Legacy president

Now our country, under convicted felon president Donald Trump, is committing piracy on the high seas by seizing oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela and brushing it off as policy. He said he'll do it again.

It's pretty outrageous stuff. In fact, Trump's presidential legacy (I prefer to call it his criminal legacy) as he enters the middle of his second term seems to be nothing more than one outrage followed by another outrage of even greater proportion.

I think this all started in his first term when he addressed the border issue in 2017-18 by separating families – parents from their children – who were seeking asylum from the horrors of their own oppressive nations. Instead, many of those parents seeking new lives found themselves prosecuted as illegal aliens and deported while their children were put in cages and placed in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services. Remember that? More than 5,500 kids were separated from their parents. To this day, about 1,200 children are still looking to rejoin their families – if they can find them.

Thanks, Trump. 

I thought that was impeachable stuff, but no. America's political backbone for presidential outage was dissolving.

The next big outage came with the Covid-19 pandemic. Huge numbers of People were dying worldwide at an accelerated rate. When the pandemic hit American shores, Trump claimed it was only "one or two" people who were dying in this country and the virus would be contained before it got worse. Instead, within weeks, hospitals were overwhelmed. There were not enough ventilators to go around. Corpses had to be placed in refrigeration trucks serving as morgues and bodies were often buried in mass graves. Oh, you forgot that part, did you?

Trump, to his credit, initiated Operation Warp Speed in 2000 in an effort to find a Covid vaccine. And it happened. In a miracle of modern medical research, mRNA vaccines were developed, reviewed and reviewed again (with over 600 peer reviews). To this day, the vaccines are credited with saving 14 million lives globally. This is about the only moment where I can find that Trump actually did something good for the country.

But then he came down with the virus.. His life was saved by a cocktail of medicines that only a president could afford. When he returned to the White House, he defiantly ripped off his mask, thus invigorating – if only metaphorically – the anti-vaxxer movement. Hundreds of thousands of people continued to die by refusing to be vaccinated.

The legacy of the anti-vaccination movement is that now measles – an illness once eliminated in this country – is now back and flourishing because there is resistance to getting measles shots. What other empirical evidence do you need that the shot works? Measles vaccines, no measles. No vaccine, measles returns. There. Believe the science. Same for Covid. Same for flu. Same for anything that requires a vaccine. And, no, shots do not cause autism. Period.

Then came Jan. 6 2021 when Trump-inspired conservative hooligans (Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys) stormed the Capitol in an effort to halt the ceremonial electoral count to affirm Joe Biden as president. That was a horrifying moment in American history where a coup to overthrow the government actually took place in front of our eyes.

We had a four-year hiatus from Trump as the economy grew and inflation dropped to 3 percent from a world-wide high of 9 percent, but then Trump was somehow elected as president again, this time bringing with him Project 2025. You remember Project 2025. It was a blueprint for American as seen by the ultra conservative Heritage Foundation. It's basically a primer on how to make America white again in the face of demographics that show the country is actually becoming browner. Some folks are frightened of that.

What Project 2025 brought us, among other things, is the absurdly named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the elimination of American influence in third-world countries (America first!), the elimination of climate protections, the call for mass deportations of all those brown-skinned people, and a host of other anti-American actions (read the Constitution) that are printed in over the project's 900 pages.

Meanwhile, the Epstein files are about to surface. Trump, who has been declared an adjudicated rapist by a Federal judge following the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit. Trump was also found guilty on 34 counts for falsifying his business records in an attempt to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels for a sexual affair between the two. So why should a connection to a known pedophile like Jeffrey Epstein surprise us?

Rape. Porn star. Pedophilia. Those words are not often associated with active U.S. presidents.

That pretty much brings us to now, where this country is seemingly committing war crimes by blowing up alleged drug traffickers in their speedboat. The premise is that the speedboats are ferrying drugs across 1,000 miles of water from Venezuela to the United States. So instead of relying on due process to stop them, Trump is blowing them up without evidence. So far, nearly 90 people have been killed, and for what? Fentanyl does not come from Venezuela, it comes from China and is manufactured in Mexico. Cocaine comes from Venezuela, but most of the deliveries are destined for European markets. So good. We're making Europe safe again.

And we might be committing war crimes – or murder – if we're blowing up survivors clinging to wreckage with follow-up missile strikes. 

And now, we're taking control of oil tankers. This one, nautically named The Skipper, flies the flag of Guyana, which makes its seizure problematical under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. 

It could be piracy instead. 

The idea behind this seizure is that the oil is under US sanction – it cannot be sold – but by doing so, the United States might be able to effect regime change in Venezuela in an effort to remove president Nicolás Maduro from office.

Or perhaps the US can muscle Venezuela into a war. I mean, why not? Venezuela has the richest oil reserve in the hemisphere. Why can't it be ours? Naaaa. That's ridiculous.

Isn't it? 

The litany of outrages might speak differently.