Donald Trump on a Roll All Week
There is always something new and exciting coming out of Washington. Last week’s big story centered on the presumed prerogative of the United States to kill people anywhere in the world without necessarily having to make the legal or moral case that they deserved death. Inevitably, the impulse to do just that derives from the very top of the government system with President Donald J Trump having on a number of occasions verbalized his national security policy, such as it is, by explicitly stating that whenever his administration encounters “enemies” of the US, the newly renamed Secretary of War would exercise the right to “kill them.” Trump claims that as president he can “do whatever he wants,” suggesting that he has never read the US Constitution.
Admittedly the brain-addled Trump is not the first US president to adopt such a de facto policy of L’État, c’est moi, though he may be the first to openly admit it. George W Bush “legalized” torture through his embrace of the “global war on terror” with him in the role of the “new sheriff in town.” He was succeeded by Barack Obama, who held weekly meetings in the White House to draw up lists of American citizens and others overseas who would be assassinated by drones. He notably killed the two al-Awlakis, a father and son from Arizona residing in Yemen, in that fashion. Joe Biden went one step further, by proxy, providing Israel with the arms and political support to carry out the genocide deaths of a minimum of 100,000 Gazans. When privately challenged by his staff on the policy, he responded “I am a Zionist” and refused to consider pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to moderate his actions.
But when it comes to Trump, one has to give him credit for his ability to turn multiple deaths into an ongoing comic routine complete with making up funny but demeaning names for the women journalists who question him during press conferences. In the past few weeks, Trump’s insults, tantrums, and threats have exploded. To Nancy Cordes, CBS’s White House correspondent he whined: “Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? You’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person.” And he complained that the New York Times’ correspondent Katie Rogers was “third rate … ugly, both inside and out.” But the most extreme put-down went to White House correspondent Catherine Lucey: “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.” But even worse went to Democratic lawmakers who told military members to defy illegal orders: they were described as guilty of “sedition … punishable by DEATH.”
As a man obsessed by himself, Trump has, in his own mind, elevated every slaughter into a narrative that demonstrates his own genius and political savvy. Last week Trump hosted two major events that demonstrated how low the leadership of the United States of America will go to promote nonsense. The first was a gathering at the United States Institute of Peace where what was ostensibly designated the site for the signing of a peace agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo turned out to be all about Trump, both literally and figuratively.
Earlier in the year, when the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by Elon Musk policy was in bloom stripping jobs and work from the government payrolls, the Institute of Peace was more-or-less seized and shut down by White House intervention, which included Trump’s describing the Institute as a “bloated, useless entity.” It was a move that is now being disputed in court as the Institute is largely government funded and was created by a law passed by Congress, but it is not under the control of the Executive Branch.
Currently, however, the Institute has been rebranded and the front of its building on Connecticut Avenue in the District of Columbia now bears large bronze letters above its own name spelling out “Donald J Trump,” a clear allusion to the president’s purported expertise as a peace maker. The State Department announced on Monday that the institute had been renamed “The Donald J Trump Institute of Peace” to honor and “reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history”. Trump claims having brought peace to eight international conflicts, though that assertion has been widely debunked and even ridiculed. Trump’s adding his name to the building facade appears to be a continuation of his effort to portray himself as a great diplomatic deal-maker as he campaigns for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2026, a distinction that he appears to greatly covet.
And the new inscription was not all. Trump was the self-anointed prime speaker at the event held there last week which enabled him to talk about himself. He referred to another meeting on Friday to draw up the final line-up for next year’s US-Canada-Mexico FIFA soccer world cup. The meeting was to be held at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, but Trump made a deliberate slip of the tongue in referring to it as the “Trump Kennedy Center.”
Trump has already loaded the Kennedy Center’s board with his supporters and has been pushing to rename the opera house after his wife and the building itself after himself. This impending takeover has reportedly resulted in many performers canceling out and also a dramatic decline in attendance by the public. At the Friday FIFA gathering itself, Trump was perhaps predictably awarded a special first time ever issued “peace prize” by the soccer association organizers! FIFA President Gianni Infantino presented the award saying “You definitely deserve the first FIFA Peace Prize for your action, for what you have obtained in your way, but you obtained it in an incredible way. And you can always count, Mr. President, on my support, on the support of the entire … soccer community to help you make peace and make the world prosper.” Trump called receiving the award “one of the great honors” of his life. It might be noted that FIFA is concerned lest Trump disrupt the World Cup games that will be played in the US, which he has already somewhat threatened to do, if he is not allowed to benefit from the publicity and name recognition! Some reports suggest that the whole performance was cringeworthy with Trump placing the medal around his own neck!
And, as is always the case with Trump, there has been still more. There was a discussion by Trump last week regarding the Dulles International Airport in nearby Virginia, with the White House pushing for it to be “improved.” He made an actual inspection stop at the facility and afterwards described the current airport as “…not a good airport. It should be a great airport, and it’s not a good airport.” He described the main terminal building as “incorrectly designed” and added: “We’re going to turn that around and we’re going to make Dulles airport – serving Washington and Virginia, Maryland, etc – we’re gonna make that into something really spectacular. We have an amazing plan for it.” The improvement would apparently feature renaming it for guess-whom.
And let’s not forget the “large” triumphal arch or is it a Trump-Full arch that might be coming on the Potomac shore outside the Arlington National Cemetery and the bill in Congress to add Trump’s large head to the Mount Rushmore Memorial in South Dakota. At least Washington DC has not yet been scheduled for renaming to honor Trump, but that will perhaps be coming next. But don’t despair, as Trump had yet another opportunity to shine last week when he issued a proclamation on Tuesday commemorating the December second two-hundred-thirty-second anniversary of the United States’ declaration of the Monroe Doctrine. It included: “Today, my Administration proudly reaffirms this promise under a new ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine: That the American people—not foreign nations nor globalist institutions—will always control their own destiny in our hemisphere… Reinvigorated by my Trump Corollary, the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well—and American leadership is coming roaring back stronger than ever before.”
Like the invention of the “Trump Corollary,” Trump never fails to take advantage of any opportunity to praise himself by name and will use all the power that he has assumed to be incumbent on his office to do so. The sad part is that the self-praise is largely an illusion, as Trump the peacemaker is more accurately a warmaker in terms of what he has done vis-à-vis his supine groveling before Netanyahu and Jewish billionaire money. Gaza under the “Trump Peace Plan” is an atrocity that has now devolved into a hand-off for Israel to kill more Palestinians thanks to Trump. Likewise for the ceasefire in Lebanon, which is a ticket for Netanyahu to murder Lebanese, and likewise for the settlement in Syria. And what about bombing Iran? And Somalia, whose people were described last week by Trump as “garbage”?
And speaking of Somalis and other nations that are considered too disgusting to entertain the entry of their citizens into the land of the free and the home of the brave, Trump has now said he wants to “permanently” end migration from third-world countries while “expediting mass deportations” of citizens of those countries who are already in the United States. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wants to add at least eleven more countries to President Trump’s 19 country travel ban, reporting on X how she met with Trump this week and recommended “a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”
Interestingly, the ban could, if applied strictly as described by Noem, be used to block Israelis’ entry into the US as a plausible case can easily be made by citing their demonstrated behavior vis-à-vis their neighbors and in Israel itself that they are “killers, leeches and entitlement junkies.” That would certainly be good news, particularly if Israel falls apart as one might hope for and many of them would want to be coming over here to the US where they would apply their skills in corrupting our government and buying and suborning the media.
In another move that I have no doubt that both the Trump White House and the Israel Lobby will be watching closely, an Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno has introduced a bill to establish that citizens of the United States “must have sole and exclusive allegiance to the US.” He said “Being an American citizen is an honor and a privilege — and if you want to be an American, it’s all or nothing. It’s time to end dual citizenship for good.”
The “Exclusive Citizenship Act of 2025” means that no one may be a citizen or national of the US while simultaneously having any foreign citizenship. And a US citizen who voluntarily acquires foreign citizenship would have to relinquish their US citizenship after the date of enactment. And those who have dual citizenship would have to submit a written renunciation of the foreign citizenship to the secretary of State or a written renunciation of US citizenship to the secretary of Homeland Security no later than one year after the enactment of the act. An individual who doesn’t comply will be deemed to have voluntarily relinquished United States citizenship for purposes of section 349(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Any individual deemed to have relinquished citizenship is “appropriately recorded in Federal systems and treated as an alien for purposes of the immigration laws.”
The initiative is interesting and the policy is similar to that which is in place in many foreign countries. Here in America, the Israel Lobby and some particular members of Congress and on the White House staff will be working hard to stop it! It was, in fact predictably an Israeli, whose Supreme Court case Afroyim v. Rusk (1967), led to the current determination that a US citizen cannot automatically lose his or her citizenship unless he or she willingly surrenders it. Though specific numbers cannot be confirmed, approximately 200,000 to 600,000 US citizens with Israeli citizenship currently live in Israel. In the US, the estimated number of Israeli-Americans is approximately 191,000.
It is difficult to discern how popular the bill to end dual citizenship might be, but one suspects that many Americans are getting very tired of hearing about the atrocities being committed on the West Bank by all those dual national “Israeli” settlers from Brooklyn! And then there is the all-powerful Israel Lobby, with all those dual national Jewish billionaires and Hollywood types asserting how they are victims of “antisemitism” and need special benefits and laws written to protect them. Trump’s top campaign donor is, for example, Israeli Miriam Adelson, who has contributed more than $100 million to the Republicans while also demanding policies beneficial to Israel, including promotion of the Gaza genocide. Trump has taken her money and complied with her every wish. Time to end all that!
https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/donald-trump-on-a-roll-all-week