by Mick Rhodes | editor@claremont-courier.com

I gotta hand it to the Trump administration: they’re getting results. We’re overwhelmed. The “flood the zone” “muzzle velocity” upending of American institutions, traditions, and norms outlined clearly in their dystopian playbook, Project 2025 — which candidate Trump repeatedly distanced himself from — has by design left us in a dizzying state of churning anxiety.

Many of us are literally sickened by the onslaught and are turning away from the news for health reasons. This too is by design. Trump and his unqualified lackeys want us reeling and reacting to red herrings such as bold proclamations against the evils of paper straws and the idiotic trade war with the most benign nation in the western hemisphere, Canada.

On Monday, I found myself so jittery and stressed I took a 1 mg. Ativan. It’s been years since I needed one of those little chill pills. But that’s where we’re at in Trump’s America.

I too am tempted to turn on, tune in, drop out and medicate myself for the next 1,407 days. If I didn’t have a bunch of kids to worry about I might just move somewhere far away and throw my phone and laptop into the ocean. But unless you’re rich enough not to be affected, and dead inside enough not to care about the rapid dismantling of our democracy, that’s just not an option.

It’s time for action, for resistance. It’s time to be on the right side of history. The world — save the despots, murderers, and dictators Donny boy is cozying up to — has spoken: an unhinged U.S. is a danger to everyone, friend and foe.

I wonder what ol’ Republican Jesus Ronald Reagan (who would be a centrist Democrat today) would say about our country’s lurch toward fascism. It’s fun to imagine zombie Ronnie pulling the rug out from under his former Grand Old Party’s blatantly undemocratic modern platform. I wonder how many news cycles it would take for Trump to have Reagan’s name scrubbed from all government servers, statues removed, etc.? After all, he’s currently directing the Fox “News” commentators, professional wrestling promoters, and right wing bloggers in his administration to scrub references to Black, brown, indigenous, LGBTQ, among hundreds of other keywords, from federal databases.

Trump and his fascist toadies are in a big rush to recalibrate America to a simpler time (for white folks), specifically to pre-Brown v. Board of Education 1953. The 1950s: when white men were kings, and “fragile masculinity” hadn’t yet entered the vernacular. That’s the sweet spot for swell Americans like his trusted advisor Stephen “America is for Americans and Americans only” Miller.

Don’t believe me?

The suddenly laughably childish Defense Department, with its wildly unqualified, racist leader Pete Hegseth, recently flagged for removal some 26,000 items in its databases. The aim? To scrub mention of the GOP’s most effective paper tiger — diversity, equity, and inclusion — from the DOD’s digital presence. The extremely dumb February 27 Department of Defense memo announcing the puerile exercise reads in part, “In alignment with President Trump’s Executive Orders and Secretary Hegseth’s directives, this memorandum mandates a digital content refresh across all DoD public platforms. By March 5, 2025, all Components must remove and archive DoD news articles, photos, and videos promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), including content related to critical race theory, gender ideology, and identity-based programs.”

Among the 26,000 items flagged as symbols of “woke” ideology by the Dumb DoD was the Enola Gay. Yes, the DDoD brain trust thinks the plane that carried the atomic bomb to Hiroshima in 1945 was a DEI hire. That’s how dumb this whole thing is; the 20-something tech bros and gals at the fake so-called “agency” “DOGE” are just smart enough to search up “gay” and relegate everything that pops up to the digital wastebin.

President Trump, possibly reached by the Courier this week, was unapologetic when asked about finally ridding America of the notoriously subversive same-sex machinery.

“Today I signed what is perhaps the biggest executive order in history to get rid of this very, very old and corrupt gay plane,” Trump may or may not have said. “It’s gone. DEI hires made a mistake, a huge mistake some people are saying, when they decided to support the woke aeronautics ideology. Today I also fired the CEO of the Smithsonian Institution. We will bring back a beautiful Smithsonian. It will be bigger, better, and make more money than anybody’s ever seen. I have the best people remodeling the building now. We are clearing out all the tremendous waste and fraud, including many other very gay items that don’t belong there. They just don’t belong there. People will be paying hundreds of dollars — some say thousands — to get in when we’re done. I have appointed Kid Rock as the new executive director of the Trump Smithsonian™. Kid will be overseeing all the tremendous change, starting with a pay-per-view exhibit of Hulk Hogan memorabilia later this year.”

This is fiction, of course. But it’s not far off from the actual headlines over these past seven years, er, weeks.

In times of stress, as per usual, there’s wisdom to be found in the (actual) words of the late, beloved public television commie, the great Fred Rogers: “Some days, doing ‘the best we can’ may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn’t perfect on any front-and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else.”

Sometimes the best we can do is to laugh in the face of absurdity. Ha!