Retrograde Trump

And An Unconditional Congressional Surrender

BILL ASTORE

JUL 22, 2026

Odds and ends from my notebook:

• Donald Trump’s vision as president is aggressively retrograde. He wants to make America more white, less diverse, more violent, less tolerant, more fearful, less accepting, again. In short, he wants to make America far less great.
• When it comes to the U.S. Constitution, the Trump administration is assertively renegade.
• The U.S. government has become something of a moral midget with a distastefully large military hammer. Under such conditions, what could possibly go wrong?
• Authorizing war is supposed to be a Congressional act, an exercise of the people’s will. While Trump can’t get Iran’s unconditional surrender, he has certainly gained the unconditional surrender of Congress.
• Maybe the Biden and Trump administrations’ blank-check support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has something to do with the fact that America knows something about being a genocidal expansionist state that sees indigenous people as “savages.”
• Data, data, everywhere, but intelligence, empathy, judgment and compassion are increasingly difficult to find.
• Two or three times a year, I buy a couple of lottery tickets for fun. They are of course a regressive tax on the working classes. They represent the selling of (largely) false hope. And my state of Massachusetts has something like 100 or so lottery tickets you can buy with a face value from $1 to $50. Yes — $50 lottery tickets! Something about this is so wrong and exploitative. And of course now you have “Draft Kings” and all the “legal” betting on sports. It’s a system designed to impoverish workers and enrich the already rich, the reverse of what we should have. And it’s the working classes who get sent to die in America’s various illegal wars, also for the benefit of the rich, as the latter stay home with heel spurs and “other priorities.”
• It’s fascinating that as oil and gas prices soar due to the Trump administration’s warmongering policies, there’s been absolutely no talk of conservation or cutting back on consumption of fossil fuels. It’s “drill, baby, drill” or even steal, baby, steal (as in commandeering oil tankers on the high seas).
• I find it shameful that dead American troops are used to justify further attacks on Iran that might lead to yet more dead American troops. For what, exactly?
• The proposed merger of the Israeli and U.S. militaries (Section 224, now 219, of the NDAA, and Section 1217 in the Senate) includes an Executive Agent who’d report directly to the Secretary of Defense, in this case Pete Hegseth, with no Congressional oversight. Once again, Congress willingly abdicates its responsibilities, this time to a foreign power. The U.S. military and intelligence agencies should not be intermingled with those of any foreign power, yet Congress is preparing to do exactly that with Israel.
• Pete Hegseth testified the Iran War has cost roughly $38 billion so far. The true figure is closer to $100 billion. The self-styled Secretary of War can’t do basic math.
• When escalation is seen as a way to end wars, whether with Iran or between Russia and Ukraine, my mind goes back to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the Israeli warning: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Deep penetrations will be met with deep penetrations. (That was the Israeli response to Egyptian incursions in the Sinai Peninsula.) Which brings me to an eye for an eye and pretty soon we’ll all be blind. 
• Put differently, as David Bowie sang for the movie “Cat People,” it’s like putting out fire with gasoline. Or with Tomahawk and Hellfire missiles. It doesn’t work.