Driving the Wayback machine under the influence

The Trump administration is living history

What a time to be a history buff. I mean, the Trump administration’s performance is worthy of any living history reenactment, and has the added bonus of being in real life. Some future Ken Burns will make a whole career out of this. This is one of those good, bad and ugly posts, so let me start with the good.

President Trump has had matched the number of cabinet meetings held by his predecessor (and successor: what’s the word for a sandwich president?) in four years, and has done it in his first year. The Trump cabinet has met nine times in 2025, which is how many times President Joe Biden’s cabinet met in four years. Congratulations.

That’s the good. Now the bad and ugly (you decide which is which).

During the latest cabinet meeting, Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth’s name card was misspelled. He’s the “SSecretary of War.” I tried to get Grok or ChatGPT to make a cartoon version of that, but I’m not good at writing prompts to get those AIs to make decent images. David Thornton is a lot better at it.

Image: AP via Yahoo! News

The meeting droned on and on, leading to reports of the president’s eyes drooping, or him nodding off. Budget Director Russell Vought was caught by a reporter’s camera drawing little clouds on White House stationary. So much for taking detailed notes. The president had asked everyone to move quickly (of course he went first and spent a long time speaking), but nobody did.

I think historically, this is about what you’d have seen in a Continental Congress meeting in 1775. John Adams described the meetings as moving “as slow as a snail,” and a “tedious trial of patience.” Thomas Jefferson complained that delegates spoke for hours “without saying anything.” Ben Franklin would doodle in the margins of his notes. Adams practiced his penmanship, drawing “practice flourishes” during the meetings. Jefferson made architectural sketches on his note paper.

Hegseth spoke of the “fog of war” doing what to our lethal military is like plinking .22LR rounds at a can, blowing up small unarmed boats. For the record, we are not at war. We seem to be trying to start one, but Nicolás Maduro is smart enough not to sink Venezuela further by declaring war on the United States.

Speaking of Maduro, that’s another living history example. For a couple of decades, several U.S. presidents tried to kill Fidel Castro. First it was Dwight Eisenhower, then it was JFK, who botched the Bay of Pigs invasion. After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson continued the parlor game of trying to off Castro, to no good end. And in the end, Castro died in bed, like most dictators do (Muammar Gaddafi and Benito Mussolini excepted, as they were killed by their own citizens).

Maduro has reportedly increased his security and taken to sleeping in different beds each night. Who knows, one day if Trump’s campaign of speedboat diplomacy against drugs pays off, Maduro could join Bashar al-Assad in Moscow. And speaking of drug trafficking, who says Trump has no heart? In a cascade of mercy, the president pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, former president of Honduras, who was serving a 45-year federal sentence for drug smuggling in a West Virginia prison. Turns out, it was a lobbying campaign by Trump pal and fixer Roger Stone that moved the president’s autopen hand. I wonder how much money Hernandez had his henchmen pay Stone for the privilege of getting free?

For Trump’s part, he is doing his best to interfere with elections in Honduras. He’s also managed to convince his political acquaintance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to seek a pardon from Israel’s president. President Isaac Herzog said he’d take the request under advisement. Of course, nobody thinks seeking a pardon for corruption charges that have literally dragged on for years would be some kind of admission of guilt for Netanyahu. Right?

Back to Maduro; according to Axios, a Trump adviser said, “But maybe this is a message to Maduro? If Trump is willing to take the heat by basically canceling this, he’s telling Maduro he can do the same to him if he just plays ball.” That’s the key to Trump’s foreign policy. Play ball. You play ball and we’ll play ball too. The one-page handout has a whole checklist of items you can use to play ball. The 747 airplane is already checked off, by the way. Someone should start a registry listing all the available gifts.

There’s one country Trump doesn’t want to play ball with: Somalia. He called Somalis “garbage” during the cabinet meeting. Vice President J.D. Vance banged the table in agreement. Just like they did in 1775. Technically, it wasn’t all Somalis Trump was describing. It was Rep. Ilhan Omar. She is a Democrat in Minnesota. You know, Golda Mabovitch moved from Kiev with her family in 1906 and grew up in Milwaukee. Mabovitch, who became Myerson, then Meir, was a committed socialist and a left-winger. In 1885, Friedrich Trump moved to New York from Germany, to escape compulsory military service. Years later, his grandson, a committed Democrat, avoided the draft, but claimed his own “personal Vietnam” by trudging through the jungles of STDs.

But Omar is “garbage,” and by extension, whoever comes from her country “stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” I personally work with some Somalis. They don’t stink. Someone is going to use Trump’s words to justify violence. Reminds me a bit of another president, Woodrow Wilson, who gladly screened the racist, KKK-glazing movie, “Birth of a Nation” at the White House.

And finally, most frighteningly, the East Wing ballroom project has been personally taken over by the president. The size and scope of the ballroom has grown. The project’s architect, James McCrery, has stepped back to make room for the designer-in-chief.

The New York Times quoted, “‘I consider myself an important designer,’ Mr. Trump has said.”

“We started with a much smaller building, and then I realized, we have the land, let’s do it right,” Mr. Trump said recently to donors, during an event to raise money for the ballroom project. “And so we built a larger building that can really hold just about any function that we want.”

Now that the architects and professionals have made space for Trump’s vision, I’m sure it will continue to grow, and grow.

It’s illegal to operate a backhoe or excavator under the influence. But there’s no law against reenacting history while high on a power trip. Trump has huffed enough gold paint to intoxicate an elephant, and now he’s taken control of the Wayback machine. What could go wrong?

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