Before the crash

To recalibrate means to change the size of your ammunition.

ICE agents use 9 mm hollow-point Luger bullets in their handguns: the ones that murdered Alex Pretti and Renée Good, caught on videos in daylight.

Hollow-point bullets expand on contact with bones and flesh, guaranteeing a kill, even for morons who don’t know how to shoot, and were not trained how to kill people — and why they should not.

“They, being the White House, need to recalibrate on what needs to be done to make sure that respect is going to be reinstilled," Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Monday, according to the notoriously woke Dallas Morning News.

Respect for what?

Abbott blithered after ICE agents executed Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse who was trying to protect a woman whom ICE agents were beating. Alex was just doing his job.

You’ve seen the videos.

Governor Abbott claimed that the ICE murders were "fomented by the governor” of Minnesota and “by the mayor” of Minneapolis, both of whom happen to be Democrats.

O, please. Violent attacks upon judges and Democratic members of Congress, the latest one upon U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), were fomented by Don the john Trump, who said that Omar “probably had herself sprayed, knowing her,” though the man who was arrested was a felon, and Omar went after him to punch him back.

Trump’s reputation is crumbling not just because of whatever reputation he once had, it’s the lies.

In The Guardian this week, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote of a stranger who approached him, a lifelong Republican, but no more. It was not just the policies and murders, the man said, “but what really finished me were the lies: Noem, Miller, Bovino, Vance, Trump. They lied through their teeth. I saw the videos! Can’t trust them ever again. None of them. Pack of liars.”

Now the national press is going wee-wee in its shorts, claiming that Trump may be backing away from murdering people in daylight for being Democrats — for thinking differently than he does.

Thanks, New York Times! Thanks, Washington Post! Keep us tuned in as you bought-and-paid-for Quislings suck up to your “sources.”

Is it really headline news — should it be? — that our Fűhrer has pulled ICE Ubergruppenfűhrer Greg Bovino out of Minneapolis and replaced him with border czar Tom Homan?

That’ll be just as effective as the Catholic Church moving pedophile priests from one parish to another.

No, what shushed up Trump for about a minute is that the NRA objected to Trumps’ toadies’ slander of Pretti as a terrorist because he was carrying a gun, which was registered, and for which he had a concealed-carry permit, and which an ICE officer pulled out of Pretti’s holster as he was on the ground surrounded by agents.

The NRA spent more than $65 million on Trump’s presidential campaigns. Human rights? No. Money talks.

If Democrats had any brains or courage they would flood the airwaves with NRA statements, and tell us that Republicans are coming for our guns.

Why the Donald retains any support at all is beyond me. John Kenneth Galbraith explained it 70 years ago in “The Great Crash 1929.”

Trump’s fading ratings, and our government’s paralysis to stop it, parallel in many ways the runup to that stock crash.

To people who were paying attention, signs of the coming crash were apparent by 1927, certainly by 1928, and increasingly apparent as summer wore on in 1929. But efforts to warn away the gamblers were feeble.

Galbraith calls it institutional cowardice. Regulators failed to regulate, legislators failed to legislate, bankers and Big Players took their winnings.

Cowardly officials refused to stop the “irrational exuberance,” because in the face of an impending crash, which all the experts knew was almost sure to come, no one wanted to be the guy who “caused” it — who made the pinprick that exploded a balloon that was about to pop on its own.

Buying stocks on margin? Holding companies and interlocking directorates of banks and businesses? Bankers and brokers selling "investment trusts" to one another, and to themselves?

Don’t blame me! I didn’t do a thing!

Which is, more or less, correct.

So it is with Republicans’ “faith” in Donald Trump. Everyone loves to buy stock in a rising market. No one wants to be blamed when it inevitably falls.

In 1929, as now, warnings flashed again and again that this bullshit could not be sustained.

Here enters, Galbraith says, “the deep faith in the power of incantation.”

When danger of any kind threatened, “preventive incantation required that as many important people as possible repeat as firmly as they could that it couldn’t happen.”

In 1929, as in 1987, before the dotcom crash, the incantation was that “the fundamentals are sound.”

So it is today, that the temporarily Powerful Toadies insist that The Don is right: The Don knows best; The Don is never wrong. And when a single regulator — Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell — insists on doing his job, regulating, he is subjected to daily slurs, threats and an “investigation” from the White House and its pet hamster, Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Trump today is in the position of Wall Street in June 1929. Everyone knows he’s going to crash, but no one wants to be blamed for it. They’re cowards.