The last straw


~by Colleen O’Brien

President Trump has accomplished many dastardly actions in his 10-year takeover of the American media, its listeners and the country we live in that is a work in process of humans living together equably. Even during the four years  Joe Biden was president, Trump was a daily pain in the heart, soul and brain of thinking Americans.
He was responsible for many deaths during his first administration because of his attempts to hide facts of the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.

He continues to encourage? allow? ignore? murders by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) men as they round up what is supposed to be illegal-entry immigrants of the rapist, murdering and thieving kind. During the first 100 days of his current time in office, 52 people have died in ICE custody. 

He has started a war in which Americans have been killed, but we don’t know how many because it changes from 14 to 18 and back to 14 within a week, according to the Dept. of War head Pete Hegseth; or 21 according to the Pentagon’s official Defense Casualty Analysis System; or 23 according to the Washington Post. MilitarySpend.org, lists 9,047 killed in the war since Feb. 28, 2026.

On his first day in office in 2025, he froze money for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Its purpose was to alleviate poverty and disease by offering aid to developing countries. Its annual costs over the decades made up less than one percent of U.S. annual gross domestic product. Trump’s closure triggered severe global humanitarian and health crises leading to millions of deaths and new preventable infections. [NPR]

The cost of the war and the rising of prices of all products because of fuel shortages, plus tariffs applied to trading partners of the U.S., created financial woes verging on scary for middle class and poor people: food or gasoline? medical care at all? rent/mortgage or homeless? These are what the populace worries about because of one thoughtless old braggart who is an ideal frontman on how to trash a democracy.


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This past Saturday, Oct. 10, he massacred 430 trees on the East Potomac Golf Links, a public course across the river from the National Mall. The prior afternoon at 4:55 p.m., his administration gave notice in a court filing that he would be cutting down trees the next day, which happened to be the first day of the three-day Christopher Columbus and Indigenous Peoples’ Day. This is important, the reason for the timing being that few people pay attention to politics on Fridays, especially if it’s a three-day holiday weekend.


Even though Judge Ana Reyes in a prior court order said she expected the administration to notify the court before removing more than 10 trees, 430 historic pines, maples and oaks were chain-sawed before heavy rain saved a few of the 529 sentenced trees. Superintendent Kevin Griess of National Mall and Memorial Park Gardens was told by the workers that about 300 more trees needed to go. The vague number of tree-cuttings is temporarily paused under a new court order, which sounds good but seldom means much to a man who has no respect for the law

The reason for the end of those stately long-lived trees on a public golf course is that a weak-minded, would-be king who cheats at golf wants a championship-level course with no trees. He probably wants a gold-dusted clubhouse, too.

Trees are not humans, but a sneaky, unnatural death of them is revolting. On top of the horrendous number of human casualties caused by this old man, he has taken out a small forest of trees on a whim. Learning of this casual decimation after the thousands of humans wasted in death is so sickening, I finally weep.

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