REPUBLICANS NOD APPROVINGLY WHILE AMERICA BLEEDS OUT

By Bill Piekney

George Orwell’s famous 2+2=5 formula for deception is here and very much alive. And there is a good deal of daily, visible effort by Trump’s posse of raiders to keep it going as long as they can, not to mention the stunning silence among Senate and House Republicans to burnish it.

Let’s take issue with what has become a common but flawed practice of calling Trump’s action plan “policies.”

There are no policies, only a fractured, mindless, subjection of the country to blunt force trauma with little or no notion of where the end zone is or what things will look like, when and if we get there.

Everything Trump is doing will prove to some degree unrecoverably destructive to the United States. His indiscriminate use of Elon Musk’s brute force techno-teams is about to leave millions of Americans without or with less healthcare, the promise of medical research for our children and grandchildren, and with broken delivery systems that are already under enormous stress.

Attacking Social Security will mean ruin if not death for untold numbers of older Americans. It is nothing less than broad daylight theft of someone else’s belongings. And nothing is being done to stop it.

The mass firing of thousands of civil servants who have been working to keep air travel safe, weather forecasting on target, postal services timely, national parks open, highway safety a reality, clean air and water, personal data secure, the generally fair treatment of a highly diverse society in place, and the national good in furtherance of the human condition are all being rolled out and fired up every day without respite. While we watch, jaws agape.

These are not policies. They are a composite slash and burn of systems that, while admittedly in need of some recalibration, were strong and healthy. Going after them is a needless, peripatetic migration of thugs going from one agency to another, with no effort to sweep up the debris in their wake.

Similarly, Trump’s approach to our international relations and trade agreements has been witless, with no sense of what our place in the world should end up looking like. It is certainly not a thought-through foreign policy. The resulting chaos demonstrates it is not a responsible trade policy. Our trade relationships, with few exceptions, such as China, were healthy. A sound trade policy was unnecessarily scrapped. Think for a moment how difficult and time consuming it will be to reconstruct them.

These are not policies. They are collective damage from a hormonal adolescent mind.

There is one exception, our relationship with Russia.

If there has been treason, as Trump has ludicrously charged Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor with, it is Trump’s alone. In the case of Russia, it looks fearfully real to me that Trump does indeed have a specific goal in mind. Not sure exactly what, but the outlines of it bring sleepless nights. Now, if that doesn’t knot your stomach, you aren’t paying attention.

So don’t do Trump the favor of being clever enough to formulate and pursue policies, inimical though they may be to US interests. A “policy” is a comprehensive product of multiple elements knitted together to advance a certain principle or worthy objective. There is none of that here.

And the Republicans watch and nod.wi

Bill Piekney served 4 years in the US Navy, 30 years with the CIA retiring as a Senior Operations Executive, and 5 years as a Senior Consultant at ODNI, International Consultant in Intelligence and National Security. He is a member of The Steady State, an organization of former National security officials.