Trying to Stay Sane with Chaos Monkey on the Loose

Chaos Monkey is software created to deliberately disrupt computer systems with unexpected errors to test resiliency and recoverability. It seems the monkey is running free in our midst, throwing new disruptions at us daily, to test how well the nation holds up. Here’s a mix of what’s been happening, and it doesn’t even touch on the armies invading our cities, a subject all its own.

With the government shutdown in its 32nd day, four days from setting the record as the longest, food assistance from the SNAP program ends today, November 1st. It doesn't have to. There's about $5.5 billion in a SNAP (formerly food stamps) contingency fund meant for emergency to which the shutdown certainly pertains — lack of food being far
The red states will be hurt the most but the shutdown of food assistance.

more an emergency that any on Trump's bogus list that now numbers eight. The fund has enough to cover more than half November's needs, yet the Trump administration has chosen to sequester it. House Speaker Mike Johnson claims it’s because the funds are not "legally available". It's remarkable that this Bible-believing Christian can lie so facilely. By statute the monies cannot be used for anything other than SNAP.

The Trump regime is holding 42 million people in more than 22 million households hostage, leaving families to suffer hunger, as a political ploy to force Democrats to vote a second time for a spending bill they find abhorrent for making health insurance impossibly costly for tens of millions of Americans with Republicans refusing to yield an inch.

Trump has surpassed himself in audacity by his demands that you and I pay him $230 million as recompense for the costs of being prosecuted. He has put in place at the Justice Department, poised for this moment, the only two attorneys authorized to approve such administrative claims (this is not a lawsuit), both of whom had been his personal lawyers. It would be Trump signing final approval, which prompted his saying,

“I’m the one that makes the decision and that decision would have to go across my desk and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”

It won't bother him for an instant.

Trump was indicted for no less than an attempt to overthrow the government to keep himself in power, for stealing classified and secret documents, and for obstructing their return. His lawyers skillfully delayed prosecution by unceasing motions and appeals, and the courts then pitched in with their own stalling tactics, seeing to it that there’d be no trials to impede Trump’s election to the presidency. The Supreme Court even gave him immunity to keep him out of reach.

For these malefactions Mr. Trump thinks he shouldn't have been charged at all. He says, “I was damaged very greatly and any money I would get, I would give to charity.” If you believe that, glad your lobotomy went well.

His first complaint even seeks damages for the purported violation of his rights by the Mueller investigation which probed Russian interference in the 2016 election. Any costs were brought upon himself for his multiple attempts to obstruct the investigation. The second complaint is for invasion of privacy by the F.B.I. searching Mar-a-Lago. Trump's novel notion is that agents with a warrant to do so were the ones who broke the law. They did indeed find boxes of government documents that he had refused to return. His other complaint accuses former Attorney General Merrick Garland, former FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Special Counsel Jack Smith of ”malicious prosecution” and “harassment” intended to sway the electoral outcome. Trump thinks "patriots" assaulted the Capitol and he should never have been charged for…

“obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government, the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election”

…as the indictment reads.

Trump had to “spend tens of millions of dollars defending the case and his reputation”. Wasn’t it wrongdoing that brought that about? And we are to pay for his criminality? Bennett Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University, said to the The New York Times:

“What a travesty. The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”

Ethics? In July, Attorney General Bondi fired the Justice Department's top ethics adviser.

There are no grounds for this payment, yet the money may simply be paid to Trump without our ever knowing, because the Justice Department “does not specifically require a public announcement of settlements made for administrative claims." It will be theft, embezzlement. And it is entirely for personal gain outside the immunity granted him by a foolhardy Supreme Court. He should realize that retribution cuts both ways.

In one of his irrational tantrums, Trump imposed an extra 10% tariff on everything imported from our good neighbor Canada because the Premier of Ontario — one of Canada’s provinces, not even the central government — has run ads with Ronald Reagan declaiming that tariffs are not good policy.

"When someone says let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports, it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works. But only for a short time. But over the long run such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer.”

In reaction, Trump repeatedly tried to say that Reagan “LOVED Tariffs”, that the ad running in Canada is a “FRAUD”.

Reminder, we pay the tariffs via price increases. We pay for his tantrums.

Trump had already wielded tariffs as his personal right by levying a 50% impost on Brazil for that country's temerity to prosecute its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for election fraud. Five Republicans joined Democrats in the Senate to vote for reversal, on the grounds that Trump doesn't have the right to set tariffs in the first place. One of the five, Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul said,

“What do you think of when you think of an emergency — a war, a tornado, a famine – you don't think of trade policy”.

Yet Trump has declared just that to give himself what he perceives is his right to set tariffs, a matter that the Supreme Court finally takes up next week. And he has corruptly deployed that power to exercise a personal grudge that we American citizens get to pay for through higher prices on imported Brazilian products such as our morning coffee.

He still has months to go before completing his first year, yet once again there was a flurry of chatter about Trump running for a third term in 2028. There sat agent provocateur Steve Bannon in an interview by editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes and deputy editor Ed Carr of The Economist saying,

"Well, he's gonna get a third term. So Trump '28, Trump is gonna be president in '28, and people ought get just accommodated with that."

Asked about the 22nd Amendment, which says "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice", Bannon archly replied,

"There's many different alternatives. At the appropriate time, we'll lay out what the plan is, but there's a plan, and President Trump will be the president in '28."

Trump to reporters on Air Force One: "I would love to do it. I have the best numbers ever." Actually, the lowest ever. He’s forgetting another number. He turns 82 in 2028 and would be nearly 87 when leaving office at the end of a third term.

The most commonly voiced "plan" is for Trump to run as vice-president, and for the president to resign after the election, ceding the “Resolute” desk in the Oval to Trump. This is fantasy. Who would willingly campaign for two years to become president only to step aside? J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio may be sycophants, but they are only sycophants in order to be anointed by Trump to be the next president, not to valiantly fall on their swords for il Duce.

“I’d be allowed to do that,” Trump claimed on Air Force One.

"I wouldn’t do that. I think it’s too cute… I think the people wouldn’t like that. It’s too cute. It’s not — it wouldn’t be right."

It's remarkable that he doesn't know that he isn't allowed to do that. The 12th Amendment's closing sentence reads:

But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."

Even Speaker Johnson seems to know better, speaking of the MAGA hat:

"The Trump 2028 cap is one of the most popular that’s ever been produced, and he has a good time with that, trolling the Democrats, whose hair is on fire about the very prospect”

Maybe he's just trolling being president yet again so as not to be viewed as a lame duck.

The legal impossibility intimates that Bannon's plan that "we'll lay out" says there is a cabal that intends something more sinister: outside the laws, a contrived emergency, the declaration of martial law that was contemplated in 2020, a successful overthrow this time. At the conclusion of the interview, Bannon wanted to say one more thing:

"I know this will drive you guys crazy but he's a vehicle of divine providence...He's very imperfect. He's not churchy, not particularly religious, but he's an instrument of divine will, and you can tell this of how he's pulled this off. We need him for at least one more term. Right?"

U.S. armed forces continue to bomb small boats in the Caribbean. Cable news runs video of the horrifying strikes pulverizing ten or more skiffs and murdering some 50 on board without any proof of drug smuggling or any due process to make that discovery. The U.S. under Trump has adopted summary executions in its stead. Senator Mark Warner (D-Va) says he has been contacted by families worried that their Navy sons and daughters could be violating international law.

Trump has sent our largest aircraft carrier, the Gerald R. Ford and its strike group, into the Caribbean as well as
USS Gerald R. Ford sent to Caribbean.

more than 6,000 troops and jet fighter wings, stirring apprehension that he intends to start a war with Venezuela without any consideration by Congress as prescribed in the Constitution.

Senate Democrats were excluded Wednesday from a classified briefing held by the White House on the attacks in the Caribbean and Pacific. So now even national security is partisan, with policy decided only by Republicans.

And now the madman — the one always trailed by the "football", the one with the finger on the button — has decided on his own that the U.S. will be testing nuclear weapons.

Speaker Johnson would like us to believe the House has not been in session for over a month because of the government shutdown. Another lie. Johnson cannot gavel the representatives back to work because he has a Donald Trump problem. The moment the House re-opens, he will have to swear-in newly elected Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva, and she has said she will be the 218th vote that puts over the top a bipartisan discharge petition that compels the House to release all of the Jeffrey Epstein files in its possession. Johnson has subverted democracy by denying an Arizona district of 800,000 people their constitutionally mandated representation in the House for over a month just to protect Donald, who is known to be in those files, cavorting with best friend the sybaritic Epstein to a degree that needs to be known.

Continuing with his penchant for upending the justice system, Trump commuted the 87 month sentence of former New York congressman George Santos after his serving only three months for fraud and aggravated identity theft. And not for the first time, Trump even absolved Santos from $370,000 of court-ordered restitution of money he had stolen from campaign contributors to buy luxury goods for himself with the credit card data they had provided. How did Santos win clemency? For having the "Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN."

Trump underwent an MRI exam. A reporter asked, “Can you say what in particular they were looking for?” Trump answered, “You would have to ask the doctors”. One doesn’t undergo an MRI without a reason and who does so without knowing what it's for? So he’s covering up something we should know about.

“Nobody has ever given you reports like I give you”, the president claims about reports that come only from him and not from doctors first-hand other than the occasional glowing letter lacking clinical specifics. He says he would let us know if something “negatively” is found. “The doctors said some of the best reports for the age, some of the best reports they’ve ever seen.”

So railed Hillary Clinton at Trump’s atrocity, the demolition of the East Wing of the White House. As custodian for eight years of the heritage site cherished as belonging to the American people, she was enraged that "he’s destroying it”. Trump is a vulgarian who upon moving into the White House again thinks it has become his own personal property.

How peculiar is it that we have a president who for years has been obsessed with ballrooms? The Wall Street Journal recounts “Apprentice” star Donald Trump making a phone call to Barack Obama in 2010 to say to him, as related by Obama’s principal adviser David Axelrod,

“You have these state dinners in sh—y little tents. I build ballrooms. I build the most beautiful ballrooms in the world. You can come to Florida and see for yourself.”

A party under tents, the Bidens as hosts.

During his first term he spoke of building one; he raised the subject his first day in office this January 20th.

In July, three members of the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) got a letter telling them that their position was terminated “effective immediately”, as reported by the Journal. They were replaced by Trump loyalists including senior White House officials. That commission is one of a warren of commissions the Journal lists that review plans for federal buildings, but in a confused mix that governs some structures and not others. Trump took advantage of the inexplicable exemption of the White House from the typical zoning and permitting that governs the usual real estate project, and plunged ahead at speed. Besides, the White House contends that the NCPC has authority over construction but no say about demolition. Trump could have plowed under the entire White House, according to that ethic. Principles did not enter in, a word unknown to Mr. Trump.

And so, America suddenly awoke to see a back hoe tearing the East Wing to shreds while the government was in partial shutdown. Michel Wolff, who has written books about Trump, says a source told him that Trump asked, “Can we do the demolition at night?”. At the Treasury Department across from the site, employees were told not to circulate photos of the ruins. Fox News, of course, completely absolved Trump of his vandalism, citing modifications made by previous presidents, even comparing it to Obama’s basketball court. Unmentioned was that Obama had simply put up hoops and painted different lines on the White House tennis court.

The East Wing was filled with artifacts of prior presidents and our history, but nothing was done to preserve this heritage. Trump simply demolished it all, which pundits call a metaphor for what he is doing to the rest of the nation's norms and institutions.