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(Y’all won’t like this one but the truth is what it is.)
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Whom the gods would destroy they first give Venezuela.
Remember Venezuela? We pretty much own it now. We grabbed its fake-socialist president back in January and replaced him with a fake-socialist president of our own choosing. The operation went fabuloso, one Special Forces captain suffered a hangnail.
Fun! Until Donald Trump — with the encouragement of Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu —decided that Iran was just Venezuela with more minarets.
The first 48 hours of that war went great too, we and the Israelis killed a bunch of guys in black dresses. We made cool-looking videos and proclaimed victory.
Just one problem, the Iranians forgot to surrender.
Or revolt.
Then they remembered why the Persian Gulf is called that.
Welp. Now we’re seven months into a 48-hour war, or “war,” or whatever it is, and if you can find a gallon of diesel for under $6, please let me and every Republican running for Congress know where.
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(Vin Diesel? Lose Texas is more like it.)
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Meanwhile, the President of the United States appears to be mostly concerned with building a ballroom, building an arch, sticking his name on the Kennedy Center, and unloading billions of dollars in worthless crypto coins on anyone foolish (or cynical) enough to buy them. He has no plan to end the war he started, much less win it.
When I voted for Donald Trump two years ago, I didn’t vote for this. Neither did you. Don’t pretend you did.
And neither did anyone else.
Thus the prediction markets now give the Democrats a 92 percent chance of taking the House and a 62 percent chance of taking the Senate.
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(Telling the truth. Even when you’d rather not hear it.)
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What’s particularly frustrating is that Trump did have a mandate when he took office. He won — not hugely, but decisively — and Republicans controlled Congress too.
He could have tried to pass lasting border restrictions, improved antitrust enforcement to push back on the monopolies and oligopolies slowly taking over many businesses. He could have tried to force Big Pharma to accept limits on vaccine immunity.
He could have stood up for the First Amendment and tried to reduce the immunity that we have accidentally given social media companies through Section 230. He could even have tried to make more controversial changes, like toughening rules on Social Security and military disability programs that are now being widely abused.
Maybe he wouldn’t have been able to do all those things, he didn’t try to do any of them.
Instead, he and Congress passed a big tax cut — at a time when the United States already had a massive budget deficit — early last year. (That tax cut is one big reason that mortgage rates are now over 7 percent; the Iran war is the other.)
Republicans have done basically nothing since, and voters have noticed.
So we will likely spend the next two years with a divided government, with Democrats preening and positioning themselves for 2028. In other words, get ready for constant threats of government shutdowns (as well as corruption investigations that frankly are overdue).
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(Ouch)
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I wish I could blame the media for this.
But the media is no different than it was two years ago, when Trump won.
Trump simply no longer cares enough to try to make any lasting policy changes — which, ironically, is why he is so obsessed with putting a physical stamp on Washington. He has forgotten that even as commander-in-chief, his military powers are not unlimited and he needs Congressional and more importantly public support.
Venezuela went well, so his heedlessness didn’t matter. But all gamblers know that the cards eventually turn. Now he has caught us in a war that has caused real economic hardship for middle- and lower-middle-class Americans, people who face their first heating oil fill in a few weeks or have an old diesel pickup that’s barely hanging on.
No American expects the president — any president — to make all the right choices.
But they expect him to try.
Trump isn’t trying.
