While America Slept

The post's title is taken from While England Slept, a collection of Winston Churchill's 1930s speeches warning of war with Nazi Germany and his nation's unpreparedness. Harvard student John Kennedy also borrowed from the prime minister in Why England Slept, his 1940 senior thesis later published in book form.

The why of America's oblivious slumber during this initial phase of Trump's authoritarian scheme will by sorted out by historians with the better clarity of mind that comes with distance. We're too close to it. While is different. Sleepless Americans see vividly and in real time the atrocious blundering abroad and anti-constitutional crimes committed by the self-declared despot. Consider only today's news.

The Times' National security and diplomatic correspondents David Sanger and Steven Erlanger write that an "epochal breach appears to be opening in the Western alliance." The paper is fond of verbs that soften — appears, seems, suggests — even when an epochal breach is a hard fact. Infuriating our NATO partners is Trump's imminent deal with fellow autocrat Vladimir Putin granting Russia one-fifth of Ukraine, the remainder to follow. (As past "compensation" for America's support of Ukraine, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in a

Kyiv meeting last week with President Volodymyr Zelensky, requested that "the United States be granted a 50 percent interest in all of Ukraine’s mineral resources, including graphite, lithium and uranium.")

"The speed of [Trump's] embrace of Mr. Putin shocked" European attendees at the Munich Security Conference, continue Sanger and Erlanger. JD Vance disgusted them. He "embraced" the continent's far-right parties so admired by Putin and bought into the latter's "narrative of an aggressive NATO infringing on a broader Russian sphere of influence." He also delivered "a blistering attack on European democracy." Said German parliamentarian Norbert Röttgen, "The spirit of the Vance speech was hostility."

Domestically, Trump is ordering the same level of stupidity, and lawlessly. In 2016 Congress required by statute that the head of the independent Office of Special Counsel — currently, Hampton Dellinger — would serve a five-year term and could be fired "only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office." Trump fired him anyway. He did so in a "one-sentence email" to Dellinger, giving no reason.

The regime's response to a temporary restraining order was that the "inarguable reading of the text is that the statute is unconstitutional," as the order's astonished federal judge wrote. A U.S. Court of Appeals panel agreed in astonishment. The matter is now in the Trumpian hands of the U.S. Supreme Court, expected to rule in days. Yet the justices must keep in mind that as America's dictator declared Saturday, "He who saves his Country does not violate any law."

With considerable and compassionate speed I'll run through three other stories in this morning's Times. When acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove III insisted that the criminal case against NYC Mayor Eric Adams be dropped by DOJ prosecutors — who resisted the pressure as "deeply unethical" — he claimed the indictment appeared political but at any rate closing the case on a "mayor who wanted to help deport undocumented immigrants outweighed convicting him of taking bribes."

In other news while America slept, the wholly ignorant-of-government non-government "employee" Elon Musk is now being handed the keys to Internal Revenue Service files containing "the private financial data tied to millions of Americans, including their tax returns, Social Security numbers, addresses, banking details and employment information." The reason, said a Reich Chancellery spokesman, is that "waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long, It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it" (italics mine). Hence none of the deeply entrenched fraud is known, nor will it be.

Also in the annals of dictatorial Trumpian stupidity is this: Only after sacking several hundred employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration last week did the regime realize that the agency, among other duties,"maintains, refurbishes and keeps safe the United States’ more than 3,000 nuclear warheads." Some workers were then rehired but others couldn't be found because "they were shut off from their federal government email accounts."

So goes the Trumpisn nightmare in what are merely its opening scenes: the uglification of America's global standing, the hideous alignment with Putin's brutality, the middle-finger aimed at the law, the brazen lying and official imbecility. Each should stagger the conscience of every American. Instead, many are sleeping through every one of them.