8/28/25

AN EPOCH OF MISERY
Engineered by the nation’s criminal-at-the-top

THE NATIONAL GUARD at Washington D.C.'s Union Station. CREDIT: Department of Defense

IN ALASKA, seasoned dictator with apprentice dictator. CREDIT: White House video

 I’M NOT GIVING UP, and I hope the rest of us aren’t, either.
     But these are miserable times. They are hard, painful, exhausting and relentless.
     We are ensnared in Donald Trump’s Epoch of Misery.
     Every day, no matter the time and day of the week,there’s a new barrage of cruel, destructive and shattering assaults on the American character, our experiment in democracy, our aspiration to be just, creative, decent and loving.
     It’s because there’s a criminal in charge of an entire country – our country, our America, our United States of America –  and that crook at the top is out to get us – all of us.
     We are in a moment when a merciless, murderous, malevolent mind is stalking our collective and individual lives. 
     It never sleeps, never takes a day off, never goes on vacation, never misses a beat in its ceaseless crusade to ravage the sacred mystery of what makes us decent, good and human.
     August, the last full chapter of summer, has been particularly savage.
     There was the red carpet meeting in Alaska between the seasoned dictator and the apprentice dictator that pretended to be focused on ending the Ukraine war, but was really just a chance for two mean guys to be mean together.
     There's the still evolving invasion of Washington by the National Guard, plus agents of “law” enforcement, dispatched on the pretext of cleaning up  crime in Washington, D.C. – orchestrated by the criminal-at-the-top.
     Imagine, soldiers, military vehicles, patrolling the streets and parks of our capital city. The National Guard is supposed to protect citizens from enemies aboard, and rescue them from disasters at home. The Guard is populated by our neighbors, our brothers and sisters, our friends and work colleagues.
      Now, these folks are dispatched on a new mission: to terrify us, to arrest us, maybe shoot us, but for the time being, to get us used to the idea that if we get out of line – protest, express our freedom of speech rights, display a sign with the wrong picture or slogan –  that Guard will follow orders and do whatever it takes to shut us up.
     Next deployment, Chicago. But maybe Baltimore is closer. Then onto New York. Any place that votes Democratic, and better still, has a Black mayor and lots of Black citizens, because the criminal-at-the-top, in addition to being a bully, an extortionist, a cheat and a liar, is, at heart, a racist.

BY NOW WE KNOW THE WORST PART OF ANY DAY is waking up to nightmare headlines about the fresh Miseries engineered the previous day by the criminal-at-the-top.
      But a couple of mornings ago, Misery got off to a particularly early, “breaking news” start, with live video of the FBI searching the home of one of the people the criminal-at-the-top hates the most (which is saying something), John Bolton.

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JOHN BOLTON CREDIT: Gage Skidmore

     Bolton is the man with the funny mustache who is disliked throughout the spectrum of good and evil, who was once Trump’s national security advisor, but later turned out to be an eloquent and compulsive Trump critic.
     The 7 a.m. searches of Bolton’s home and his office were both a smack down of a Trump enemy, but more importantly, a demonstration that no man or woman is beyond the reach of the criminal-at-the-top.
     Indeed, a onetime Trump White House lawyer, Ty Cobb, joked that when he learned of the Bolton search, “I went down and locked my door.”
      To prove the point, Trump over the weekend suggested that maybe his Department of Injustice should take a look at another friend-turned-enemy, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
      Christie’s perceived crime was the moldy Bridgegate Scandal, which is too old and complicated to go into here. But Christie’s actual offense was mouthing off on the TV Sunday talk shows, suggesting that the Bolton searches could be a result of Trump’s politicized Department of Justice. Later, Trump got in the last word, noting that Christie is a “slob” and “everybody knows it.”

AN EXAMPLE OF PROLONGED TRUMPIAN MISERY was yesterday’s  chapter in the saga of Kilmar Armando Ábrego Garcia.
     He’s the immigrant illegally sent to a notorious El Salvadoran prison, eventually returned to the U.S., subsequently imprisoned, freed for several days, then scooped up again yesterday when he checked in – as he was required to – with federal officials. The new plan, deport him to Uganda, a move put on hold – last we heard – by a federal judge. The lesson being, if not “resistance is futile,” at least “you better have a lawyer or a whole bunch of lawyers on speed dial.”
      Closer to home for me in tiny Rhode Island, the Misery Epoch last Friday halted construction of a big ocean wind farm off the coast. Forty-five of Revolution Wind’s 65 turbines already have been completed.
      The project is supposed to produce enough power to light up 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut, and is a big part of the littlest state’s effort to limit climate change and create jobs.
     But the criminal-at-the-top doesn’t like “windmills,” preferring energy from climate-wrecking fossil fuels. State and federal officials were fighting to reverse the stop-work order.
     Moving from the tiniest state to one of the biggest, Texas, Republicans, like all Republicans everywhere, did as they were told by the criminal-at-the-top. The don’t mess with Texans moved to prevent a Democratic takeover of the House in the mid-term elections by creating five new Republican-heavy House districts.
      This morning’s wake-up news was that Trump says he’s moving to fire Lisa Cook from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, part of his drive to take over the supposedly independent central bank. Note that she is Black and a woman, two categories detested by the criminal-at-the-top.

ENOUGH, YOU ARE SAYING. Just stop. Too much. Shut up. Zip it, please.
     Indeed, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know – which is  that August isn’t over and neither is the Epoch of Misery. There’s always September and then the next three years.
     The point is, and I expect that you know this, too, is that the criminal-at-the-top is only getting started and that the Misery Epoch will get worse, much, much worse.
     In D.C., for example, I think Trump is trying ratchet up the Misery, trying to create “an incident” in which he can really crack down, maybe declare martial law and maybe not just in Washington.
     My guess is that’s why the National Guard is now carrying guns; why Trump issued an executive order make burning the American flag a crime even though the Supreme Court once said it isn’t; why Trump is suggesting removal of no-cash bail - anything to make the DC crackdown more tense, more unstable, more explosive.  

ENGINEER of the Epoch of Misery, the criminal-at-the-top. CREDIT: Gage Skidmore

     Trump eventually, maybe sooner than eventually, will try to militarize more Democratic cities.
     Trump will try to use that militarization to quell protests.
     Trump will try to use facilities created for deportable immigrants to lock up national security risk protesters.
     Trump will try use the Internet, AI and so forth to track what we write, what we read, what we say, and criminalize all three.
     Which is why it is so important to keep speaking out, to go to rallies and protests, to support the John Boltons, the Kilmar Garcias and  the Chris Christies, not because we like them, but because, like them, we are all at the same risk of a government under control of a criminal-at-the-top.
      The only way to bring an end to the Epoch of Misery is for people of good will to bring it to an end. I don’t know how, don’t know exactly what to do. I can’t tell you what will work and what won’t.
     It’s not an easy fight. But it’s ours.