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Watching the Death of Nation in Real Time

~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

April 1, 2025

A hundred bucks says Donald Trump has never read the U.S. Constitution. Or The Bible. Or a book. His latest blather about running for a third term is either an overt telegraphing that he’s going to pull a Putin and declare himself “President for Life” or it’s another distraction from that fact that he and Musk are crashing the system so they can scoop up the pieces.

Either way, America is screwed.

I’ve written ad nauseam about the elements of the Trump movement that map directly on to the rise of fascism, starting back in 2015. The parallels this time around are even more stark, including hollowing out America’s system of checks and balances (starting with firing inspector generals), alienating our long term allies (Blame Canada?), flaunting the rule of law, especially due process, and the vision of expanding empire. Leave Greenland alone.

In 70 insane days, Trump has transformed the United States from a democracy to an anocracy. Anocracies are hybrids of democracy and authoritarianism. Russia has elections, but they are Putin-controlled cosplay. Trump is playing by Putin’s playbook, step by step, where a democracy is transformed into a dictatorship, with the support of the loyal oligarchs. And when your favorite oligarch is the richest man on the planet it’s that much easier.

The damage Elon Musk is doing to America may be irreparable. The 2400 Americans that Musk fired from the CDC today will have ripple effects across the world, but especially in communities that voted for Trump who require federal support in disease prevention. But, hey, MAGA got to own those liberal scientists! America is unravelling. Our safety net is being shredded. Social security is next. Our national security is already splayed open on the Signal app. The nation collapsing. And it’s not in slow motion.

Trump, his drunk frat boy sycophants, and the crafty billionaires that cleverly steer the President of the United States have a plan, to remake America into Russia, a feudal state where the landed gentry collect the wealth and the rest of us pay the interest on our debt to them. Trump going after DEI, civil rights protections, and vote by mail is all part of the race to autocracy. All that was great about 20th Century America is being erased before our eyes.

But in a moment straight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, we’re not dead yet. We still have time to jump off the corpse wagon.

The natives are restless. Protests are growing all over the country, including in red states. Americans are waking up to the threat. Sociologist C. Wright Mills called it the sociological imagination. When you are aware of your values and those values are under threat, the crisis moves you to develop a wider analysis. If you value American democracy, this is a fucking crisis. And the irony is that it will be disaffected Republicans who tip this thing into a national surge against Trumpism. Yeah, Idiocracy requires idiots and there will always be MAGA cultists who will follow their orange god off a cliff, but we can do this without them. We need Reagan Republicans and the ghost of John McCain. (Eighties Me can’t believed I just typed that, but this is an emergency!)

This is go time, America. It’s time for old baby boomers and young Gen Alphas to make noise, monkey wrench, flood the courts, take to the streets, sit in, stand up, and stop this madness. Or there will be a point when we can no longer claim to be free.

America is No Longer the Leader of the Free World

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

March 4, 2025

Many of us watched the February 28th White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is abject horror. One of our most heralded allies was being attacked by Trump and Vance like a child being berated for breaking a window with a baseball. Then it became clear that it was the set up. An ambush for Trump’s Russian bosses. Vance badgering him to apologize. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend chiding him about not wearing a suit (when few of Trump’s White House chums have). I wanted Zelenskyy to just say to Trump, “Mr. President, are you aligned with America’s ally, Ukraine, or Putin?”

We know what Trump would have said – “I’m not aligned with anybody.” 

In that moment, it was clear that America was no longer the leader of the free world. That our allies could no longer rely on us and that we weren’t going to lift a finger to defend democracy. In that moment, Trump gave Putin the green light to obliterate Ukraine. At the United Nations, we voted with Russia (and North Korea) against the condemnation of Russia’s 2022 invasion. The following actions backed that position up, including halting support of military aid to Ukraine, ceasing cyber operations against Russia, mass firings at the CIA and FBI, and Trump asking to end U.S. sanctions against Russia. What more could Vladimir Putin ask for? (I’m sure we’ll find out.)

Trump’s capitulation to Russia and the falling in line of the MAGA cult rings familiar. In the years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, there were Americans, including in Congress, that thought the United States sending billions of dollars to our European allies to fight Nazi Germany was a big ol’ waste. Those nations weren’t sufficiently “grateful.” This included after Germany began their brutal blitzkrieg of Great Britain in 1940. They wanted England to at least give us some of their islands in the Caribbean for helping them. But FDR said, F that. We’re all in for freedom.

What launched the American century began in the first global conflict. During the “war to end all wars” (aka WW I), isolationist voices had the day, until it was clear that Britain and France REALLY need our help (and a ton of American merchant ships were being sunk by U-boats). On April 6, 1917, we declared war on Germany and shut that shit down. By November of the following year, the war was over. And the United States was the new hot shot defender of freedom, our perfect hair blowing in the wind. Ever since that moment in 1918, lovers of freedom and democracy knew we were their ride or die. Sure there were some ethical lapses, Central America, Vietnam, but for the most part we were the good guys on the planet.

That ended last Friday. The global realignment, long envisioned my MAGA architects, has jettisoned its long held alliance with Europe, viewed as decadent by Steve Bannon and white nationalists, in favor of an allegiance to authoritarian regimes like Russia. France is “socialist” and Moscow has clean subways. Sure, political dissidents are thrown into Siberian prisons, but Moscow has clean subways. We are now a part of the axis of evil and Trump and his handlers could not be happier.

I often tell the story of the time I was at a meeting at the U.S. embassy in London in 2018. I was there as a part of a government-funded trip to study how the British respond to violent extremism. We just happened to be at the embassy the day President Trump was attending a summit in Helsinki, Finland with the Russian leader. We all watched the press conference where Trump famously said that he trusted Putin’s assertion that Russia didn’t interfere in the 2016 election, over the evidence presented by his own intelligence agencies. The shock among the career diplomats I was watching with was palpable. They immediately scrambled to craft a response to the fact that the U.S. President and had just publicly chosen loyalty to the biggest dictator on the planet over his own nation.

We don’t know if Putin has some serious kompromat on Trump (perhaps the pee pee tapes are in a vault in the Kremlin) or Trump just really wants to be an authoritarian (or both), but Trump’s mandate is clear. He’s out for himself. He’s never read the Constitution, or The Bible for that matter. I’d lay odds he’s never read a complete book. He’s the transactional president. If it serves him and the sycophants that kiss his ass, he will throw Americans and their security under the bus. He will wage war on our allies, like Canada and Mexico, and sing the praises of dictators like Turkey’s Erdoğan and Hungary’s Orbán. Whatever fluffs his fragile ego.

Trump is murdering America.

So, sorry Ukraine, and other nations fighting to be free and democratic, we now have our own fight to win.

Trump’s Shock & Awe Plan to Collapse the American Economy

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

February 4, 2025

These first two weeks have been dizzying. Trump and his billionaire bros have attacked multiple aspects of our democracy. They have ripped the guardrails off while Democrats have stood there, dazed and confused. The flurry of bias-motivated executive actions, appointments of merit-less droogs hell-bent on dismantling the imagined “deep state,” inflation driving tariffs, saber-rattling at our allies, and the pardoning of violent criminals who, in 2021, tried stop democracy in its tracks. It’s all too much.

The chaos of Trump, ripped from the pages of Project 2025, is the intent. In a normal world, each action would occupy a few weeks in the news cycle, but there’s a dozen actions a day. The chaos is the point. The opposition is playing Wack-a-Mole to each insane impulse from the orange madmen who is declaring war on our allies with one hand and canceling Black History Month celebrations with other. He’s throwing countless federal employees into economic crisis (as well as those, like me, who are employed by federal grants), while blaming the airline crashes on Obama and dwarves. It’s like being punched in the face over and over again with no chance to land a counterpunch.

Trump didn’t invent this strategy. Bush used it to destroy Iraq in 2003. Twenty-two years ago, they called it “Shock and Awe.” Use the military might of the United States to overwhelm Iraq and out of the chaos, create a machine that would profit post-war contractors. Just Google: Halliburton, Iraq, and Profit. This “shock doctrine” (as Naomi Klein called in her 2007 book) has a history of effectiveness. The disaster capitalism employed in nations like Chile was utilized to generate billions in profits for war contractors in Iraq. This week, as witnessed by the plunging of markets after Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, Trump has brought disaster capitalism to the homeland and he and his billionaire bros stand to take home all the money.

The shock doctrine relies on chaos to shake up markets and political organization. Not only is the opposition stuck on the back foot trying to respond to each affront, economic destabilization paralyzes the working class who is more worried about inflation and holding on to their jobs than developing a strategy to fight back. Meanwhile, oligarchs are positioned to swoop in and calmly reassemble the pieces in a way that permanently protects their power and profit. This happened in Russia in the 1990s and it’s happening here now. It’s like that scene in It’s a Wonderful Life when there’s a run on the banks and George Bailey tries to calm the panic, saying, “Don’t you see what’s happening? Potter isn’t selling. Potter’s buying! And why? Because we’re panicky and he’s not.”

Trump, unregistered foreign agent Elon Musk, and their army of gangster capitalists are crashing the economy on purpose. Shipping migrant labor across the border, ludicrous tariffs, rampant deregulation, and appointing insanely unqualified loyalists are all meant to tank financial stability. Trump no longer needs his MAGA troops who were told he would lower the price of groceries on “Day 1.” They served their purpose of installing him back in the White House. They will suffer at the checkout line along with the rest of us. But at least they got to “own the libs.” Musk, now with the keys to the U.S. Treasury, can let the air out of America’s tires and jack up his global banking portfolio and Trump’s voters will have no idea what happened.

Like Mr. Potter, Trump’s billionaire bros will come in to “manage” the economic crisis. The German National Socialist Party did this when the Great Depression hit Germany. They consolidated power with the promise of affordable eggs. And now, when we look for the storied institutions of democracy to prevent an authoritarian takeover in the United States, including a free press, an independent judiciary, and a non-partisan Department of Justice, we will find they have been hollowed out during MAGA’s war of the “deep state.” Trump’s vow to purge the FBI of agents and analysts who investigated January 6th should be all the warning Americans need.

It’s easy to draw on the rise of Hitler as a historical parallel. And even though Melania has claimed that Trump kept Mein Kampf on his nightstand, Donald probably isn’t going back 90 years for a playbook. The rise of Putin and the rule of Russian oligarchs provide the formula. Just read Garry Kasparov’s 2015 book, Winter is Coming. Putin used economic calamity and the fear of Chechen terrorists to dismantle Russian democracy, making him President for Life. Dissidents get poisoned or sent to a Siberian gulag. Trump using the federal government to go after his political enemies is a page out of his comrade’s manifesto.

So what do we do?

We’ve have three weeks of the worst assault on American democracy in our lifetime. We’re all in shock that it’s really this bad. And it’s going to get worse. We can’t depend on Chuck Schumer and the corporate toadies of the Democratic Party save us. Many of them are in line to profit from the consolidation of power by the billionaire class. The Democrats who stand against them need to make themselves known now (or hang separately, as Ben Franklin said). But this is about us first. Us who are battered and defeated by the task at hand. Do we retreat into Netflix binges, or is there a path forward?

This is great opportunity to remember the practices of mindfulness. We’re all in reaction mode right now. Personally, I’ve had to resist the desire to punch someone, especially fellow working class people who think DEI is their enemy while their egg prices skyrocket. This is time to stop. Take a pause and breathe. Then we can start planning. There’s a great device popular in AA circles called “HALT.” Does this situation make me “Hungry Angry Lonely or Tired”? If so, just stop and take stock. So slowing the freakout roll is key.

Swiss sociologist Jennifer Walter offers a simple strategy to re-enage with solutions. First, focus on a few key issues you care about instead of being overwhelmed by the tsunami of fires that need to be put out (to mix metaphors). Second, find trusted sources of information who can do the work of providing needed facts and analysis. Third, if their goal is to overwhelm you, take mental health breaks. Meditation is a favorite “self gift” of mine. Next, Walter suggests taking 48 hours to respond to a news story to let your emotions subside and sort out what’s important. And lastly, build community to share the load. My faculty union president sent out an email last week, entitled, “What to Do in a Burning House,” asking faculty not disengage but step forward. I immediately joined a union committee.

Progressives, real patriots, and those who just care about the price of heat this winter, have been knocked to their knees by the Trump/Musk war on the buttresses of American democracy. But it’s time to stand back up. A lot of the heavy lifting is going to be done by lawyers who still have access to the courts to stop Trump’s actions, many of which are illegal and/or unconstitutional. The rest of us who are not the uber rich have a role, whether it’s monkey-wrenching the shock doctrine or building a viable alternative to Trump’s fear-fueled vision of America. Take a breath. We will do this.

When Hate Wins

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

November 9, 2024

“Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win.” – Kamala Harris, November 6, 2024

I went down a pretty deep rage hole after Trump the Rapist won Tuesday’s election. The list of things that made him unfit to be our president was as long as an Alaskan winter night, including being found liable for a sexual assault by a jury of his peers, which the judge described as rape. Remember when Mitt Romney was disqualified from the Presidency because he left the family dog on top of his car? That Trump the Rapist won the popular vote defied comprehension . I found myself quoting the line from Marilyn Manson’s “Irresponsible Hate Anthem,” that screams, “I wasn’t born with enough middle fingers.”

So I unplugged for a few days. I didn’t want to see the gloating MAGA memes or sit through MSNBC’s Monday morning quarterbacking. We know what happened. The Putin-Musk disinformation campaign pushed millions of gullible Americans into Trump’s cult of personality, while the Democratic Party sat around and got high on the smell of their own farts, clueless to the reality on the ground. The White House, the Senate, and probably the House, now the playthings of a sociopath and his self-enriching oligarchs.

We know it’s going to get bad. It already has. The day after the election, African-Americans of all ages started receiving texts stating that they would be enslaved to pick cotton. Many texts mentioned Trump, saying things like, “Our Executive Slaves will come get you … be prepared to be searched down once you’ve enter the plantation.” In the last few days, Trump’s misogyny has unleashed an army of male trolls who have been harassing women (and girls in school) with the chant, “Your body, my choice.” And this thing is less than a week old.

After a few days of screaming at the sky (and one night of poker and much whiskey), it may be time to lick my wounds and figure out how to prepare for what’s to come. And how to fight it. Step one is to let go of the hate. That’s their game. There was a news story today that Iran was working on a plot to assassinate Trump to avenge the death of Qassem Soleimani, but the FBI caught the three plotters. My immediate thought was, “I guess Iran didn’t have a Plan B.” But that doesn’t cure America of the sickness that is Trumpism. It would only elevate the calls for more blood.

Resisting the lizard brain mandate to blindly fight my supposed enemies is part of this. Who are these enemies? I can generalize them as “MAGA morons,” too dumb to see through Trump’s con act. But these “morons” are people I know. Some of them are my students and family members. They see us as “evil” and we see them as cognitively impaired. Neither is the reality. (Well, Trump is most certainly cognitively impaired, and if he makes it to January 2029, we’ll see the 82 year-old sitting with a drool bucket, staring at the sun, on Inauguration Day.) But falling into the us vs. them binary just turns a needed conversation into a mindless war and, again, that’s not our thing.

It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be ready to fight. I’m already geared up for the 2026 midterms. Cozy and I will make pink pussy hats for the coming marches. I’m dusting off my civil disobedience skills and will be a 60-something monkey-wrench in Trump’s march to authoritarianism. Don’t think I’m making the case for resting on my white male privilege.

But I think we can do it without the vitriol. Yeah, millions of women voted for Trump the Rapist. Are they just bimbos and battered women suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? Or are they complex human beings with multiple motivations that, with love instead of hostility, can be cleaved away from the misogynistic cult of Trump the Rapist? And the men who love them may follow.

I had a publication in 2004 titled, “Getting It: Women and Desistance from Hate Groups.” It was based on my research on former racist skinheads. Their exit stories followed a similar path; a woman in their life, a girlfriend, a teacher, a step-mother, gave them the gift of empathy. They said, “Listen to what I have to endure as a female. That’s what you are doing to people of color.” Lightbulbs went off and the skinheads walked away from hate. There is no greater hate group than MAGA, so why wouldn’t that same strategy work again?

So it’s time to unclench the fist and open the hand and start rescuing people from this death cult. I didn’t know how to truly put women first until I became a father of girl. I wonder how many MAGA bros would vote for Trump the Rapist if Trump raped a women they loved. (Well, besides Ted Cruz.)

So here is my Three Point Strategy to get us out this nightmare. 1) Let go of the hate and the us vs. them narrative. It stops meaningful action in its tracks. 2) Circle the wagons. We need to let know those most vulnerable know that we have their backs. This includes members of immigrant and trans communities. Their fear-level is off the charts. (We’re locking down Andi’s citizenship before the Inauguration so we don’t have to worry about her being disappeared by the “Day 1” plan for mass deportations.) And 3) Reach out with soft hands to those that voted for Trump the Rapist, especially the women. Let’s be Pied Pipers of love. The alternative is a war of all against all and we’ve done that. We don’t want MAGA civil war re-enactors 150 years from now in red hats, screaming, “Your body, my choice!” at Gettysburg.

Deep breaths, America. And let’s get in there where we are needed. 

Beta Trump: The Day the King Fell Off the Hill

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

October 12, 2024

I was 18 or 19 when I first heard the line, “Real men don’t eat quiche.” I remember being so confused because I loved quiche! Eggs, pie, it’s the perfect meal! Was I not a real man? What if I ate quiche with one hand and bashed someone over the head with lead pipe with the other? Where was this guidebook for what was and wasn’t the permitted behavior for real men, so we wouldn’t become fake men?

Judith Butler, the philosopher who wrote Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), took issue with any attempt to define “real men” or what makes a “natural woman.” These are human inventions, invented by humans who have no actual authority over such designations. Sociologists know that gender is fluid and changes across time and space. What was masculine in 1954 is quite different from what is masculine in 2024. My own research on racist skinheads found them largely motivated by this changing nature of masculinity, as their manly factory jobs were offshored and “their women” declared their independence and began bringing home bigger paychecks. For Butler, gender was a performance and, boy, did the skinheads perform.

So it’s with great amusement that I watch the buffoonish performance of masculinity by former President Trump. This child of privilege, who has never lifted anything heavier than a golf club, has routinely pretended to be a strongman. On his first run for president, he regularly told his supporters to “knock the hell out of” protestors. When, as president, he contracted COVID, he defiantly ripped his mask off on the White House balcony (and was then whisked off to be treated by the nation’s top doctors). When an assassins bullet barely grazed his ear, he raised his fist and chanted “Fight! Fight! Fight!” His endless admiration of dictators like Orban and Putin is all part of the act. Former Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly had to beg Trump not to praise Adolf Hitler in public. Admiring Kim Jong Un is one thing, but Hitler, well, that might be a PR problem.

One of the themes of this election has been the 18 point gender gap between Trump and Harris supporters. And it’s not just uneducated white men that are breaking for Trump. It’s also a lot of uneducated brown and black men. Even Obama has been enlisted to try to convince black men to vote for the black woman. Is Kamala Harris this year’s quiche?

Patriarchy is the oldest power dynamic on earth. Older than capitalism. Older than racism. It doesn’t go all the way back, but as long as we’ve been defining God as “He,” men have enjoyed the privilege of being the king of the hill. Over the last 100 years, men have been slowly pushed off their throne, but they are not giving up without a fight. More women are fully employed than men. More women are graduating from college than men. And now a woman is favored to be Commander in Chief. What’s a fragile boy to do? Trump’s appeal to these broken men is as He-Man, the Master of the Universe. Ah, those were the days.

So it’s not surprising that men from every generation who still buy into 1950s myths of masculinity have glommed onto the the fake bravado of the Richie Rich from Queens (who wears a girdle). They want their UFC, their trad wives, and their unrestricted access to women’s bodies and paychecks. Trump is the incel icon. His conviction for sexual assault only endears him to the lost boys of the twenty-first century. He claims he will restore the moral authority to the days when manly men (like him?) ruled the roost. Masculinity in Harris’ America is under assault from DEI, illegal immigrants, and drag queens, according to Fox News/MAGA doctrine. Trump even referred to radio host Howard Stern as a “woke beta male” after Stern interviewed Harris this week.

Trump’s dive into the cesspool of the manosphere, doing interviews on bro podcasts and bumping chests with misogynists like Logan Paul, may be intended to stiffen his limp poll numbers, but they’re likely to have the opposite effect. Trump should have taken note of the response to his Mini-Me, JD Vance, who tried to define what was and wasn’t a “real woman.” (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t childless cat owners.) The quip rallied women from across the political spectrum who collectively said, “You don’t know me, Couch Boy!” Trump’s pathetic performance of toxic masculinity may endear him to a small number of women who have Stockholm syndrome after years of abuse, but female voters are the proverbial sleeping giant. Just look at the turnout anytime abortion restrictions have been on the ballot.

The vast the majority of these self-declared “alpha males” (pffft!) have women in their lives who have caught glimpses of life outside of patriarchy. It’s a world where they have control over their lives and are safe(r) from sexual harassment and violence. They don’t want to go back to being Mrs. John Doe. A lot of the “alphas” are materially supported by women, even if it’s just living in their mother’s basement. And these women who have their alpha ears are telling them that real men support women’s autonomy and that, if not respected, they could easily take their love to a man who sees women as human beings. My guess is that those men who are still falling for Trump’s macho con don’t have women available for honest conversations. Like Logan Paul, they are flailing in a world that sees alpha men as vestiges of the bad old days.

That’s why Harris running mate Governor Tim Walz is so refreshing. Like me and Kamala, Tim is Generation X (all three of us were born in 1964), and grew up in an era when women gained immense economic and social power. We saw our moms move from housewives to career havers. Walz has all the manly credentials (veteran, football coach, fried food eater). He’s also a girl-dad (of a Swiftie, just like me!) and a defender of queer kids and women’s reproductive rights. The sad incels can try to define him as “soft” (“Tampon Tim”), but Walz’s version of masculinity is something painfully out of reach to them. His 30-year-marriage, compared to Trump’s serial philandering, stands as a model of how men should be in the world. (If you think any of Trump’s marriages were happy, I’ve got some stocks in Trump Steaks I’d like to sell you.) If Alpha Boy thinks he’s going to have a 30-year marriage with a trad wife, he hasn’t spoken to an actual female off the internet.

The conventional wisdom is that it will be female voters that save us from the strongman authoritarian trip of Trump and his Handmaid’s Tale Project 2025 vision of making America 1954 again. Many of those women will be telling their men they are voting for Trump and in the privacy of the voting booth pulling the lever for Harris. But I think a bunch of those alpha males will be voting for Harris, too. Because their girlfriends, wives, mothers, sisters, daughters told them that real men vote for women.

We Defeated Fascism 80 Years Ago, We Must Defeat Trump Now. It’s Go Time!

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

May 27, 2024

I had a voir dire day dream about a month ago. I was being interviewed as a prospective juror for Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York. When I was asked about my excessive media bashing of the former president, I offered this reply, “I know two things. The first thing is that this is America and that Mr. Trump is presumed to be innocent and should only be judged on the facts pertaining to the indictment. If those facts support his acquittal, I will vote so. The second thing I know is the Donald Trump is a buffoon who leads a sub-moronic cult of personality and he has no business leading this great nation.” My proclamation wouldn’t have gotten me seated on the jury but it would have probably gotten me seated next to Rachel Maddow the next Monday evening.

It’s so easy to see Donald Jessica Trump as a clown, an obese orange orangoutang, falling asleep and farting in the courtroom, dreaming of dates with Ivanka. His bizarre word salads about Gettysburg and contraception can be written off as dementia, syphilis brain, or just never being told he’s wrong by the army of red tie bootlickers he surrounds himself with. It makes for great fodder for Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and a phalanx of liberal commentators on YouTube. “Look at El Cheeto try to dance to the Village People at his rally! What a train wreck!” “Look at Orange Hitler drink water with two hands like a drunk toddler!” “Look at Dumpie saying Nikki Haley is Nancy Pelosi. Is he an idiot or what?” “Did you see the libertarians booing his confused ass? LMAO!” Trump is the gift that keeps on giving to joke writers.

But is he a joke?

I know a certain Mexican green card-holder that does a good job of frequently popping my bubble of white privilege. We had a pretty heavy conversation about what the potential re-election of Trump really means for people like her. I was curious at why she was not more interested in the Trump soap opera in New York. As someone who works in the law field, I would have thought this fascinating trial would have grabbed her attention. Her response slapped me upside the head. She was so disgusted that we (white people) had let this man rise to the position he’s in that she just checked out of the whole circus. Why aren’t white people rioting in the streets to stop him? “The only time I’ve seen white people rioting was on January 6th,” she said.

Boy, did she have a point.

Her perspective was that white male liberals enjoy the Trump spectacle. He’s fun to lampoon with his spray tan and buckets of KFC. We eat up his gaffes and stories of sexual harassment, knowing that, if he wins, we’ll still be comfortable, sitting in front of MSNBC for the next four years. But if Trump wins in November, he’s floated the idea of building detention camps for undocumented immigrants, including DACA residents. While “illegal aliens” from Norway don’t need to worry too much, a large percentage of my students would be “disappeared” if he was elected. As he did during his first term, Trump would cancel all the federal DEI programs that work to make America a more equitable place. His war on women’s reproductive rights would continue, and the safe space we seek to provide for LGBTQ people would be thrown under the bus to appease his Christian Nationalist base. Make America Gilead Again.

Perhaps even more frightening is if Trump loses. He’s already front-loading the election denial for the results in November for his knuckle-dragging cult that fervently believes the 2020 election was stolen by Biden, the doddering old fool who is also a brilliant criminal mastermind. (Pick a lane, Karen.) The work I’ve been doing on this federally funded grant has collected troves of information on how the far-right is arming up to launch their civil war as soon as their dear leader, again, says, “This election was stolen.” I don’t doubt the FBI has their hands full getting in front of the MAGA militias who are under every rock in the nation.

How did the hell did we get to this point, America? It’s not like Trump has been some secretive Manchurian candidate. He’s been completely open about his “Dictator on Day 1” fantasies. From his idolization of authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and Kim Jong Un, to his utilization of Hitlerian language, like “unify the Reich” and “vermin poisoning the blood of the nation,” the Orange Führer hasn’t actually hid his intentions. And his base is completely fine with Trump as dictator, and turning the White House into a weapon of retribution. (I hope Liz Cheney has a very deep bunker.)

So while late night comedians make fun of Trump for not being able to form a coherent sentence, or tease his sycophants outside the courtroom for dressing as mini-Trumps, the United States is on the precipice of oblivion. What this country might look like during the next election cycle could be unrecognizable, as voting districts are gerrymandered to guarantee Trumpists majorities, women are required to register their pregnancies, abortion only exists in back alleys, new media regulations limit the free (“enemy of the people”) press, and anyone left of Mitt Romney is now the target of heavily militarized police departments. This isn’t hyperbole. Trump has suggest support for such policies and so much more.

How do we save America from Trump?

Personally, I say a nightly prayer that Donald Trump has a heart attack on the toilet. If Nikki Haley is his running mate (if he’s smart, which he’s not), she’ll look like Bernie Sanders compared to a Trump second term. I’m not holding out on the power of collective prayer to remove this human turd from the mortal coil. So we have to heed the words of my favorite Mexican, we need to riot. I’m not talking about kicking in a Starbucks window with our Doc Marten boots. I’m talking about getting vocal every chance we get, like those libertarians who screamed into Trump’s face this weekend. I can’t legally advise throwing rotten vegetables at the presumptive Republican nominee, but this is a fucking 4 alarm fire. In the words of J Lo, let’s get loud.

Here’s my message to straight white men – If Trump is elected, we’ll survive, but a lot of the people we care about won’t. We’re too polite and worried about offending anyone. If you’ve got Trump supporters in your circle, either do your best to wake them up or cut them loose. We need all hands on deck. We need record turnout this fall. Yeah, Biden is old and will probably die soon (putting a woman of color in the Oval Office). But after him, there are multiple generations – X, Millennials, Z, Alpha, that are energized and ready to create a vibrant, healthy nation, that includes everyone, even that crazy uncle who likes “Mexican food, just not Mexican people.” He can be reached. As Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” And as every annoying reality show contestant says, “Ride or die.”

If you love the idea of America, get off your ass. Whether you are an overwhelmed soccer mom or a teenage anarchist, this is go time. There is no “freedom” under authoritarian rule. Just ask Russia. We must do everything. We must do everything to stop Trump to save America. This Memorial Day for all those brave soldiers who fought fascism 80 years ago, let’s do this.

The End of Democracy and the New Dark Age

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

March 28, 2024

I lived long enough to see several nations cease to exist, including Rhodesia (1979), the USSR (1991), and Yugoslavia (1992). Even though many believe that “God likes us the best,” there is no guarantee that the United States will exist in perpetuity. We could exist for thousands of years, like Iran, or the U.S. could be kaput by this time next year. There are certainly warning signs that the great American experiment may have a rapidly approaching expiration date.

The idea of America was born in The Enlightenment, the European Age of Reason. Intellectuals, inspired by cracks in the medieval divine right of kings that propped up the authority of the Catholic Church, fashioned a new paradigm in which free thinkers were no longer burned at the stake as heretics. Those cracks were created by the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, that encouraged the translation of the Bible and believers to seek the truth themselves instead of trusting the dogma of the Church. (Many of those reformers were killed by the Church, including William Tyndale, who dared to translate the Bible into English.) The new rebellion was embodied by Galileo Galilei who’s crime was to present evidence that the earth went around the sun, and not reverse (and who was put on trial by the Church in 1633).

Galileo laid out the framework for the new intellectual movements, taking root in oppressive monarchies in France and across Europe. Like Galileo, who did research based on a theory that made logical sense, the new thinking would be rooted in the values of rationality and empiricism, not blind trust and superstition. This “enlightenment” gave birth to an explosion of science that often contradicted the teachings of the Church. (“How do you reconcile the new fossil evidence with Genesis? Let’s do some research and find a truth rooted in the empirical!”) Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) infused this philosophy with the binding rights and responsibilities of the autonomous individual, a radical new conceptualization of freedom.

The founders of the United States were not brutish patriots who merely wanted independence from their taxers. They were deep thinkers who studied and debated the Enlightenment tenets. Thomas Paine was involved in the French Revolution and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson’s time in Paris deeply informed how the rational and empirical experiment of American democracy would be constructed. The United States of America is a child of the Enlightenment and exists because the core values of the Enlightenment have persisted for 248 years.

When I taught social theory at Portland State University, we’d often get get into a spirited discussion about the end of the Enlightenment. If the Enlightenment was born in coffeeshops in the 18th Century Europe, when did it end? Some students would argue for 2001, when religious extremists attacked America and a hostility to climate science was a hallmark of the Bush administration. I would counter-argue that as long as democracy and science are still widely valued, the Enlightenment is alive and well. I have since changed my mind. The Enlightenment, that lifted humanity out of the Dark Ages, died on January 6th, 2021.

We knew that the Trump Administration was hostile to science. We saw it on a regular bases during Trump’s COVID briefings, with his ludicrous suggestions that the virus could be cured with sunlight or by injecting bleach. One of the world’s leading immunologists, Anthony Fauci, became a meme as he regularly face-palmed behind Trump’s “I know better than the scientists” buffoonery. And we knew that Trump was hostile to democracy. His administration was characterized by attempts to weaken voting access, Congress, the Department of Justice, and the courts, and a constant war on the free press (parallel to his Russian compatriot, Vladimir Putin). January 6th, was the culmination where he unleashed his anti-vax hordes on the Capital. Believing, despite of all empirical evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 election was “stolen,” the Trump mob tried to prevent the constitutional transfer of power and install their monarch.

In the following years, Trump has cozied up to the world’s dictators, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and made it clear that, if re-elected, he would weaponize the federal government to seek retribution against all his political enemies. I hope Mitt Romney has a safe room. Authoritarianism is six months away from America’s doorstep. Trump has joked that he would be a dictator on the first day of his presidency if he  wins. But if he loses, he’s already told his moronic anti-Enlightenment base that the election will have been stolen, and they are armed and ready to rectify the situation. Democracy’s only hope may be that Trump dies comically on the toilet this summer.

I routinely warn against the “sky is falling” prognostications. I remember thinking the Cold War tensions of 1983 would be the endpoint of the human race. (Remember Korean Air Flight 007?) We survived that and 1984. “The world moves on, another day, another drama, drama,” as Taylor Swift sings. But things are different this time. My feelings may be shaped by this federally funded project I’ve been working on for the last two years. We are tasked with interrupting political violence and the chatter I’m seeing about a “second civil war” has been ramping up the closer we get to Election Day. The Trump droogs are locked and loaded and ready to wage holy war on anything they deem to be “woke” or that stands in the way of their dear leader taking control of the reins of power. They are clear that both science and democracy will be fired from Trump 2.0, and if you don’t believe me, take a look at the Handmaid’s Tale agenda of the evangelicals at the Heritage Foundation who think Trump is God’s gift to embryos.

I try to talk about the Enlightenment whenever I can. It’s why America is here. It’s why we walked on the moon. It’s why we can save millions of lives with immunizations. And it’s why infertile couples can have children (except in Alabama). Trump and his minions embody the exact opposite of the values of the Age of Reason. They wanted to burn Anthony Fauci at the stake and hang Mike Pence from the gallows. If they succeed, three centuries of the triumph of rationality and empiricism will be succeeded by a new dark ages where the only value will be fealty to the sovereign, who is currently selling Bibles wrapped in an American flag. This is not dystopian fantasy. This a coming storm that could put out the light for a thousand years. But we stopped that storm 79 years ago. Can we do it again?

Lessons from Joan of Arc – Courage for the Coming Battle

~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

January 6, 2024

This January 6th we mark the 3rd anniversary of Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election, with the help of his troglodyte hoard, and end American democracy. I’m choosing to, instead, mark the 612th anniversary of the birth of Joan of Arc, and her cinematic campaign to save her nation.

Portland has a wonderful statue to the “Maid of Orleans” in the Coe Circle roundabout. It was erected on Memorial Day 1925, after pioneer doctor (and close friend of Teddy Roosevelt) Henry Waldo Coe saw French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet‘s equestrian statue, Jeanne d’Arc, in Paris. I guess he thought Portland was going to become the Paris of the Pacific Northwest. For the last 28 years, I’ve been circling around the golden teenager, atop Sunflower, her horse, without thinking too much about it. I’d seen the original statue in the Place de Pyramides on one of my early trips to Paris. But other than that, I just thought about it as something “kinda cool.”

This past summer I decided I needed to learn more about this child warrior, so I dove into the deep end. My starting knowledge was that she was a French teen that rallied her nation against the English in the Hundred Years War and was burned at the stake. That was about it. So I started reading everything I could get my hands on, including the insanely well chronicled transcripts of her 1431 heresy trial in Rouen, Normandy, the heart of English controlled France.  I watched over a dozen films, from Cecil B. DeMille’s Joan the Woman (1917) and Carl Theodor Dryer’s restored 1928 silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, to Bruno Dumont’s heavy metal musicals Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017) and Joan of Arc (2019). Cozy started to think I was losing my mind, as we took extra spins around Coe Circle to say hello to my new favorite person.

The Joan obsession took me into a wider investigation of the Hundred Years War, which many historians see as paving the wave for modern nation states. That 15th century fasciation took a slight detour into all things Henry V and the 1415 Battle of Agincourt. (I’m currently reading Shakespeare’s Henry V play. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”) It was such a different world, emerging out of the pandemic of bubonic plague, facing a new form of religious nationalism. Oh, wait, maybe not.

First, let’s put Jeanne d’Arc in her historical context. Her birthdate may be a fiction as even she didn’t know how old she was and January 6 is the Epiphany in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. (I just finished off the King Cake in our house.) But she was likely born around 1412 in Domrémy, in an English controlled part of Northern France.  Around age 13, she started reporting the religious visions, first from the archangel Michael, telling her to save France from the English and restore Charles VII to the throne. At 17, Joan made her way to the Royal Court in Chinon to ask Charlie for an army so she could drive the English out of their strategic stronghold in Orleans, on the River Loire. Since Joan claimed to be sent by God on a mission to restore Charles’ crown, he said, “Sure, why not.”

In April 1429, Joan, who was the age of a high school senior, had her army and, with standard in hand, sacked Orleans, sending the British running. And according to all the well documented eye-witness testimonies, she was 100% bad ass. The English would taunt her from behind their walls, calling her a “whore,” and she would just say, “OK, I guess you all will now die.” She’d get shot with arrows and keep going. She was nuts. After she got Charles VII his thrown back, her value wore off and he kinda just sorta accidentally let her get captured by the English, who were keen on proving that she was a devil. I mean if God was on France’s side, what did that say about England? And plus, she dressed like a man, which really pissed off the transphobic Catholic clergy. They were the only ones allowed to crossdress.

During her 1431 trial in Rouen, Joan was the same bad ass, dancing circles around the clerics, who really needed to prove she was a witch. This illiterate teenager outwitted her judges at every turn. They tried to trip her up, asking questions like, “Do you know whether or not you are in God’s grace?”  Refusing to be trapped, she skillfully replied, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest creature in the world if I knew I were not in His grace.” They were like, “Oh, this chick is good.”

In the end, the political needs of the English overseers won out and Joan was ordered to be burned at the stake. In the intense desire to save herself from the fire, she briefly recanted and accepted a life in prison. But then she realized that would have invalidated her entire life dedicated to faith and France, and said, “Fuck it. Light me up.” (That might not be a direct translation.) On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake at the Old Marketplace in Rouen and her ashes were thrown into the Seine so there would be no relics left.

Cozy, my daughter (named after another tragic French girl, Victor Hugo’s Cosette), has been asking my why I’m so obsessed by Joan of Arc. After all, now if a teenager told you that God, angels, and saints had told them to demand an army so they could wage battle against foreign invaders, the term “mental health crisis” might be employed. What can a 15th century “religious fanatic” tell us about the challenges in 21st century? Patti Smith, in her blog this morning, posted a tribute to the maid, writing, “I keep returning to her story in order to contemplate the impossible decision she had to make, and her remarkable bravery in making it.”  It’s not the religious fanaticism (perhaps schizophrenia) that brings us back to Joan. It’s the commitment to freedom from oppression. For Joan it was English rule and limiting gender norms of medieval Europe. For us it’s something different, but not much.

As we mark this day when we remember Trump’s desperate attempt to replace America’s democracy with some bizarre form of authoritarian rule, the story of Joan of Arc is instructive. Her trial was marked by a bizarre obsession her judges had with the fact she refused to dress as a woman. Ron DeSantis’ and the Proud Boys’ obsession with drag queens and banning gender affirming care for trans kids is cut from the same dogmatic cloth. But there is an even grander call to human potential here. The courage young Joan demonstrated to free France, in the face of older and more resourceful adversaries, will be required as American democracy is attacked from all angles. I’m not equating Putin with Henry V (Henry fought his own battles, for one), but the multi-front assault we face might demand a bit of Joan’s fanaticism and steadfast belief that our cause is just. As Joan said, as she led her legions to liberate Orleans, “All battles are first won or lost, in the mind.”

Ukraine Days: Reflections During a DakhaBrakha concert

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

October 1, 2022

Last night Andi and I went to see the brilliant Ukrainian band, DakhaBrakha. They were playing a sold out concert at an art center in Beaverton, Oregon before they head back to Europe. (Their November 11 show in Krakow, Poland will be one for the ages.) They’ve chosen to tour the globe while their homeland burns under the continuous assault of Putin’s invasion to share the need for the world to act. Their music is so other-worldly, the best way I can describe it is, imagine Kate Bush joins Radiohead and they are kidnapped by Cossacks and taken to Neptune. They call it “ethno chaos.”

As Andi and I let the exotic sounds wash over us, animations of Russian missiles falling and photos of bombed out apartment buildings in Irpin and Mariupol filled the screen behind the four-piece band from Kyiv. Occasionally slogans, like “Russia is a terrorist state” and “Arm Ukraine” would flash across the screen as the music crescendoed. The one male in the band, Marko Halanevych, implored the audience to do what they could to support “Free Ukraine.” The audience, made up of Ukrainian-Americans, recent refugees, and Portland music fans, responded to his “Slava Ukraini” with “Heroyam slava!” – Glory to the heroes.

The message of the music was magnified that day because Putin had just held a dog & pony show in Moscow to declare the regions of eastern Ukraine as formally annexed into Russia, to be defended as a part of Russia. Adding to the significance of the day, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy submitted Ukraine’s application to NATO. It felt like the last moments before World War 3. Andi clutched my hand as the music and the moment consumed us. Children, like our daughter, were being killed or driven from their homes while we sat in a brand new arts center half a world away.

The concert is certainly in my top ten now, but also helped Andi understand why I had to go to Ukraine this past spring. “When white people are at war with each other, things are really serious,” she said, only half-joking. I bought us DakhaBrakha shirts after the show, proceeds going to Ukraine, and talked with some local Ukrainian residents about the power of the night’s performance.

I will always reflect on my trip into the war zone to provide what little help I could. Portland and Lviv, Ukraine are now “friendship cities,” soon to be sister cities, partially because my experience championing Ukrainian coffeeshops as air raid sirens blared in Lviv. I feel a deep connection to the local Ukrainian population and Andi, Cozy, and I often have our fill on pierogis in the basement of a local Ukrainian church most Saturday afternoons.

I wanted to post the eight blog posts I wrote before, during, and right after my trip to Poland and Ukraine in one place as a chronology. I was briefly a hot topic in the local news when I was there, but now, as we pass the 6 month mark, the war in Ukraine becomes just another story as the world seems to turn upside down. It’s still raging (although Ukraine is advancing and Russians are fleeing their country to avoid conscription) and the lessens I learned there still resonate.

UKRAINE BLOGS

Entry 1: In the Toilet Paper Tube of History: Watching the Battle for Ukraine in Real Time (February 27, 2022)

Entry 2: Psychoanalyzing the Attraction to Chaos, or Why I Want to Go to Ukraine (March 14, 2022)

Entry 3: On the Polish Border with Ukraine: Watching the World Change from Up Close (March 25, 2022)

Entry 4: The First Two Days on the Polish-Ukraine Border, as Bombs Fall on Lviv (March 26, 2022)

Entry 5: One Night in Lviv (Makes a Hard Man Humble) (March 28, 2022)

Entry 6: Panic in Auschwitz: Putting the Present Moment in Context (April 2, 2022)

Entry 7: Where I’ve Been, What I’ve Seen, Who I Am: A Brief Reflection of My Time in Ukraine/Poland (April 5, 2022)

Entry 8: The Rescue of the Girl in the Red Coat: Gratitude for One Ukrainian Dad (April 17, 2022)

The Catch-22 of Trump 2024, or, How Donald Trump’s Comical Death is Democracy’s Great Hope

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

September 19, 2022

The good news is most Americans don’t want Donald Trump to run for president again. In a  recent PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll, 61 percent of Americans said they want the orange oaf off the ballot. Of course, another poll, from Harvard, found 67 percent of Americans don’t want Biden to run for re-election (citing his age, not his attempt to overthrow the government). But Trump has become the drunk uncle who won’t leave after the holidays. Based on the spotty attendance of Ultra MAGA weirdos at his recent rallies (“Huge!” pfft!), Trump’s cult of personality seems to be shrinking like his legal team.

But it only takes one Timothy McVeigh to ruin your whole day.

Just take one look at the people showing up at these MAGA rallies. On one hand, if you ever wondered were old white people go to die, it’s to a mostly empty arena dressed in red, white, and blue “Let’s Go Brandon” golf shirts. But on the other hand, these people are batshit crazy. That fascistic devotion to Trump is reflected in numerous polls that report the majority of Republicans still believe the Big Lie, that the Con Man from Queens won the 2020 election. As Joseph Goebbels is alleged to have said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Behind the wack-a-doo attendees at Trump rallies are numerous “patriot” militia members who are heavily armed and waiting for the go from their dear leader to kick off their “boogaloo” with the promise that the rednecks will win this civil war. A recent ADL report found scores of Oath Keepers in the ranks of the military, police, first responders, and among elected officials. Like a page out of the racist playbook, The Turner Diaries, these Timothy McVeigh-wannabees hope to make January 6 look like a Beach Boys concert on the DC Mall.

Which brings up to the conundrum of 2024 and Trump’s concerning attempt to force his way back into the White House. There are three possible scenarios, and none of them end well for this great nation.

Scenario 1: Trump runs in 2024 and a crushing recession, endless memes about “black crime,” the harassment of poll workers, and a well-timed news story about an undocumented immigrant from Latin America savaging a white woman (whether true or not), and 45 becomes 47. Trump takes it as a mandate to further deconstruct American democracy. Can you imagine what the federal courts will be capable of doing after another four years of Trump appointments? Suddenly The Handmaid’s Tale will look like a utopia instead of a dystopia. As forces loyal to the Constitution try to prevent America from sliding into an authoritarian state, civll war becomes eminent.

Scenario 2: Trump runs in ’24 and loses to Biden (or Kamala Harris because Joe fell off his bike). It will be seen as evidence of another “stolen election.” Nearly every MAGA candidate that lost a primary this year claimed to be a victim of “voter fraud.” As funny as it’s been they are sitting up the expectation that if Trump loses in ’24, it will be because the unseen evil forces. (Spend some time on Trump’s Truth Social or Gab and you know it’s the “Jews.”) Since peaceful means will be seen as no longer effective, violence will be called for – Civil War 2: The MAGA Boogaloo.

Scenario 3: Merrick Garland indicts Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection or handing over classified documents to Putin, or throwing ketchup at the wall. Whatever. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits ANY politician who has taken the oath of office from holding future public office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Engaged in, not caused. You better believe the DOJ is mulling this one over with sweating brows. While this is probably the best option that demonstrates that our Constitution and the rule of law actually fucking mean something in this country, the “defund the FBI” crowd is still going to be triggered and urged to drag themselves out of their troll holes and shoot SOMEBODY.

This really sucks. It sucks for America and for those of us that just want to live in peace and not have to have to defend ourselves from roving gangs of MAGA militias looking for liberals, Black Live Matter activists, and drag queens to hang. I have weapons training but I’d rather spend my gun budget on some shrubbery and taking my kid to Disney World (if the DeSantis Army hasn’t nuked it). Plus, I suck at that Big Buck Hunter game. I don’t know how good I would be at mowing down marauding Proud Boys on my street.

So America’s hope seems to lie in Scenario 4: The death of Donald J. Trump. And it can’t be from the most likely cause, a massive heart attack. The QAnon loons will see conspiracy all over that outcome. You thought bunker dwellers had a field day with JFK’s (and JFK Jr.’s) death. They will see the hand of Fauci and/or Antifa in Trump’s “natural causes” bucket kicking. And then we’re back to the armed rebellion of the sub-moronic legions. No, it has to be in public and as mundane as possible.  He’s gotta trip over his feet and break his neck at a golf course, or fall off a stage at rally while doing that embarrassing white man dance. He could choke on an Egg McMuffin or maybe he could step out of a speeding limo after an argument with Eric. It’s gotta be Darwin Award-level stupid.

We know from research that cult-like movements tend to fade when the charismatic personality at the center expires. (Except for the Dead Head thing. That shit refuses to go away.) The MAGA faithful might rally around Junior, or the more frightening Ron DeSantis. But they can’t give them what Don gave them, the ability to be stupid but feel smart. And the Trump chapter closes, not with a bang, but with a briefly lingering oder.

This is where we are America. The threat of armed political violence is very real and the clock to 2024 is ticking. The great hope of America may just be Donald Trump driving his golf cart into a pool at Mar-a-Lago and getting his khakis caught in the pool drain or being hugged to death by Diamond and Silk and the My Pillow guy. But it’s gotta be spectacularly stupid, like the man himself.

PS. Scenario 5: Ukrainian victory drives Putin from power and the kompromat that Vladimir has on Trump falls into pro-democracy hands. Trump is told it will be released if he doesn’t permanently retire. Trump moves to Moscow where he spends his remaining days paying prostitutes to pee on pictures of Barack Obama.