press Corps credentials to “new media” voices.

Trump also broke laws and ignored court orders, contending judges have no right to overrule his actions. The goal appears to be to test the limits of presidential powers at the Supreme Court level. The Court has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three justices he appointed in his first term.

In each case, Trump departed from traditional norms and pushed the boundaries of presidential power.

The framers of the Constitution, having overthrown a monarchy, envisioned a constrained role for the president. Separation of powers, requiring presidents to be re-elected, and granting Congress impeachment powers are all mechanisms the founding fathers included to limit the power of the office.

Other presidential restraints have been traditional rather than legal. But those traditions may not last forever. When George Washington declined to run for a third term, Ahe established a tradition that lasted over a century, until FDR served four terms. Only three years after FDR’s death, term limits became law through enactment of the 22^nd Amendment.

Expansion of presidential powers has mostly occurred incrementally, often in times of crisis. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil Law. FDR pushed the limits of presidential power during the Great Depression and pushed through the War Powers Act during WWII. Following 9/11 George W. Bush dramatically expanded the power of the intelligence agencies. In each case, presidents met little resistance as they took actions previously reserved for Congress. 

Yet even as presidents gained power, limits remained. Since Watergate, presidential involvement in Justice Department and FBI investigations has been strictly limited – by tradition – especially when they touch on the White House.

In his first term, Trump unsuccessfully challenged many of those traditions. This time he appears prepared to push for a different outcome.

Notes.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-24-2025

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/defining-the-presidents-constitutional-powers-to-issue-executive-orders

https://hls.harvard.edu/today/presidential-power-surges/

Blueprint for Autocracy.

February 19, 2025. 

Prove me wrong, I thought. As I watched President Trump in his first days in office it occurred to me that he was doing just about everything you would if you wanted to dismantle American democracy and/or aid Russia. That is a breathtaking statement. At the time, I did not believe it was a real possibility.

In no particular order, these are the steps I’d take to create an authoritarian America.

• Control the legislature. Crush all opposition.
• Control the judiciary. Appoint yourself mediator of right and wrong. 
• Control the executive branch. Take control of all federal agencies, even those previously independent.
• Control the military. Raise your own army.
• Control the press. Make your own truth. Deny, deny, deny, attack.
• Feed your base. Create your own enemy. Declare a war of “us versus them.”
• Demand loyalty to you rather than the constitution. Install loyalists at every level in every branch and agency of government.
• Assemble an inner circle of the rich and powerful and intelligentsia. Bring plenty of sycophants.

Here is a Russian wish list.

•         Concede Ukraine.
•         End sanctions and other efforts to isolate Russia and its allies.
•         Destroy NATO. Adopt and reinforce the themes of Russian disinformation.
•         Cut off American global socioeconomic, and humanitarian influence. 
•         Reinstitute an isolationist American military policy.
•         Form alliances with the world's other autocrats, dictators and monarchs.
•         Undermine democracy around the world.

Pick a fight with your neighbors was not on my bingo card but combined with a war on immigrants and a threat to seize the Panama Canal it serves as an effective means to destabilize the Americas.

I’m still waiting to be proven wrong. Still waiting.

"Nuts."

February 14, 2025.

In her January 24^th newsletter “Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson marked the anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge in WWII  by noting American General Anthony C. McAuliffe’s famous response to a German demand for the surrender of Bastogne. “Nuts.”

Richardson went on to describe the US role in stabilizing the postwar world and the development of an American era of prosperity, including the success of the GI Bill. “At home, the government invested in ordinary Americans. In 1944, Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, more commonly known as the G.I. Bill, to fund higher education for some 7.8 million former military personnel. The law added to the American workforce some 450,000 engineers, 180,000 medical professionals, 360,000 teachers, 150,000 scientists, 243,000 accountants, 107,000 lawyers, and 36,000 clergymen.”

The newsletter entry resonates with me. My uncle, John “Jack,” McCabe, fought in the Battle of the Bulge. One of those GI Bill doctors was Francis O’Connor, MD, my father-in-law. Dr. O’Connor was a graduate of the University of Louvain Medical School in Belgium. Americans were welcome there because of Belgium, and Louvain’s, strong relationship with the US. 

Before WWI, Louvain was most famous as a university town. The library tower of the Catholic University of Louvain dominated the town. In 1914, the German army of Kaiser Wilhelm II invaded neutral Belgium. Louvain was burned and the library destroyed, but not before German soldiers committed atrocities, including pillaging and the rape and execution of civilians.

The Sack of Louvain was part of Germany’s Rape of Belgium. The invasion of “poor little Belgium” became a rallying point in turning other countries, including the US, against German aggression. 

After WWI, a movement to raise funds to rebuild the library gained momentum in the US, especially among academic communities. The new “American Library” of Louvain was designed by an American architect and built by an American company. An eagle sits atop the tower and inscriptions in the foundation blocks bear the names of US donor universities and organizations. A plaque in the entry explains in English and Flemish that the library was presented to the people of Belgium by the people of the United States.

Only seven years after it was completed WWII began and the library was again burned in a fire started by German artillery. The fire caused international outrage. Again. After the war the library was rebuilt again and completed in 1950. 

Francis O’Connor arrived at the University of Louvain just a few years later. The rest, as they say, is history. Francis met Jackie de Fays. They married, and my wife Mary and her sister Za were born in nearby Brussels in 1958 and 1959.

Richardson concluded her newsletter by detailing how “since the inauguration of President Donald Trump on Monday, the dismantling of that system is happening all at once.”

Americans continue to take pride in our heroes like my Uncle Jack but seem to have forgotten or abandoned the history of why he was there, how Dr. Francis O’Connor and countless other Americans benefited along the way, and how the US became a world power. 

Notes.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-24-2025

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://ghum.kuleuven.be/ggs/research/america-europefund/aef-library-brochure-online-06-2023.pdf

Introduction: An American Study.

February 19, 2025. 

On March 22, 2019, Special Counsel Robert Mueller submitted his “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.” The controversial report did not find conclusive evidence of collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia. It did find that Russian disinformation was widespread. Mueller later stated that his investigation's findings of Russian interference "deserves the attention of every American."

On charges of obstruction of justice, Mueller had been advised that a sitting president is immune from criminal prosecution. As such, he would only say that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

Between his election in November 2024 and inauguration in January 2025,  Trump’s behavior seemed unusual and bewildering. He coveted our allies' territories, nominated candidates with questionable qualifications and ethics for cabinet posts, dined with a parade of billionaires and tech titans at Mar a Lago – which he dubbed the “center of the universe” – and began spending lots and lots of time with his new best bud, Elon Musk.

The media, old and new, was abuzz as they tried to make sense of it all. I thought their reports were far too small and missed the mark by a long shot. They parsed every outrageous quote and explored the history of Panama, but time and again failed to report larger implications. 

With almost every comment and action Donald Trump was trumpeting that he had no intention of playing by the old rules. As I watched, I was, as the kids say, losing my shit. I don’t normally wear tin foil hats. I generally dismiss conspiracy theories. But I could not help thinking back to Barr's report and other signs of what Trump II would bring. Could the President of the United States really be in Putin's pocket? Was he really going to implement Project 2025, a plan he claimed to have never read? I hoped I would quickly be proven wrong.

And then came inauguration day. From day one Trump unleashed a torrent of executive orders and shocking statements. He obliterated DEI programs and banned the word gender from the Federal vocabulary. He unleashed Elon to strip the Federal bureaucracy for parts. He suggested Palestinians leave Gaza so he could build a nice resort. He attacked our neighbors, threatened tariffs, and doubled down on making Canada our 51^st state. He quietly dispatched a senior diplomat to call on Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko, who had aided the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He dispatched Vice President JD Vance to scold Europe, threaten NATO, and warn that immigrants are Europe’s real “enemies from within.” And then he placed a call to an old friend, Vladimir Putin. 

I was introduced to historian Heather Cox Richardson's brilliant "Letters from America," with her January 24 newsletter on the anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge in WWII. Inspired, a few days later I started journaling as an outlet for my bottled-up feelings and frustrations. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I have followed Richardson’s style of matching current commentary to relevant historic references when I can. 

I was also bedridden with back pain and medicated. Writing helped me focus and fight through the fuzziness in my head. On more than one occasion I wrote witty and inspired entries that turned out to be absolute gibberish on reread. On February 17, I started writing a long entry on my phone while prepped and waiting for surgery. That one has still not been finished.

I am not sure what this herky-jerky collection of passages will turn out to be, perhaps journal, blog, or simply a fever dream. I’m not sure where it goes next. The entries are not written or ordered chronologically. They do not follow an orderly outline. Events unfolded so quickly that I jumped ahead and circled back as time allowed – history, and Donald Trump, wait for no man. As for style and format, I hope my teachers and professors forgive me. 

As entries piled up, I realized that I, too, was underestimating what’s happening in this second Trump presidency. Collusion, obstruction of justice and Project 2025 are just the start. I believe what's going on is much bigger than that.