The FAA tells us this Thanksgiving week is likely to be the busiest travel day in 15 years. And as FAA administrator Sean Duffy encourages Americans to don their finest formal wear in anticipation of their voyaging, perhaps it’s worth strapping on your corset and/or cummerbund as we take a Day-Before-Thanksgiving tour of our shared destination. Because wherever American families gather, this year, their location will be the same: Crazy Town.
We can all agree on that.
A quick glance at the headlines reveals the mess in which we find ourselves: the former head of the FBI and New York’s District Attorney hav both had cases—filed at our president’s revenge-driven behest—against them dropped after a judge ruled the DA in charge of their prosecutions had been illegally appointed.
An astronaut and combat pilot is being investigated by the “Department of War” for instructing members of the military to follow the law.
A Russian-authored “peace plan” which gives Vladimir Putin everything he wants in exchange for, essentially, Ukrainian surrender, is being touted as official American policy.
And speaking of the former Soviet Union, at the same time the United States government is bashing the “communist” mayor-elect of New York City Zohran Mamdani, they’re snapping up ownership stakes in private companies, which is a helluva lot closer to actual communism. To paraphrase a Katy Perry song of a certain vintage, after their Oval Office meet-cute, Trump kissed a Pinko—and he liked it.
There’s the idiocy of our current tariff situation, in which the president staked the American economy on a plan to tax the hell out of everybody, but mostly the American public. The result: prices are up despite the White House’s failed attempts to massage those Walmart “Thanksgiving meal” numbers—and people are pissed. To rectify the situation, the administration is now selectively removing tariffs from random products; the party of free trade is now reaching into the American economy and instituting what amounts to price controls on certain goods and services.
Not that I think Trump and his ilk are closet Reds any more than I think they’re closet humanitarians. Instead, the headlines we’re seeing point to something worse than a full Marxist takeover of the American government. Marxism, at least, has an animating ideal.
One of the many problems with installing an amoral doofus without a coherent governing philosophy at the helm of the world’s richest and mightiest nation is that such a person will then behave as an amoral doofus without a coherent governing philosophy.
What follows is what we see: a disparate hodgepodge of ad hoc, often contradictory policy positions which leave the nation uncertain and vulnerable. The reason, for example, Covid-19 hit us so hard wasn’t just because we were dealing with a novel pathogen, but we were doing at the same time we were dealing with said amoral doofus discarding an entire playbook—one literally titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents”—designed to deal with a future epidemiological nightmare Oopsie! And that was when we still had competent people like Dr. Anthony Fauci heading most of our federal agencies. Imagine the response to a future pandemic if RFK Jr. is in charge. Horse paste for everyone!
Speaking of which: If those high food costs have you trimming your turkey budget, I bet you could get some high-quality horsemeat on the cheap. Spread a little Ivermectin and pesticide on there and you’ve got yourself a delicious spin on the traditional open-faced leftover sandwich!
A government powered by spite is unlikely to be a government that inspires confidence. Poll after poll screams “danger,” showing the administration on the same glidepath as the UPS plane that crashed in Kentucky last week. Sure, it got off the ground but not for long. That’s kind of where we find ourselves approaching the one-year mark of the second Burger King administration, a nation hurtling disaster, and the American public knows it.
One thing about data sets; they tend to return to the mean. After the executive order blitzkrieg of his first several months in office, orders which had Trump’s political opponents scrambling, the opposition appears to have found some footing. The judiciary (sans the nakedly partisan Supreme Court) is leading the way, with the Trump administration losing most of the cases it brings.
Citizens have mobilized. Elections are being held and, just like last time, Republicans are being unceremoniously dumped from office. Former allies like Marjorie Taylor Greene are breaking for the exits. And yesterday, we learned that, with eight months still to run on its charter, DOGE is now no more. (The agency did tweet yesterday that it’s still around, but my sources say that was just Big Balls roaming around the empty offices looking for an accountant to fire.) While DOGE may have failed to eliminate any “waste, fraud, and abuse” it did succeed in eliminating an incalculable number of human lives. I mean that literally—it’s impossible to calculate the true scale of deaths that eliminating USAID and other programs caused.
The president, too, has returned to his own meanness. Not that it ever went away. Gone is the triumphal preening of his first 100 days, the arrogance of the dressing down of Zelenskyy in the Oval Office replaced with a mortifying “Quiet, piggy” to a female reporter in the back of Air Force One. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight despite the turbulence. And do try to ignore the ground rushing up to greet us.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Enjoy your trip to Crazy Town.
The post Opinion: Travel Plans For Thanksgiving? We’re All Headed to Crazy Town Regardless appeared first on The Daily Beast.
