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In the early days of the Great War, later to be known as World War I, there existed a distinct set of rules for conducting warfare by submarines against civilian shipping. After all civilian ships are not military combat vessels and it was considered a crime to sink civilians without warning. Undersea Boat, U-Boats, were, when attacking a civilian shop, expected to surface, announce that the ship was targeted to be sunk, and provide the crew and passengers time to abandon the ship in their lifeboats, and once that evolution had been completed, then the sub would sink the vessel. All very proper and civilized warfare.

England, an island nation, quickly discovered that losing tons of shipping weighed heavily on both their economy and their population. They took drastic action to save their crucial shipping, inventing the Q-ship. A Q-ship, converted from a standard commercial vessel, boasted deck guns that could be hidden from view. (And the reason the department of hidden and special gadgets is known as Q-branch.) Once an enemy U-boat surfaced and made its intention to attack known, the hidden guns would be deployed and the submarine sunk. Imperial Germany responded rationally and stopped providing civilian ships with any warning, sinking them on sight in unrestricted submarine warfare, pushing the United States of America to enter the war.

When the sequel war came about no nation attempted restricted submarine warfare, instead sinking enemy vessels of every type without warning or mercy – evidence that any standard or norm once abandoned is forever lost.

The Constitution of the United States requires that every decade the federal government performs a census and based upon that the congressional districts for the House of Representatives are drawn.

In 2003 after the Republicans gained full control of the government of Texas, they sought to replace the district maps that had been drawn following the 2000 census, breaking the norm of only redrawing the districts each decade. Democratic members of the Texas government even fled the state in an attempt to deny a quorum and prevent the redrawing of the lines but ultimately failed to kill the scheme. In 2006 the mid-decade redistricting got the seal of approval from the US Supreme court when they interpreted the constitution as requiring a redistricting every ten years but not forbidding it at other times. Further exacerbating the issues of congressional districts is a pair of Supreme Court decisions, 2019’s call that the issue of drawing lines for partisan purposes lies beyond the scope of Federal courts to address and this year’s call that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require majority-minority districts throws open the season for unrestricted gerrymandering warfare. Districts drawn to advantage one political party that just happen as a side-effect disadvantage any particular racial group are now perfectly constitutional.

As with submarine warfare a civilized norm once abandoned is dead. With early votes in the primary already cast, Louisiana is seeking to redraw their districts to eliminate Democratic seats and states with Democratic trifectas are speaking of drawing lines that eliminate every Republican seat within their states.

I despise the current and proposed gerrymanders, but I am also a realist and understand that the current Republican party, headed by a vainglorious buffoon who hates above all things being held in the slightest manner accountable will never ever reach a consensus to ban the offensive practice of politicians picking their voters. The only hope that exists is for the GOP to lose their hold on the Federal government and for the Democrats, should they hold all three branches in 2029, be forced, and they will have to be forced because like the ring of power having the seats is powerfully seductive, to fix this with Federal laws.

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And not even the wisest can know what world is being born.

It is a testament to the power of the order that emerged following the Second World War that the term ‘post-war’ is instantly understood with no confusion as to which war is being referred even as that war, its evils, its heroism, and its terrible cost, passes out of living memory. Soon there will be none alive for whom that global struggle is a memory, and it will live only in textbooks, documentaries, and retold narratives. More importantly, the structures erected following the war are now beginning to crumble.

A lot of the destruction of that world order, one that had been laid upon a foundation of law, both national and international, and alliances can be laid at the feet of Donald J. Trump and his backwards, idiotic, and vainglorious mentality. A man who meets the clinical criteria for malignant narcissism coupled with the intelligence of a stunted teenager and the morals of a grifting carnival barker should have never risen to occupy the most important post on Earth. He did not achieve that posting by himself, no there is great culpability to be spread around, some obvious and direct, such as the men with far greater intelligences who saw their duty to the nation and set it aside for their own comfort and prosperity some not so direct, such as the reforms of the 60s that sapped the strength of political parties until they grew so weak as to be unable to fend off attacks from within. Now, with this low IQ, self-dealing, vengeful little man helming our nation’s course into the future, those institutions that have guided and safeguarded the world since the end of the war are falling like rusting relics. Trump alone did not kill off the post-war order, cultural movements around the world contributed to that, but a just, smart, and principled American president may have been able to provide the leadership in these dark times that could have saved and strengthened them, but that ship has sailed and it has sunk.

A New World Order will emerge and not I nor anyone else can know what it will be. We can hope and fight for one that is driven by law and justice and a respect for human life in all the many forms that it can take but that is far from an assured outcome. The time of change has been given to us and it is only us that will shape it into reality. It is a terrible and terrifying responsibility.

So, Trump, in his boundless narcissism, has decided that the United States Navy needs battleships again, and that these should be known as ‘Trump Class’ battleships serving as the centerpiece of his golden fleet initiative.

Of course, like with nearly every single thing that comes from this man, they are not what he promises and are vaporware, produced to stroke the ego of a vain and insecure toddler.

The proposed ships are not battleships in any conventional sense of the word. Ships are rated by their displacement—that amount of water that is displaced by the vessel as it sits there floating in the ocean. The USS New Jersey fully loaded with crew, supplies and munitions displaced 61,000 tons. A destroyer, small fast and agile ships might displace as much as 9,900 tons, this proposed ‘Trump-Class Battleship,’ if it ever came into existence, is slated to displace about 35,000 tons, about half the size of an actual battleship.

The first ship to be commissioned in this proposal would be the USS Defiant, making the truth of the matter even more clear as the first ship commissioned is the lead ship and the vessel from which the class name is derived. These vaporware vessels would be Defiant Class ships, but hey we know that Trump would just love to slap his name on it before it glides down the slipway into the water. Not that it ever will, or if by happenstance it does, it will be far beyond the current presidential term and in all likelihood this president’s life expectancy.

What these deranged fantasies expose is that Trump, a dim-witted and ignorant man, is fixated on navies that haven’t actually mattered in over a century.

The last major war where battleships dominated the seas was World War I. By the next world war, the battleships lost their throne as monarchs of the seas to the aircraft carrier. Beyond delivering massive shore bombardment, battleships serve little purpose beyond being massive and terribly expensive targets.

I do wonder if we are watching the next major evolution in naval warfare as the Russian invasion of Ukraine plays out. The Black Sea fleet has been humbled and not by new sleek warships but by cheap uncrewed drones. Is perhaps the next dominant warship not something with guns that can throw shells the size of cars 20 or more miles or floating cities filled with the latest and most expensive jet fighters and pilots, but rather small fast agile vessels that can unleash hell in the manner of hundreds if not thousands of cheap hard to detect and hard to hit drones?

Either way, the man-baby that sits in the defiled Oval Office is too stupid and too vain to see it.