A national crime wave? Trump is correct.

I haven't much time today — still sojourning in lovely southern Quebec with even lovelier Québécois friends of mountainous generosity and kindness — a sojourn extended, perhaps, by a rather curious, push-pull combo — Air Canada's lockout of striking flight attendants this Saturday — 36 hours before my booked, return flight to the former Weimar Republic.

That said, I'll say again I'm short on time; enough for only one observation (local travels today, also pre-scheduled). I shall begin with an apology, for the observation is nothing more than self-evident knowledge. I raise it merely because, though monstrously obvious, as knowledge it appears to be anything but commonplace throughout the American volk. To wit ...

The historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose superb newsletter I just read: "Yesterday MSNBC ran a column of statistics fact-checking Trump live during his press conference, showing that crime in Washington, D.C.—and across the country—is falling significantly, despite Trump’s claim that we are in a crime wave."

And there you have it. Even network fact-checkers were dreadfully bereft of seeing what was, is, and shall remain right in front of their face: The United States is undergoing a massive crime wave. Its tinpot generalissimo and discolored führer has unleashed a staggering barrage of flagrant unconstitutionalities, statutory violations and otherwise criminally impeachable indecencies with Adolfian rapidity.

Richardson alludes proleptically to what requires no prognosis: "Trump’s assumption of control over the Washington, D.C., police force and his calling out of the D.C. National Guard [and plans for a 'Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force': affectionately, an American Sturmabteilung, or brown-shirted street militia] are ... an attempt to create a dictatorship as Project 2025 prescribed."

There are failed attempts, struggling attempts and successful attempts, the latter known as faits accomplis. How French, or Québécois, of them, one might say, though in Trump's case they're downright Teutonic. Is this not self-evident? Known and knowable? Has His Bloated Pomposity yet met with a discouraging counterforce? Does one even lie stealthily in the wings?

You know, I know, every American should know — the answer is no. But such knowledge escapes the commonplace, notwithstanding that Trump's criminality is overt, daily, and despotically vast. For Christ's sake, people — no, for your own sake — wake the fuck up, take a whiff, the dictatorial wretchedness of it all.

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