Trump's bizarre definition of success

Defiant to the end, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem flickered with irritation as members of Congress grilled her like a cheese sandwich this week. They asked why she directed more than $220 million to her friends for a PR campaign to highlight herself. With her husband sitting right behind her, they asked her if she carried on an affair with a staffer aboard a government jet. They asked about children kept in internment camps, warrantless searches, masked agents invading people's homes and properties in brutal reigns of terror. They asked her why she told the world Renee Good, a mother of three children, and Alex Pretti, a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs nurse trying to shield a woman thrown to the ground by a federal agent, were "domestic terrorists" when federal agents under her command shot them and video evidence contradicted her statements. Would she apologize for that, they asked. She dodged it. She remained, at best, impassive through it all. At worst, she was combative, even bored. The next day she was speaking at a Nashville conference around the same the time the president posted on social media that she was fired. Her face didn't register that either — but really, what do you expect from a woman who thought it was a good idea to brag in her autobiography about the "leadership lessons" of killing her puppy and her goat in the same lunch hour, as U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., brought up? "Point is, those were bad decisions made in the heat of the moment not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis," he thundered, outraged, not unlike what a lot of us are feeling, and have been for a year now. "We are an exceptional nation," Tillis said. "And one of the reasons we're exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership. You've demonstrated anything but that." In 2018, staff writer Adam Serwer of The Atlantic said "the cruelty is the point" about President Donald Trump's administration, Part One. It wasn't a design flaw of their feckless and greedy strategies; it was their driving force. Remember being the "shining city on a hill," that phrase loftily employed by President Ronald Reagan and passed down through so many presidents since then. Reagan may have had great speechwriters, but those words echo from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of St. Matthew. We like to think of ourselves as a beacon to the world, and for generations perhaps we were, at least in our global charitable works and our diplomatic alliances. We were a far cry from the ideal we could have been, but we now are a sorry excuse of the America we used to be, a horrifying example of what can happen when a nation with so much promise, wealth and good fortune squanders it on apathy and cruelty, convincing ourselves fearmongering is faith. A nation that once knew its strength was its people turned, methodically and insidiously, against them from the inside out because a handful of the loudest ones told them to, day after day. Our allies don't know us. We've broken loyalties we've shared for generations, instead choosing to embrace dictatorships that have shown their true colors to us again and again. Just since I wrote last week, we are at war. It is our second war this year, if you count the one he's waged against our own people. Do we just stop talking about Minneapolis because he lost interest? Do we forget the people locked up and abandoned around this country? Many with no criminal charges? While the White House bumbles its way through the regime change across the world that it totally, absolutely, didn't start this war for, another regime change is in the works close to home. I hear he's appointed U.S. Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., to take over the DHS, announced, as usual, on social media. I know we're spending $1 billion a day on a way he can't even explain to us. I know caskets with American flags are coming back home. In Minab, backhoes are digging row after row of small graves for the nearly 200 little ones killed at a girl's school. I stared at that photo for a long time. That is a staggering number of dead people to understand and an unfathomable number of little girls. It sears the conscience. Trump said Wednesday, "We're doing very well on the war front, to put it mildly." He rated it 15 on a scale of 1 to 10. Contact Chronicle-Telegram columnist Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.