The end of 2024 and beginning of 2025 could not have had a more scripted sequence if you are looking for comparisons. As former President Jimmy Carter passed away and laid in state at the nation’s capital, the tarnished successor prepared to take the throne of the nation’s highest office. Few individuals can be cast in more opposite personas than Donald Trump and Carter. Carter served a single term of office which saw the United States as a country at peace after nearly a decade at war in southeast asia. Although criticized at the time, Carter’s administration took all of the nation’s problems at the time in stride, most notably the fuel crisis caused by the Arab Emirate nation’s embargo. As we all know, citizens and politics are often petty and short sighted. What is news today is quickly forgotten for what takes place tomorrow. In the 70’s the security of world peace was quickly forgotten for the rising prices of fuel, a circumstance relatable through our current cycle of inflation which has made food and housing costs skyrocket while at the same time we are not actively engaged in any global conflicts.
The 2024 elections left the writing on the wall and it distinctly sent a message to liberal politics in the country: get out! The country resoundingly voted for conservatives in almost every race unseating incumbent liberal candidates and handing control of the U.S. House, Senate and office of President to Republicans. You have to look back to the Regan years to find a more complete political landslide. Which, not coincidentally, is when Carter failed to win re-election. It does not matter that we are not at war, it does not matter that the climate crisis seems to grow more prescient with each week and month, it does not matter that Americans ignored the weight of 34 felony convictions to place a career businessman and narcissistic personality back in control of the world’s largest economy and most powerful military. The United States of America marches to its own beat even when the rest of the world is left worrying and wondering of the long term effects of this junior superpower’s fits and flights of fancy.
Donald Trump’s second term is definitely bound to bring big changes from Joe Biden’s relatively uneventful last four years. In addition to undoing everything that Biden or Democrats have achieved in his term, Trump vows to initiate the largest mass deportation of immigrants in U.S. history. He’s also promised to reduce the size of national monuments and parks, loosen oil and gas exploration restrictions, impose crippling tariffs on China and other foreign suppliers, and withdraw from NATO and the UN to begin with. I have to hand it to Republicans, 2025 will be quite the departure from the boring normalcy of Biden’s last four years. It may even give 2020 a run for its money from a chaos measurement standpoint.
NYE Violence
The country wasn’t even a day into the new year when a truck careened into a crowd of revelers in New Orleans, Louisiana killing 6 and wounding dozens of others. Hours later a lone Army Serviceman parked a rented Tesla Cybertruck at the Trump Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada and detonated its contents full of fireworks and other explosive devices. And that’s how our country celebrates the new year, with violence, death and hollow gestures of political and civil protest. No one even cares anymore, or so the news tells us. The news tells us everything that we should feel and do in the moment and then it moves on to the next big story or outrage. The news isn’t even “news” anymore so much as programming to gain views and ratings as a form of boosting commercial revenue: Infotainment. Visual media has in essence become what its predecessors predicted it would: the medium has become the message. As a society flooded with devices and interaction with visual media, we take cues not on the content of the programming itself but from the devices through which we monitor the content. And for the large part we aren’t actually consuming media so much as participating in the act of consumption like so many other things that those in the western world engage in. The act of being seen is more important than what we are actually doing at the time. Americans are obsessed with self image and the impression it leaves upon others. This might be considered the true legacy of consumerism and the effect of our overexposure to the ubiquitous presence of screens of all kinds in everyday life.
The two terrorist acts weren’t perpetrated as much as a way to send a message, but as a way to be seen as representing a cause. One, a self-proclaimed jihadist bent on sowing terror in the name of opposition of…America? The other, an enlisted U.S. Army member who was supposedly a supporter of conservatives and Donald Trump. Which makes his gesture of suicide in that manner all the more puzzling. Both are acts of dubious purpose and meaning while doing little else than making the headlines for a day. And perhaps that’s all these men meant to do was to have fame for a few moments at the end of their empty lives. However, having purpose does not mean that it must be validated by fame or attention. Having purpose is an internal satisfaction and one that an individual seeks without the approval of others. But this type of philosophy has long since been drained from mainstream society and replaced by the artificial purpose that is offered through our various outlets of instant gratification and attention seeking platforms. For too many people our purpose is derived at the cost of one another and through the sacrifice of our own emotional and mental health. We stopped being civilized long ago and chose to be a civilization.
Burn, Hollywood, Burn!
Why do Republican Presidents get all the fun assignments? Terrorists fly planes into the World Trade Center, New Orleans is inundated by a catastrophic hurricane and flood, Los Angeles burns halfway to the ground…probably because it is easiest to blame the Damn Libs for the whole mess, and they do this quite well. When it comes to the current POTUS there are none better than Trump to not only spin any instance as an occasion to grab the spotlight for himself but also to cast any would-be opposition into the role of pariah. Not even 48 hours had passed before Trump, his administration and Oceania’s Fox News were parroting the talking points of blaming Democrats and liberal policy making on the disaster taking place in the largest city on the west coast. In the meantime, LA continued to burn and did so for the next 20 days. Only after not only neighboring states but crews from other countries responded to aid the stricken communities were the 4-5 fires brought under control.
With the fires under control and the ash settling, Los Angeleans gaze upon a city with huge swaths of neighborhoods reduced to charred masonry, twisted girders and the remains of people’s dreams reduced to nothing. Famous neighborhoods like Malibu and Pacific Palisades are gone. Schools, nightclubs, beaches and glamorous homes of the famous are no longer as well as those of thousands of residents who made a living and raised families in the largest city west of the Mississippi. America has never seen anything like this happen in modern times. A similar disaster struck the Hawaiian city of Lahaina a few years ago but many people had never heard of this relatively small town on the island of Maui. Los Angeles is known globally as the center of the entertainment industry. Hence the international support. In fact, it seems like support was offered by everyone except the incoming administration who even hinted at withholding aid and recovery resources as retribution for California’s liberal political alignment. So this is the game they will play for the next four years? Every domestic crisis will become an opportunity to point out the Democrat’s shortcomings in planning or organization and a crucible of faith in Republican’s ability to lead our country to “greatness”. Human life and loss be damned, it is more important to remain loyal to The One and Only Supreme Leader! Another disaster will strike a major American city and one of the similarities that it bears is the close relation it has with climate change. Southern California now extends its “fire season” to essentially the entire year round. I have news for the Trump Administration, the environment doesn’t care if you are trying to Make America Great Again, it will do what we have driven it to do at this time. Buckle up.
The Trials of Empire
This screed/rant could easily go on for many more pages and untold words but it doesn’t need to. I’ve made my point; the second administration of Donald Trump will be unprecedented in the resentment, insecurity, instability and attention it generates. It has already done that in less than a month’s time. Also notable since the swearing in of the nation’s 47th POTUS are the appointees to the Presidential Cabinet and chiefs of staff, and, his executive orders. Ranging from authorization of deportation of all illegal immigrants, to disbanding from the World Health Organization (WHO), to virtual abolition of all Diversity and Ethnic Inclusion (DEI) staffing across all federal offices. In a news cycle that couldn’t get enough in the past two years buildup to the 2024 election, the next four years may actually prove to overload it. We may need more fake news channels! Just kidding, the dozens we already have are too many.
But, what times we are living in! Every generation bears with it that “the sky is falling” end-of-the-world mentality but most of them proved to be false prognostications (exceptions given for the two World Wars and the Cuban Missile Crisis). This time around it feels much more palpable with so many world powers in various states of aggression or posturing. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been since its introduction. This decision was made in consideration of the multitude of armed conflicts taking place, the acceleration of extreme weather events due to climate change and the overwhelming presence of AI and its unknown impact on the future of technology and society. Don’t forget the possibility of yet another pandemic either with avian influenza on the rise just a few mutations away from human transmission capability, and, ebola once again on the rise in several African nations.
Why should we care about the rest of the world though? The United States is unto itself an island. Or at least it feels that way for His Majesty. Trump’s agenda has targeted everything from immigration policy to the constitutional status quo of birthright citizenship. He’s already scrubbed any mention of DEI from federal sites and protocol as well as severed forms of aid to domestic and foreign resources and organizations. His Cabinet is composed of a various assortment of tech bros and lapdogs who are more than ready to do the bidding of their master and as they tick off the “goals” of Project 2025 little will be left of what we have become accustomed to as American Democracy. We are about to be living the fictions of Orwell which should be the first several books added to the Trump Presidential library once they are retired from his America: the Owner’s Manual collection. A new age beckons, one that will restore the glory of when America was great again. Domestication, servitude, segregation, patriotism, and above all, loyalty to the Once and Future King. And bear in mind that Trump, a 34 time convicted felon, was re-elected overwhelmingly by the popular vote. Remember, America made this happen because it believed that it was in its best interests.
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