When I was a little girl, I asked my babysitter why men wearing cowboy hats kept shooting each other on TV.
In the Wild West, she explained, if a man didn’t like what someone did, he killed him.
No adult men I knew did that, so I assumed those days were behind us.
Later, when I learned about nuclear weapons, I thought they’d prevent wars.
They didn’t, but I thought the backlash from George W. Bush’s unwarranted invasion of Iraq would keep presidents from starting wars for wars’ sake.
Now the Trump/Project 2025 administration doesn’t hide its savagery; it just spins it as strength and justifies it with lies.
On Inauguration Day, Donald Trump pardoned or commuted sentences of the nearly 1,600 Capitol invaders who tried to overthrow the government five years ago. Beating up law enforcement is no longer a crime if it’s done for him.
Then Trump started making noises about annexing Greenland and Canada, whether their people wanted it or not. Renaming our largest government agency the Department of War should have sounded more alarms.
As the second year of this administration begins, we’re already seeing the poisonous fruits of what it sowed in 2025.
Months of deadly attacks based on shifting pretexts – drugs, cartels, terrorism – culminated in the post-New Year’s Day takeover of Venezuela, a nation that posed no threat to the United States but has oil Trump wants.
Based on how he and the Project 2025ers are running our country, Venezuelans aren’t likely to see much relief from the poverty and oppression their former dictator inflicted.
Back in the States, the White House put up a website saying the Jan. 6 goons who brandished weapons and screamed for the execution of Trump’s vice president were just “patriotic Americans.” Like sleazy defense lawyers, the PR team blamed the victims, accusing former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of failing to secure the building and the Capitol Police of escalating tensions.
The morning after that terrible anniversary, ICE agent Jonathan E. Ross killed Renee Good during an immigrant roundup in Minneapolis. The shooting – far from the agency’s first — sparked public outrage because video footage indicated Good, a U.S. citizen who wasn’t a target, was trying to drive away just before Ross shot her.
Nonetheless, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Good was attempting to run Ross over. Trump even showed New York Times reporters a video to back up that claim; when they said it didn’t appear to, he pivoted to the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
Meanwhile, JD Vance proclaimed Ross has “absolute immunity,” branded Good “a deranged leftist” and called her death “a tragedy of her own making.”
Over the years, Trump pined for the days when police cracked U.S. protesters’ heads, but he’s taking the opposite approach to demonstrators in Iran.
“We’re locked and loaded and ready” to rescue peaceful protesters if the Iranian government shoots and kills them, he wrote on social media on Jan. 2. (Rescue corpses? O…kay.)
He also celebrated the birth of Christ with airstrikes on Nigeria and suggested more if Christians continue to be murdered there.
Apparently, all Trump has done and threatened in our hemisphere isn’t enough to satisfy his ego
“My own morality, My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” the aspiring Nobel Peace Prize recipient told the New York Times.
Given his lack of morality and the rapid deterioration of whatever mental faculties he had, we’re in big trouble.
For despite his many failings and failures, Trump has only gained wealth and power in his second term. As a result, laws, rights and moral principles no longer apply if they conflict with his whim du jour.
With the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority mostly indulging him, Congress is our only hope. The Senate has passed a bipartisan resolution limiting his war powers, and the House has defied him by voting to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies. Democrats are looking at ways to rein in the Department of Homeland Security.
It’s a start, and if we can convince more of our elected representatives to grow a spine and put America before Trump, the America that was working its way toward greatness just might make it past its 250th birthday.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
Want to be a columnist with Coal Region Canary? Contact us at newscanary@gmail.com.
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