After a long stretch of having no problems with our Starlink satellite internet, the only high speed broadband option available to us out here in rural south Salem, Oregon, our router has developed a serious connection problem.
Meaning, no wi-fi, despite my best efforts over the past four hours to figure out what the problem is. Of course, this being an Elon Musk company, it isn't possible to get any support via phone, so I'm waiting for a reply to the support request I sent via the Starlink iPhone app.
That request went out via a dreadfully slow cellular connection (our cell service is as bad as our broadband service, which is limited to 7 Mbps DSL, aside from Starlink, when it's working).
Since I'm addicted to writing a daily post for one of my three blogs, I figured that I'd keep my daily post habit fed in a simple fashion by sharing the end of a great piece by David Remnick in the May 5 issue of The New Yorker. It's titled "100 Days of Ineptitude." Naturally he's referring to Trump.
The record of failure after a hundred days is, at once, astonishing and predictable. With no evident purpose, Trump has alienated Europe, Japan, Mexico, and Canada, further undermined NATO, and made even more plain his affection for Vladimir Putin.
He has sanctioned his benefactor Elon Musk to hoist a chainsaw and commit mayhem against government agencies that save countless human lives. With evident pleasure, Trump has deported more than two hundred people (nearly all of whom have no criminal record) to a Salvadoran gulag. With his tariff proposals, he managed to destabilize the global economy in a flash, perhaps the worst own goal in history.
As part of his revenge campaign, he has waged a war of intimidation against dozens of scholarly, commercial, and legal institutions. Some, like Columbia University, Amazon, and Paul, Weiss, have caved, choosing the path of obedience over principle. Shari Redstone, of Paramount, would rather trash the independence of "60 Minutes," the most respected investigative outlet on television, than resist the absurd attacks of Trump and his lawyers.
The enduring emblem of this Administration and its duplicity is undoubtedly STRUMP, a meme-coin scheme that has brought many millions of dollars in profits to the President and his fellow-investors. Few seem to mind. Trump has normalized presidential corruption.
If one were forced to choose two representative events in the life of the Administration so far they would surely be the White House meetings with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and, six weeks later, with the Salvadoran President, Nayib Bukele.
In the first, Trump treated a moral hero as an ungrateful scoundrel. In the second, he treated a sadistic dictator as a soulmate. It is hard to recall a scene in the Oval Office more revolting than that of Trump's smiling request to Bukele to build five more prisons, because "the homegrowns are next."
In recent weeks, there have been encouraging signs of opposition to Trump, on the streets and in the courts. Cory Booker, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders are among the clearest voices of dissent on Capitol Hill. But accommodation and cowardice remain the norm.
"We are all afraid," the Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, said to a gathering in Anchorage. No doubt. The threat of retaliation is no joke, but the Senator's plaintive cry does not exactly meet the demands of the moment. This is not primarily a matter of competence or a clash over policy.
The Trump Administration is carrying out a coordinated assault on first principles. "The limits of tyrants," Frederick Douglass said, "are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." The President will persist in his assault until he feels the resistance of a people who will tolerate it no longer.
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