The Trump/Project 2025 regime often reminds me of a story I heard when I lived in Jersey City, which for decades was famous for its corrupt politicians.
Back in 1958, the local powers that be rewarded loyal minion Bernard “Barney” Doyle by naming him county superintendent of weights and measures. The position came with an annual salary of $6,500 (about $74,000 today) before customary kickbacks inexplicably nicknamed “rice pudding.”
After the swearing-in ceremony, a reporter asked Doyle the number of ounces in a pound.
According to former Jersey City Mayor Thomas F.X. Smith, Doyle was too gobsmacked to reply right away. “Give me a break,” he finally said. “I just got the job.”
I still laugh at how this midcentury guy was chosen to ensure scales and measuring devices were up to par. But from Donald Trump on down, there’s nothing funny about the havoc today’s unqualified and incompetent federal officials are wreaking.
Since Inauguration Day, Trump’s been running our country the way he did his businesses – into the ground. And with only yes-men and -women around him, the world is at the mercy of decisions based on his greed, vengeance and whims.
This regime’s failure to consider the consequences of its actions has led to a host of costly messes: the Department of Government “Efficiency,” the Epstein files, the unauthorized demolition of the White House’s East Wing, the haphazard tariffs, the indiscriminate immigration roundups and the due diligence-free warehouse-buying spree to expand ICE’s concentration camp footprint.
Awful as those moves are, they pale against the reckless Iran “excursion” Trump embarked on hours after saying negotiations would continue. Some spinmeister misnamed this war “Epic Fury,” perhaps because a more truthful catchphrase, “Waste, Fraud and Abuse,” was already taken.
The regime has squandered tens of billions of dollars on what it hopes will distract us voters from domestic problems, but the war has already driven up gasoline prices to the point where Trump eased oil sanctions on both the country he’s been bombing and Russia. At least BFF Vladimir Putin is benefiting.
Many of us at home will have reason to feel more epic fury if GOP members of Congress decide to pay for the war with additional cuts to health care and other programs.
More important, 13 U.S. military service members have died and nearly 400 have been wounded in this foray, which has also killed more than 2,100 Iranian civilians and injured thousands more. Our country is far less safe than it was even at the beginning of this year.
Meanwhile, Trump must be dizzy from all his about-faces. “Six weeks ago, the U.S. went to war supposedly to end Iran’s nuclear program,” Lebanese journalist Hisham Melhem told Philadelphia Inquirer worldview columnist Trudy Rubin. “Now Trump talks about a joint venture [tollbooths on the Strait of Hormuz] with the regime in Tehran.”
But according to The Hill, Trump later said Iran “better not be and, if they are, they better stop” charging fees for access to the crucial passageway.
On Tuesday morning, he threatened to wipe out Iran’s civilization. That evening, he announced a cease-fire, subject to reopening the strait.
Defense/War (Crimes) Secretary Pete Hegseth interpreted the announcement as a “capital-V victory” by “the president of peace,” but we’ve already seen that our enemies and frenemies aren’t the only ones who believe agreements are made to be tested and violated.
For now, Iran controls the strait, a power it didn’t hold before the war, Rubin wrote, and she didn’t think it would embrace Trump’s concept of a plan to get a piece of the cryptocurrency toll revenue. (She also noted that Don Jr. and Eric are both in the crypto business, as is the son of special Iran negotiator Steve Witkoff.)
“Expect oil prices to stay high, the global economy to suffer, and the Mideast to remain unstable,” she predicted. “Talks — if they don’t collapse — are likely to drag on, or end with more U.S. concessions to empowered Iranian hard-liners.”
All this makes the Jersey City shenanigans look pretty tame. Ingrained as the corruption was, its scope and impact were limited.
And unlike Barney Doyle, who was mortified at the ignorance he showed, Trump and his Project 2025ers flaunt theirs and respond to challenging questions with lies and belligerence. After all, they can’t use Doyle’s excuse that they’re new at their jobs.
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.
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