Retired While on Active Duty
By: Nadin Brzezinski
Tags: Trump, Cyber Attack, Covid 19, Right Wing, Russia

There is a military saying about people who stop doing their job as they wait the final months until retirement. Since it is not much that anybody can do, these people just do the bare minimum they can to avoid getting in trouble. The President of the United States, while seething because we the people gave him a pink slip, has retired while on active duty. He abandoned the bridge while the ship takes on water, the crew is dying and we have a raging fire taking over the ship of state.

Usually, people who do that while in nondangerous rear duty are despised within their units, But abandoning the bridge while we have multiple crises is downright criminal. We know the president has never been interested in the job. He never grew into it. Now he is angry since we the people fired him and he continues to claim that he won the election. He even said, at some point, that he was not going to leave the White House when Joe Biden takes the oath of office on January 20th. Whether this is a base move, to keep them active and in fantasy land, or he believes it, does not matter. The fact is that his base believes the next president is not legitimate. This is one of Donald Trump’s legacies. This is a direct attack on democracy. For you here is a link to facts.

However, this attack on democracy is not limited to Trump. Elections are fair and clean as long as they win. This is a project from a right-wing that is intent on destroying the American political system if they cannot rule from a minority position. But what about President Donald Trump? We are in the midst of a few crises that he still ignores. The most obvious is the pandemic, which continues to kill Americans at an exponentail rate. Given that they wanted to create a herd immunity by getting people sick, this one actually makes some sense. If you believe the best way to deal with this is to infect as many people as you can, then ignoring disease and death makes sense. This is criminal disregard for human life, and coming from the so-called party of life it is a sad reflection on them. It is a true standard that it is not a single human life that they believe in. It is just birth that they understand as a political tool.

This is not a good thing to be said, and historians will have to judge the president and his party. This is a period of wanton disregard for the nation. As tragic as this is if this was the only crisis, fine. Trump never had his heart on responding to the pandemic. This may very include the idea of herd immunity, in which case, they achieved the bad parts of it. Also, Republicans prefer money to human life and this crisis has made this crystal clear. In my view, they also enacted a form of soft eugenics, but this point is harder to prove. After all, most Americans are not familiar with the ugly bits of history where this was openly embraced.

The Russian Hack

But there is more. There is a wanton disregard to the worst penetration of critical cyber-infrastructure in modern American history. This comes via Moscow and has been ongoing for at least nine months. As usual, the president is not responding or challenging Vladimir Putin. It is as if the president does not care or he was working for a foreign power. Yes, this would be, if proven, treason. I believe that by his lack of interest in anything beyond his person and his golf course, Putin is able to do whatever he wants to the United States. He knows the current sheriff is asleep at the job, and the keys that protect the nation are there for the taking.

This cyber-attack is not the first on the United States, and will likely leave a lot of code-behind. This code is there to be activated in case of kinetic conflict, meaning war. Some of our members of Congress have compared this to an act of war, not that the president will say a thing. The president is once again, sleeping at the wheel. He cares little about the job but wants to keep it. It is somewhat of a mystery except that we know he has legal exposure, and some may expire with a second term.

This has also been called a cyber-Pearl Harbor, in other words, the opening salvo of a war. . We have no idea how deep the Russians are, or what they control. This is not just American agencies, like the Department of Energy. They have penetrated finance, which could destabilize the country in other ways. This is what is happening under this president’s watch and he has yet to address this issue.

According to Al Jazeera English:

“I would imagine that the incoming administration wants a menu of what the options are and then is going to choose,” said Sarah Mendelson, a Carnegie Mellon University public policy professor and former US ambassador to the UN’s Economic and Social Council. “Is there a graduated assault? Is there an all-out assault? How much out of the gate do you want to do?” To be sure, it is not uncommon for administrations to refrain from levelling public accusations of blame for hacks until they have accumulated enough evidence. Here, US officials say they only recently became aware of devastating breaches at multiple government agencies in which foreign intelligence agents rooted around undetected for as much as nine months. But Trump’s response, or lack thereof, is being closely watched because of his preoccupation with a fruitless effort to overturn the results of last month’s elections and because of his refusal to publicly acknowledge that Russian hackers interfered in the 2016 presidential election in his favour. Exactly what action Biden might take is unclear, or how his response might be shaped by criticism that the Obama administration did not act aggressively enough to thwart interference in 2016. He offered clues in a statement on Thursday, saying his administration would be proactive in preventing cyberattacks and impose costs on any adversaries behind them.

This is why this president is making all this even more dangerous. When somebody retires while on active duty, it has an effect on command readiness. This is why people in the military despise people who do this. This president is putting national security and the health of safety of Americans at risk. Or to clarify, increasingly so.

The last president to do this, sort of, was Herbert Hoover, who made the depression far worst than it should have been. It was on purpose to make life difficult for the incoming Roosevelt administration. Trump is leaving a worse mess for the incoming Biden administration. This literally is the definition of selfishness and pettiness. Some may even call it treason. However, this will not end in a court. What will happen though, is that Trump will pardon friends and donors. That is the only concern he still has. Oh and tv ratings. However, one has to ask why is it that this president has never cared about Russia. Could it be his business or loans from Russian banks and the mafia?