This country is a sick joke being told by a soulless ghoul without a speck of funny. This torturous period in U.S. history replicates by the minute, and we’re not even 365 days into this four-year grotesquerie.

A half-circle of halfwits gathers behind their sitting king in the Oval Office as he regurgitates an xenophobic rant against the Somali-American community living in Minneapolis. They laugh and giggle as the sexual predator calls human beings “garbage” and lies that these dark-skinned people from this singular African nation have destroyed both Minnesota and the United States.

Minnesota has one of the largest Somali contingents in the country, with an estimated population of about 100,000. There are another 160,000 or so people of Somali descent living elsewhere in the United States.

These 260,000 people, however, aren’t the ones destroying this country. They are victims in an ever-expanding ethnic cleansing campaign.

The MAGA regime’s press secretary, the cross-wearing, always-lying Karoline Leavitt, characterizes the Mag King’s racist diatribe as “amazing” and an “epic moment.” The vice president puppet, JD Vance, bangs the table in agreement. A White House handmaid says the racist-in-chief is right to highlight problems caused by “radical Somali migrants.”

Rep. Randy Fine, MAGA-Ariz., defends the Mad King’s hate, saying “not all cultures are equal, not all countries are equal … the president speaks in language that Americans understand.”

True that. I understand the Mad King and his MAGA underlings are racist crud.

They take food stamps away from low-wealth families, who are often people of color because of, well, racism, and sign a deal with Boeing to spend $140 million of taxpayer money on six new planes to deport randomly kidnapped Black and brown people.

The regime flags personal essays, narratives about overcoming obstacles, and diversity statements as being potentially unlawful.

The Mad King says Somalia “stinks.” The stench this horrible person smells is coming from the White House and Mar-a-Lago.

“They contribute nothing,” barks a creature who inherited his wealth, has never held a real job in his life, and whose contributions can be distilled down to bankruptcies, garbage presidencies, and a low-IQ TV show. “I don’t want them in our country … we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”

For the price of $1 million, though, wealthy foreign individuals can buy a Trump Gold Card.

“For a $15,000 DHS processing fee* and, after background approval, a contribution of $1 million, receive U.S. residency in record time with the Trump Gold Card,” according to the offer’s government webpage. (*Additional small fees to the U.S. Department of State may apply depending on the applicant. Translation: If you’re a person of color, expect to pay more.)

The regime claims anyone who pays $1 million will be deemed to have “exceptional business ability” and become eligible for an employment-based immigrant visa. Of course, one of these “exceptional business” minds could just use the money they inherited from their white supremacist father.

Coming soon: “Foreign nationals can sign up now and secure their places on the waiting list for the Trump Platinum Card. When launched, and upon receipt of a $15,000 DHS processing fee and $5 million contribution, they will have the ability to spend up to 270 days in the United States without being subject to U.S. taxes on non-U.S. income.”

All this Gold and Platinum will be funneled into a slush fund, as criminals, authoritarians, racists, fascists, and funders of terrorism buy their way into the Mad King’s good graces.

The “Art of the Deal” fraud has put a for sale sign on everything. Citizenship, work visas, advanced military capabilities, artificial intelligence, sensitive technology, classified documents, and freedom. For the right price, anyone can have whatever they want.

To protect MAGA tech bros and their AI obsession, the Mad King signs an executive order blocking states from regulating the rapidly emerging, energy-sucking technology. The protection order also creates a federal task force that will have the “sole responsibility” of challenging states’ AI laws. (I thought states’ rights were a MAGA bedrock. That option must only apply to the issues of abortion, guns, gay marriage, and voting.)

Soon after the Mad King spewed his pre-holiday hate, the regime ramped up deportation efforts, using “strike teams” of out-of-shape ICE thugs and other federal criminals to target Somalis.

We most certainly are going the wrong way, at supersonic speed, thanks to the Mad King and his MAGA minions. He’s been embedded in the Oval Office, again, for less than a year and the damage done to institutions, civil rights, U.S. world standing, the public trust, and environmental health with take decades to repair.

For example, MAGA lawmakers have voted to repeal a federal policy that limited the amount of land in an Alaska wildlife refuge that could be leased for oil and methane development. The MAGA-led Senate narrowly approved a resolution that revokes a 2024 rule governing energy development on the 1.6 million-acre Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

MAGA views both the environment and people as nothing more than resources to be abused and belittled.

If one Somali or person of color does something wrong, everyone associated with that nationality and/or ethnicity is a criminal, guilty of being. Due process be damned. Funny how that unjust standard doesn’t apply to MAGA and most white people, including a man the Mad King’s own department of injustice charged.

The stain of white supremacy has again bled through the White House walls, and no amount of Kilz can cover it.

The Mad King’s second round of hideousness began on his first day back in office, when he granted clemency to every person (some 1,500) charged or convicted for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, even those convicted of violently assaulting police officers. In all, some 400 rioters were charged with violent offenses during the televised ransacking.

One man was convicted of repeatedly assaulting police officers with pepper spray, a metal crutch, and wooden and metal poles. “For over one hour, defendant David Dempsey viciously assaulted and injured police officers,” according to federal prosecutors.

Ryan Nichols plead guilty to pepper-spraying police officers and urging rioters through a bullhorn to storm the building. “This is not a peaceful protest. If you have a weapon, you need to get your weapon!” he yelled, according to prosecutors.

Daniel Rodriguez plead guilty to using a stun gun and “plunging it” multiple times into a police officer’s neck.

The insurrection, incited by the pretend patriot through a firehose of lies, resulted in about $3 million in property damage to the Capitol, historic artifacts, and the building’s grounds. The total cost to taxpayers, including law enforcement and security expenses, has been estimated at $2.7 billion. Plus, there was the human feces smeared on Capitol walls that needed to be cleaned.

Dozens of pardoned Jan. 6 criminals reportedly had prior convictions or pending charges for crimes, including rape, sexual abuse of a minor, production of child sexual abuse material, domestic violence, manslaughter, and drug trafficking.

About a dozen of these insurrectionists have been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for other crimes, including plotting the murder of FBI agents, child sexual assault, possession of child sexual abuse material, and reckless homicide while driving drunk. 

The Mad King calls these criminals “patriots.”

Trump is rude and crude. He’s Berzelius Windrip, the eventual dictator in Sinclair Lewis’s remarkable 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” a cautionary tale about the rise of authoritarianism that was ignored.

About a decade before the orange-tinted loudmouth was even born, Lewis crafted a political character who was “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture. … Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy.”

The fictional Windrip, like the Mad King, promises to make America great again, by targeting minorities, liberal elites, and a “swindling” press.” He unleashes ICE-like hooligans, curtails civil liberties, establishes concentration camps, and usurps the power of Congress.

It’s as if the Mad King read the book and stole all of Lewis’s warnings. But since he can’t read his own speeches off a teleprompter, there’s little chance he read the book, or any book.

The MAGA regime’s hateful immigration policies echo its political ignorance and racism. It has blocked new refugees, except for white South Africans whom it falsely alleges are the targets of “white genocide,” from entering the country.

Untrained, unethical, masked cosplayers use racial profiling and brutality to detain and terrorize people who simply look Latino or speak Spanish. They demand to see papers of any person they feel like harassing. Those they terrify are usually brown, female, and/or nonthreatening. Their marks can also be pregnant (the latest such attack was Monday), have a disability, be elderly, be a gay makeup artist, or be a child with cancer.

ICE thugs in a Chicago suburb detained a 22-year-old woman two weeks after she had an emergency C-section. At the time of her arrest, her newborn daughter was in a neonatal intensive care unit.

The woman, an immigrant from Mexico who has a pending petition for asylum and a pending application for a visa for victims of crime, was locked up in an overcrowd facility, had limited access to food and water, was never provided a breast pump, and was never assessed by a medical professional while in the regime’s custody.

Federal thugs, without a warrant, storm a dormitory at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, detain an undergraduate, and aim rifles at students and staff.

Two things ICE goons seldom encounter while they terrorize college campuses and public streets: a gang member or violence, beyond the foot-long turkey sub that was hurled at one of them. The MAGA baby whined in court that the sandwich exploded with mustard and onions.

(Nearly 75% of ICE detainees have no criminal convictions, according to federal government data. Of the quarter who do, only 5% have had a violent criminal conviction.)

During the 2024 presidential campaign, the Mad King and his nasty campaign claimed Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets. The inevitable result of this hate? Threats to that community spiked, businesses closed, and many legal Haitian residents left the city.

The regime recently hatched “Operation Catahoula Crunch,” with the goal of making 5,000 arrests over two months. This racist operation is targeting the Vietnamese community in Louisiana. It started with goons pulling roofers from a job.

The regime has shifted taxpayer spending from cancer research, public health initiatives, and climate crisis mitigation to terrorizing people of color and tormenting the marginalized. It recently canceled grants awarded by the Biden administration to help three low-wealth communities deal with emergencies.

The regime does most of its hunting in Democrat-led states and blue cities.

Earlier this month in Boston during a naturalization ceremony in Faneuil Hall, regime goons lined up some of the soon-to-be citizens and told them they couldn’t proceed because of their countries of origin. They were mostly likely from places the Mad King calls “shitholes” and couldn’t find on a map.

As Sarah Betancourt of GBH reported, “Becoming a U.S. citizen takes years and involves immigrants acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes and a citizenship test.”

The Mad King couldn’t pass the citizenship test, nor the background checks.

This ghoulishness is playing out at naturalization ceremonies across the country, as sleazy government officials deem people “high risk” because they come from a country they personally don’t like but have never been to, or simply because the person has the wrong skin color, wears a hijab, or has dreadlocks.

As for the people — Black, white, brown, Asian, Catholic, Muslim, gay, transgender, old, or young — who can’t afford the rising costs of food, shelter, utility bills, and medicine, the Mad King rages that the “word affordability is a con job by the Democrats. The word affordability is a Democrat scam.”

Before he deemed affordability a Democratic trick, he campaigned on affordability, saying, “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.”

His corruption is doing the opposite.

The Mad King’s tariffs, anti-climate policies, federal funding cuts, and grifting are, for one, driving up insurance costs for homeowners — sometimes by double digits. His no-clue tariffs hammered U.S. farmers, so he wants to spend $12 billion in taxpayer money to bail them out of a problem he needlessly created.

While the Mad King calls affordability a hoax and doesn’t care if millions of people see their health-care premiums double or triple, his regime is working to deliver billions more in tax breaks to some of the largest corporations in the country.

Not satisfied with harassing people of color within our borders, the regime is murdering Black and brown people in international waters, and seized (stole) an oil tanker — “the largest one ever seized actually,” brags the dimwitted pirate of the Caribbean. The Mad King is calling this crime spree an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, but the regime’s killings are increasingly centered on Venezuela, where there is lots of oil, and not Mexico or Haiti, where most of the cartels actually operate.

The idiot king says, “Every boat we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives.” But the number of people who die from drug overdoses annually in the United States is far fewer than the amount he suggests have been saved by the fishing boat strikes the regime has illegally carried out since September.

While the regime has bombed more than a dozen boats — which would mean the lives of at least 300,000 Americans have allegedly been saved, even though U.S. overdose deaths hover around 100,000 per year — the Mad King pardons an actual drug lord.

MAGAs cheer taxpayer-funded killing of civilians at sea, for allegedly being drug runners, without due process or any evidence beyond the word of serial liars and keep quiet about the recent pardoning of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had just started serving a 45-year federal prison sentence for helping to traffic 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

The blowing of boats and people (100 and counting) out of the water, though, isn’t enough for the bloodlust MAGA cult. Billionaire tech bro Joe Lonsdale wants a return to public lynchings, writing on social media, “If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law. We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others. Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”

Thoughts and prayers that this toxic muppet is never in charge.

With all this regime-sponsored criminality, it’s no surprise the Mad King has demanded the International Criminal Court amend its founding document to ensure it doesn’t investigate him and his top henchpeople for potential war crimes, threatening U.S. sanctions on the court if such an exception isn’t created.

Regime members and their political enablers are petty and unserious people. They recently renamed the “National Renewable Energy Laboratory” the “National Laboratory of the Rockies,” because the word “renewable” sparks MAGA temper tantrums. Their idiocy is always on full display. They wear it like proud peacocks.

To wit: Rep. Dan Meuser, MAGA-Pa., says the Mad King has what it takes to get the economy going, because the “president is the best at expressing and providing that patriotic hope that has real results.”

In early February, less than a month into office, the 79-year-old baby demanded he be selected chair of the Kennedy Center “to make sure it runs properly,” because, remember, he is the only one who can fix everything, even stuff that isn’t broken.

“We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center … some of the shows were terrible. They were a disgrace that they were even put on,” shallow Don whined.

The regime’s primitive war on woke has since spilled into the arena of typography. Marco Rubio, the humiliating secretary of state, has halted the State Department’s use of the font Calibri, calling the 2023 Biden-era directive a “wasteful” surrender to diversity.

The change was made to “restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program.”

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility is a framework used by organizations, governments, schools, and businesses to create fair, welcoming environments where everyone, regardless of background, feels represented, valued, and can fully participate.

The change was made because studies have suggested that sans-serif fonts, such as Calibri, are easier to read for those with certain visual disabilities. The State Department says it is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface. They think it’s more manly.

Cruelty and chaos are the regime’s primary focus. It’s Mafia rules. Kiss the Don’s ring. It’s also about unadulterated hate.

For example, during a recent MAGA rally to ostensibly address rising costs, something the Mad King knows nothing about, because he’s never visited a grocery store or pumped gas, or cares about (he began his rant saying inflation was no longer a problem and that Democrats had used the term “affordability” as a “hoax” to hurt his reputation), he quickly swerved into name calling and familiar grievances.

“Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right?” the rabid racist asks. “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden?”

The Mad King says he objects to taking immigrants from “hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries.” He pontificates that those places “are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”

He could have been describing the White House, Mar-a-Lago, or anywhere he and Stephen Miller hang upside down.

As we know well, MAGA hate isn’t a foreign-only ideology. Their cruelty knows no bounds. Individuals, groups, causes, words, fonts, truth, facts, and allies can all melt these snowflakes.

Admiral Rachel Levine was the first transgender person to be confirmed by the Senate to serve in the federal government. Her official portrait at the Department of Health & Human Services headquarters was changed during the government shutdown to her previous name.

National Park Service rangers have been ordered to remove books and retail items at park gift shops that run afoul of the Mad King’s proclamations targeting diversity and equity across the federal government.

The Putin puppet rages at the European Union and praises dictators and tyrants, because he so desperately wants to be fawned over. He says Europe is a “decaying” group of nations led by “weak” people. He disparages European leaders for being “politically correct,” saying “I think they don’t know what to do. Europe doesn’t know what to do.”

Give him credit, though, the Mad King is awesome at projection. In the past month alone, when speaking to or about several female reporters, he has succinctly described himself: “A terrible person;” “Ugly, both inside and out;” “A stupid person;” “Stupid and nasty;” “Obnoxious;” and “I got a perfect mark, which you would be incapable of.”

Quiet, Mr. Piggy.

Related note: Since there are way too many examples of Karoline Leavitt’s lying, these two easily checkable trumped-up fictions will suffice. She recently told one of the regime’s propaganda channels that “President Trump convinced President Xi to continue purchasing again American soybeans, which is something China wasn’t doing under the last administration because they had no respect for President Biden or the country at the time.” Lie. During Biden’s four years in office, China imported an average of 27.7 metric tons of soybeans annually. Through July of this year, China had imported 5.9 million metric tons. During Trump’s first term, China imported an average of 24.2 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans annually. Leavitt lied Dec. 16 that gasoline is below $2 a gallon in “many states across the country.” Not one state Tuesday had an average price below $2 a gallon. Hawaii ($4.44), California ($4.36), and Washington ($4) had the highest averages, while Oklahoma ($2.31), Colorado ($2.49), and Texas ($2.52) had the lowest. The national average was $2.91 a gallon.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.