Tag Archives: defense

Patriotism Betrayed

As Trump rolls out his loony-tunes Cabinet choices, we are beginning to see the irony of “America First.” Rather than even a skewed version of patriotism, Trump is threatening a wholesale retreat from America’s founding ideals and from America’s place in the world.

I won’t waste pixels on his desire to put a science-denying medical conspiracy theorist in charge of the nation’s health, although I will note that–should RFK, Jr. actually make it through the confirmation process–most of the people who will sicken and/or die will be the True Believers in the MAGA base, the same folks who refused to wear masks or get vaccinated against COVID.

RFK, Jr. and his brain worm aren’t the most unbelievable nominees. Others pose an immediate threat to America’s global dominance. A recent essay in the Bulwark addressed the consequences if those nominees’ should take office. With respect to Tulsi Gabbard, the author wrote:

In addition to the problems she will cause American intelligence, her appointment will also send shockwaves through allied intelligence groups.

Because absolutely no one is going to share intel with us once she’s at the top of the org chart.

Instead our allies will cobble together alternative working relationships that do not include America. Without a seat at those tables, decisions will start to be made without consideration of America’s interests.

Eventually those informal working relationships will be codified. And America will be on the outside looking in. Hostage to events with a diminished ability to shape them….

It will also mean that the Pacific nations will have to come to their own arrangements with China. Because if the American public was not willing to shoulder the burden of merely shipping arms to Ukraine, then there is zero chance that we will be willing to go kinetic in the defense of Taiwan.

Tulsi Gabbard–one of Putin’s “useful idiots” and a woman so compromised she couldn’t get a security clearance– at the head of America’s intelligence agencies would be very bad for America, but as the essayist notes, it would be worse if our allies still believed there was a chance America would continue as a guarantor of the global order, only to find that they were mistaken when Putin and Xi acted.

If the Gabbard nomination wasn’t a sufficiently clear sign of America’s retreat from its global obligations and alliances, Trump’s choice for Defense Secretary “sealed the deal” as the saying goes.

Trump has always mistaken acting for reality, and his choice of Pete Hegseth–a television host–confirms his inability to distinguish manner from substance. As the Independent recently reported, not only is Hegseth, a Fox News pundit, massively unqualified, he wants to launch a “frontal assault” against top brass, kick women out of combat, and “implement Donald Trump’s sweeping agenda for the world’s third-largest standing fighting force.”

Hegseth’s nomination, which came as a shock to members of Congress who will ultimately be asked to vote to confirm him, reflects a broader trend among Trump’s Cabinet-level nominations and White House appointments — grievance-fueled loyalists whose disdain for a perceived establishment matches Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to governing and disregard for expertise and experience in a government that tens of millions of Americans depend on.

Since the announcement of Hegseth’s nomination, we have learned that he self-identifies as a Christian Nationalist, sports several White Nationalist tattoos, and has been credibly accused of sexual assault. If confirmed, he will enthusiastically implement Trump’s promises to reimpose a ban on transgender service members, end a policy that covered travel costs for service members seeking abortion care, and gut diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Hegseth is also an out and proud bigot, who spent his college years crusading against diversity and “the homosexual lifestyle,” and suggested in a 2024 book that General Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, and an Air Force fighter pilot with 130 combat flying hours and 40 years of service, only got the job because he is Black. (I’m sure that accusation endeared him to the African-Americans who comprise over 20% of America’s armed forces.)

There are very real issues with U.S. foreign policy. Critics–especially on the Left–point to multiple episodes where American interventions have been highly improper, to put it mildly. Others find fault with current Mideast policies. Americans of all political stripes routinely criticize aspects of the bloated Defense budget.

Correcting past blunders and “right-sizing” the budget, however, require competent leadership, and Trumpworld, from the top down, is thoroughly incompetent. (On the other hand, if the goal of America First is to make America the first country to surrender global influence and abandon its allies, they’ll be great…)

Putin and Xi are undoubtedly cheering….

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Peter Wehner Explains The Inexplicable

Like most Americans today, I occupy a bubble. My friends, family, colleagues and neighbors all tend to see political reality largely the way I see it.

So I was taken aback–floored, really–by a conversation I had during a weekend visit to New Buffalo, Michigan. Our daughter and son-in-law had treated us to the visit and a tour of the 1932 World Fair’s “Homes of the Future” sponsored by Indiana Landmarks. We were staying in a lovely Bed and Breakfast, and while I was getting coffee, I chatted with a guest who turned out to be from Carmel, a suburb of Indianapolis.

What began as a cordial exchange devolved when he mentioned that he “loved” President Trump. (I’m sorry to report that I didn’t bite my tongue; I suggested he’d been drinking the Kool-Aid, and he stomped off.)

This encounter bothered me immensely. Here was a person who was obviously comfortable financially, who didn’t look like someone who ignored the news, or was mentally incapacitated. Why would he “love” this pathetic excuse for a human?

My husband’s theory was that Trump justifies the guy’s probable racism, but the exchange was still rankling when I read Peter Wehner’s column in Monday’s New York Times, titled “What’s the Matter with Republicans?”

One might hope that some of the party’s elected officials would forcefully condemn the president on the grounds that there is now demonstrable evidence that he had crossed an ethical line and abused his power in ways even beyond what he had done previously, which was problematic enough.

But things are very different today than they were in the summer of ’74. Mr. Trump was on to something when he famously said, during the 2016 campaign, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, O.K.? It’s, like, incredible.” What most people took to be hyperbole turned out to be closer to reality.

Wehner–who was formerly a staunch  Republican–then asked the same question I had asked: why? What would account for continued fealty to someone who is not only a demonstrably unfit President, but a truly repulsive human being with what Wehner accurately describes as “a mobster’s mentality”?

Why, then, are so many Republicans yet again circling the Trump wagon rather than taking this opportunity to denounce what the president did and declare some independence from him by doing so? Why has Mr. Trump, an ethical wreck of a man both before and after he reached the White House, earned such fealty from Republicans?

Wehner says it isn’t policy, and I agree.

Understanding the close compact between Mr. Trump and the Republican Party starts with acknowledging the false hope many establishment Republicans placed in the shady real estate mogul as he rose to power. They misdiagnosed the individual they were dealing with, assuming that Mr. Trump would “grow in office” and that they, the “adults in the room,” would be able to control and contain him. At the outset of this unholy alliance, they were convinced they would change Mr. Trump more than Mr. Trump would change them. But the transformation turned out to be in them, not him.

Wehner acknowledges that politicians’ self-interest is threatened by the loyalty of the GOP base to Trump. But what accounts for the devotion of that base–of people like the man I had encountered?

As a conservative-leaning clinical psychologist I know explained to me, when new experiences don’t fit into an existing schema — Mr. Trump becoming the leader of the party that insisted on the necessity of good character in the Oval Office when Bill Clinton was president, for example — cognitive accommodation occurs.

When the accommodation involves compromising one’s sense of integrity, the tensions are reduced when others join in the effort. This creates a powerful sense of cohesion, harmony and group think. The greater the compromise, the more fierce the justification for it — and the greater the need to denounce those who call them out for their compromise. “In response,” this person said to me, “an ‘us versus them’ mentality emerges, sometimes quite viciously.”

“What used to be a sense of belonging,” I was told, “devolves into primitive tribalism, absolute adherence to the leader over adherence to a code of ethics.”…

As the psychologist I spoke to put it to me, many Republicans “are nearly unrecognizable versions of themselves pre-Trump. At this stage it’s less about defending Trump; they are defending their own defense of Trump.”

“At this point,” this person went on, “condemnation of Trump is condemnation of themselves. They’ve let too much go by to try and assert moral high ground now. Calling out another is one thing; calling out yourself is quite another.”

And then there’s that shared racism….

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Follow The Money

Want to know what America’s real priorities are? Easy; just follow the money.

Some of what we find when we examine federal spending isn’t a surprise. We’ve all watched as the Trump Administration has eviscerated the EPA, for example, so cuts and rollbacks there may infuriate but not surprise us. After all, Trump has dismissed climate change as a “Chinese hoax,” eliminated subsidies for clean energy, and slapped tariffs on solar panels.

Given this administration’s well-known bias against science, evidence and clean energy–not to mention Trump’s fondness for the dying coal industry–I shouldn’t have been surprised by the general thrust of a recent study of America’s federal subsidies for fossil fuels  by the International Monetary Fund.

But I was.

Because the amount of the subsidy was staggering.

The United States has spent more subsidizing fossil fuelsin recent years than it has on defense spending, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599 billion.

The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices and how much consumers would pay if prices fully reflected supply costs plus the taxes needed to reflect environmental costs” and other damage, including premature deaths from air pollution.

Since most observers consider the U.S. defense budget to be hopelessly bloated, the fact that fossil fuel subsidies exceed that budget is absolutely mind-blowing.

The study concluded that if fossil fuels had been fairly priced in 2015–i.e., priced without those direct and indirect subsidies by the federal government– global carbon emissions would have been reduced by 28 percent, and deaths from fossil fuel-linked air pollution would have been cut in half.

People (like me) concerned about the environment may not have recognized the enormity of the fossil fuel subsidies, but most of us were pretty sure that a lot more federal dollars go to support fossil fuels than are directed to programs incentivizing the development of clean, alternative energy. The IMF study confirmed that suspicion.

And then there’s the extent to which our financial support of fossil fuels exceeds our investment in education. Seeing those numbers was another gut punch. After all, Americans give lots of lip service to education; we’ve had “education Presidents,” and it is the rare politician who doesn’t make education a prominent part of his or her platform.

Nevertheless, according to Forbes Magazine, that same IMF study determined that the U.S. spends ten times more money propping up the fossil fuels that drive climate change than we spend on education.

Globally, fossil fuels receive 85% of all government subsidies. What if we diverted just a portion of the U.S. subsidies and used that money to improve public education?

Virtually every candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination has expressed concern about climate change, and an intention to combat it. Voters can determine just how committed they are to the environment by asking whether the candidate plans to continue the obscene subsidies that waste our tax dollars, pad the bottom lines of immensely profitable oil and gas interests, and prevent us from effectively addressing an existential threat to the planet.

Just think what we could do if we redirected a substantial portion of the defense budget (as, interestingly, the Department of Defense itself has advocated) and entirely terminated the unnecessary, wasteful and arguably immoral subsidies for fossil fuels.

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