And The Miller, He Has Served Us Worse Than That

Stephen Miller became White House Chief of Staff yesterday, replacing Susie Wiles.

Many people are probably nonplussed by Miller's promotion.  True, he has engineered the deportation of immigrants and is most obviously responsible for the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, along with many others, but a lot of them probably see Miller's elevation as being little more than a change of title and an addition of minor responsibilities, mostly just running the White House staff and delegating authority.  They would be severely mistaken.

Contrary to popular wisdom, the White House chief of staff, not the Vice Presidency, is the second most powerful position in the nation.  The White House chief of staff oversees policy implementation and directs the agenda.  And Miller's agenda is both in line with Trump's agenda and more extreme at the same time.  Trump obviously felt a need to shake up the staff after the Republican losses in last week's midterm elections, and he found Wiles to be ineffective, but only revenge against the voters and the Democratic Party can explain why he chose someone as fascistic and as ruthless as Miller to implement his agenda.

This is especially concerning in light of Trump's advanced age and advanced dementia, because, well, all you have to do is look at Ronald Reagan's two terms.  President Reagan had gotten somewhat discombobulated after the 1981 assassination attempt against him.  Much of Reagan's successes in his first term were the work of White House Chief of Staff James Baker, who had visibly aged in four years.  Art Buchwald famously said that he wanted Baker to admit that he was the real President with an actor playing the part.  Baker was so exhausted that he switched jobs with Treasury Secretary Donald Regan at the start of Reagan's second term, allowing a man whose name was two letters different from the President to run the country to and make people who were corrected for calling President Reagan "President Regan" realize they were right all along.  When Regan was ousted over his handling of the Iran-contra affair and his failure to shield the President from the fallout, former U.S. Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee replaced him, giving up his plans to run for President in 1988 and, as the joke went, become President in 1987.  Reagan's last chief of staff was Kenneth Duberstein, whom I called our first Jewish President.

Miller, apparently, is our second.

My point - and I do have one - is this: White House chiefs of staff have exponential power in running a presidential administration when the President himself is limited in his abilities due to age or overall health - or just plain lazy, a charge Former House Speaker Tip O'Neill justifiably made against President Reagan.  But what do you do when the President is not only a psychopath, and a demented old psychopath at that, is managed by a 41-year-old psychopathic far-right chief of staff at the height of his cognitive abilities?

Even if Trump weren't so old and demented, Miller would still be a problem.  George H.W. Bush was a far more attentive President than either Reagan or Trump, and he was greatly skilled in foreign policy, but for the first half of his single term, he let White House Chief of Staff and former New Hampshire governor John Sununu direct domestic policy, and because Sununu was an arch-conservative, we're still dealing with his legacy today.  We don't have a dedicated commitment to fighting climate change because of how Sununu handled the issue - or didn't handle the issue - as Bush the Elder's right-hand right-wing man. 

Trump has none of Reagan's vision or Bush the Elder's seriousness.  As a result, Miller will likely have more power than any White House chief of staff in recent memory.

Be afraid.  Be very afraid. 

Olympics Letter Update

This is a tale of two swimmers.

Janet Evans (left), America's distance-swimming sweetheart of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Kirsty Coventry, the Zimbabwean swimming champion who was born and raised there when the place was still called Rhodesia, are directly connected to the 2028 Olympiad and its fate.  Evans is the chief athletic officer of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, and Coventry is now the president of the International Olympic Committee.  And this past Labor Day weekend, I got around to writing both of them, as I wanted to, to share my thoughts about the 2028 Olympics.  (I finally found the postal address for the Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee.)  I told Evans that I wanted to see the Olympics moved to a city outside the United States because of Trump and his fascist regime, and I asked Coventry to make that happen.

In my latter to Janet Evans, I told her how much I revered her and asked her to bear that in mind as I said rather bluntly that I did not want to see the Los Angeles Games take place because of the militarization of Los Angeles earlier this year and how Trump wants to use his power to bring California to heel.  I also mentioned how he might rough up athletes and spectators from other countries at the Games.  At one point, I even deigned to address her by her first name, even though I don't know her from Eve (although I have fantasized about knowing her, and knowing her intimately, but I didn't tell her that!).  This was different from the open letters I wrote to her on this blog, which were mostly my own brand of punditry in the form of letters to a friend.  This was brutal, personal honesty.  No sugar coating whatsoever.  

As for my letter to IOC President Coventry, I repeated the same points I had made in my February 2025 letter to her predecessor, Thomas Bach, that Trump is a threat to world peace and security and a danger to multilateralism, and I also mentioned how a Bach spokesman blew me off in his reply.  But then I made the added points of how Trump has made things worse for America and the world since then.  I especially stressed the recent militarization of Los Angeles and how Trump's immigration policy violates human rights.  (Although I didn't mention it, this might spur Coventry's memories of living in Zimbabwe under the repressive regime of Robert Mugabe.)  

And yes, in both letters, I cited Adolf Hitler and the 1936 Berlin Olympics - like the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, awarded to the city before anyone knew who would be ruling the host city's country.  Coventry, of course, grew up in fascist-racist white-minority-rule Rhodesia, and Evans is a lifelong resident of Orange County, California, and I don't need to say any more about that.  Let's just say I expect both of them to Get It.      

I mailed both letters today.  It will be very interesting to see how both women reply.  Especially Evans, who, as anyone who has read this blog before might know, has always placed herself above politics but has inevitably gotten sucked into them. 

Heil Drumpf!

It's not news that John Kelly, Donald Trump's second White House chief of staff, said that Trump admired Adolf Hitler and said that Hitler did good things.  He said all that months ago.

What's news is that reporter Michael Schmidt got it on tape.

More so, Kelly described Trump's Hitler fascination in much greater detail, noting and lamenting is admonition for the loyalty Hitler demanded (but didn't get) from his generals in the Second World War.  Kelly - no one's idea of a liberal (he agreed with Trump that the Civil War could have been avoided by compromise and called Robert E. Lee "an honorable man") - made it clear to Trump that there was nothing Hitler ever did that was good and told Schmidt that he felt that Trump's desire for unlimited, extreme power clearly made him a fascist.

And, even as Kamala Harris has come right out and said that Trump was a fascist, more of her campaign surrogates have been stressing how Trump, as President, would not only arrest leading Democrats for speaking out against him but for arrest average Joes and Josephines for doing so - and even though no one has said that Trump would make dissent a capital offense - except me, of course - and Trump himself has said nothing of the sort, just remember, you should be afraid not just of what Trump says he'll do.  You should be afraid of what Trump doesn't say he'll do.  All you need to do is look at what Hitler himself did without ever mentioning any of it in the parliamentary campaign the Nazis ran in what would be the last free election held in Germany in Hitler's lifetime.

As for the good things Hitler is believed to have done . . . he stole the credit for both of them.  The autobahns were inspired by the first Italian autostradas built by engineer Piero Puricelli in the early 1920s.  Hey, how far back do you want to go?  The Long Island Motor Parkway, the world's first controlled-access road for automobiles anywhere, opened in 1908.  As for the Volkswagen, which Hitler built the autobahns for . . . even some VW enthusiasts mistakenly credit the VW Beetle to Hitler, calling it "the only good idea Hitler ever had."  The "people's car" was actually Ferdinand Porsche's idea, and he conceived of it before the Nazis came to power.  Hitler just gave him the means to develop it, and he used the people's car idea for propaganda purposes; the factory meant to produce Volkswagens (and did, but not until after the war) built military vehicles.

La Duchessa

As I have watched the rise of right-wing populism in the United States, I looked to see if I could make an ancestral claim to Irish citizenship on my paternal side, but my nearest Irish immigrant relatives are my fourth great-grandparents, which leaves me out of contention.  But, at least on my maternal Italian side, I had my maternal grandfather, who came to the U.S. from Italy in 1924 to escape fascism.

Then this shrew Giorgia Meloni and her far-right Brothers of Italy party win power.

The Brothers of Italy are a right-wing extremist party founded in 1946, a year after Mussolini's downfall  and the same year the Italian monarchy was abolished.  As party leader, Meloni opposes abortion, gender studies, and immigration.  Not all immigration, apparently, just immigration of the brown people from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, believing that the EU's acceptance of migrants is part of a plot to replace Italians.  She also supports domestic economic policies that promote more native births to push up the country's low birth rate.  Paradoxically, she's been skeptical of COVID vaccines and has refused to vaccinate her daughter, claiming that the probability of someone under twenty years of age dying from COVID is the same as being struck by lightning.

You may wonder how an Italian woman can be so ruthless and nasty, but I've known all along that Italians have such a mean streak.  I grew up outside Newark, remember.

I thought I'd have to escape the rise of fascism in America in 2022 and move to Italy just like my maternal grandfather escaped the rise of fascism in Italy in 1922 and moved to America.  Now I have to go to a backup plan - travel to Ireland and marry a red-haired local lass like Sean Thornton did in The Quiet Man.  

And if that doesn't work out, there's always claiming political asylum in Canada.

One advantage Meloni does have is that, like her hero Mussolini, she'll make the trains run on time.  It's not that American fascists can't make trains run on time.  It's that they don't even believe in passenger rail in the first place. 

Imperial Walker

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is moving once again to ensure that his state's name ought to be spelled with a K, no longer even to disguise the fascist nature of his policies. Democratic State senator Fred Risser, who has represented his legislative district longer than Walker has been alive, was speaking against a Walker-backed bill that will restrict voter registration and participation by eliminating party-line voting, lengthening the residency requirement before registering to vote from 10 to 28 days, and - the icing on the cake - requiring voters to carry photo ID in the form of a driver's license or a passport, which will deter poor people (who don't normally own cars or travel abroad) from voting. The Republican Senate president cut off Risser before his time expired. When I saw the video of the incident, I thought I heard someone to tell Risser to shut up. The bill was passed 19-5, declared passed before some Senate Democrats could even vote.

Walker - who wrote the bill - is expected to sign it next week.

Wait - there's more! Walker is going after against gay and lesbian couples by trying to undo a law that allows basic rights such as taking leave to care for a sick partner and making end-of-life decisions. It's bad enough that homosexual couples aren't allowed to marry in Wisconsin, and now apparently they're not allowed to live together as if they were married.

Scott Walker is a disgrace and a detestable excuse for a human being.