Donald Trump Is a National Emergency

All hands on deck; the entire nation, including conservatives, must focus on his immediate removal from office

Licensed from Adobe Stock

A couple of weeks ago, a formation of Blackhawk helicopters buzzed the roofs of my Atlanta neighborhood, and it got me thinking…¹

Yesterday, I posted a short piece that focused mostly on an infographic issued by the American military revealing the massive arsenal the United States has dropped into the Southern Hemisphere.²

It’s nothing less than an invasion force, although it’s one designed for the 1950s (Make America Great Again!), not modern, drone era warfare.

Here it is again in case you missed it:

See bottom of graphic for source

One of my favorite commenters on Substack, Wild Lion*esses Pride by Jay, to whom I subscribe, pointed out that this force isn’t just a show-and-tell force. It’s designed for larger prey, such as the Panama Canal, which Trump has said he covets.³

The canal, of course, belongs to Panama through the Carter-Torrijos Treaties, which were signed after a vote requiring two-thirds of the U.S. Senate in 1978.

My regular readers know what’s coming: I’m about to plop a little history into your lap. Worry not, my friends, it’s brief. And history is how we learn what may happen next.

What the heck is a Canal Zone?

The Panama Canal Zone was created by the United States with the help of Theodore Roosevelt’s big stick.

The U.S. wanted to build a canal across a tiny piece of land in what, in the early 1900s, was part of Colombia.

Geographers call this kind of land an isthmus, which is a piece of land such that if you had a really big saw and were able to use it to cut through the land, you’d have what geographers call a strait, which is a narrow stretch of water connecting two larger bodies of water.

An isthmus is a very cool geographical feature, although it can get a tad windy if you like beach strolls.

American imperialists looked at this tiny stretch of land and thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could cut the time it takes for merchant ships from Europe to trade with Asia?”

It wasn’t a particularly new idea. Conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa thought of it, too, way back in the early 1500s.

Programming note:

Now I have an earworm, so here’s a musical interlude you can play while reading the rest of this article, so you can have it, too.

Back and forth the idea went, involving minutia only hardcore historians would be interested in, until the Spanish Empire largely fell apart following its defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Excited like a southern Republican discovering a new sex toy after instituting book bans, Teddy Roosevelt dialed up the leaders of Colombia and told them if they didn’t want to cede a parcel of land to the U.S. to build the long-desired canal, he might just have to support some of those (new!) rebels in Panama, and oh my gosh, they might just decide to form their own country!

“Wait!” Colombian leaders yelped. “Uncle!”

“Great,” said Teddy, “I’ll send a few of my men down to haggle out the terms of the thing.”

They haggled, but nothing satisfactory to both sides came, and Teddy, growing impatient because presidents back in those days had to get things done to be re-elected, became flustered. Action was required.

“Viva U.S. Panama Canal Zone!” became the battle cry of a boisterous crew of rebels in Panama. Before long, voila! (There were still a lot of French around there in those days.) A new country called the Republic of Panama was born in 1903.

The leaders of the new country loved their new beautiful digs so much, with its jungles and beaches and such, that they decided it would be cool to split it in half and give the United States a 20-mile-wide zone across an isthmus so that Teddy could fulfill his dream of blasting the place apart and making a…

…strait!

I don’t know about you, but I do love a good terraforming story.

Here’s another sign the new country’s leaders loved their fledgling nation: They included a cool provision in their Constitution that if the local people got restive, the United States could send in troops to straighten things out. I mean, come on, who wouldn’t love to have their country carved into two? Be reasonable, people.

Besides. Sometimes, bigger nations have to help smaller ones decide what’s best for them.

Cartoon titled, “Go Away, Little Man” by Charles Green Bush, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Canal building commenced soon after.

Just to be sure construction went according to plan, Teddy named the Secretary of War the construction manager of the canal in 1904.

Sidebar

No, Kegsbreath did not invent the term “Secretary of War.” There really was a War Department in the good old days.

Not to be outdone, President Woodrow Wilson said to his friends, “Why not just make the Secretary of War the governor of the whole place?”

Can you imagine if they gave Kegsbreath such control? There’d be a bar at every palm tree. Now that I think about it, that’s not such a bad idea.

Anyhoo, the U.S. finished its terraforming project in 1914 in the newly carved out land, which was by then officially U.S. territory.

Globe map by Addicted04, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; all others public domain. Image smashup by author.

The United States paid an annual fee to Panama in exchange for the armed land heist. The Panama Canal Company was born to try to turn it into a profit-making venture, but making a profit from this kind of venture isn’t easy, especially when you have to deal with things like bribes and payoffs to big American companies.⁴

In the late 1960s, local citizens decided that they’d had enough of the bullying, so they rioted and fought with U.S. citizens who were living in the Canal Zone.

In 1968, Panamanian Colonel Omar Torrijos staged a military coup in Panama.⁵ Shortly after, he worked with Jimmy Carter to establish a treaty transferring ownership of the canal to Panama.

By this time, the waterway was showing signs of losing its panache. The canal was a maintenance nightmare anyway, but climate change, even though not many people back then were thinking much about it, was reducing the depth of the canal and forcing people to consider engineering a fix so that big cargo ships could continue using it.⁶

President Jimmy Carter, himself an engineer, after studying the problem for a minute following his election, jumped at the opportunity to free the U.S. of what had become a major burden (he had opposed a canal treaty during the election campaign, probably because his opponent, Gerald Ford, wanted one).

A treaty was signed in 1977, turning the canal over permanently to Panama by 1999.⁷

Or so we thought.

In December 2024, just after the worst election ever, the flapping methane mouth of Mar-a-Lago somehow got wind of the piece of history I’ve just described. Most likely, a brownshirt like Stephen Miller whispered into his ear one fine evening while staring at girls in martini glasses, “You know, boss, we used to own the Panama Canal.”

“What’s the Panama Canal?” must have surely been the response from the villainous creep.

“It’s like the Suez Canal, sir, only it’s in Central America.”

“What’s the Suez Canal? Wait, isn’t Central America where they teach Mexicans how to rape people before they come to the United States?”

“Yes, sir, that’s the place. And if you want a third term, you must tell the American people we want our canal back.”

So the perfect genius said to the American people that we would “take [the canal] back or something very powerful is going to happen.”⁸

I have no idea what that means, exactly, but now we can sort of guess that it doesn’t much matter, because that “something powerful” appears to be a massive buildup of weaponry in the seas south of Key Largo.

By now, it’s fair to assume that the simpleton has seen enough PowerPoint slides and stick drawings to sort of understand that these assets can be used to seize the canal in violation of the treaty the United States signed in 1977.

Or maybe he’ll use them to attack Caracas in Venezuela and, in the guise of removing a bad guy, immerse us in a horrible war where every Venezuelan citizen grabs a gun to fight back, thus converting a largely pro-U.S. population into an enemy.

Who knows?!?!!

It could be anything.

That’s the problem.

There is no strategy surrounding anything he’s doing. He’s following the whims of his ruined mind.

This makes him incredibly dangerous as the Epstein files make their way into the public domain.

In the good old days, American imperialistic intent was blatant. Nobody cared, so it didn’t matter much. But there was a certain logic to it, even if it meant conquest and a strikingly absurd level of poverty for its victims.

Now, presidential intent is much different. Everything is centered around keeping an American president out of prison. That’s the sole reason he ran again in 2024. His chief of staff, Susie Wiles, isn’t a government official. She’s a co-conspirator with a criminal who co-hosted a billion-dollar child trafficking empire frequented by CEOs, tech bros, sheiks, and British princes.

He may be history’s dumbest major leader, but he’s known about the Epstein files longer than any of us. It takes zero intelligence to anticipate the nuclear blast the files are about to trigger. We can continue to hope that such a nuclear blast remains a metaphor, or we can start demanding that the mainstream (conservative) press do its job and report consistently on his failing mind as he continues to fall apart at public-facing events.

Whatever is afflicting him shows up anytime he does, whether in a speech or in a True Sociopath post:

When someone is this insane, especially when their decades-long involvement in history’s most vicious sex and murder scandal is on the verge of discovery, they would normally be tailed by law enforcement every hour of the day.

The question conservatives who support the agenda of Donald Trump need to ask themselves is the most basic: Can’t you beat us any other way? Your man is about to die. They’re holding him together at Walter Reed with duct tape and giraffe drawings. Instead of trying to beat the clock by blitzing the country with policies you know you can’t sustain, show that you have a small vestige of decency.

Run him out of office. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you can take advantage of having control of all three layers of government, and you’ll find a way to pound us all into submission despite his absence. If that’s so, at least you can show that you have the balls to kill us all the old-fashioned way.

History is watching, whether you like it or not. If you win your war against America by continuing to enable a child trafficking predator who can’t tie his own shoelaces, whose mindlessness is about to kill thousands of young men and women, your grandkids will probably replace your gravestones with a monument covered with the names of the people you’ve killed through your cowardice.

Ironically, you may end up on that list, too. Because that list will be a lot longer than a few thousand American armed forces personnel.

Covid under his watch, when he still had maybe ten percent of his mind, killed a million of us. Chances are, his next act is about to make that look like a minor historical blip.

Thanks for reading!

Notes

If you’re a big fan of internet rabbit holes that go far beyond my simplistic description of the Panama Canal, check out this piece covering BlackRock’s involvement:

https://artofprocurement.com/blog/supply-who-owns-the-panama-canal

h/t to my readers, who always inspire me through their comments.

Footnotes

1. My conservative neighbor, who’s lived in the same place for forty years, tells me that whenever he sees them training like that, a military event follows shortly thereafter, so he stocks up on popcorn and keeps his eyes glued to cable news.

2. I altered it a bit with my own headline because they forgot to.

3. “Why the Panama Canal Is on President Trump’s Agenda.” 2025. Harvard.edu. March 11, 2025. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/international-relations-security/why-panama-canal-president-trumps.

4. For fans of rabbit holes, and the various intricacies I’m not willing to cover in this short piece:

Barner, Kelly. 2025. “Who Owns the Panama Canal?” Artofprocurement.com. Art of Procurement. March 27, 2025. https://artofprocurement.com/blog/supply-who-owns-the-panama-canal.

5. I know what you’re thinking: “Why can’t the U.S. find a nice, adventurous colonel like this?”

6. A major fix to the canal was initiated in 2016:

Rodríguez, Roberto. 2021. “The Canal’s New Anchorages and Infrastructure Investments Reflect a Changing Industry - Autoridad Del Canal de Panamá.” Autoridad Del Canal de Panamá. January 20, 2021. https://pancanal.com/en/the-canals-new-anchorages-and-infrastructure/.

7. “Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations - Office of the Historian.” 2025. State.gov. 2025. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1977-1980/panama-canal. Also the source material for much of the basic history in this article.

8. Harvard.edu, ibid