The Turning Tide
Beckons the Bold
Donald John Trump is a greasy grifter and unabashedly corrupt businessman enjoying and abusing his role as 47th president of these barely United States. The first ten months of his second term in high office were purposefully chaotic, gratuitously cruel, and blatantly self-serving. Not to mention highly unusual and routinely savage. Oh. And mostly illegal in thought and deed.
As of 04 Nov 25, the wind no longer is at his back. Or that of his enablers and supporters.
Impementaton of the horrific 2025 playbook is stalling out. Leaders of democracies are telling the world generally and Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy specifically that America’s current leadership cannot be trusted.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is disrespecting the Dozing Don in public (meetings of mutual assistance with India and China) and in private. His continued aggression in Ukraine alarms out erstwhile NATO allies and shames our preening presidential puppet.
The Troubled Times and Turning Tides of the Tyrant Trump
Despair is just so 2024.
In Act 4, Scene 3 of his 1599 play about Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare had Brutus urge Cassius to know his context and take advantage of it.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”
Well, fine. But swimming is not what opportunists do. They arrange for vessels to transport persons, plans, and fortunes across watery divides.
Ted Sorensen put some lovely phrases into the mouth of the young and charismatic 35th president of the United States. In or about 1962, John Fitzgerald Kennedy proclaimed that “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Inspiring. Also misleading. The phrase suggests general prosperity improves conditions for all participants. It may be that the benefit is not equally shared. Weak boats leak at any level of tide.
Circumstance, fortune, destiny, and information also condition benefit. I, for example, always was standing at a railroad siding when my various ships of fame docked remotely elsewhere. Treasure is never lost. It just goes where claimed.
In May of 2012, Emmymedlin published a poetic tribute to a woman he loved entitled “The Changing Tides.” He joined other poets like Longfellow, Mary Oliver, and C. S. Lewis in contemplating the nature, power, rhythm, and meaning of tidal action as it may mirror, manipulate, and monitor human affairs and emotions. These meditations consider what is left on the abandoned shoreline after the tides pause, turn, and draw back into their great abyss. Treasures to be retrieved. Dross to be left to its own natural demise.
Our treasures are:
1. The Declaration of Independence;
2. The Constitution of the United States;
3. All amendments in their plain face wording; and,
4. Customs, practices, policies, and laws supportive of the foregoing.
Dross includes, but is not limited to:
1. Faithless political parties:
a. The Democratic party does not get to escape the consequences of its failure to be effective.
b. The Republican party cannot escape the stain of the results of its quiescent fawning.
2. Every portion of the budget funding ICE operations;
3. Any person or process impeding immediate, adequate, and continuing funding of Ukraine’s fight to evict Russia from territory invaded and occupied since 2014;
4. Resistance to maintaining the full faith and credit of our country to its citizens and creditors;
5. Every executive order and action on and since 20 Jan 25:
a. Based on an invented national emergency not true in fact or principle;
b. Taking advantage of marginalized persons and interests;
c. Removing oversight of executive actions and operations;
d. Weakening the nature, purpose, and operation of agencies and institutions in service to the health, welfare, and security of the governed; and,
e. Distorting, disabling, or dismantling previously funded social, research, cultural and educational programs.
6. Visible branding of public places and spaces with the name of the 47th president.
We the People are at that moment in American history when despair over the results and consequences of Election 2024 is passe’ and counterproductive. The persons and purses of Resistance 2.0 have done more to challenge Trump 2.0 than a captive Congress and/or a complicit high court.
It is time to cause redemption, reform, and renewal in the elections of 2026 (congress) and 2028 (president). It will take continued, increased, strategic, and fiercely funny resistance to the abuses and atrocities of the current administration.
It will take a changing of the guard in both houses of Congress.
We can do that.
The tide of Trump 2.0 is paused. Advantage is ours to take. Time is of the essence. Action is imperative.
While Project 2025 turns to retrench and before it can return, let us clear the exposed shoreline of its exposed and vulnerable rot.
Let us convent to vote every oath breaker out of office. Starting with those who have proven non-responsive and faithless to us personally--on issues vital to our life, liberty, security, welfare, inalienable human rights, and/or constitutionally protected freedoms.
We can embrace and direct change. We can restore ourselves to benefit the world.
We can retrieve the rule of law and customs of common decency. We can champion notions of peace on earth, goodwill to humanity. We can insist upon respect for the governed. We can demand reasonable and realistic standards of living and dying.
Of Manly Mice and Micey Men
The White House has a rat problem.
Queen Victoria was a lovely and unique lady betrothed to and bewitched by her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. She married him in 1840 and bore him nine children who married into royal families in Spain, Russia, and Germany. She carried a genetic mutation not evident in either side of her family. It was hemophilia. This “Grandmother of Europe” seeded the various cousins complicit in the breach of diplomacy which enabled and fueled World War I.
Stephen N. Miller is White House deputy chief of staff for policy and the United States homeland security advisor since 2025. He is a dangerous intellectual hemophiliac. His xenophobic political beliefs and racial prejudices are inherited, diseased, unstable, and unsustainable. They also are unfair and unattractive.
He writes the most vitriolic portions of the anti-immigration Royal Rants that Ding Dong Donny manages to cherry-pick off his teleprompter. The ones that set unattainable capture quotas for ICE and Border Patrol operations. Those that allow and encourage use of militia and military force against domestic targets of opportunity. Those that advocate separation and detention of members of families with an adult found, suspected, accused, and detained for being guilty of working while brown.
It is time to cage the rat and stop the bleeding.
We can do that.
A Fickle Fair Wind and a Faithless Following Sea
In 1966, the Lennon-McCartney team wrote and recorded “Eleanor Rigby.” The song is a definitive and bittersweet anthem to isolation. It wondered from whence came all the lonely people.
On 27 Apr 1993, K. T. Oslin released a country music album entitled “Greatest Hits: Songs from an Aging Sex Bomb.” It included a song she and Randy Goodrum composed. It suggested compulsion drove isolation. Those caught in its vice are “dining with a demon they can’t control”:
“’Cause they’re trying to fill the empty part thirsting for happiness
Drowning in their own excess
They’re starving
From a hungry heart.”
On 07 May 1980, Desperate Donny went public with another page from his daddy’s despicable playbook. For the next decade, when he was under scrutiny, he would have his alias (John Barron) act as a spokesman in telephone interviews with supportive media willing to allow him to justify his actions in the ear of favored listening audiences. Attention is his drug of choice. He is addicted to it. He needs and turns to approval as does a plant to sunlight.
The Big Guy is a case study in insecurity. He is a leaking vessel which cannot be filled. All nations and some sports organizations know how to gain his attention and favor--flatter his brand and enrich his holdings.
He is in failing health and beset by diminishing mental acuity. His second term in office has delivered no benefit to 92% of the governed. The natives are getting hungry, scared, and crabby.
He has not held one of his self-soothing MAGA rallies in the last seven of the first ten months of his second term. He substitutes private pay to play events for the large and loud public gatherings of the faithful. He is drowning in his own excesses. His hungry heart is ravenous.
He has lost a fair wind and his once following sea.
He is frightened, lonely and dangerous.
The Epstein files will continue to trouble him. Gerrymandering may not save him from an independent congress ready, able, willing, and eager to reclaim and use its Article One powers. He is being played for a fool by his “friends” in Israel, Russia, and the Arab states.
During his first term in high office, his son-in-law made $2 billion dollars from the Abraham Accords.
His second term intermeddling in the regional conflicts in foreign lands has produced two more grandiose and blatantly self-serving “Peace Plans:”
1. One is not working (Gaza); and,
2. The other is objectionable (Ukraine)
His TACO tariffs have made a hash of world trade and market futures. The noose of judicial constraint is tightening as pleadings against the administration’s unlawful policies, programs, and operations gain a level of merit that the high court cannot avoid.
In early Dec 25, the administration published a 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (November 2025). The proposed Strategy is neither wise nor workable. In his 07 Dec 25 Substack posting (To the Contrary), Charlie Sykes notes that the Traitor Trump “prioritizes culture war issues, embraces identitarian dogma, moves us closer to Russia, and signals abandonment of Europe.”
Anthem
The only way past the fact and consequences of Election 2024 is to resist implementation of the Project 2025 playbook in every place and on every point all the time.
Efforts to neutralize President Crazy Pants most appropriately and effectively focus on function and purpose, not personality. We the People need to fumigate the office of the presidency. And all the rats despoiling and distorting its proper role.
It is a three-step process:
1. Election 2026: Restore a responsible and responsive Congress;
2. Election 2028: Find and elect a person of vision, good character, and determined intention to bend the arc ot history toward a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people that does not perish from the earth;
3. Thereafter: Return the rule of law to a position that favors life, liberty, security, welfare, and the pursuit of happiness for the governed.
Let us covenant to continue to remember ourselves well as we push through and past the Time of Trump Troubles. Let us honor and harness our indivisible Power of One to use our person and our purse to delay, divert, dismantle, and demolish attacks on our human rights and constitutional protections. Let us find and band with like minds and common objectives. Let us grow in number, force, and coverage. Let us become undeniable. Let us covenant to:
Be faithful
Be firm
Be resolved
Be present
Be strategic
And, further, to:
Rise
Remain
Resist
Persist
Prevail
And, to continue to wonder and ask— “What’s in those Epstein files?”
Go, team, go.
From your pen to fate’s ear, Georgia. Thank you for your thoughtful and vigorous comments. I appreciate them and your support.
Well, my very dear and totally really truly awesome friend—WHAT a way to start my day!!! Thank you. (Purr, purr, purr.)