Sorry-not-sorry to be alarmist here, folks, but all of us need to look away from our own stressful lives — or the TV or TikToks — and pay close attention to what’s going on in Washington and the White House.
The short story is, President Donald Trump is a train wreck going off the rails as you read this, and he’s taking us all down with him.
If you’ve perused this space before, you know I’m not shy about pointing out Trump’s many and serious shortcomings, nor am I alone.
Many key members of his former loyal staff have repeatedly sounded the alarm about his narcissism, his temper, his lying, his corruption, his misogyny, his racism, his blundering, his deep appreciation for fascism and a long list of equally worrisome personal and psychological problems.
Even though Trump enjoys the lowest approval polls of any newly elected president in modern times, his ability to get elected not once but twice will remain both a mystery and a stain on the history of the nation.
I’m not talking about things like Trump’s lurid admiration for people like Russian President Vladimir Putin, a sadistic and cruel dictator who poisons his political enemies. Just this week, Putin casually told the world that, shucks, folks, he sure hopes he doesn’t have to lob a few nukes around Ukraine and Europe should everyone start to seriously fight back against Russia’s crimes.
That’s the Bizarro World we have wrought upon ourselves by electing a man who continues to tell the world that he was elected president in 2020 when every credible court, Republican and Democrat in the country said that he was not.
But enough ancient history.
The flashing red lights on the nation’s dashboard aren’t about Trump telling people that windmills cause cancer or that the numerous polls showing how much Americans dislike and distrust him are fake deceits.
No, these four-alarm Trumpster fires rolled out one by one over the weekend.
Going off like a gaseous geyser on NBC’s Meet the Press over the weekend, Trump said he isn’t sure about how much due process Americans and immigrants really should get under the Constitution, which unequivocally guarantees it.
Queue the cold, deep shiver running down the spine of every non-MAGA American in the country, and half of the MAGA Americans, too.
“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump said when pressed by NBC reporter Kristen Welker.
It is no exaggeration to point out that a guarantee of due process, not a suggestion, is what sets us apart from Iran, North Korea, China and Russia.
After shrugging over his understanding of and appreciation for the most fundamental right Americans revere, Trump moved on last week to fixing stuff.
Trump said he was perturbed by Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum’s weekend rebuke of Trump’s insistence that the US send troops to Mexico to fight drug gangs and stuff. She reminded the world that Mexico is not at war, and that such a move would essentially be an invasion. Being told “no” by a Mexican woman didn’t settle well with Trump.
“Well she’s so afraid of the cartels she can’t walk, so you know that’s the reason,” Trump told reporters Sunday. “And I think she’s a lovely woman. The president of Mexico is a lovely woman, but she is so afraid of the cartels that she can’t even think straight.”
It was Trumpspeake for “Crazy Women Drivers.”
Moving on, Trump said he wants the federal government to close the Alcatraz museum in California and turn it back into a working prison. It was closed more than 60 years ago because it was literally falling apart.
On a California island, the prison became notorious as a place where inmates were abused, not unlike many prisons in the South after the Reconstruction. Trump is busy cutting all kinds of critical programs and services under the false flag of “saving money,” but he wants to throw possibly billions at rebuilding something he thinks convicted felons, like himself, might find scary.
If Trump truly wants to scare folks straight, why not sentence them to Mar-a-Lago for 30 days of golf and dinner with himself? Talk about scared straight. If that doesn’t reduce crime, how about having to be a congressional aid for Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert? No doubt people would choose Alcatraz in its current condition over that kind of cruel and unusual punishment.
But wait, there’s more.
After throwing Alcatraz out there, as if it were as real as invading Canada, Trump said that the tariff wagon would now begin dumping on: foreign movies, or at least movies made in foreign places.
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account Sunday. “This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”
It makes no sense to anyone but Trump and his butt-kissers, since it is American movie companies that save big money by filming sometimes in foreign places.
I think we all agree that Trump would not be the type to watch foreign films screened in the U.S. I can’t imagine his sitting through “The Lives of Others” without creating a ketchup stain on the screen.
And Dealin’ Donnie ended his weekend flurry of very stable ingeniousness with his pièce de résistance: Pay immigrants to leave the country, ours, not theirs.
On its surface, paying undocumented immigrants to high-tail it for anywhere but here for $1,000 and a bus or plane ticket sounds like a workable solution to Trump’s “Operation Aurora,” which was to be the beginning of mass deportation of millions and millions of immigrants.
Finding out now that what everyone but his loyal cabinet told him is true, that mass deportation would cost hundreds of billions and pretty much be impossible, even Trump can run a calculator well enough to figure that deporting about 12 million illegal immigrants at $1,000 each is only $12 billion! Compare that to current ICE estimates of $17,000 per immigrant to harass, threaten, talk about, track down, lose, come up empty-handed, harass some more, track some more, lose, find, arrest, jail and then deport, maybe, Trumportation sounds like a winning bargain for everyone — except the immigrants, and, well, the rest of the country.
What Trumportation fans don’t take into account is the estimated $98 billion a year that illegal immigrants pay in income taxes to the federal, state and local governments. Trump will ship that revenue out along with the immigrants who work and pay those taxes. Likewise, Trump would be deporting about $300 billion in annual spending power that immigrants generate after they get their paychecks. So the U.S. economic toll for Trumportation would actually be about $420 billion, according to real experts at places like Carnegie and American Immigration Council. Of course that doesn’t count the economic downturn businesses who employ about 10 million immigrants would face, unable to replace those workers.
But as we’ve all learned in just 100 days, this Trump administration is all about the show, not the substance. From the Gulf of America to banning mandatory paper straw abuse, it’s hard to take any of this seriously, until you seriously look at how dangerous all this is.
Trump is a walking progenitor for our generation’s “never again.”
If you know someone who just can’t face the onslaught of Trump news, help them through it. If you know someone who understands fully what Trump is and likes what he does, push for their recovery.Â
In the meantime, support legitimate media that ask questions and get answers from Trump and others. More dangerous than Trump and his acolytes are those media that either accidentally or purposely tell their readers and listeners that this is all OK.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com
It is such a great feeling to see Dave Perry’s head explode (figuratively speaking of course.)
Whoa down Mr. Perry. I’m worried about your well being, working yourself up to such a high state of anxiety. Keep that heart calm . Please, keep praying for my recovery. Thanks.
Dave and his fellow marxists hate the taste of their own “liberating tolerance.”
The problem isn’t Trump, the front man who managed to be propped up to win an election to another term.
A quick read of his Truth Social posts, a brief review of his comments in interviews, reading some of the transcripts of his speeches, and glancing at the scattershot approaches to his Executive Orders, trade negotiations, and appointments makes it plain — he isn’t in charge of his faculties and certainly isn’t guiding his Administration.
His family and some associates are providing lines to say about cryptocurrency that will make him richer. The Project 2025 personnel are making certain their ideas are included in the blizzard of Executive Orders and the people Trump is choosing for leadership roles for the agencies on a list to shutter. Musk and the DOGE boys are shutting down regulators who have oversight of Tesla, SPACEX, and tech firms generally, and rushing in to grab and integrate data from what had been separate silos kept by the federal government. RFK Jr. and others are “making America Healthy Again” as only he and a few crackpots would prefer.
There are 1352 more days of the cluster of interests surrounding Trump, whether he is aware of those days or not.
Unfortunately you don’t seem to understand. Trump did not get elected because he is a great guy and everyone supports his every move. The Democrats elected him through their choice of candidate and their never ending support of causes that are not supported by the average American. You continue to push illegal immigration
and to ignore that most Americans realize what a threat that is to our country. The danger now is that Trump, through his excesses, will create a backlash that drives us back toward the wacky ideas supported by the Democrats and the Sentinel. God, what we would give for sensible, honest government, not driven by two party childish politics.
Yep, Trump is a tired, old, wiseacre, but he doesn’t pay the typical price that most politicians face because many fully understand his racism and misogyny and embrace it! I get that it may be hard to hear that there exists racism and misogyny today, but if we are to improve as a society, wouldn’t a little equality be a good thing? I said that Trump is an old wiseacre. That’s true because he’s an 80-year-old juvenile who never learned that everyone doesn’t need to hear his every brain fart. But the wiseacre side is exactly what a lot of MAGAts love. There is a genuine streak that runs through MAGAland that just wants to rip things up because they believe that they have been somehow slighted by efforts to lift all boats and produce a culture of equality. My brother is one! Trump seized upon this and now uses it at every turn to reward his cronies. It’s a reality that Trump doesn’t care one bit about hard-working voters unless he needs votes, and then he lies and cajoles his way to victory. He’s actually very busy rewarding Musk with contracts and grants that he cut from NASA, securing votes for his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that will expand the deficit, and making sure that big businesses benefit by cutting tariffs for their specific purposes. Meanwhile, small businesses are closing because they can’t survive Trump’s chaotic policies, retirees are being declared dead by Social Security, and hard-working families will soon be faced with Trump Tariff Inflation! Yep, good times!
Absolute poppycock.