Donald Trump’s nominees for cabinet positions come in four categories: moderately qualified, unqualified, highly unqualified, and dangerously unqualified.

Yesterday, Matt Gaetz, a member of Category 4, ended eight days of turmoil by “withdrawing” from consideration as Donald Trump’s Attorney General nominee.

If I were a betting person, I would put all I own on his not walking the plank voluntarily.

The Senate was never going to confirm him, the allegations of sexual criminal behavior were going to be published — that will probably happen, anyway — and we’re left to wonder the level of Donald Trump’s hubris that would bring him to nominate someone so fatally flawed in the first place as the nation’s chief prosecutor.

Wherever he is, Kevin McCarthy is sporting a great big smile. It was Gaetz who engineered McCarthy’s ouster as Speaker of the House.

Yesterday evening, just hours after Gaetz was out, Master-of-the-quick-draw Donald Trump nominated Pam Bondi as his latest pick for AG. Bondi was Florida’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2019. A true Trump loyalist, she has none of the Gaetz baggage and actually knows what the job of attorney general entails. Moreover, she has the most important qualification for the job — she is a 2020 election denier and was right from the start of the “stop the steal” movement. Bondi bonded with Trump so much that she became his defense counsel during his second Senate impeachment trial.

Trump’s AG in his first term, Bill Barr, testified before the Congressional Committee investigating the insurrection of the 6th of January. He testified that he told Trump over and over again that he’d lost, and, like a game of whack-a-mole, Trump kept coming up with new conspiracy theories, each of which Barr debunked for the clueless leader. To his credit, that was Barr’s job as U.S. Attorney General. With Bondi, Trump will no longer have that guardrail when the inevitable moment of ethical concern arises.

She’ll probably glide into confirmation, which might have been Trump’s intent all along.

My other nominees for Dangerously Unqualified are Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota, as Secretary of Homeland Security.

If Trump somehow succeeds in avoiding confirmation hearings and slides his nominees in through recess appointments, it would be nice to know something about them, wouldn’t it? Something more than media varnish?

So, today, let’s examine South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.

Noem, 52, served two terms in the South Dakota Legislature, rising to the post of assistant majority leader. In 2010, she narrowly defeated four-term incumbent Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin to win the one and only South Dakota seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2018, she ran for Governor, won, and suddenly found herself in charge of 13,000 state employees. Since then, she has been an ardent member of Donald Trump’s MAGA cult.

At the NRA’s annual meeting last year in Indianapolis, Noem, to the delight of the gun-totin’ crowd, shared this nugget about her one-year-old grandchild, Addie: “She already has a shotgun and she already has a rifle and she’s got a little pony named Sparkles, too.”

Knowing what Noem did to her 14-month-old wirehaired Pointer, Cricket, for “misbehaving,” I hope Addie doesn’t one day decide to put some high speed lead between the eyes of Sparkles if he “misbehaves.”

Cricket, a pheasant hunter, was apparently difficult to train. He was good at catching pheasants, but even better at catching a neighbor’s chickens. Noem says he killed a few one afternoon after pheasant hunting. So, she walked him over to a gravel pit and shot him in the head.

She also owned what she called a “nasty and mean” male goat. So, right after sending Cricket to the big kennel in the sky, she grabbed the goat, dragged it to the same gravel pit, stood it beside Cricket’s carcass, and shot it too. But because the goat jumped at the moment of execution and did not immediately die, she went back to her truck, reloaded, and finished the job properly.

Noem proudly confesses all of this in the memoir she published when she was auditioning to be Trump’s pick for vice president. She titled the memoir No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward. Why do politicians always write long titles? It’s like they’re pretending to be academics.

In her long-title memoir, Noem explained she included the double-killing gravel pit episode to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.

The Cricket and goat affair is illuminating when one considers what Donald Trump now wants her to do — become Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS).

With more than 260,000 employees, the Department of Homeland Security was created after 9/11 by combining 22 federal agencies into one cabinet level office. DHS responsibilities are weighty and numerous:

• Border security: Protecting the U.S. borders from illegal people, weapons, drugs, and contraband;
• Immigration: Administering the immigration system of the United States;
• Cybersecurity: Protecting cyberspace, which is essential for national security, economic vitality, and daily life;
• Emergency response: Responding to natural and manmade disasters;
• Antiterrorism: Working to prevent terrorism;
• Election security: Ensuring a secure electoral process;
• Economic security: Working with the private sector and international partners to secure global trade and travel systems;
• Human trafficking: Combating human trafficking, which is a form of modern-day slavery that involves the exploitation of children and adults; and,
• Transportation security: Ensuring the security of transportation. 

With the exception of being Governor of an expansive, sparsely populated, midwestern U.S. state which is home to less than a million people, 13,000 of whom are state employees, Kristi Noem has no security experience. Her principal qualification seems to be Trump’s endorsement of her as, “very strong on Border Security.”

In 2018 (the year Noem became Governor), according to the American Immigration Council, South Dakota was home to 35,175 immigrants (foreign-born individuals) comprising 4 percent of the population. More than a third of them were naturalized citizens. Another 5,256 immigrants were eligible to become naturalized citizens the following year. South Dakota’s immigrant population has roughly a similar level of educational attainment as native born citizens.

All of which shows there is no migrant crisis in South Dakota. Consequently, Noem has no experience defending “border security.”

In her memoir, the stories of Cricket and the goat are true, and she’ll be asked about it in her senate confirmation hearing, presuming there is one. What was not true was her claim to have canceled a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and actually meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. These “minor errors,” according to her publisher, will also come up if Senators get the chance to grill her.

In their political memoirs, politicians don’t seem able to resist the urge to gild the lily.

Regardless of her poetic license, if she is confirmed, this is a person who will have the massive task of overseeing the security of America. It is a profoundly demanding job for which she is utterly unprepared.

In the presidential election of 1992, James Carville coined the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid!” He had it printed, blown up large, and hung in a prominent place in Bill Clinton’s  campaign headquarters to remind everyone of what the election was all about: money, and why the common folk didn’t have enough of it.

In the recently concluded election, exit polling conclusively showed the nation’s “poor” economy was top of mind for voters, who believed it to be a product of the Biden-Harris Administration. Donald Trump had banged that message over and over like a Japanese Taiko Drummer. A plurality of voters bought what he was selling, and he is now set to reoccupy the White House on 20 January.

The only thing wrong with this scenario is that the economy is not poor. Rather, it’s the envy of the world. Inflation has fallen hugely, productivity is rising steadily, unemployment is low, and real wages are rising, all of which shows the American economy to be riding along quite nicely and getting better all the time, thank you very much.

Kamala Harris was never able to convince enough Americans of any of this.

How to reconcile the “poor” economy that propelled Donald Trump to victory with the real economy a plurality of Americans refused to credit and seemed to ignore?

A simple answer is that while headline macro economic data is exemplary, the micro economy —yours and mine — still lags, which is evident anytime one visits the local grocery. Instead of, “It’s the economy, stupid,” it is now, “It’s my economy, stupid!”

The inflation rate may be near the Fed’s gold standard of 2%, but for most Americans, especially those with income in the lower 25th percent quartile, it doesn’t feel that way. Donald Trump’s dystopian messaging resonated with a plurality of our fellow citizens who, looking no further than their personal pocketbooks, inclined to believe the worst.

As noted economist Michael Klein, founder of Econofact.org¹, an academic economic think tank, wrote in early 2024:

Inflation is the rate of change in prices over a given period of time. In its mandate to keep prices stable, the Federal Reserve does not aim for zero inflation, as an inflation rate that is too low can also be problematic for a national economy. Since 2012, the Federal Reserve has set an explicit target inflation rate of 2 percent. But inflation rose well above the Fed’s target following the COVID pandemic, reaching a high of around 9% in June of 2022.  As a result, by December 2023 consumers were seeing prices that were on average about 19% higher than they were before the pandemic in December 2019, as measured using the CPI-U. However, the rate of increase of prices had slowed dramatically to 3.4% by December of 2023.

The inflation rate has now dropped even further to 2.4%, getting ever nearer to the Fed’s 2% target. However, while the inflation rate has fallen drastically, prices still remain high.

To counter high prices, wages have been climbing significantly. In fact, since May, 2023, every month has seen wages grow faster than the Consumer Price Index, meaning wages are outpacing inflation, as this EconoFact chart shows using data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Regardless of the steadily improving economic data, prices and interest rates remain painfully high. However, confounding the reality of high prices is the reality that Americans, despite high prices, appear to be on a spending spree.

As Greg Iacurci reported for CNBC, net worth for a typical U.S. household rose 37% during the pandemic according to data released by the Federal Reserve in its triennial Survey of Consumer Finances. At the same time, net worth dropped for the lower  income quartiles.

That 37% percent growth was the largest since the Fed started its modern survey in 1989. It was also more than double the next-largest increase on record: Between 2004 and 2007, right before the Great Recession, real median net worth rose 18%.

How to explain this? Iacurci asked Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics:

In large part, that was due to the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates to rock bottom at the onset of the pandemic, easing borrowing costs for consumers, Zandi said. An expanded social safety net made it less likely people had to take on debt. And when it became clear the U.S. economy would recover quickly from the early pandemic shocks, due to government support and vaccines, asset prices like stocks and homes “took off,” Zandi said.

The increase in net worth during the pandemic and its recovery has allowed Americans to spend big once again, far outpacing every one of our allies, as this JP Morgan chart shows:

But, as you probably can deduce, not everyone has benefited equally, a point the Fed’s report makes clear. For example, assets like homes and stocks are generally not held by families in the bottom 20% of income. Another case of the haves doing better, and the have nots doing worse.

Studying this makes one realize this presidential election came too early for the democrats and Kamala Harris. Things have been getting better for quite some time, but not fast, or tangibly, enough to ease consumers’ feelings of dread. Consequently, they bought into Donald Trump’s fear mongering. Right up to election day, he continued to lie, saying we have “the worst economy ever.”

What is truly weird to contemplate is that our economy will likely continue its steady improvement, and after three or four months in office Trump will declare the economy saved — and it will all be because of him.

Among a host of other not so nice things, six-time-bankrupt Donald Trump will be remembered for being one of the best bullet dodgers in history.

___________________

¹ EconoFact is a network of leading academic economists that publishes analyses aimed at educating the public with respect to the national debate on economic and social policies. It is published by the Edward R. Murrow Center for a Digital World at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. You can subscribe to its work for free.

To understate the obvious, last week’s election results have been heartbreaking for the losing side and bottom-of-the-ninth, walk-off, grand-slam-home-run-happy for the winners. If nothing else, the surprising results showed once again experts and their predictions are worth about as much as a sneaker full of puppy poo.

And now, they’re at it again. If I read one more story that seems straight out of  The Astrologer’s Handbook with a headline beginning, “What a second Trump term will mean for (fill in the blank),” I will find something resembling a Black Hole, dive headfirst into it, and disappear with a *poof*.

It would be nice to think the soon-to-be 47th President and all Members of the 119th Congress will be thoughtful, decent and loyal to the oath they will all take in January. But I’m sure we all know that in Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill,” internecine, atavistic political warfare will reign supreme. Looking for all the world like a gussied-up version of the Hatfields and McCoys, Republicans and Democrats will once again assemble in a highly organized circular firing squad, seeming far more intent on annihilating each other than on devoting themselves to the moral imperative of governing.

Under Donald Trump’s benevolent guidance, Republicans will do their best to implement the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (or, at least, Agenda 47, which is the Republican National Committee’s Platform and a bullet-pointed version of Project 2025 — I know, it’s all so confusing), and Democrats will do their best to prevent that. Should make for interesting theatre.

But of all the possible questions we could now be pondering, the one I’m asking today is: Will Donald Trump restore the portrait of Andrew Jackson to the Oval Office?

When he first took office in 2017, Trump ordered the removal of the George Henry Story  portrait of Abraham Lincoln, hung by President Obama, and replaced it with a portrait of Andrew Jackson, painted by Ralph E. W. Earl.

The portrait — depicting a leonine Jackson, dignified in a dramatic cloak — was originally a bit of 19^th century political PR. Earl was a close friend of Jackson and churned out a stream of images aimed at convincing voters that the seventh president was a worthy member of America’s founding pantheon. That was a ridiculous stretch, but give Earl credit for trying.

Jackson was, in fact, unique. For example, he was the only president to serve in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. He was also a military hero, a slave-owner, a lawyer, a judge and a planter.

Born in 1767 in the Carolina backwoods, he became a courier for the Revolutionary Army as a 13-year-old. The next year, he was orphaned when his mother died of cholera after nursing sick soldiers in South Carolina. Despite knowing great hardship when young, he grew to earn the nickname “Old Hickory” for his tenacity and became an American General in the War of 1812, routing the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1814.

As a General and as President, he believed in the segregation of whites and Native Americans, according to NPR’s Steve Inskeep, author of Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab. Inskeep writes Jackson was ruthless, “opening Southern land for white real estate development, including his own personal real estate investments, whatever the human cost.” His 1830 Indian Removal Act resulted in the “Trail of Tears,” where roughly 17,000 Cherokees were forced out of their homeland east of the Mississippi river at gunpoint and moved to present-day Oklahoma. Thousands of Cherokees died on the journey. Jackson didn’t care.

In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Inskeep said, “Trump gets in Twitter fights, but Jackson got in actual duels.” He added, “Gunfights with live fire.”

Of his many duels, 103 of them, actually — it’s amazing he had time for anything else — Jackson is only documented to have killed one person, Charles Dickinson, another southern planter and slave owner. Dickinson accused Jackson of reneging on a horse bet, calling Jackson a coward and an equivocator. Dickinson also made the mistake of calling Jackson’s wife Rachel a bigamist. He was right. The wealthy Rachel (her father had co-founded Nashville, Tennessee) had eloped with and married the uncultivated Jackson in 1791 not knowing her first husband had failed to finalize their divorce.

This was too much for Old Hickory, who challenged Dickinson. They met at Harrison’s Mills on the Red River in Logan County, Kentucky, on 30 May 1806. Jackson sustained a serious wound from Dickinson, who shot first. The bullet hit Jackson in the chest, was never removed, and caused him chronic pain for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, after being wounded, Jackson remained standing, fired, missed, re-cocked his weapon, fired again, and killed Dickinson. We should note that firing twice was against the rules. Once again, Jackson didn’t care.

In addition to injuries sustained in duels, especially Dickinson’s bullet that lodged in one of his lungs, by the time Jackson became president he had already survived smallpox, osteomyelitis, malaria, dysentery, rheumatism, dropsy, “cholera morbus” (widespread intestinal inflammation), amyloidosis (a waxy degeneration of body tissues) and bronchiectasis (inflamed and dilated bronchial tubes).

The man seemed invincible.

After losing to John Quincy Adams in 1824, when the election was decided in the House of Representatives, Jackson ran again in 1828, defeating the incumbent Mr. Adams decisively.

As the first President not part of the founding elite, he was also the first to ride a populist insurgency to victory. The populism he espoused held that westward expansion meant more chances for “the common man” to participate in national affairs. He considered himself one. His populism also meant that anything in the way of American expansion (perhaps the initial version of Trump’s America First dogma), had to go. That included Native Americans.

Jon Meacham, the author of American Lion, his 2008 biography of Jackson, said, “Jackson was the first president who was not a Virginia planter or an Adams from Massachusetts. The establishment at the time saw his election as a potentially destabilizing democratic moment in what was largely a republican culture.”

In brief, the establishment elites were afraid of him, and for good reason.

In addition to what he did to Native Americans, and in keeping with his populist persona, Jackson:

• Vetoed the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States. Jackson viewed the bank as a powerful, elitist institution that favored the wealthy, and his veto effectively dismantled and ended it;
• Created the Spoils System by appointing political supporters to government positions, which he saw as a way to empower the common people and give them access to political power. His innovation also let him surround himself with true loyalists.
• Opposed and ended the Nullification Crisis, championed by Jackson’s Vice President, John C. Calhoun. The crisis centered around the idea that states could nullify federal laws. Jackson  saw this as a threat to national unity, a power grab by wealthy elites, and an attack on federal authority, meaning his authority.

The seventh President, who was fond of saying, “I was born in a storm, and calm does not suit me,” centralized federal power as no one had before him. He was authoritarian in nature and regimental in policy. A hard, quick tempered man not known for losing gracefully, it’s no wonder Donald Trump during his first term could look up to his left from the Resolute Desk and see one of the few men he could bring himself to admire looking back at him.

By the way, in case you’re wondering which portrait Joe Biden put in place of Andrew Jackson’s after assuming office in 2021, it is Benjamin Franklin’s, painted by Joseph Siffred Duplessis in 1785.

I don’t think Dr. Franklin will be hanging in the Oval Office much longer.

Today is Veterans Day. It needs commemorating.

According to the Census Bureau, in 2022 there were 16.2 million veterans in the U.S., 6.2% of the total population¹. Today, a lot of them will hear, “Thank you for your service,” and deservedly so.

We’ve come a long way in the appreciation of our veterans. It wasn’t always so. One hot summer, fourteen years after Johnny came marching home from the battlefields of World War I, he was persecuted, dehumanized and then cast into the darkness of the Great Depression.

Mindful of what our President-elect thinks of veterans and soldiers, especially those who were killed or captured in combat (see this for background if by any chance you’ve been on another planet for a couple of months), the story I’m about to tell is worthy of the moment. It is horrifying and a stain on our nation’s history, but there is much to learn from it.

Here’s what happened.

1932 – Washington, D.C.

At the close of World War I, Congress decided to thank the war’s veterans for their service with some cash — $500, which, in today’s dollars, would be about $7,500. Quite a sum. But there was a catch: the “bonus” authorized by the Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 would not be paid until 21 years later in 1945. The veterans did not complain at the time. It was The Roaring Twenties. Everyone was flush.

But then, the black curtain rose on the Great Depression. The economy descended from full employment in August 1929, where the unemployment rate was 3.2 percent, into massive unemployment in 1933 when the unemployment rate reached 25 percent. From sitting on top of the world, plutocrats were suddenly seen jumping out of Wall Street skyscraper windows.  Breadlines served the meals du jour. The word, “Hobo,” which had been hardly used since its first appearance in 1888, became a symbol for the forgotten man.

Out of work men, many of them World War I veterans, rode “Hobo trains” around the country to find work and food. It was  a dangerous and difficult way to travel. A 20-year-old CBS Radio reporter named Eric Sevareid joined them in “riding the rails.” His experience of the harsh realities of the time provided a unique perspective, a light illuminating the darkness of the Great Depression.

When things were at their darkest, in the summer of 1932, a horde of penniless, desperate veterans and their wives and children descended on Washington, D.C. Four hundred of them had begun the journey from Portland, Oregon, in mid-May. They began the  long trek to Washington not as hobos, but aboard a freight train, loaned to them for free by the rail authorities. After exiting the train in Iowa on 18 May they hitched rides and walked the rest of the way to Washington. Like Peter the Hermit’s doomed Peoples Crusade, they picked up other  groups along the way. By the time they reached Washington, there were 25,000 of them.

They camped in District parks, dumps, abandoned warehouses and empty stores. They built homemade shanty towns. Their largest camp was a 30 acre site on the Anacostia Flats.

The aging warriors had come to the nation’s capital to ask Congress, admittedly 13 years early, for their $500. Newspapers christened them “the bonus Army,” or “the bonus marchers.” They called themselves the “Bonus Expeditionary Force,” the BEF.

The men drilled, sang war songs, and, once, led by a Medal of Honor winner and watched by a hundred thousand silent Washingtonians, marched up Pennsylvania Avenue bearing flags of faded cotton.

The BEF pleaded in vain with Congress for the money. They were ignored and left to wither. As a last resort they appealed to President Hoover to meet with them. He sent word he was too busy. Then, confronted with 25,000 squatters he would later label “communists,” while asserting less than 10% of them were veterans², he isolated himself from the city, canceled plans to visit the Senate, had police patrol the White House grounds day and night, chained the gates of the Executive Mansion, erected barricades around the White House, and closed traffic for a distance of one block on all sides of the Mansion. A one-armed veteran, attempting to picket, was beaten and jailed.

Conditions for the veterans were pathetic. The summer heat was severe. Lacking shade or screens, the BEF was beaten down by the climate’s fury. Since the founding of the city, Washington was viewed as a place to be avoided in the summertime. In the words of an official guidebook, Washington was “a peculiarly interesting place for the study of insects.”

The veteran men and their families had arrived at the height of Cherry Blossom season, but by July they were debilitated, ghostly, dehydrated, and hot. Very hot. The columnist Drew Pearson, writing in his syndicated column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” called them “ragged, weary and apathetic with no hope on their faces.” Downtown businessmen complained through the Chamber of Commerce that “the sight of so many down-at-the-heel men has a depressing effect on business.”

And that was the extent of their crime, their threat to the country. They weren’t good for business.

General Douglas MacArthur, the Army’s Chief of Staff and its only four-star general, who, even then, referred to himself in the third person, had met with some of the men and assured them if he had to evict them he would allow them to leave “with dignity.” But when the end came for the BEF at 10:00 A.M. on 28 July 1932 there was no dignity to be found. Hoover had had enough, and he ordered “Mac” to get rid of them. Trouble was, he didn’t tell the General “how” to get rid of them. MacArthur, who never did anything small in his life, did something big now.

First, he sent in Police Commissioner Glassford, who had been more sympathetic to the marchers than other authorities, and they appreciated it. He had asked Congress for $75,000 to feed the marchers, a request that was denied. Now, he told the men they had to leave, orders of the President. They refused, which was all MacArthur needed to unleash the Army. Led by then Major George Patton and his 3rd Mounted Cavalry — with him prancing at the front atop his privately-owned horse (he had a stable-full; he was rich) — followed by infantry and a World War I vintage Tank Brigade, bullets began to fly.

BEF men were killed. Two babies were gassed to death. And Joseph Angelino suffered a deep wound from Patton’s sabre-wielding cavalry, the same Joseph Angelino, who, on 26 September 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, had won the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second highest medal, for saving the life of a young officer named George Patton.

By midnight that day, the Army had driven the BEF veterans, their wives, and children across the Potomac and out of the city. But that wasn’t good enough for MacArthur and Hoover. The BEF was chased and harassed west and south, out past Ohio and all the way down to Georgia. Then, the veterans, their wives, and their children just folded into the vast transient population that roamed the land in 1932 — forgotten people.

Four years later, in 1936, by a margin of 322 to 98, Congress overrode a veto by President Franklin Roosevelt³ to immediately pay World War I veterans their full $500 bonus specified in the Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924.

Although about four million World War I veterans, around 25% of all who served, were eventually paid the bonus, which amounted to roughly $1.7 billion at the time, many of the bonus marchers had died; many more were never found.

Throughout our history, the sacrifices of the few have benefited the many.

____________________________________________

¹ To put this in context, at the end of World War II, the population of the U.S. was 141.39 million, 42% of what it is today. Thirty-three percent of all males were veterans. They totaled 16.5 million men. Less than 1% remain alive today.

² The Veterans Administration, which had the actual service records, would subsequently refute Hoover’s claim with an exhaustive study concluding that 94% of the  bonus marchers were veterans of World War I.

³ This was not Roosevelt’s finest hour. He delivered his veto at a joint session of Congress, arguing the program would invite demands for similar treatment by other groups and that it was not a relief bill since it was not based on the demonstrated needs of the recipients. With respect to the veterans, aside from the wounded, he said: “I hold that that able-bodied citizen because he wore a uniform and for no other reason should be accorded no treatment different from that accorded to other citizens.”

At the end of this momentous week, it has become apparent that many Americans who voted for Kamala Harris, me included, are taking things hard — very hard. Depression sits in the air. The losses of the Presidency and the Senate, and the likely loss of the House (that’s not a loss, because the Democrats didn’t have it in the first place), have caused widespread alarm.

Heading into the weekend before Veterans Day, I’ve decided something light might help. So, I’m offering a story from America’s woebegone Vietnam saga. Not our finest hour, but then, neither is this one.

For the many millions who voted for Donald Trump: You might like this too. We’re all Americans.

The story is 3,500 words, so today is Part One, tomorrow, Part Two.

Not everything during the Vietnam War was horrid. Soldiers look for humor wherever they can find it. This is an example of that. It might make you smile, maybe even laugh. Rusty the scout dog, the Red Cross Donut Dollies, the little man with the big wrench, the entrepreneurial Mama-San — they’re all here, still living in the fog of the past.

This story will take you back to that strange time when our nation found itself to be the wagging tail of a fiercely hawkish dog.

A Vietnam Story — Part One

It was a beautiful late summer day in Vietnam, and my 28-man Platoon and I, along with Rusty the scout dog and his handler, PFC Snyder, were feeling good. Having recently concluded one of our personally satisfying  occasional encounters with a few visitors from the North, we were sunning ourselves on the rocky top of what passed for a mountain in northern South Vietnam, when Bobcat called.

Bobcat was Colonel Robert Stillingworth, “Still” to his few friends, Bobcat to me. He was a terse and demanding man. Never used a hundred words when three would do. In the entire time I knew him, ten months that seemed a lot longer, I never heard a kind word escape his razor thin lips. Talking to him was like talking to a tree on a trail.

Anyway, Bobcat called, and the ultimate, sub-rosa reason he called was because, with only three months to go, he had yet to win his Silver Star. He believed winning this award was essential in his quest for what he considered his much-deserved promotion to Brigadier General. Of course, I did not know this at the time. Why should I? But afterwards it explained everything.

As soon as I heard his voice, I knew siesta-time was over.  “Go to the secure freq. I have orders for you,” he said. I switched to our secure frequency. He said, “You are to proceed to the sea.” Then he gave me a couple of coordinates, which, with deduction worthy of an officer and a gentleman, I presumed to be somewhere on the coast of the South China Sea. “You are to be there no later than 0100 hours. You will receive further orders upon arrival. Any questions?”

Well, no. Seemed simple enough. Then I heard, “Bobcat out.” The man had a way with words.

I pulled out my map and saw that our upcoming little nighttime stroll would cover about 24 kilometers, we called them “clicks.” This would equal roughly 15 miles. Twenty-four clicks in less than eight hours and, since we had just been resupplied with rations, ammo, and what not a couple of hours earlier, we’d be bebopping along with about 85 pounds on our backs.

The good news was we wouldn’t have to bebop through much jungle. After we made it down the mountain, we’d be just about one click from Highway 1, the only paved road north of Saigon. We’d take that north, and it would lead us right to where we were supposed to go. Simple. As long as we didn’t stumble onto any of the bad guys.

I called over my platoon sergeant Dave Lucey, a firefighter from California back in the real world, and told him to tell the rest of the guys the good times were over. Time to pack up and move out. So, we gathered up our stuff, and off we went.

About an hour later, we were on Highway 1. That’s when the rain began. It rained all the way to the sea.

In the gloom of a rainy night, our boots soaked through and through, we squished our way up Highway 1. About one click from where we were supposed to wind up, we took a right off the highway onto a dirt track and saw the lights from a village up ahead. As we got nearer we could hear voices, a lot of them. But before we got there we smelled the bread.

In our haste to make the deadline, we hadn’t stopped to eat, just kept slogging up Highway 1 in the rain. Now, dead ahead of us, a sorry group of cold and wet-to-the-core soldiers, was an old woman, smiling from ear to ear, standing behind a table in front of a tiny building that appeared to be the village bakery. She had two hanging oil lamps, one on each side of her, and spread out on her table were loaf after loaf of newly baked bread. The lady had known we were coming.

Ravenous as we were, we bought every loaf, making the smiling Mama-San instantly wealthy. We wolfed them down. If you ignored all the sand still in the bread it was the best we ever tasted.

Then we moved on to our rally point, where all the voices were coming from. We found ourselves in a little harbor, really little. And in it were a few small boats, not much more than Sampans, really.

Standing on a narrow pier hanging out over the water was the Intelligence Officer of our Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Horace Barnacle. He showed me written orders, but didn’t let me read them, and told me the boats behind him belonged to the South Vietnamese Navy.

“Excuse me, Sir, South Vietnam has a Navy?” I asked. “Yup, and you’re lookin’ at it.” Pointing to something that looked like it was thrown together by a few people with failing eyesight, he said, “Your orders are to board that ship over there with your men and, ah, the dog. I see you have a dog. Well, that’ll be all right. Dogs can swim. The ship will ferry you up the coast to just south of the DMZ , where you will conduct an amphibious assault at coordinates I will provide and secure the beach.”

When he said DMZ, he got my attention, because the DMZ was the Demilitarized Zone, the most dangerous place in all of Vietnam.

I just looked at the man and said, “Sir, this is a joke, right?” “No joke,” he said. “Get ready to board, cause you’re leaving in 15 minutes.”

Dumbfounded, I said, “But sir, this is really strange. Do you know what kind of resistance my men and I will run into when we do this stupid-ass, crazy thing?”

Colonel Barnacle draped his arm over my shoulder and pulled me aside. “Lieutenant,” he said. “Believe me when I tell you it is highly unlikely you and your men will encounter much resistance, if any.”

“Is this just an exercise?” I asked. “Sort of,” he said. “But it’s kind of secret. Now get your ass on the boat.”

So, we did. Scout dog Rusty, PFC Snyder, and the rest of us began squeezing ourselves into the hold on the deck of a bobbing boat I hoped wouldn’t turn into a watery coffin. The hold, about 20 by 30 feet, sloped from the middle out to the sides. At the middle it was perhaps four feet high. At the sides it was down to about two and a half feet.

Somehow, we crammed ourselves in. It would have been a lot less uncomfortable if it weren’t for all the 85-pound rucksacks and weaponry.

Finally, crushed together, we pushed off from the dock, and the put-putting engine sent us all slowly out into the South China Sea.

But before we got too far out, our South Vietnamese Navy piece of junk started rattling underneath us. Gears started squishing and grinding. Then, everything stopped, and it became eerily quiet. From somewhere in the middle of the hold we were stuffed into, I heard Randy Billingsley, our M-60 machine gunner, say, “I can’t swim.”  A couple more guys said the same thing, and I began to think Vietnam’s hot, swampy, snake infested jungle wasn’t such a bad place, after all.

That was when a door opened in the front of our compartment, which seemed to be getting smaller by the moment, and a wiry little man with a big smile slipped through it. He was carrying a wrench about the size of his arm. He slid between two of our guys and opened another door. He oozed through that one and disappeared.

Next came the banging. That was when Billingsley once again let everyone know he couldn’t swim. This got Rusty the dog upset, so he began howling. Then, everyone was talking excitedly at once, Rusty kept barking, the little man kept banging, and I got worried.

I don’t know what would have happened next, if not, at that very moment, the engine hadn’t suddenly come to life, which instantly silenced everyone, even Rusty. The second door opened and the little man with the big wrench was once more with us with an even bigger smile. He said, “Okey dokey,” and vanished through the first door.

Relieved, we continued up the South China Sea in the dead of night.

About ten minutes later my big mistake reared its furry, German Shepherd head, because that was when  Snyder, stuck way back in the left corner, yelled over to me, “Lieutenant, the dog’s gotta go.”

The mistake had been loading Rusty and Snyder in first. They always led after our Point man in the jungle. Why not here? Well, this was why not.

There was nothing we could do, no way to get him anywhere else. So, with all of us glued tightly together and doing our best to squeeze away from the stench about to come, Rusty did his thing, a four-plopper according to Snyder, and the rest of our trip up the South China Seacoast was redolent with the very special aroma only dogshit  can make.

At 0815 hours in the morning we were finally at the assault point. Getting out of the little torture chamber that would have made Grand Inquisitor Torquemada proud, was harder than getting in. It  was probably the most ridiculous part of the entire operation. But we did it and said goodbye to South Vietnam’s gunless Navy. We even scooped up Rusty’s calling card to save the little man with the big wrench from having to do it.

After we tossed that into the sea, we discovered that the genius who designed the “plan” didn’t allow for low tide, so we hit the water for the big battle about a quarter mile from shore.

Not a shot was fired.

We watched the South Vietnam Navy chug chug away. Then, heads up, we casually waded ashore, walked up a sandy beach like the kind you find in Hawaii, and found rectangular table after table along about 100 feet of beach, behind which, with smiles to light up the sky, stood six beautiful women of the American Red Cross, dressed in their signature pale blue outfits, handing out cans of Coca Cola and doughnuts. To the guys in the field, they were known as “Donut Dollies,” and they’d been doing this since World War II.

Having not died in the second coming of D-Day, we occupied the beach without encountering a single moment of stress from an enemy that must have had other things on its mind.

Sometime in the weeks ahead, I had a chance to spend a few minutes with our Brigade Adjutant, a friend. It was he who told me the story of how Bobcat had directed an amphibious assault on a tightly held enemy location on the South China Seacoast, and, with a .45 caliber pistol in each hand, had led his men to victory.

At least, that’s what the citation for his Silver Star said.

This morning, the sun rose just as it did yesterday morning and the day before that. But things certainly felt different with this sunrise, didn’t they?

We all have to process the election results in our own ways, and that will take some time. For my therapy, I was off to hit 600 tennis balls — very hard.

About a nanosecond after results were known, pundits from around the world were telling us what happened, and how, and why. Experts always emerge right after the gun sounds, ending the game.

I think it all comes down to something H. L. Mencken once wrote: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Put another way, we could say Americans knew exactly what they were getting with Trump this time around, and more than 72 million of them said, “Yup. That’s for me.”

At this moment, there are two prevailing thoughts about Donald Trump’s second term. The first, as expressed in George Will’s column this morning in the Washington Post, is that, “Trump’s scatterbrained approach to almost everything makes it likely that he will fail to do much of what he has vowed to do.”

The second, as expressed by me, in this Letter, is that, while Trump is certainly scatterbrained, he has managed to surround himself this time around with a host of folks who are not, and who are rabidly committed to carrying out the national prescription set forth in the 923-page Project 2025. You remember Project 2025, don’t you? The Heritage Foundation’s well-written, blueprint for Trump’s second term? The one he said he didn’t know anything about, despite the inconvenient truth that 140 senior members of his first Administration authored it?

And, come the 20th of January, 2025, those devoted loyalists will be running things. Unlike the first Trump term, there will be few, if any, reasonable people who will act as necessary guardrails to both his whims and, more important, the draconian rules to live by found in Project 2025.

Regarding Trump’s signature campaign message — “the greatest mass deportation in history” — Peter Rousmaniere, a genuine immigration expert, pointed out this morning in Working Immigrants that this will be impossible. But what will not be impossible is even worse. To quote Rousmeniere:

With regard to massive deportation of unauthorized persons, that will not take place, because it will within weeks turn into a debacle. That cannot be done sub rosa as the separation of children from parents was for a few months in 2017, only to be halted immediately when it became apparent to the press. Massive deportation can be filmed, will be documented by attorneys and media. Public interest groups are primed to turn every arrest into a cause celebre.

It is more likely that he will use the power of his pen to withdraw executive branch protection of the 800,000 DACA beneficiaries and to the hundreds of thousands of humanitarian parole people admitted during the Biden administration. That also may apply to many of the Temporary Protected Status residents in the country. We will see a controlled voluntary or forced removal of hundreds of thousands of people.

Among the people forced out will be those unfortunate Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, demonized by both JD Vance and Trump. Those are the refugees praised by Springfield’s Mayor, as well as everyday citizens. Nonetheless, it should be noted that yesterday, Ohioans went to the polls and voted for Trump, refugee defenders, or not.

Immigration is just one example of what’s coming in the months ahead.

I’ve always thought democracy allows people to get the government they deserve.

Last night, America got the government it deserves.

Today the curtain falls on this presidential election’s Act I. Only God knows the script for the days and weeks ahead.

If she loses, Kamala Harris has vowed to engage in a peaceful transfer of power. As Vice President and President of the Senate, she has said she will preside over the election certification process whether she wins or loses the election.

Donald Trump has also committed to a peaceful transfer of power — but only if he wins.

More than 80 million Americans voted early. For the rest, it all comes down to today.

On one side stands a candidate who cozied up admiringly to Vladimir Putin, exchanged love letters with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, mounted a coup, incited an insurrection, was convicted of 34 felonies (so far), withheld national defense top-secret documents after a demand for their return by the National Archives, was found to be civilly liable for sexual assault (27 other women have now accused him of sexual abuse; and don’t forget the Access Hollywood tape), and there is so much more. We won’t even mention passing the unfunded Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that will add nearly $2 trillion to the national debt and disproportionately benefit the wealthy, or the delayed response to Hurricane Maria, the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico, or the paper towel foul shots into a crowd of Puerto Rican victims, or two impeachments, or urging his Secretary of Defense to shoot protesters in the legs, or on and on and on and….

It’s all been so exhausting.

On the other side, we find a decent, compassionate woman with excellent credentials, who has been endorsed by hundreds of prominent conservative Republicans. These are civilian officials, national security experts, and ex-military senior officers, many of whom served in the first Trump Administration in high-level positions. All of these Harris endorsers vigorously assert Donald Trump is unfit to hold any office, let alone America’s Presidency.

And what is the worst thing we could say about her? Well, she has been accused of being late, very late, to see the seriousness of the border crisis or recognize she and President Biden were out of step with the rest of the nation. While “Border Czar” was not in her portfolio, the Administration certainly took too much time to take definitive action. But in Biden’s third year, with White House backing, Congress had a chance to attack the problem vigorously in a bi-partisan way, and was all set to do just that — until Donald Trump forbade it. Why? Because he needed the crisis to continue in order to have an attack issue. Most Republican Senators rolled over like submissive dogs, and nothing happened, nothing good, anyway.

Consequently, absent congressional action, President Biden issued an Executive Order that significantly lowered illegal border crossings in 2024.

At his rallies, Donald Trump has played the border issue like a Stradivarius violin, and much of America has been hypnotized by the siren song. It’s the only thing he’s been good at, stirring up a crowd like a Carnival Barker. Now, most Americans believe that, after the economy, the border crisis is the most important issue of this election. Lockstep, a large minority have marched right by all the former President’s documented moral, ethical, mental, and legal shortcomings. They don’t seem to care. Apparently, character and virtue no longer matter to many of our fellow citizens. Why is that?

For my part, for all the hatred, lies, dis-and misinformation, I remain hopeful and somewhat optimistic that the nation’s better angels will prevail. I have a belief that won’t be squelched that when each of us is standing in the sanctity of our own small, private space with a ballot in one hand and a pen in the other, we will do the right thing.

We will do the right thing.