Constitution of the United States of America,14^th Amendment, Section 3:
“No person shall .  .  .  hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath .  .  .  to support the constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same  .  .  .” (emphasis added)

Having sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” President Donald Trump orchestrated and ordered a physical assault on the United States Capitol, Congress, and the Constitution.

Some argue the President does not “hold any office” of the United States, and is, therefore, exempt from censure under the 14^th Amendment, Section 3.  Ignoring its common-sense absurdity, this assertion hinges on the definition of an “office.”   

Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution states:
“The executive Power shall be vested in the President of the United States of America.
He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years  .  .  .” (emphasis added)

Merriam Webster defines “Officer” as “one who holds an office of trust authority or command.” (emphasis added)

Ergo: Under Article II, Section1, the President of the United Staes holds an “office” of the Unted States and is subject to the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment, Section 3.

In “Tired of Winning” Johathan Karl quotes an assertion by an official who worked closely with Donald Trump that the former President, “lacks any shred of human decency, humility or caring.  He is morally bankrupt, breathtakingly dishonest, lethally incompetent, and stunningly ignorant of virtually anything related to governing, history, geography, human events or world affairs.  He is a traitor and a malignancy in our nation and represents a clear and present danger to our democracy and the rule of law.”

What might this imply for Donald’s MAGA minions?

Jimmy Buffet’s demise recalls lyrics around America’s drug of choice.

• Wastin’ away again in Margaritaville  .  .  .
  But there’s booze in the blender and soon it will render
  That frozen concoction that helps me hang on.”
  Jimmy Buffet
  
• “Jose Quervo
  You are a friend of mine.
  I like to drink you with a little salt and lime.”
    Cindy Jordan
  
• “Tiny bubbles
  In the wine
  Make me happy,
  Make me feel fine.”
    Leon Pober
  
• “Oh whiskey, you villain, you’ve been my downfall.
  You’ve kicked me, you’ve cuffed me, but I love ya for all.”
    The Pirates Charles
  
• “Pour me somethin’ tall an’ strong.
  Make it a Hurricane before I go insane.
  It’s only half-past twelve but I don’t care.
  It’s five o’clock somewhere.”
    Jim “Moose” Brown and Don Rolins

We suffer.  Alcohol numbs the pain—for now.  Given its consequences: hangovers; alcoholism; organ damage; spousal, child, and other abuse; automobile and other accidents; and lost productivity, our alcohol dependence seems masochistic.  Compared to the costs related to alcohol, the money America spends on its “War on Drugs” is Petty Cash.

It’s not just America.  British belly-up for stout, gin, and scotch.  Wine is a French and Italian staple.  Beer keeps Germans fat and happy.  To push Russians over the edge, confiscate their vodka.  Saki in porcelain cups have the Japanese smiling.  Tequila keeps Mexicans afloat.   

Alcohol dependence seems a European, hence, American issue.  In Africa, Asia, India, China, the Near and Middle East, it appears not problematic.  The Quran and Islamic dietary law forbid alcohol and other intoxicants.     

Why is a significant chunk of humanity alcohol dependent?  Again, to be human is to suffer.  Eons back, someone discovered that ingesting spoiled fruit juice or elixir from fermented grain alleviates suffering—for the moment.

It “helps me hang on,” is “a friend of mine,” ”Make(s) me happy; Make(s) me feel fine.”  In the end, “I love ya for all!”

It’s Happy Hour somewhere.   

Cheers!

On Moring Joe, September 25, conversative commentator Charles Sikes opined, “Joe Biden can say: ‘Yes, I’m old, but he is crazy.’”  Crazy is three years junior to Old.

Lest we question, a handful the Crazy one’s Malignant Narcissistic notions:

• Toxic chemical injections to cure COVID-19.
• John McCane, and hence all prisoners of war, is not a hero.
• Reputedly, armed forces personnel are “suckers” and “losers.”
• He beat “Obama” in 2016 and 2020!
• Biden could start World War II.
• Wind turbines kill birds.  As always, Donald’s source is not specified.  Automobiles kill 500 times, communication towers 50 times, and buildings’ windows twice the number of birds killed by wind turbines. 
• Wind turbines kill whale! 
• Despite over sixty failed court challenges, overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and near-universal consensus that he lost, Donald insists he won the 2020 Presidential election.
• In consort with Trump’s Secretary of the Army, Mark Esper, Joint Chiefs of Staffe Chair, General Mike General Milley assured his Chinese counterpart America would not attack his country.  Presumably, for acting without his expressed blessing, Donald called this “act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would be death!”
• On the heels of, (1) orchestrating an attack on the Capitol, Congress, and Constitution, (2) pressing Secretaries of State, Governors, and Legislators to overthrow 2020 election results, and (3) absconding with thousands of official government documents, Donald Trump insists, “I did nothing wrong.”
• Undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our county.”

Old or Crazy. Your choice.

Like Cervantes’s mentally unhinged Spaniard, ours jousts with windmills.

Locking up Donald Trump would greatly simplify the Secret Service’s job of protecting the erstwhile President.  Today, as Donald bounces between Mir-a-Lago and Bedminster, shakes hands with starstruck admirers in Arizona or Alabama, harangues before MAGA Minions in Tennessee or Texas, Secret Service agents face daunting logistical challenges.  In Federal lockup, Trump’s protectors’ problem would be boredom.     

In Bernie Madoff’s final residence, the Federal Correctional Institution at Otisville, NY, “Club Med,” Trump would be free to swap lies with other nonviolent, white-collar crooks.  In this rigorously scheduled and circumscribed environment, a couple of agents would shadow their man from mess hall to common area to the “yard.”  Overnight, one could park outside his cell.

Keep Donald Trump safe!  Lock him up!

Claiming limitless discretion in handling official government documents, Donald Trump turns the Presidential Records Act on its head.

For we who missed it or forgot:

44 U.S.C.  §2202. Ownership of Presidential Records:

“The United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records; and such records shall be administered in accordance with the provisions of this chapter.” (Emphasis added)

Am I missing something?  I think not.

Poor sad, mad Donald.

Faced with four indictments, 91 counts, Donald Trump insists, “I did nothing wrong.“  Donald views allegations against him as a Conservative strategy to bar him the Orval Office.  OK?  Let’s see.

How does Donald define “nothing wrong”?  From TV and reading I’m aware of acts by our forty-fifth President which appear to violate statutes:

• Despite the Director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security, Christopher Krebs, labeling America’s 2020 election the most secure ever, and more than 60 failed court challenges, Donald claims Biden and the Democrats “stole” the Presidency. 
• Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes and badgered state officials to overturn election which examination and recounts prove to be accurate. 
• Trump and his acolytes hatched a scheme to submit false state electors and have Vice President Pence refuse to certify valid slates.
• On January 6, 2021, Donald ordered MAGA minions’ assault on the United States, Capitol, Congress, and Constitution and, for three hours, took no act to stop the suffering, carnage, and deaths. 
• On leaving office, in defiance of the Presidential Records Act, Donald spirited boxes of official government documents to his Mir-a-Lago home/resort. 

Given these undisputed facts, how can Donald continue to believe he, “did nothing wrong“? 

Fall of 2017 in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump three dozen mental health professionals and others with hands-on experience laid bare the roots of Donald’s self-image and beliefs. The former occupant of the Oval Office exhibits textbook symptoms of “Malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”  As defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM5), Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is, “a persistent manner of grandiosity, a continuous desire for admiration, along with a lack of empathy. It starts in early adulthood and occurs in a range of situations, as signified by the existence of any 5 of the next 9 standards,

• A grandiose logic of self-importance
• A fixation with fantasies of infinite success, control, brilliance, beauty or idyllic love
• A credence that he or she is extraordinary and exceptional and can only be understood by, or should connect with, other extraordinary or important people or institutions
• A desire for unwarranted admiration
• A sense of entitlement
• Interpersonal oppressive behavior
• No form of empathy
• Resentment of others or a conviction that others are resentful of him or her
• A display of egotistical and conceited behavior or attitudes”

Nine for 9 exposes Donald Trump’s core conviction he can do “nothing wrong”!

Numerous writers expand on this.  Trump niece and Clinical Psychologist Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough How My Family Crated the World’s Most Dangerous Man exposes the genesis of Donald’s beliefs and behavior.  Michel Wolff’s Landslide; Michael C. Bender’s Frankly, We Did Win The Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost;andCarol Leonning and Philip Rucher’s I Alone Can Fix It examine Trump’s lunacy.  A common takeaway: America’s forty-fifth president exhibits an obsessive, egomaniacal sense of self-importance and insatiable need to be extolled, if not venerated.

When villagers reneged on paying the Pied Piper of Hamelin for piping rats into the Weser River, the Piper piped their children into—accounts vary—the River or a cave, never again to be seen.  Will the most recent resident of the Oval Office pipe the Grand Old Party to its demise? 

In an August 4, 2023, Wall Street Journal Opinion, former Deputy Attorney General Jeffery Rosen points out that the threat Donald Trump poses for America’s democracy was recognized by its Founding Fathers.  Rosen writes,
“The allegations in the indictment of Donald Trump for conspiring to overturn the election of 2020 represent the American Founders’ nightmare.  A key concern of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton was that demagogues would incite mobs and factions to defy the rule of law, overturn free and fair elections and undermine American democracy.  ‘The only path to the subversion of the republican system of the country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1790.  ‘When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in temper  .  .  .  is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity,’ Hamilton wrote, ‘he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’ .  .  .  ‘The idea of introducing a monarchy or aristocracy into this country,’ Hamilton wrote, ‘is one of those visionary things, that none but madmen could meditate,’ as long as the American people resisted ‘convulsions and disorders in consequence of the acts of popular demagogues.’”  (My emphasis.)

Today, Madison’s and Hamilton’s seeming clairvoyance is stunning!  They wrote, however, not from prescience but from wisdom regarding human history and folly.

Jeffrey Rosen goes on chronicling the tug-of-war between Americans who would “promote the general welfare” (Preamble to the Constitution) through civil discourse and democratic precepts, and those who would impose their values and beliefs on everyone—Taliban rule in Afghanistan today leaps to mind.  

While Rosen’s scholarship far outdistances mine, a couple of takeaways give me hope.  First, the anonymous proposition that, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”  Second, as I have written, “Despite uncounted shortcomings and blunders, for two-and-a-half centuries the United States of America’s government has served its citizens as well as anyone anywhere has any right to expect.”

For an historical perspective on America’s current governmental turmoil, Jeffrey Rosen’s exposition is a “must read!”

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