Let’s dig into some of the total unmitigated absurdity — the deranged, preposterous, mind-boggling, soul-crushing absurdity — of America’s fascist president Donald J. Trump.
What follows is a short list from the top of my head.
+ Mein Trumpf says he has been murdering Latin American people in the Caribbean to stop drug shipments to the United States but (a) offers zero evidence that the people he has extrajudicially executed are bringing in drugs to the United States and (b) pardons a former Honduran president, a right-wing politician who was convicted by a U.S. jury that reviewed mountains of hard evidence showing that he helped bring 500 tons of cocaine into the United States while joking about “shoving cocaine up the gringo’s noses.” When questioned about this pardon, Trump claim to know very little about the former Honduran president. and says that president was just the unfortunate victim of leftists who didn’t like him because of his politics. How absurd.
+ Trump says that the video should be released of a September 2nd mass murder in which the U.S. military, under his command, slaughtered two shipwrecked people (after they’d already killed nine others) in abject violation of international law. Then Trump changes his mind and defers to his fascist “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, keeping the video from public view. When an ABC reporter asks him to explain the change, Trump claims he never said the video should be released. He tells the reporter she’s “terrible” and says she works for a “fake news” organization. Absurd.
+ Trump calls merely alleged narco-traffickers (who weren’t even heading to the United States when he blew them up) “enemy combatants” and “terrorists” engaged in a “war” on the United States. This is ludicrous. There’s no declared war. The people he has serially mass murdered in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific have been unarmed, and there’s a thing called drug interdiction by the Coast Guard.
+ Trump campaigns for a Nobel Peace Prize even as he: bombs Iran; threatens to seize Greenland; helps Israel carry out genocide; aligns with Russia’s mass killing of Ukrainian civilians; kills 600,000 people with cuts to USAID; slaughters 87 Latin Americans on the high seas; signs off on a neofascist National Security Strategy that calls for the US to brazenly dominate the Western Hemisphere and control its resources by sheer force; escalates on the path to a petro-imperialist regime change war on Venezuela by declaring the air space over that nation closed, flying F-18s over the country, and seizing a Venezuelan oil tanker right off its coast (last Wednesday). Absurd.
+ When asked about the tanker seizure and what the US will do with the oil on the ship, Trump claimed not to know much about it and confessed to international piracy by saying “I guess we’ll keep it.”
+ After six U.S. military and intelligence veterans in the U.S. Congress released a video reminding U.S. military and intelligence personnel of the basic legal and moral fact that they must not follow illegal orders (something his own Secretary of War said years ago), Trump absurdly accused the legislators of “treason,” suggesting that they should be executed. Trump’s toady Hegseth threatens one of the Congresspersons, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), with a military court martial.
+ Trump claims again and again that his 21st century Gestapo, ICE and Border Patrol, are going after “the worst of the worst” — violent criminals, rapists, murderers, gang members — even as it is abundantly clear (from evidence that his own Department of Homeland Security has released ) that his racist gendarmes — his masked thugs, kidnappers, and fugitive slave catchers — are criminally sweeping up Latino people who in the great majority have no violent criminal records. How viciously absurd.
+ Trump absurdly calls anti-ICE protests rebellions against the US government that regular forces can’t handle to try to justify federalizing National Guard units and militarily occupying US cities.