Our "pants on fire" president

Recently, I authored a commentary that examined how, under Trump, we are “governed by fraud, and led by liars.” I hope you read it, and if you did, I hope you got something out of it. It was a lengthy, fact-based opinion piece that I feel hit several nails on the head, one being that it is awfully hard to trust a president or anybody serving in his administration, when all they have to show for their existence is lying and deception.

Indeed, one of the worst admitted Trump Administration perpetrators, FBI Assistant Director Dan Bongino, announced this week that he is leaving his post in January, apparently to return to his podcast and Fox News, where he admittedly lied for a paycheck, something Bongino said he dearly missed.

It’s very strange way to live in this, or any country, when you wake up everyday actually expecting to hear boldface, blatant lying from your nation’s leadership. Take Trump's rushed, unhinged, pre-Christmas "bah-humbug," nothing-new-here, partisan address to the nation Wednesday night. He actually took the time to continue to bash Joe Biden; insist that grocery prices are down, when they're certainly not; and that the country is doing great, when 64% of Americans say it's anything but.

But that's the way it's going to be for the next three years. Trump is only going to see and preach what he needs for us to believe. What’s true and what’s not could very well be the difference between war and peace, life and death.

Maybe even yours.

With Donald Trump, unfortunately, all of the above is a daily fact of life. Whether it’s his over-the-top worship of Russian President Vladimir Putin or strange fealty for documented bad guys like the pardoned convicted January 6th insurrectionists or corrupt former NY Congressman George Santos, Trump embodies all of the characteristics of a leader who has absolutely no consideration for the honest people he’s supposed to serve, but has every consideration for miscreants like himself who always have something up their sleeves, and uses the powers of his high office to further his own corrupt appetite.

 In a series of very candid interviews in Vanity Fair magazine, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said that Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality," that he feels there's nothing he can't do. To me, that means the man is drunk with power, has lost touch with reality, and there's no stopping him.

For the record, Trump doesn’t drink, so Susie's description can’t be good on its face, no matter how you slice it. He is NOT a normal human being.

Another aspect of this “trust him not” problem is when Trump repeatedly fails to reflect the decency and respect we’ve come to expect from our presidents, who, in times of national crisis or tragedy, are supposed to represent our collective feelings and values, and express them with grace, dignity and compassion when the situation warrants it.

That clearly was not the case earlier this week, after the tragic deaths of actor-director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. The pair allegedly were murdered by their adult son, who has a long history of drug and mental health problems.

The positive generational impact of Reiner and his work in American culture is undeniable, and warmly appreciated by many, so such a tragedy is something that is deeply felt, and our supposed “leader” is supposed to speak for all of us in expressing that collective sentiment.

And yet, Trump saw fit to belittle Reiner, a beloved artist famously known as “Meathead" on the classic “All in the Family” sitcom, and successful director of noteworthy films like “Stand by Me,” “When Harry Met Sally” and “A Few Good Men,” alleging that the real cause of his death was the fact that he was a liberal critic of Trump.

"What a good time it would be to have a leader with a moral compass," opined comedian Seth Meyers in reaction to Trump's deranged attack on his murdered friend.

 Make no mistake, while precious few in the Republican Party and MAGA movement have displayed some decency in criticizing Trump’s outrageous lack of compassion and dearth of moral compass, those who haven’t condemned him or said a respectful word about the Reiner tragedy are just as bad as he is. There’s no other way to look at it.

Many of us who vehemently disagreed with the unsavory views of assassinated right-wing activist Charlie Kirk have always made clear that we abhorred his murder, because we were taught to respect a person’s humanity and right to it, no matter how much we opposed his thoughts.

Apparently, Donald Trump was never taught that simple lesson in human decency.  That’s another reason we can never trust him.

And never will.

That’s why literally anything he says or does is closely watched with a jaundiced eye.

For instance, it seems most apparent now that something very big is about to jump off in Venezuela by Christmas, if not sooner. Our military has moved big guns, tens of thousands of troops, and a multitude of fighter jets to the region. We’re hearing from Attorney General Pam Bondi that much of this is a law enforcement action backed up by the military. And we’re also hearing that Venezuela is not the only targeted South and Central American country Trump wants to bring to heel to his whims, meaning that Columbia, Honduras and other sovereign nations are also on the hit list.

On Monday, Trump issued an executive order designating fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction,” thus allowing him to further flex his military muscle in the supposed cause of fighting the importation of illegal drugs. On Tuesday, he ordered a "total and complete" naval blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going to and coming from Venezuela. On Wednesday, The NY Times reported that those oil tankers will have Venezuelan military escorts, so Venezuela is about to become the mouse that roared, which may mean the prospect for war may be just around the corner.

Of course, Trump and company have draped their real intentions in claims that they’re “saving millions of American lives” with their provocative and certainly illegal military actions of bombing boats and seizing oil tankers. Stemming the spread of illegal drugs had been floated as the M.O. for a hot minute, until Trump suddenly pulled one of his pardon rabbits out of his magic hat, wiping the criminal slate clean for corrupt former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted last year in a U.S. federal court of using his office to help drug traffickers import more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Hernandez was rightfully sentenced to 45 years in prison.

Trump’s excuse for pardoning and tolerating such a monster? He was “setup” by the Biden Administration.

Anyone who has studied Trump for 30 seconds or less knows that anything and everything he does is transactional. He expects loyalty from the plants in the Oval Office pots if he sees fit to water them.

So we all know that his pardon of the fellow felonious former president of Honduras has strings attached we can’t see clearly yet, because it makes no damn sense to pardon a major Central American drug dealer who helped traffic tons of coke into Ma and Pa Kettle’s middle America, while claiming from the other side of his mouth to champion the fight against drug smuggling from Venezuela.

Something is clearly up, and, in Trump’s mind at least, that something is big enough, and important enough, to move major American firepower into `the South, Central and Caribbean regions to show folks down there who’s boss.

We know Trump wants to confiscate, if not control, as much oil on Earth as possible. He’s on record as saying the United States should have taken the oil from Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War. So it’s not a stretch to postulate that he wants to at least control Venezuela’s vast oil reserves once he forces Pres. Nicholas Maduro to start packing. 

I hope Maduro has read Los Angelos Times columnist Jackie Calmes’ latest offering like I have on why Trump got rid of his military lawyers. Calmes writes that after “firing top lawyers at the Army, Navy and Air Force” because they might “slow him down,” Trump’s military entanglements “are… creating a knotty mess of lawlessness, hypocrisy and potential war crimes…” when you throw in Venezuelan boat bombings, and threatening to prosecute Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona for telling military personnel that it is their duty to disobey illegal orders. 

According to Trump, such blasphemy from the former Navy officer and astronaut is “seditious behavior” deserving of “death.” For the record, no it isn’t, but of course, the military legal beagles normally around Trump to save him from himself apparently are not there to tell him so.

If I were Maduro, I would interpret all of that to mean that if Trump wants to bomb his country to kingdom come, and take his oil fields by force, there’s little or nothing to stop him.

And if Pres. Maduro kept reading the latest news out of Washington, D.C., he would have also seen that a majority of Americans opposed Trump giving a pardon to his cocaine trafficking buddy, former Pres. Hernandez from Honduras. 

According to a new Economist/YouGov poll taken December 5-8,  66% of Americans disapprove and only 13% approve of that pardon. I’m sure such numbers do anything but warm Madura’s crooked heart about how we feel about bad guys over here.

So, there will be no sympathy for Maduro if Trump decides to make an example out of him.

Bottomline here is whatever Trump is doing with these weird power moves with the U.S. military, you can bet it’s to ultimately fatten his pockets with more power and money. Problem is, when you start showing off your military might for nefarious reasons, enemies tend to figure it out, and start to test your mettle.

That may have been what that unfortunate murder of three Americans in Syria was all about over the weekend. Trump has blamed ISIS for the crime, and has vowed to retaliate, but that just might get us into another war that Trump might not be ready to handle, though I'm sure he thinks he is.

Pres. Donald Trump is not an honest man. We know this, so anything we hear coming from the White House these days, we have to always read between the lines because we all know he’s always up to something that does not benefit the country.

In a recent editorial in The Hill, William S. Decker, opinion contributor wrote, The person who currently commands the awesome weapons of the presidency lacks the temperament, mental stability and moral compass required for the job. The American republic and the international order are hanging by a thread.

Decker later added:

The unadorned truth is that Trump’s broken moral compass, overactive testosterone, sycophantic staff, pathological narcissism, and extraordinary presidential powers make him a clear and present danger to the republic and the world. That mix of accelerants is even more volatile with a capitulating Congress and the Supreme Court’s decision that he is above the law.

This is our “pants on fire” president, folks, and the sooner this nation gets this sick, sick man out of office, the better!