When silence implies consent | Mary Sheehy Moe

I know: Everything. Everywhere. All at once. All the time. The whiplash alone is painful. We all want to look away, distract ourselves somehow … but can we afford to?

This April, our president’s debacle production has spiked dramatically. April Fools Day began with him trying to glower the Supreme Court into doing his bidding on birthright citizenship. It ended with his finally formally addressing the nation on why he waged war with Iran and when it will end. It was his usual bob-and-weave, although that expression conveys an agility that was evident neither mentally nor physically in the man behind the podium.

He always prefers the path of diplomacy, he assured us (but he continually sends two people with no diplomatic credentials and glaring conflicts of interest to negotiating for “us”).

The Strait of Hormuz is not our problem, he assured us. We don’t need it. If other countries do, they should “grab it and cherish it.” Or just wait and it will “open up naturally.” Sheesh.

When will the war end? “Shortly, very shortly,” he assured us. “Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.” Hmmm. From the Stone Age through World War II, destruction as a solution has never worked out well.

But Trump was just warming up for Easter. Having already dropped every other kind of bomb on Iran, he saved the f-bomb for Christianity’s holiest day. Genius! It distracted us from the fact that his accompanying threat not only contradicted his claim four days earlier that we have no interest in the Strait of Hormuz but also constitutes a war crime.

On to the Easter Egg Roll, where a life-sized Easter bunny added to the surrealism of a president of the United States, addressing an audience replete with young children, gloating about bombing missions, bad-mouthing his predecessor, and enticing autograph requests with promises the kids could sell his autograph for $25,000 on eBay. (Ah, where is Elon Musk’s 4-year-old “shush-man” when you really need him?)

The next day was the capper. Sometime before dawn, Trump tweeted: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” He gave Iran till 8 p.m. EST (prime time, of course) to avoid genocide.

If you believe this was just a negotiating tactic, please reread “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Personally, I believe this boy IS the wolf. He has reauthorized the genocidal “solution” our country led the way in ending after WWII by creating a rules-based international order. The threat is beyond shameful. It’s inexcusable. The guy’s gotta go.

Invoke the 25th Amendment? That would require the vice president to act, and at that moment Vance was in Hungary of all places, assuring Hungarians their corrupt leader had our president’s full-throated support. (The kiss of death, it turns out. The rest of the world sees what we refuse to.)

Impeachment? We need truly moral majorities in both houses of Congress to accomplish that, which will take a length of time we may not have. But to say nothing, do nothing, in response to the inexcusable is to normalize it. So after reading Trump’s April 7 genocidal threat, three Montanans I know wrote their congressmen, imploring them to reign in this madman at last.

Within seconds of one another, they received exactly the same response from Sen. Sheehy that afternoon. After schooling them using Cliff’s Notes from the April Fools Day Address, Sheehy closed with this dismissal of their concern: “I will oppose any action to restrict President Trump’s efforts to end the radical Iranian threat once and for all.” Wow. Even genocide?

Now, between tweeting sacrilegious memes, pillorying the Pope, and fawning over the Arc de Trump, the president plunges us once more into a hokey-pokey between recklessness and fecklessness. He has neither the attention span nor the patience to enter into the long-term regime change in Iran that, thanks to him, is now the only way Americans will ever be safe again.

And while the world watches, jaws dropped, we resume our roles as children cowering in the back seat, covering our eyes while our drunken uncle drives us … somewhere.