The City of Sonoma’s decision to surrender a silly idea about imposing an utterly unnecessary mini-roundabout, i.e. “traffic circle” on Third Street West – ostensibly to calm traffic and make bike riding safer – is worthy of praise. Third Street West traffic demonstrably doesn’t need taming, and it takes a grown-up traffic engineer to admit when they are wrong.
Would that similar wisdom be embedded in the sycophantic obedience being frantically cultivated in every corner of the Trump Administration’s bureaucracy. The latest example of this cowardly enthusiasm for licking the royal Trump golf shoes is information leaking out of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) that bike lanes, along with studies on bicycle safety, are being discouraged and even removed. It may have started when Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the agency would end support for what he called “DEI bike lanes.” According to the New York Times, on a July 7 X post, Duffy claimed the Biden Administration “used your money for DEI bike lanes and climate change. THAT’S OVER.”
The Big Mac crumbs lead right back to the corpulent body of the golfcart-friendly president who has said, “I will never, ever ride a bicycle,” and also remarked about the trim Pete Buttigieg, who rode a bike to work while he was head of DOT, “He rides a bicycle to work. Can you believe it?”
But Trump always has been more about image than anything else, witness his pairing himself with the authentically rugged, trust-busting, “rough-riding” war hero, Teddy Roosevelt in a pair of three-story banner portraits draped on the front of the Labor Department headquarters in Washington. We are, one can infer, supposed to equate one president with the other. But that, of course, would be a lie.
The president’s audacity to lie, to spout obvious untruths in broad daylight with cameras and microphones recording every word, has become the object of growing fascination and horror. Many Trump analysts (it has become a legitimate occupation) have concluded that, because he has so thoroughly sifted out of his governing circle anyone who will tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, and because on top of that, he doesn’t read much of anything, he is dangerously uninformed. Witness the war in Iran. Witness the Canadian Tariff War. Witness tariffs in general.
Were all this not so dangerous to national and international order, it would be weirdly fascinating. And for anyone who has spent any time at all studying the life of Adolph Hitler, Trump’s behavior appears sadly and dangerously familiar. Hitler had a similar illusion that he was ordained to reshape the world, and that he was a wiser strategist than almost all his generals.
When Hitler decided to invade Russia in June of 1941, he radically misjudged both the Soviet resistance and the effect of a subsequent freezing winter that immobilized the German forces who lacked sufficient winter gear. Thousands froze to death. Then, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler decided the time was right to declare war on America, despite advice from his generals to the contrary. And while U.S. entrance into the war in Europe was inevitable, the isolationist sentiment in Congress and in the public was strong enough to give President Roosevelt pause. Until Hitler declared war on December 11, four days after Pearl Harbor.
Such amateur, vest-pocket historical analysis may seem presumptuous or questionable. But the symptoms of autocratic self-delusion that drove Hitler look eerily familiar in Trump. To our everlasting credit and relief, we have a democratic tradition baked so deep in our political and spiritual genes that we will survive this time, still on the road to a more perfect union.
If, that is, the demonic, vandal forces who attacked the sacred reflecting pool, don’t spread their evil acts beyond the banks of the Potomac.
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