Another day, another tacky, thoughtless gesture. Trump is all caught up in the festivities today, evidently oblivious to the two assassinations in Minnesota and the list of other Minnesota lawmakers found on the suspect, indicating that he intended to kill Governor Walz and Congresswoman Omar, among others. The problem with all this is that this is not reality TV, which is scripted, or even fictional TV, where characters die all the time but the actors get up and go play somebody else the next week. The two dead legislators are gone forever. I don’t know if Trump can parse that. In any event, he doesn’t seem consumed with the tragedy, here’s what he’s busy doing.
Today is flag day. Here is Trump violating the flag code by signing his name on it.
pic.twitter.com/cAhG1EYxva— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) June 14, 2025
At a time of national tragedy, he plays with a flag. At a time when wars continue to break out, he has a vanity parade. This is all cosplaying and play acting to him. Simply, we have no leadership in Washington right now. The only person in Trump’s circle who is knowledgable about how things actually work is Marco Rubio and you see how he’s performing these days. He waffles on something as basic as whether we’re at war with Iran or not.
That may hold for a day or two but get ready for the return punch. Here’s what happened in Iran this morning.
Iran will close the Strait of Hormuz and the Americans will understand that they are dependent on this region of the globe.
— Isabelle De Saint Aubin🇨🇵⚜ (@bluemint5011) June 14, 2025
That could happen and a lot worse. Iran will not turn a blind eye to the United States. At the very least they believe we are complicit at the worst they think that we’re weak and vulnerable and who can blame them for that assessment? We’ve been through tough times before but this is different.
But two things, many historians suggest, distinguish this moment from other troubled times in our past. The first is the sheer number of conflagrations taking place at once — not only in the United States but also around the world. In Los Angeles, a U.S. senator, Alex Padilla of California, a Democrat, was pushed to the ground and handcuffed Thursday after trying to confront Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, about the immigration raids. Hours later, Israel launched its first airstrikes on Iran, and Iran retaliated Friday, launching scores of missiles, some of which broke through air defenses in and around Tel Aviv.
“We live in highly disruptive times,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Even before this week, Naftali argued, the world order was destabilized as Trump tore up trade deals and foreign alliances, and the United States, Russia and China moved to “take advantage of worldwide changes for their own interests, adding to the velocity of disruption.”
The second thing is Trump himself. At fraught moments like this, it normally falls to the president to step up as the reassuring figure, whether it was George W. Bush heading to downtown Manhattan after the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, or Bill Clinton going to Oklahoma City after a truck bomb destroyed a nine-story federal building and killed 168 people in 1995.
Not Trump. When Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democrat of California, protested the dispatching of the National Guard to Los Angeles, the president responded by ordering even more members of the guard to the city, followed by a contingent of Marines. When told that the “No Kings” weekend protests might spill into Washington on Saturday, Trump warned that anyone trying to interfere with his military parade, which coincides with his 79th birthday, will be met with “a very big force.”
“What really stands out to me now is that the biggest source of chaos is the president himself,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton University. “Rather than acting as a force to try to bring some kind of reconciliation, calm and stability, he is fueling the fires.”
Naftali argued that Trump could “end most of the tension single-handedly.”
“But he revels in confrontation, and he is resentful and vengeful in a way he wasn’t quite in 2017,” Naftali said. He added, “No wonder many Americans are on edge when our commander in chief is determined to put tanks on the streets of D.C. and eager to declare emergencies to send masked and armed federal or federalized forces almost everywhere else.”
We have an idiot child at the helm of our democracy and things are heating up badly after less than five months in office. Democracy is a fragile thing. People, however, are resilient. We’re going to find out in days to come if our current generation of Americans has the mettle that our forebearers had and whether we can keep this republic. If we can survive Trump and MAGA, we can survive damn near anything.
