The Problem with Drawing Lines in the Arabian Sands… Trump’s Bluster is Bringing Further Disaster to Everyone, MAGA Included.

As I have been watching all of Trump’s losing yesterday I began thinking of the words or the fictional Raymond Reddington, played by James Spader in the great crime drama, “The Blacklist”. He once said, “You know the problem with drawling lines in the sand? With a breath of air, they disappear.” Trump draws many lines in the sand, and they always blow away.

Trump lost the Middle East as UAE ignored him and left OPEC. He lost some of the Republicans in Congress due to his continued lies about the war, and he is ensuring that the U.S. Dollar will stop being the world’s reserve currency, which will shatter the U.S. economy as nations cast American Bonds aside, dumping them for the Chinese Yuan, Bitcoin, or the Euro. If you think that interest rates suck now, you haven’t seen anything yet.

But Trump and his cabal are thieves and criminals, and that includes the six Republicans of the Supreme Court majority who gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act, and made it harder to challenge racist gerrymandering. This was to ensure that the White Power voters of the Old Southern Confederacy once again in position to completely reestablish “White Man’s Rule” throughout the old Confederacy. And to rub salt into the wounds, Justice Sam Alito used the 14th Amendment as the basis of his arguments. Others have written about how abhorrent the ruling was in much more detail than me. I can only say that it very much resembles the actions of the Court in Cruikshank v. United States where the court overturned the murder convictions of the leaders of the Colfax Massacre, the Civil Rights Cases overturning the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. The court majority of that era turned the 14th Amendment on its head to remove the recent gains made by Blacks during Reconstruction. The Roberts Court has become one of the most infamous Courts in American history. Justice Joseph Bradley who wrote for the majority in the Civil Rights cases was very clear in his opinion, he wrote:

“to deprive white people of the right of choosing their own company would be to introduce another kind of slavery…. It can never be endured that the white shall be compelled to lodge and eat and sit with the Negro. The latter can have his freedom and all legal and essential privileges without that. The antipathy of race cannot be crushed and annihilated by legal enactment.”

Bradley also wrote that such laws were made African Americans a “special favorite of laws”and ignored the fact that in most of the country blacks were indeed not a favorite and were in fact still the subject of discrimination, segregation, political disenfranchisement, systematized violence, murder and lynching.

Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slave owner opposed majority in Cruickshank, the Civil Rights ruling, and Plessy v. Ferguson, became known as the “Great Dissenter”. In his dissent from the majority in the Civil Rights decision, Harlan wrote, “[t]he supreme law of the land has decreed that no authority shall be exercised in the country upon the basis of discrimination, in respect of civil rights, against freemen and citizens because of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Bradley’s opinion is very much like that of the current Republican majority on the Roberts Court. The Roberts Court said that states could gerrymander districts based on political party, but not race. Of course in doing so they ignored that the party suing to end voting rights in all of the lawsuits that ended up before the Court were made by White Republicans in the former Confederacy. It’s hard to make the argument that what the Court ruled was not race based. If the Party suing to eliminate districts that have Black majorities who happen to be of the opposition Democratic Party, how can the Court say that a White Republican majority eliminating Black Democratic districts is simply based on Party? It is race, except that is the White race being favored.

Lynching as a Spectator Event

The result was that by 1900 that violence was used with great effect and between 1880 and 1968 approximately 3,500 people were murdered or lynched throughout the South. In 1892 alone 235 blacks were lynched “and throughout the decade, whites lynched an average of 150 southern blacks per year.” This had become a far easier task and far less dangerous for the perpetrators of violence against blacks as Supreme Court “interpreted black people’s other constitutional rights almost out of existence.” Since the court had “limited the federal government’s role in punishing violations of Negro rights” this duty fell to the states, which seldom occurred, and when “those officials refused to act, blacks were left unprotected.”

Enough of that for now, I must move on. However, if you want to learn more you can order or purchase my book “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Religion and the Politics of Race in the Civil War Era and Beyond”, or should you become an annual subscriber, I will send you an inscribed copy at my expense. But I digress, enough of that. Back to Trump’s misadventures in the Middle East.

Yesterday Trump and Drunken Pete were telling Congress that the War Powers Act now longer applied because of their “ceasefire”. However, a ceasefire is not peace, especially when you still are conducting a naval blockade which of itself is an act of war. Their lies are insulting to anyone with any knowledge. They know nothing or strategy, and completely discarded diplomacy when a deal was about to be reached before the first bombs or missiles were dropped or launched. They have followed discredited strategies of air power enthusiasts that have never produced victory of themselves. They ignored the warnings of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I am sure those of CENTCOM as well.

Photo from Yahoo News

Map from NY Times

The results have been disastrous. Every one of our major bases in the Persian Gulf and surrounding nations have significant damage and are effectively out of action. We have no access to the Gulf, no Navy ships in it, and no way to deliver the heavy ground forces that will be needed by Trump and Hegseth as they talk about putting “boots on the ground”. The fact is that if the situation in Iran and the Gulf remains as it is gas and oil prices will still continue to rise along with the prices of everything we consume, and Trump and the GOP’s poll numbers will continue to tank. He no longer can simply walk away and declare victory because Iran won’t let him. Thus, he will have to resort to more bombing killing thousands of innocent Iranians. True, he might kill some members of the Iranian Military and Revolutionary Guard, but those guys are well dug in, while the innocent civilians and children have none. In our jargon they are “collateral damage”. No war crimes to see here, just move along.

The war will go on. It hasn’t really ended, people will die and the world economy will tank along with that of the United States. There will be a major recession or quite possibly a full economic depression. Please believe me, we haven’t seen the end or the worst of this.

This crisis is going to suck like a Hoover, and I mean Herbert, not the vacuum. Since many people, even those that make good money live month to month because of things like astronomical rises in rent and mortgage payments, insurance, local and state taxes, and let’s not forget healthcare costs, most only need to lose one of two family incomes, or have a devastating health crisis for which they no longer either have health insurance, or pay ungodly premiums for crappy coverage to lose everything. The only people that make money will be people like Trump and his billionaire buddies who sell stocks short and profit off of the misery of ordinary people. Hell, I haven’t even mentioned the ordeals of most people. or the loss of life that our military personnel will experience as Operation Epic Shitstorm continues, whether Trump and Hegseth call it a war or not.

In the broader strategic context he also announced the withdrawal of a U.S. Army mechanized brigade from Germany as part of his pique with NATO. German Chancellor dared to criticize Trump’s disastrous war against Iran. The timeline for that is six to twelve months. The move will embolden Russia, weaken NATO and be a multibillion dollar fiasco to withdraw the units and their equipment. This does not include the costs of re-stationing the brigade in the United States or the Indo-Pacific theater. One of the big issues will be the infrastructure in their new location. This is not like the end of the Cold War where we had a lot of excess infrastructure to move units back to in the United States, and if we decide on the Indo-Pacific we will also need the approval and assistance of the nation or nations that we move them. Yet another disaster because Trump’s skin is so thin and his actions never have anything to do with what actually makes sense for the United States. Trump’s inflated ego and epic ignorance will be the death of us.

I could go on but I have been writing this article on and off of two days. So I bid you a good night, a better tomorrow, and please watch your six.