Tommy Carcetti
Tommy Carcetti's JournalThat old Cassandra feeling is back again.
In 2016, after Trump first won, there were a lot of people insisting, "Don't worry. Trump won't be as extreme a President as he was a candidate. He was probably just saying those things to placate his base to get elected. Now that he'll be President, he'll pivot and be more of a moderate figure. He'll use his business skills to negotiate deals with Democrats in Congress and he'll get some meaningful things done."
I personally knew this was not going to happen, and said so at the time.
Trump took office, and he certainly did not pivot. He was just as extreme and divisive a President as he was a candidate. And I knew the "dealmaker" thing was bullshit from the get-go, because I knew Trump was in fact a very shitty and incompetent businessman and the whole "Art of the Deal" thing was a superficial gimmick. He doesn't know how to get along with other people who think differently than him, and he'll just want to tear them down instead.
Flash forward to 2020 after Trump lost the election. I remember hearing a lot of, "Trump will eventually concede his loss, albeit reluctantly, and just slink back to Mar-a-Lago. But then he'll get to relish playing 'Kingmaker' in helping to choose other Republicans for the next round of elections."
Once again, I knew the "kingmaker" thing would never, ever happen. Trump's ego would not allow him to cede the spotlight to others, even if they appeared to have his blessing. And he would never, ever admit to losing because he's incapable of doing that. He'll incite the worst, most violent of his supporters who are willing to act in his name because those are the ones who pay him homage and are truly loyal to him where others are not.
And lo and behold, there was no concession or peaceful transfer of power. And we had January 6th. And Trump was only interested in crowning himself as his own successor and running again.
Now we are in 2024. I've heard a lot of, "Don't take the whole 'retribution' talk seriously. He's not actually going to go after his opponents for real. That's just Trump being Trump. And we survived his last term, so I'm sure we'll be fine again this go around. Maybe he's learned more. Maybe he'll stand up against Putin this time around and defend Ukraine because he'll see Zelensky as strong and determined, and doesn't he like strong leaders?"
None of that is going to happen. He's dead serious about wanting to go after his opponents, and if he gets a troglodyte like Kash Patel into the FBI, he's going to try to make that happen. He hasn't learned a thing about being a good leader. We barely survived his last term only because of a House majority in the second half and guardrails within the White House. There are no guardrails this time, only sworn loyalists. And he's not going to stand up to Putin or other authoritarians. The only "strong" leaders Trump admires are the authoritarian types. He couldn't care less about strong, principled democratic minded leaders such as Zelensky and he'd just as well see them lose.
I hate to sound so pessimistic this morning but I've seen all the same Pollyannaish optimism about Trump dissolve like sugar in tea as reality sets in. Time and time and time again.
He will not get better. He will only try to make things better for himself, and through that, worse for the rest of us.
BREAKING NEWS: Trump's FBI pick pitches new slogan for the agency
BREAKING NEWS: Trump’s FBI pick pitches new slogan for the agency
President-elect Donald Trump’s recent decision announcing he plans to replace current FBI Director Christopher Wray (who Trump himself appointed in 2017) with longtime Trump loyalist Kash Patel has made waves both inside and outside of DC. But the man tapped for the job has himself seized on the opportunity to rebrand the 91-year-old agency in his own personal image.
Patel, who served as the Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense during Trump’s first term, is no stranger to marketing, as he has used his personal name to sell everything from vitamin supplements to leather jackets to even children’s books. And it is this particular mindset that Patel seeks to bring to the next post at which he intends to serve.
“Behind every memorable brand is an even more memorable slogan,” Patel said on a recent interview with Fox News. “Nike. Coca-Cola. You name it. So why shouldn’t the FBI be any different?”
With that, Patel revealed his proposed new tagline for the agency: Federal Bureau of Investigation—Kash Gets Busy.
“Think about it,” Patel explained. “What’s more reassuring to Americans than to let them know that the FBI has countless busy bodies out there working to take down the oppressive Deep State that’s lurking behind the shadows?”
“FBI: Kash Gets Busy will signal a brand-new era in federal law enforcement,” Patel continued. “No longer will it be restricted to simply investigating normal violations of federal law. Under the new Trump administration, FBI: Kash Gets Busy will be able to expand its powers to go after the people who are the true enemies of the state, and whose treachery has revealed itself through such nefarious means as Russiagate and the January 6th Select Congressional Committee.”
Patel’s FBI: Kash Get Busy project will rely heavily on past methods utilized in the agency’s Hoover era: file documentation on various subjects and the compilation of lists.
“If you are an enemy of President Trump, be warned that no place will be safe for you,” Patel said. “FBI: Kash Gets Busy will be on your phones. In your homes. Tracking your car. In your hotel rooms wherever you travel. We will make sure to get to know each and every one of your neighbors who will report to us on all your activities. And if any of those neighbors don’t want to play ball with us, you can be sure there will be place for their own name to be put on an FBI: Kash Gets Busy list.”
Besides Trump critics, other proposed targets of FBI: Kash Gets Busy activities include media organizations, labor unions, environmental protection groups and civil rights activists. FBI: Kash Gets Busy will also ramp up foreign intelligence operations and will even work to embed secret agents pretending to be native citizens of other countries.
Despite these lofty plans, Patel admits that his vision still remains very much something of a work in progress.
“I’m still not 100% set on the name,” Patel said. “For example, I was also thinking of going with FBI: Now Kash Vanquishes Dissent.”
DETAILS AT ELEVEN
It's back.
That feeling is back.
The feeling of dread and uncertainty that existed for four plus years when we woke up every single morning.
That feeling of "What's he going to do now?" or what person he'll try to antagonize or how he'll plot or conspire to his own selfish ends.
What fresh hell will he bring today?
We had a four-year respite from it. Even President Biden's most staunch ideological opponents would have to truthfully and honestly admit he never put them in any such position himself.
But now we're back to this moment again. Every single morning.
· · · -- -- -- · · · Mayday, Mayday, Mayday
Code Red.
Break glass in event of emergency.
Vnimaniye, Vnimaniye.
Hopefully you get picture.
We are in serious, serious trouble at the moment.
And this is not a drill.
I wrote this for my own personal Facebook feed, but I'm going to go ahead and share it here as well.
Take it as however you will.
My formative years were in the 1990s, and looking back at it, it was a very subtly remarkable time for us here. The Cold War had just ended, the economy was absolutely booming and there was this new thing called the Internet that seemed really cool and exciting. No, we weren’t completely enlightened on everything, but still, we seemed to be trending in the right direction.
That’s not to say the 90s were great for everyone worldwide—ask anyone living in the Balkans or in Rwanda, for example—but here at home, there was really nothing to bother us beyond our own personal internal angst, problems, and crises. Just to give you an idea of how things were, our two biggest news items of the time seemed to be 1) a celebrity murder trial and 2) a presidential affair. We actually fixated on those stories for months as *the* leading national news across the board. It’s amazing how much airtime those things got.
Then came the 2000s, and we had 9-11, and the Iraq War, and the Great Recession. Even still, those things seemed temporal, more or less like speed bumps as we continued to move forward. We elected a black President, and that ended up serving as a Rorschach Test of sorts, with two seemingly very distinct answers emerging.
I would say the time when things really began to change was about a dozen years ago. Maybe a little longer.
The first time I really noticed this darker air was after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. 26 schoolchildren and teachers had just been horrifically murdered. I turned on the news, and what did I see? Lines and lines of people outside of gun shops, all wanting to buy AR-15s, the same gun that the shooter used. People were “afraid” they wouldn’t be able buy them much longer. (Of course, those “fears” were never realized.)
I remember when Columbine happened in 1999 and it seemed unfathomable at the time. Now it’s just an annual to biannual occurrence.
What seemed to be happening was that the Internet started to become more than just merely a means of communication or a handy business tool, but rather the primary source for information.
And the biggest problem was that so many people had been conditioned to think that if someone was in print or something was broadcast, it automatically had credibility. They forgot that there still had to be an editorial process at work, fact checking and vetting, peer review, and that those things would not be a given in our new online era. If anything, they would become increasingly rarer and rarer.
So we got to a point where now you could just pull up on your phone whatever the first garbage it was you see on your Twitter or Facebook feed, repeat it to whoever happens to be sitting next to you as if it were the God’s honest truth, and never even get up off the couch. And suddenly, that was now our new era of information.
Disinformation flourished worldwide, and from that mass misinformation inevitably followed. Autocrats were elected. Autocracies flourished. Migrants and refugees were mocked and demonized for being the “other.” I saw my own ancestral homeland ripped apart by invasion and war. I saw ugliness and division paraded around as virtues and strength.
This continued unchecked for years, in our own country and beyond. Then 2020 happened, and people do seem to forget, but 2020 was actually a bad time. A very, very bad time. And here in the US it was just bad enough that just enough people—really a bare, slim majority of us—were able to momentarily stand up and pull the brakes, and recognize that this really was not who we wanted to become.
But then, we forgot. Or—even worse—maybe we just stopped caring.
After 2020, we thought maybe this was the end of the storm. But as it turns out, we were just in the eye of the hurricane, enjoying a momentary respite of wind until the other side of the storm came barreling through.
January 6th. A 34-count felony conviction. Civil judgments for fraud and even sexual assault. Things that in our prior era would be unthinkable and instantly disqualifying for anyone seeking a position of power. But either too many of us forgot, or too little of us kept caring.
We—our country, our nation—are broken and sick. True, really our whole world can also be described as broken and sick, but that’s always been pretty much a given. But this seismic shift change we’ve had over the past decade and a half has especially hurt us here at home.
And the silver lining is that broken things can get fixed. Sick people can get healed. But it’s got to take some effort, and God knows if we have that type of effort in us right now.
And for now, it appears, we just want it darker.
I am currently as middle aged as I can possibly be.
Barring the onset of some sudden acute and terminal illness or an oncoming Mack truck spiraling out of control, I am more or less at the very midpoint of my life, with half my life lived and half my life left to be lived.
And at this point, after the events of yesterday, I can only think of the two sets of people who will be affected most by all of this--my parents and my children.
My parents raised me right. They instilled in me a true, genuine sense of decency and morals and ethics for which I couldn't have asked for a better possible upbringing. And I'll forever be grateful for that...I know that not everyone has had an uncomplicated, unblemished relationship with their parents, but I certainly have.
And I would like to say I've tried to raise my own children right in turn. It's not always easy to gauge, but when I heard that my youngest stood up for a friend of hers after someone called her friend a racial slur, I couldn't help but be immensely proud of the young woman I've raised. Or when my older one gently patted me on the arm this morning and told me it would be all right. To their great credit, neither of them were at all happy with these unsavory developments.
But my parents are old. Thank God, they are still very much active as possible for octogenarians, but they are old. And even though they are active at the moment, the time will eventually come where they will reach their twilight years. Hopefully it will not be within the next four years, but to be honest I don't know if we as a country will continue to be bound by four-year intervals of hope any longer.
And for someone in their twilight years, I can only imagine that as they look back at their long life, they can see that society as a whole progressed for the better as they aged. And that would give them hope for their next generations even after they pass.
But I feel as though Donald Trump has robbed many of that. The damage he and his ilk have done, and the damage that he will now continue to do for the foreseeable future...the idea that someone would leave their earthly life and that being the last impression that they get. It's terrible and it's tragic.
And my children--growing up their formidable teen years, with all this around them. It has the potential to make anyone cynical and pessimistic for the future. That shouldn't be the case for children, ever. There should always be the promise of great things to come. That things are good, and that they can get even better. But Donald Trump and company suppress that feeling. Their worldview is ugly and hopeless and hateful, with only selfish motives to rule the day.
I grew up in the 90s. The Cold War had ended, the economy was good, and while nothing in the world was perfect (ask anyone living in the Balkans or Rwanda, for example), there was still an overall sense of immense optimism of the times. 9-11 and the Iraq War and the Great Recession quelled that a bit, but we figured it was just a speed bump of sorts. Obama was elected, which made us proud, but then something happened. Roughly 10 years ago, maybe a little longer, but we began to lose that optimism that we once took for granted.
Trump's first election hit us in the gut. Then COVID. Then January 6th. The hope was that the Biden years was the end of the storm, but really it was just the eye of the hurricane, a brief lull of momentary calm before the devastating winds picked up once again.
Whether it's your life's legacy when your old, or your dreams and aspirations when you're young, they don't deserve to be robbed by the dark forces of nature. That's just cruel.
And that's why I'm heartbroken today.
Not for myself, but for my parents and for my children.
They deserve so, so, so much better.
There was no better ally to have on your side at DU than The Magistrate.
I remember 2014-15 very well.
Ukraine had just gone through its Euromaidan revolution, where its former Russian-friendly strongman Viktor Yanukovych had ultimately fled to Russia after having had his thugs kill dozens of protestors in the middle of Kyiv. Just days later, Vladimir Putin moved into and annexed Crimea, and within a month or so he had stoked up a bloody proxy war in the far East of the country.
This was before the 2016 elections, before the full scale 2022 invasion, and Russian disinformation on the internet was a far less known thing. And unfortunately, it hit DU fairly hard when it came to events in Ukraine. People here were convinced that Maidan was a western sponsored coup and not a popular inherent revolution of the Ukrainian people's own will, that the Crimean annexation was somehow legitimate, and that Ukrainian troops were massacring people in the east of the country. All were lies, but they were being fed convincingly by effective channels of Kremlin disinformation.
And it was beginning to show everywhere, including here on the pages of DU. There would be multiple posts claiming that Nazis were running the government of Ukraine, or that CIA had overthrown Yanukovych, or about this supposed massacre or that one. And they'd get a lot of replies and a lot of likes.
I would try to push back, but it was really disheartening to see these false talking points getting so much traction here at this website. At times, I felt very alone and isolated, as if I were a lone voice of dissent on the matter and that I was losing the argument.
Except...I wasn't.
Because where I would post, I'd frequently find at least one other DUer willing to echo the side of truth on the issue of what had happened in Ukraine. Not only that, he had his own particular style...gentlemanly. Never profane or angry. Always referring to his fellow posters as "sir" or "ma'am." Always rational. Always able to bring the facts and express them just so in the way they'd leave others without a reasoned retort to be had.
In other words, the Magistrate was the best ally in a rhetorical argument you could ever dream to have. He was consistent, he was on point, and he was always there when you needed to count on him.
I never actually met the man. I never knew his real name. But in the virtual world of DU, he was as good a friend and wingman as you could get.
Farewell, good sir, and safest of travels to the Great Beyond. 
Yes, the distinction between debris and bullet *is* important.
I am well aware that the shooter--and once again as we'll all point out, a fellow Republican--was shooting at Trump and even if one of his bullets did not hit Trump, that wouldn't disqualify it as an assassination attempt.
Some people--even here--have said that whether Trump was actually shot or merely shot at and injured by debris is nothing more than a distinction without a difference.
But Trump's immediate reaction, his supporters' reactions, and their overall proclivity to lie and distort the truth and thereby control the messaging should not be swept aside.
"Took a bullet" sells much better to the voting public than "took some inadvertent debris." It sounds neater, more cool, more sacrificial for a man who is inherently selfish by nature.
They want people to think Trump is literally bullet proof, that bullets could magically bounce off his body as if it were rubber.
And if it was truthfully a bullet, so be it.
But I've heard from a fair amount of people that a bullet of that type from that sort of gun even providing a side glance to the head wouldn't have done nearly that minimal damage that we saw. That what we saw was more consistent with some sort of debris from the shooting hitting Trump in the process, whether it be glass or something else.
So, yes, we as the American public do deserve to know the truth as to whether Trump was actually shot, or merely shot at and received minor injuries in the process.
Because Trump and his campaign can't be trusted with handling the truth themselves. They never have been.
Oh, for fuck's sake, people.
I did not watch yesterday’s debate; I’m currently on vacation, have already made up my mind as to who I’m voting for, and I wanted to spend the evening enjoying vacation things.
I see everyone is worked up because conventional wisdom is that President Biden had a subpar performance, and now everyone’s talking about how he’s too old and what not. Some even want him to step aside so we can exchange him for some newer, more exciting model like Gavin Fucking Newsome.
This is absurd. Ridiculous. Kafkaesque.
On one side you have people wanting the President to step aside because they thought he was disappointing at a debate. And if debate performances were an accurate barometer of electoral success in November, then we’d have President Gore or President Kerry or President Hillary.
So to freak out now—in June—is just plain silly.
On the other hand, you have a guy who not only was convicted of 34 felonies last month, but also was found liable for fraud, defamation and sexual assault. And who currently stands indicted in 3 other courts on charges ranging from election interference to knowingly withholding classified documents. And who was unprecedentedly impeached twice, with members of his own party voting for his removal. And who had an embarrassingly terrible one term track record as President and never held an average approval rating over 50% and never won a popular vote. And who was elbows deep in involvement with foreign adversaries like Vladimir Putin.
Who incited a violent insurrection at the US Capitol and who not only has never once apologized for that, but now lionizes the criminal participants.
And no one is calling for him to step aside. No one.
No, sorry, this is all fucking bullshit and all the Chicken Littles calling for President Biden to step aside need to calm the fuck down, because President Biden does not need to step aside. And if we’re cowardly enough to insist on someone different, they’ll go after that person just as hard. Maybe not over age, but certainly something.
Trumpism is a scourge on this country, this election is a referendum against it and I’d much rather go with the bird in the hand over the two in the bush.
Seriously, people.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back on vacation now.
As Ukraine pleads for help, Washington remains mostly silent
AS UKRAINE PLEADS FOR HELP, WASHINGTON REMAINS MOSTLY SILENT
By Tommy Carcetti
May 14, 2024
LVIV—Speaking from inside the well-fortified government headquarters in the provisional capital city of Lviv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky once again made a desperate plea today for American assistance as the country struggles to hold off a relentless Russian military onslaught that threatens what remains of the war-torn country.
Zelensky’s urgent request brought to mind similar conversations he had with President Donald Trump five years ago during his administration’s first term, which ultimately lead to the President’s impeachment. Critics of the President have openly speculated the entire incident has significantly jaded President Trump’s approach towards Ukraine in the two and a half years since the full-scale Russian military invasion of the country, a claim that the administration vehemently denies.
Nonetheless, the mood in Washington appears to remain rather cool towards offering any form of aid or assistance towards Ukraine, even though many have argued the United States is morally obligated to intervene pursuant to the terms of the April 2023 Hong Kong Agreement, which it helped negotiate.
Speaking on Fox News Sunday this past week, Secretary of Defense Michael Flynn stated, “Our priorities remain inward and in the interests of the American people first and foremost.” Secretary Flynn cited the continued build-up of American troops along the U.S.-Mexico border as the issue of highest importance, insisting the mobilization is necessary to protect against drug trafficking and illegal immigration. Flynn also pointed to the supplementation of deputized National Guard troops stationed in Chicago, Detroit, Portland and other U.S. cities which the administration continues to maintain is necessary in order to protect against civil unrest.
“The fact is while we as Americans certainly feel for the Ukrainian people, the situation over there remains on the bottom of the totem pole so to speak as opposed to our own national defense interests,” Flynn said.
Following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, the dynamics of the conflict were radically altered by President Trump’s sudden and unexpected announcement on March 11, 2022 that he was unilaterally withdrawing the United States from all NATO alliance agreements.
The governments of Hungary and Turkey announced shortly thereafter that those countries would be leaving the NATO alliance as well. While both of those countries have officially maintained that they remain neutral in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Ukrainian government officials have continuously accused Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban of secretly providing assistance to the Russian military.
Meanwhile, NATO remains in a chaotic, fractured state following the loss of its most powerful ally, even as open Russian threats to NATO countries such as Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and the Baltic states have dramatically increased.
Following the U.S. withdrawal from NATO, an emboldened Russian military was able to make rapid progress throughout Eastern and Southern Ukraine, displacing nearly half of the country’s entire population in the process.
In March 2023, President Trump offered his own personal services as a neutral broker to end the conflict. While Russian President Putin immediately responded to the offer, the Ukrainians were far more hesitant to accept any assistance. Only after the fall of Kharkiv—Ukraine’s second largest city—to Russian control did Ukrainian President Zelensky ultimately agree to peace talks.
Accepting the Chinese government’s offer of Hong Kong as the venue for negotiations, the four-day talks in April 2023 were described as extremely tense and contentious. Ultimately, however, it was President Trump who announced a resolution: Ukraine would effectively cede control of its Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Odesa regions to Russia, as well as surrendering any claim to the Crimean Peninsula which Russia had illegally annexed in 2014. The result would leave Ukraine effectively landlocked and without access to the Black Sea.
In exchange, Russian President Putin agreed he would cease any further incursion into Ukrainian territory absent “any substantive provocation” by Ukrainian forces. As a guaranteeing measure, President Trump announced that should either country violate the terms of the agreement, the United States would “appropriately intervene” with “proper means of assistance, including military” to the non-breaching party.
The truce would not last long. Within three weeks of the agreement, Moscow had accused the Ukrainian military of breaching its terms, a claim which the Ukrainian government vehemently denied. By June 2023, Russia had resumed full scale military operations, and on August 10, 2023, the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv effectively fell to Russian control, sending President Zelensky and members of the Ukrainian government fleeing to the far west of the country for their own personal safety.
Since the fall of Kyiv, Ukrainian forces have retreated to beyond the Teteriv and Pivdennyi Buh River basins, leaving Ukraine with roughly a quarter of its original pre-war territory remaining under its control. The cities of Zhyotmyr and Vinnytsia—now representing the front lines of the conflict—stand uninhabitable, having been nearly destroyed beyond all recognition. After gaining the status of Ukraine’s new capital, Lviv has endured constant round after round of missile and drove attacks. Over 20 million Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes since the start of the war, and with the remaining portion of the country unable to support the refugees, a spillover into Ukraine’s neighbors has created a growing humanitarian crisis.
For those Ukrainians left behind in territory now controlled by Russia the story remains far less clear, although reports that have emerged from those areas have painted an extremely grim picture filled with harrowing stories of human rights abuses. A civilian death toll has been equally difficult to nail down, although the consensus is that the figure extends well into the hundreds of thousands.
But despite Ukraine’s increasingly tenuous grip on its own rapidly shrinking territory, as well as the ever-growing threat posed by Russia to Ukraine’s neighbors, the Trump administration has exhibited little to no interest in coming to the side of either Ukraine or any of America’s former NATO allies.
After meeting with Russian President Putin in Moscow last month, Secretary of State Paul Manafort reported that there was “simply an insufficient basis” to conclude that Russia’s claim of Ukrainian provocation after the Hong Kong Agreement was unjustified or unreasonable.
Meanwhile, in a scenario that would have certainly invoked an Article 5 response back when the U.S. was a member of NATO, the Polish government expressed its extreme frustration that the Trump administration had offered no comment or condemnation when the border town of Przemysl was struck last week by a large barrage of Russian missiles, killing five civilians and damaging numerous structures in the center of town; the Kremlin has responded by simply claiming the strike was “inadvertent” but has not otherwise apologized for the incident.
“There appears to be little willpower within the Trump administration to want to address anything relating to matters overseas, let alone Ukraine,” noted John Kerry, former Secretary of State under President Obama. “The stock market has just climbed back over 20,000 points, unemployment is back in single digit territory and there are signs that inflation may soon be slowing down. I just don’t think I see them doing anything to make waves or have the public suddenly worrying about any sort of foreign engagement.”
Nor has the ongoing situation in Ukraine and Eastern Europe barely registered at all on Congress’s radar; much of the most recent session has been spent attempting to rally support amongst the state legislatures to speedily ratify the 28th Amendment that was passed by the Republican Congressional supermajority last year. If ratified by the states, the Amendment would immediately and retroactively repeal the 22nd Amendment limiting a President to two terms in office and pave the way for President Trump to be officially nominated this summer for a third consecutive term in office.
But in Ukraine, constitutional machinations in the United States are the furthest thing from people’s minds as the country prepares to make what might be its last stand as a free and independent nation. While many hope the more hilly and mountainous terrain of Western Ukraine might provide local forces with more of a geographic advantage against Russian forces than the open terrain in the east of the country, the fact remains that without sufficient weaponry in the hands of its military, such an advantage would likely be meaningless.
And barring a sudden and unexpected about face from the Trump administration in its policy position, it appears unlikely that the United States will answer the Ukrainian government’s increasingly desperate calls to intervene in its fight against Russia.
“The bottom line is that Ukraine is dealing with the Trump administration, and President Trump has for whatever reason chosen to give Ukraine the cold shoulder thus far,” Secretary Kerry remarked. “While I’m sure we all might want to speculate how a President Hillary Clinton or a President Joe Biden might have handled the situation with Ukraine and Russia, the fact of the matter is that we’re dealing with a President Donald Trump here, and nothing in the world right now can change that.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
NOTE TO DU: As hopefully you were able to quickly discern from the content of the article--if not the byline itself--this is not an actual news article, but rather my own personal work of alternate historical fiction depicting how the situation in Ukraine might be currently unfolding had Donald Trump somehow been elected to a second term in office.
Over the past few years, I've taken to writing as both a hobby and a therapeutic exercise. I actually completed an entire novel, which eventually one day I might try to shop for publication. I also recently wrote a personal essay piece to which I actively am soliciting various journals.
And as some of you here at DU might know, I'll occasionally curse this website with my "BREAKING NEWS" bit, that increasingly hit-or-miss satirical news articles that inevitably end up with those two goofy looking news anchors declaring "Details at eleven." The purpose of those pieces (other than a diversion of my own time) is just to poke fun and throw out as absurd and non-sensical of a story as I can possibly put forward while maintaining just the slightest bit of plausibility in a truly fucked-up world.
This, however, was not intended to be a fun, satirical piece like those are.
Rather, this was intended to show the real world consequences of what electing a person like Donald Trump to office might have on world events, based on the four year track record of what we already know those devastating consequences to be. And it serves as a warning for this November of the real danger that might face us if we are forced to endure even just a day more of that horror show in office.
And on a more personal level, while writing this did allow me to flex some creative muscles, it was nonetheless something that was also rather difficult emotionally for me to put together. Given that I have relatives currently living in Ukraine--and more specifically in Western Ukraine, which so far has been spared the worst of the war's violence--the uncertain future in Ukraine and that part of the world weighs heavily on me for their sake.
That being said, please feel free to take this however you wish to take it.
And keep all of this in mind come November.
Thanks,
TC
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Member since: Tue Jul 10, 2007, 02:49 PMNumber of posts: 43,607