Continental Rift IV

Here’s a newsflash for anyone just waking from a coma: Project 2025 is in full effect. The president did a masterful job of distancing himself from the controversial 900-page manifesto in the run-up to the 2024 election, but he wasted no time in installing its framework on his very first day back in the White House.

From the DOGE dismantling of the administrative state, to the war on D.E.I., to the defunding of Ivy League Universities, to J.D. Vance’s speech before our NATO allies in Germany, to this massive immigration return-to-sender effort, to the recent tariff grenades lobbed into the global market; from the melting ice of Greenland to the Panama Canal; from our old buddy Canada to our new buddy Russia, all the way down to the Gulf of America, one thing is abundantly clear—this is not your father’s Republican Party . . .

This is not even your Uncle’s Tea Party movement. In fact, this current Trump administration barely resembles the last Trump administration. And to debate the motives and tenets of these bygone political philosophies as if applicable to this new shape-shifting MAGA machine is to argue with the stirred dust and lingering exhaust of a bus that has already roared past.

The old left/right paradigm of Blue Dog labor unions versus corporate executives, the liberal anti-war movement versus GOP defense hawks, Democrat entitlement caucuses versus small government Republicans, the leftist lawyer lobby and right-wing venture capitalists, Main Street and Wall Street, pro-life and pro-choice, even black and white . . . These once bold-line divisions are suddenly thin and grey, as politically relevant in 2025 as Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell.

I’m going to have to interrupt my own essay here. It sounds like I know what I’m talking about, doesn’t it? This smug, professorial tone; my O’Reillian command of current events, that impressive bus metaphor a couple paragraphs ago . . . Do not be misled. I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t think anyone does. Not Elon Musk, not Speaker Johnson, not Senator Thune, not even Melania. Is he running for a third term? Will he actually defy the courts on some of these immigration rulings? Are these tariffs for real? Or just the art of the deal?

No idea.

Maybe that’s the draw of having a reality show in the Oval Office―the danger, the intrigue, the daily cliffhanger episodes. “Will the world’s longest running democracy survive? Tune in tomorrow to find out.”

But I keep returning to a single question. It has almost become a north star for me amid the chaos of wildly swinging markets, tariffs threatened and then almost immediately rolled back, DOGE firings and DOGE rehirings, the hyperventilating on CNN and the cheerleading on FOX News. It is a question that every Democrat, every Republican, and every independent with firm political opinions should be asking themselves. Not just once, but daily. With every new headline. It’s a question for anyone in pursuit of the Truth. And it goes like this . . .

Am I wrong about Donald Trump?

—April 10, 2025

[This essay is the fourth part in the Continental Rift series first posted on March 24, 2025. See Continental Rift V…]

Continental Rift III

A quick observation regarding the Dow. It’s a been a little over 48 hours since the president declared April 2nd, 2025 “Liberation Day” and imposed tariffs on all of our trading partners across the globe, a move that has caused the market to shed six trillion dollars so far. The biggest drop since Covid.

This Covid connection is ironic because 2020 is the same year we opened a Robinhood account and began buying a little stock every month. In the process, this humble prisoner learned all about the discipline of investing and what some call “the most powerful force in the world”—compound interest. Watching this account grow has been one of the most exciting experiences of my life. The S&P 500 had back-to-back years of over 20% growth in 2023 and 2024, and the handful of stocks that I picked were doing even better than that. We were right at double the total amount we invested after last year’s presidential election. Optimism was high and the markets reflected this. But most of those gains have been wiped over the last couple months, culminating with these extremely painful last few days.

I keep thinking about a Wall Street Journal article I read back in January about Warren Buffet and how while everyone was busy buying stock, the Oracle of Omaha was selling. I wish I would have followed his lead right about now. And if my little Robinhood account has been so thoroughly decimated over the last couple days, I can only imagine what some people’s retirement accounts are looking like this morning. Not selling now though. Not panicking either. We’ll keep chugging along, month by month, sticking to the script, taking advantage of the discounted prices. When you’re committed to the long view, you don’t get caught up in all the Bull and Bear headlines. We’ll survive. America will rebound. Potentially stronger than ever with a trade policy that benefits this nation’s workers and consumers. Sounds like this is the endgame. But these are admittedly dark days.

The president recently advised America to “hang tough” in a Truth Social post. What he is attempting to do is extremely bold and a massive gamble politically. I’m pretty sure those independent voters and swing states who were the tipping point in the “resounding mandate” that swept him back into office did not have a crashing stock market or a global recession in mind when they pulled the lever. Conservative media outlets are appealing for patience, albeit with nervous smiles. What else can we do but wait and see and try not to watch those plummeting red numbers on the ticker? But it’s hard not to wonder how thunderous the outcry would be if the Biden administration issued these same tariffs, or if it was Obama who was counseling us to “hang tough.”

—April 5, 2025

[This essay is the second part in the Continental Rift series first posted on March 24, 2025. See Continental Rift IV…]

Continental Rift II

Imagine a scenario where an American was removed from society for 20 years. We’ll say it was voluntary, for the purposes of this essay. No internet, no cable television; his main source of information, the ABC World News at 6:30pm EST every night along with the political roundtable shows on Sunday mornings. Kinda like a social experiment in a controlled environment that examines the prolonged effect of the legacy media on the human brain. What would this person’s political opinions and beliefs look like based on his daily diet of news consumption? How might his worldview be shaped after a couple of decades of David Muir, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos?

Dystopian as it may sound, you actually do know someone like this. You are currently reading his words.

When it became fashionable to distrust the media and “fake news” became a national catchphrase, I didn’t get it. Why would anyone not trust Cecilia Vega? Why would respected journalists like Jonathan Karl and Martha Raddatz tell bald-faced lies to the American people? I still don’t believe they would. But a couple things happened over the last few years that at least caused me to reevaluate my blind trust in network news. The most alarming and egregious of which happened during the January Sixth riot . . .

Amid the live ABC News footage of gallows being erected, chants of “hang Mike Pence!”, police being beaten with Trump 2020 flags, windows being busted, and members of Congress stacking tables and chairs as barricades, another ominous clip was woven into the feed―the image of Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr’s fiancée at the time, laughing and dancing at what appeared to be a party in the West Wing. I think she might have even had a champagne flute in her hand.

This was a tipping point for me. The moment when my disgust and outrage boiled over. The fact that this family of billionaires from Queens, New York, had convinced rural America that they were somehow their champions was bad enough, but now they were celebrating as democracy collapsed? Unreal.

So I did what every other writer does in times of distress and despair―I grabbed my pen and wrote about it. The result was a scathing indictment of this modern-day Nero fiddling in the Oval Office while the Capitol burned. I titled the essay Final Act of Cowardice, slapped it in an envelope, and mailed it out to be posted on the Malcolm Ivey website.

A year later, I was watching ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” when a guest mentioned in passing how the footage of Guilfoyle dancing was actually from a previous White House function and did not occur on Jan 6. Wait, what? This seems like something that should have been vociferously condemned, investigated, and corrected in the interest of capital T, Truth. Instead, barely a footnote.

Shortly after this revelation, I watched a former White House staffer testify before the House January Sixth Committee that the president had to be restrained by Secret Service in order to be kept from joining the rioters/insurrectionists/sightseers that day. Restrained. An allegation that Trump vehemently denies, but that’s not the point. I accused him of cowering in the safety of his office while his supporters and Capitol Police paid the consequences for his reckless words and his inability to admit defeat. I even included it in the title of the essay. While it is inarguable that all those people―and America as a whole―did pay a hefty price for his reckless words and inability to accept defeat (he still doesn’t), I doubt that even his most vocal critics would classify him as a coward. Donald Trump is many things, but a coward is not one of them. The world learned this in real time on July 13, 2024, when his kneejerk reaction to an assassination attempt was to pop back up, raise his fist, and yell, “Fight! Fight!”

Sidenote: The intent of this essay is not to capitulate. I’m not a tech oligarch seeking to expand my empire, or a Democratic senator in a red district, or an Ivy League dean in fear of losing federal funding. I’m just a prisoner. A guy who’s changed his life while serving his time and hopes to reenter a society not teetering on the brink of civil war, economic collapse, crumbling infrastructure, and totalitarian government. But I’m also a writer. And a writer’s job is to tell the truth.

Back to last year’s MAGA rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One of the interesting things about this day in relation to the media was how the crowd quickly turned on the press correspondents who were covering the event. “You did this!” they shouted in the eerie aftermath of the shooting. Of course, the journalists they were referring to were pretty much everyone except Fox News.

Ever since I arrived at my first federal prison last year, I’ve been fascinated by the cable news experience and how the reporting varies on a given topic depending on which channel you’re on. It’s like two different countries almost. In a federal joint, this difference is further underscored by the fact that televisions are segregated like Jim Crow Era water fountains in the Deep South. The “white TV” is mostly Fox News interspersed with a little History Channel here and there when the 24-hour news cycle gets redundant. The “black TV” is mostly BET with either MSNBC or CNN for news. Each station is transmitted through headphones. Flipping back and forth between the two has been a revelation for me.

For instance, when CNN was reporting on the market’s recent nosedive due to tariff fears and consumer uncertainty, Fox was hammering transgender athletes competing in female sports . . . When Fox is highlighting how we are 39 trillion in debt with a 1.9 trillion deficit and how it’s fiscally irresponsible to borrow money just to give it to other nations via USAID, CNN was talking about a looming “constitutional crisis” and how the current administration might defy judges’ orders . . . When the editor of the progressive Atlantic magazine was accidentally invited to a Signal group chat full of Trump’s highest ranking Cabinet members who were discussing the planned bombing of Houthi rebels two hours before it happened and sending each other muscle emojis as the targets were struck, Fox News quickly pivoted to a high-ranking MS-13 gang member who was nabbed just outside of D.C.

Similar to our current political climate, one side is clearly rooting for the other to fail. But contrary to popular belief, I don’t think that the media brass “hates” Donald Trump. I think he is the only hope of prolonging their inevitable demise, even if ratings are currently down. Just today, I’ve been listening to coverage of him floating the idea of a third term. And another story about him going after the nation’s largest law firms. This is headline gold for news organizations. And every day, it’s something new and disruptive. No other president is giving the media that.

And then there is radio . . .

My friends on the right will disagree with this, but one exception to all this partisan media animosity is NPR. Yes, certain shows, hosts and guests obviously have their own views. But there is nothing remotely polemic or political about Science Friday or A Way with Words or Hidden Brain or Marketplace. I owe so much to National Public Radio. Far from home, in solitary confinement cells, through hurricanes and wildfires and cancel culture and presidential elections and war and pandemics . . . NPR has been an amazing source of fact-based education. They are part of the reason an autodidact prisoner like the author of this essay even knows what “autodidact” means 🙂 Unfortunately, NPR and PBS are now in Trump’s crosshairs. I hope the opposition can find a way to resist him on this. Time will tell.

That’s it for this week. See y’all next Tuesday. Stay safe out there.

—March 31, 2025

[This essay is the second part in the Continental Rift series first posted on March 24, 2025. See Continental Rift III…]