More about Trump’s actions vs his aspirations. You’d think Trump were running to win a Nobel Prize not for peace, but for belligerence.
NY Times, David French, 7 Sept 2025: It Doesn’t Seem Wise to Let Trump Decide What War Is
(This echoes the topic yesterday about RFK Jr. finding a simple-minded explanation for autism.)
President Trump has done it again.
He is attacking a genuine and serious problem recklessly, heedless of the consequences and, in this case, of human life.
On Tuesday I watched Trump proudly display grainy footage of a military strike on what he said was a boat full of narco-terrorists on their way to the United States with a load of drugs.
Typically, when the Coast Guard or another branch of the military or law enforcement spots a boat suspected of carrying drugs, we seek to stop the boat, search it, seize any drugs and arrest and question the crew. If these drug smuggling suspects open fire, American forces can respond, but they cannot simply execute someone on the mere suspicion of drug trafficking.
We do not kill those suspected of being criminals from the air.
But Trump does. Don’t bother him with concepts like these:
The thing that separates war from murder is the law, and the law of war contains two key components. They go by two Latin terms: jus ad bellum and jus in bello.
Jus ad bellum refers to the limited legal right to go to war. In other words, when is it legal to fight?
Jus in bello refers to conduct within the war. If it’s lawful to fight, then how must I fight?
For the use of military force to be lawful, it must satisfy the requirements of both doctrines. …
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According to this, right-wing MAGA media are rooting him on.
Media Matters, 5 Sept 2025: Right-wing media’s campaign for military intervention and regime change in Venezuela
Right-wing media outlets have spent August and September agitating for the Trump administration to take military action against Venezuela, including possibly toppling the government of President Nicolas Maduro.
On August 8, The New York Times reported that President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to begin targeting “foreign drug cartels” including the Venezuelan group Cartel de los Soles, which the administration recently labeled as a “specially designated global terrorist” organization supposedly headed by Maduro. Later that month, Trump directed U.S. warships carrying thousands of Marines and sailors to Venezuelan waters. On September 2, Trump ordered the military to strike a boat in the Caribbean allegedly carrying illicit narcotics, killing the 11 people aboard.
Right-wing pundits reacted by defending the legality of the strike even before the White House had offered its official legal rationale. Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner asked whether critics of the airstrike were “working against America and for the drug cartels with their support.”
Then follows a long list of examples from Fox, Daily Wire, and various right-wing and MAGA commentators.
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Short items.
Slate, Joshua Shanes, 5 Sept 2025: A Senator Just Unapologetically Declared the U.S. a White Homeland, subtitled “America, he says, isn’t an idea—and isn’t for everyone.”
On Nov. 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the greatest speeches in American history, the Gettysburg Address. It opened “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
On Tuesday, Eric Schmitt, the junior senator from Missouri, declared that Lincoln was wrong.
“What is an American?” This was the question Schmitt posed at the fifth annual National Conservatism Conference in Washington. His answer is that the nation is fundamentally not based on the idea of equality or freedom or any other ideal. Nor is it accessible to people of all races and religions. It is fundamentally, he told an assembled crowd, a white homeland.
Blood and soil human nature; principles don’t count. This matches the right’s steadfast support for Israel.
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Once again, Republicans steal the credit for projects being built that they voted against.
NY Times, 7 Sept 2025: Trump Tried to Kill the Infrastructure Law. Now He’s Getting Credit for Its Projects., subtitled “Signs bearing President Trump’s name have gone up at major construction projects financed by the 2021 law, which he strenuously opposed ahead of its passage.”
In southern Connecticut, the federal government is replacing a 118-year-old bridge along America’s busiest rail corridor. The $1.3 billion project was largely funded by the 2021 infrastructure law that was championed by then-President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — and strenuously opposed by Donald J. Trump.
These days, however, motorists cruising by the construction site might be forgiven for thinking that a certain famous New York developer was responsible for it all.
“PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP” a sign by the road declares. “REBUILDING AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE.”
In recent months, a number of similar signs have popped up in front of major infrastructure projects financed by the bipartisan 2021 legislation, a $1.2 trillion package that Mr. Trump, who left office in January of that year, had passionately railed against. He called the bill “a loser for the U.S.A.,” and warned that Republican lawmakers who signed on could be thrown out of office by angry primary voters. “Patriots will never forget!” he wrote.
Once again, there is no sort of “equivalence” between the parties. They are not each as bad as the other. Republicans are duplicitous and hypocritical. And usually wrong.
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First they came for…
Washington Post, 6 Sept 2025: West Point alumni group cancels award ceremony for Tom Hanks, subtitled “The decision follows a series of political controversies involving the Trump administration that have rattled the prestigious military institution.”
Hanks, the announcement noted, was a leading proponent for creation of the World War II Memorial in D.C.; supported efforts to build a national memorial for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a celebrated Army general before entering politics; and served as national chairman for a massive fundraising campaign to establish what is now the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.
“Tom Hanks has done more for the positive portrayal of the American service member, more for the caring of the American veteran, their caregivers and their family, and more for the American space program and all branches of government than many other Americans,” Robert McDonald, a former secretary of veterans affairs and the alumni association’s board chairman, said in the June announcement.
Hanks, in the same announcement, called it “humbling and meaningful” to be recognized by the institution. Other recipients have included presidents, defense secretaries, diplomats, senators and journalists.
But the planned celebration appears to have run headlong into Trump-era politics.
Because Hanks voted for Biden. A portion of the MAGA morons seems convinced he’s a pedophile, based on no evidence whatsoever. See comments at this JMG post. And he’s woke!
As conservatives demonize and dismiss more and more of the population, what will be left? I suspect that most of America will continue just fine, and the MAGA cultists with withdraw into ever-shrinking echo-chamber cults. They will accomplish nothing, and the rest of the world will move on.
(Once again: conservatives, especially the Christian ones, seem defined by their inability to get along with people unlike themselves.)
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Does this look like Nobel Peace Prize material?
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: September 6, 2025
Today the social media account of President Donald J. Trump posted an AI-generated image of Trump as if he were Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now in front of the Chicago skyline with military helicopters and flames and the caption “Chipocalypse Now.” Kilgore loved the war in Vietnam in which he was engaged; his most famous line was “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
Over the image, Trump’s social media post read: “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The words were followed by three helicopter emojis, symbols the right wing uses to represent former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s goons’ disappearing political opponents by pushing them out of helicopters.
Although it has become trite to speculate about what Republicans would say if a Democratic president engaged in the behavior Trump exhibits daily, this open attack of the president on an American city is a new level of unhinged. Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo wrote: “The president of the United States just declared war, actual military war, not a metaphorical one, on a major American city, and one governed by his political opponents.” He added, accurately: “In any other period, this would be impeachment-worthy.”
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History will pass judgement.
