Just when half of Americans think the country cannot sink lower, President Trump, a convicted felon and rapist, is lecturing voters about law and order.
This epitomizes irony and illustrates the decline in American values, ethics, and governance.
The U.S. is in a decline for a simple reason: it elected Trump, a well-known sociopath and criminal, to the presidency TWICE, not just once.
The fact that Americans returned an apparent mental case to the presidency is a failure of the two-party political system, as it is evidence that half the population hates the everyday workings of the federal and state governments.
Americans are not particularly well versed in politics and finance, let alone geopolitics and political philosophy. Still, they sure will follow a hateful demagogue over the cliff if he panders to their prejudices about poor people, immigrants, laze government workers, welfare queens, leftists and communists, and anyone who has a grievance they cannot understand, or else they need to externalize their shortcomings.
Cannot get a raise or a better job? Are you jealous of federal workers with pensions and benefits? Are you afraid of losing a job to an immigrant being paid less? Can’t afford a new car? Are food prices too high? Are you afraid of communists, leftists, gays, or transgender people? No problem. Trump has a solution. It makes no difference if it makes sense. It is even better if it makes no sense. That’s Trump’s attraction.
He wants you to become mentally unbalanced, hateful, and simplistic. If that happens and you start to repeat the same word five times in three sentences or make claims that “nobody has ever seen anything like it” or”this will be the best ever,” you will fit right into Trump’s insane world.
If you think Trump is a great businessman and believe his fake business history, remember that Tony Schwartz ghostwrote the 1987 book The Art of the Deal. Schwartz now says he is embarrassed that he helped create a fake persona for a sociopath. Says Schwartz, “I put lipstick on a pig.” He now says he feels “great remorse” about trying to elevate Trump into respectability.
Or, if you think Trump is a great investor, one recent study found that if Trump had invested his inheritance from his father, he would have more money if he invested in a stock index fund than with all of his failed real estate deals, bankruptcies, and other money-losing scams. The New York Times reported that Trump “received at least $413 million from his father over the decades, much of that through dubious tax dodges, including outright fraud.” (Trump’s companies have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection seven times.) 
Pundits who wrote about Trump’s 100-minute State of the Union speech last night had great observations about his lies and inconsistencies. Still, none mentioned the fact that he is a convicted felon who was lecturing Americans about law and order.
Didn’t they find that strange? That was the first time in American history that a criminal addressed Congress as president, yet not one New York Times editorial commentator noted this nadir in American history.
America began its slide well before Trump was first elected in 2017. This decline spans weak leaders from both parties: Bill Clinton, George Bush I, George Bush II, and Barack Obama and their failures in leadership and in recognizing the growing wealth disparity, unwarranted invasions and wars, and catering to the Deep State (yes, Dems, there is one) who is unaccountable and wastes billions and kills millions.
Fentanyl As A Powerful Political Wedge Issue
Take the case of fentanyl, a deadly drug that has become the latest excuse again to ramp up the failed 50-year-old War on Drugs. Fentanyl is used as an excuse to ramp up border walls, anti-immigrant sentiment, tariffs, and myths about a foreign invasion of insane criminals that can re-invigorate the whole federal and state DEA-CIA-Homeland Security-intelligence community Deep State. The reason: So they can get more money to keep following the same War on Drugs playbook that has not worked for the past 50 years.
Do we need to try something new to combat drug smuggling? The Deep State says, “No way.”
What we do every day works great, the DEA-CIA-intelligence groups say, even though the War on Drugs started in its modern form in 1972 under President Nixon, who wanted to divert public opinion against the failing war in Vietnam. Like many things in the federal government that funnel billions into the military-industrial complex, the War on Drugs was the Trojan Horse that became a money-printing machine for scores of hidden agencies and programs worldwide.
It provides great cover to topple governments, start wars, assassinate people, threaten other nations, and sow fear into the American people. Fear is an excellent emotion for politicians. Are you afraid of meeting a gay or transgender person in an elevator? Don’t worry. The transgender population in the U.S. is 0.5% (or 1.5 million people), and it is 7% for gays (including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender). This means the average American will live their entire lifespan (75 years for men and 80 years for women) without ever meeting a gay or transgender person face-to-face.
Fentanyl became a top-drawer public health issue when it started to be used by poor Caucasians in Middle America. According to Dr. David Feillin of the Yale School of Medicine, opioid misuse is not new. Still, its misuse spread rapidly when it began to be prescribed liberally and inappropriately by doctors and a drug company, Purdue Pharmaceutical.
“Over the years, the misused opioid changed from opium to morphine to heroin, which grew in prevalence during the 1960s and 1970s. And then, in the 2000s, we saw a surge of prescription opioids that were being diverted from those that were prescribed to people for chronic pain [to the illicit marketplace]; people started misusing the diverted supply instead of—or in addition to—heroin,” Dr. Feillin said.
Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid that’s 50 times stronger than heroin and 80-100 times stronger than morphine. It is cheap to produce and can be combined with into other drugs like heroin, cocaine, and crack cocaine.
Like the path of other feel-good drugs, fentanyl found its user pattern that helped shape its political use. “The opioid overdose story in the U.S. was young, white, and rural for a long time, but the story is changing, especially for older Black adults, according to Joel Segel, associate professor of health policy and administration at Penn State University.
“In Western and Midwestern states, Black individuals had lower overdose death rates than white individuals before the (COVID) pandemic but higher rates since 2020. In Southern states, by contrast, Black individuals had consistently lower drug overdose death rates than their white counterparts at every age,” the Penn State study found. Overdose deaths were highest in Montana, Nevada, Utah, and South Dakota, according to the Centers for Disease Control from September 2023- to September 2024.
Trump, Fentynal, Tariffs, and Lies
So, as Trump bungles his way through national policy, Americans will suffer from higher taxes, more social and financial anxiety, risks from unexpected places, and declining confidence that the nation is on the right track.
Trump’s DOGE poss will never investigate the waste, fraud, and abuse built into the War on Drugs. That investigation is the portal into the Deep State, and DOGE does not want to interfere with its inner workings.
Instead, DOGE will harass average working Americans who have little recourse to job security. The “little people” are who Trump harasses.
If DOGE were serious, they would investigate the $1 trillion, 50-year-old failed War on Drugs. That would uncover the preventive actions against opioids and how they have not worked.
It’s time for a new approach, but the Republicans oppose anything new, especially if it improves the lives of average Americans. Writing in a June 29, 2020, Policy Analysis article by Josh Bowers and Daniel Abrahamson (“Kicking the Habit the Opioid Crisis and America’s Addiction to Prohibition”) by the conservative Cato Institute, law professors Josh Bowers and Daniel Abrahamson wrote that “The drug-free society is a pipe dream. If, instead, we were to acknowledge that drugs are an often (but not always) unfortunate fact of life, we might come to regard drug misuse, abuse, dependence, and addiction for what they are—questions of health, not morality, and social policy, not penology.
“However, under the DEA umbrella, the mandate to eradicate drugs in the United States became, in practice, a mandate to eliminate certain drug users. These users were often minorities and the poor,” Bowers and Abrahamson wrote.
This has not changed. Under Trump, fentanyl is only a prop to terrorize other nations for concessions only he wants or understands. Next week, fentanyl will be replaced by another impending danger. We will see a weekly crisis from this unstable leader for the next four years.
