MAGA fans learn the real cost of owning the libs
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This monstrous Trump gambit plays well in headlines but is doomed to fail
South Carolina has doubled down and sent additional National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., as part of a second wave of federal deployment. We urge South Carolinians to ask what this effort is really accomplishing and at what cost.
Deploying the National Guard may play well in headlines, but it doesn’t build safer neighborhoods.
In Washington, D.C., we’ve lived through the first phase of this federal surge. What we saw was a dramatic spike in low-level arrests and swarms of federal agents in public spaces, all under the banner of a so-called “crime emergency.”
What followed was increased burdens on young people, overwhelmed courts, the cancellation of vital community activities and, most troubling of all, polling that showed the majority of residents felt less safe than before.
Deploying the military is not a sustainable strategy for public safety.
The presence of a badge or a uniform alone doesn’t guarantee justice, and we can use federal tax dollars more effectively.
When Congress slashes funding for violence interruption, youth programs, housing, and mental health services and then turns around and floods the streets with militarized agents, they’re not offering a solution.
They’re creating a short-term spectacle that ignores long-term needs.
This year, major cities across the country saw encouraging reductions in violent crime. That happened because of years of investment in prevention, community-based support, and early intervention strategies.
In Washington, we’ve seen the evidence: hospital-based violence intervention programs, youth engagement, behavioral health resources, and mentorship initiatives work. They create real, measurable safety by keeping people connected and supported.
We are not naïve. We know public safety is a serious concern for many communities, including in South Carolina.
But sustainable safety cannot be imposed from the outside in. It must be built from the ground up in close partnership with residents, local officials, and community organizations who understand what’s happening on the ground.
That’s why it’s so alarming to see this deployment move forward with no local consultation and no clear strategy.
Policymakers should stop ignoring the data and start funding what works.
Militarized “solutions” may be good for soundbites, but they do nothing to address the root causes of violence.
Our community deserves more than posturing.
Washington residents deserve the right to govern ourselves, including determining how best to achieve long-term safety. Washington’s voters overwhelmingly support public safety solutions built on trust and meaningful investment.
Sending more National Guard to Washington might make headlines, but it won’t make us safer.
- Vanessa Batters-Thompson is the executive director of DC Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, a nonprofit advocacy organization in the District of Columbia. She brings more than 20 years of experience in litigation, policy, and public interest advocacy. Before joining DC Appleseed, Vanessa held leadership roles at the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Center, Bread for the City, and George Washington University Law School. She holds a law degree from GW Law and a bachelor's degree from American University. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her family and enjoys camping, reading, and growing flowers.
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Trump is probing how to cross a red line — and only one thing can stop him
The first US missiles that struck boats in the Caribbean in early September were described by Washington as a “counter-narcotics operation,” a sterile phrase meant to dull the violence of incinerating human beings in an instant. Then came the second strike, this time on survivors already struggling to stay afloat. Once the details emerged, however, the official story began to fall apart.
Local fishermen contradicted US claims. Relatives of those killed have said the men were not cartel operatives at all, but fishermen, divers, and small-scale couriers. Relatives in Trinidad and Venezuela told regional reporters their loved ones were unarmed and had no connection to Tren de Aragua or other cartels, describing them instead as fathers and sons who worked the sea to support their families.
Some called the US narrative “impossible” and “a lie,” insisting the men were being demonized after their deaths. UN experts called the killings “extrajudicial.” Maritime workers noted what everyone in the region already knows: the route near Venezuela’s waters is not a fentanyl corridor into the United States.
Yet the administration clung to its story, insisting these men were “narcoterrorists,” long after the facts had unraveled. Because in Washington’s post 9/11 playbook, fear is a tool. Fear is the architecture of modern American war.
The US did not emerge from the Iraq War into peace or reflection. It emerged into normalization. The legal theories invented and abused after 9/11 — elastic self-defense, limitless definitions of terrorism, enemy combatants, global strike authority — did not fade. They became the backbone of a permanent war machine.
These justifications supported drone wars in Pakistan, airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia, the destruction of Libya, special operations in Syria, and yet another military return to Iraq. And behind every expansion of this global battlefield was a US weapons industry that grew richer with each intervention, lobbying for policies that kept the country in a constant state of conflict. What we are seeing today in the Caribbean is not an isolated action; it is the extension of a militarized imperial model that treats entire regions as expendable.
The next wars were always there because we never confronted the political and economic system that made endless wars a profitable cornerstone of US power.
A framework for endless war
The Trump administration has advanced several overlapping legal arguments to justify the strikes, and together they reveal a post-9/11 framework that stretches executive power far beyond its intended limits.
According to detailed reporting in the Washington Post, a classified Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo argues that the United States is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with so-called narcoterrorist organizations. Under this theory, the strikes qualify as part of an ongoing armed conflict rather than a new “war” requiring congressional authorization. This framing alone is unprecedented: drug-trafficking groups are criminal networks, not organized armed groups targeting the US.
A second pillar of the memo, described by lawmakers to the Wall Street Journal, claims that once the president designates a cartel as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, it becomes a lawful military target. But terrorism designations have never created war powers. They are financial and sanctions tools, not authorizations for lethal force. As Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) put it, using an FTO label as a “kinetic justification” is something “that has never been done before.”
The OLC memo also invokes Article II, claiming the president can order strikes as part of his commander-in-chief authority. Yet this argument depends on a second unsupported premise: that the boats posed a threat significant enough to justify self-defense. Even internal government lawyers questioned this. As one person familiar with the deliberations told the Post, “There is no actual threat justifying self-defense — there are not organized armed groups seeking to kill Americans.”
At the same time, the administration has publicly insisted that these operations do not rise to the level of “hostilities” that would trigger the War Powers Resolution because US military personnel were never placed at risk. By the administration’s own logic, that means the people on the boats were not engaged in hostilities and therefore were not combatants under any accepted legal standard, making the claim of a wartime self-defense strike impossible to reconcile with US or international law.
Under international law, executing people outside a genuine armed conflict is an extrajudicial killing. Nothing about these strikes meets the legal threshold for war. Because the people on the boats were not lawful combatants, the operation risks violating both international law and U.S. criminal law, including statutes on murder at sea, a concern reportedly underscored by Adm. Alvin Holsey’s early resignation.
The memo goes further still, invoking “collective self-defense” on behalf of regional partners. But key regional partners, including Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, have publicly criticized the strikes and said they were not consulted, undermining the very premise of “collective” defense.
This internal contradiction is one reason lawmakers across both parties have called the reasoning incoherent. As Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) put it, “This is a memo where the decision was made, and someone was told to come up with a justification for the decision.”
And beneath all of this lies the most dangerous element: the memo’s logic has no geographic limits. If the administration claims it is in an armed conflict with a designated “narcoterrorist” group, then, by its own theory, lethal force could be used wherever members of that group are found. The same framework that justifies strikes near Venezuela could, in principle, be invoked in a US city if the administration claimed a cartel “cell” existed there.
If Trump truly believes he leads “the most transparent administration in history,” then releasing the memo should be automatic. The American people have the right to know what legal theory is being used to justify killing people in their name.
For decades, OLC memos have been used not simply as legal advice but as the internal architecture that allows presidents to expand their war-making power. The Bush torture memos treated torture as lawful by redefining the word “torture” itself, calling it “enhanced interrogation,” thereby enabling years of CIA black-site operations and abusive interrogations. The Libya War Powers memo argued that bombing Libya did not constitute “hostilities,” allowing the administration to continue military action without congressional approval. Targeted-killing memos, including those related to drone strikes on US citizens abroad, constructed a legal theory that lethal force could be used outside traditional battlefields, without trial, based on executive determinations alone. In each case, the memo did not merely interpret the law; it reshaped the boundaries of presidential war powers, often without public debate or congressional authorization.
The American people have the right to know what “legal theory” is being used to justify killing people in their name. Congress needs it to conduct oversight. Service members need it to understand the legality of the orders they receive. And the international community needs clarity on the standards the US claims to follow. There is no legitimate reason for a president to hide the legal basis for lethal force, unless the argument collapses under scrutiny. A secret opinion cannot serve as the foundation for an open-ended military campaign in the Western Hemisphere.
A 200-year doctrine of control
If the legal foundation comes from the post-9/11 era, the geopolitical foundation is older — almost ancestral. For 200 years, the Monroe Doctrine has served as the permission slip for US domination in Latin America.
The Trump administration went even further by openly reviving and expanding it through what officials called a “Trump Corollary,” which reframed the entire Western Hemisphere as a US “defense perimeter” and justified increased military operations under the language of counter-narcotics, migration control, and regional stability. In this framework, Latin America is no longer treated as a diplomatic neighbor but as a security zone where Washington can act unilaterally.
Venezuela, with its vast oil reserves, sovereign political project, and refusal to submit to US pressure, has long been marked as a target. Sanctions softened the terrain. Disinformation hardened public opinion. And now, military strikes near its waters test how far Washington can push without triggering public revolt at home. The term “narcoterrorism” is simply the newest mask on a very old doctrine.
The strikes in the Caribbean are not isolated. They are the predictable intersection of two forces: a post-9/11 legal regime that allows war to expand without congressional approval, and a 200-year-old imperial doctrine that treats Latin America as a zone of control rather than a community of sovereign nations. Together, they form the logic that justifies today’s violence near Venezuela.
Label that opened the door
After 9/11, every administration learned the same lesson: if you label something “terrorism,” the public will let you do almost anything. Now, this logic is being used everywhere.
The cruel, decades-long blockade on Cuba is justified by claiming that the island is a “state sponsor of terrorism.” Mass surveillance, border militarization, endless sanctions, all wrapped in the language of “counterterrorism.” And now, to authorize military action in the Caribbean, they simply take the word “narco” and attach it to the word “terrorism.” The label does all the work. The danger is not confined to foreign policy: after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the same elastic definition of “terrorism” is now being used domestically to justify crackdowns on NGOs the administration claims are inciting “anti-American” political violence.
The only reason Trump has not launched a full-scale attack on Venezuela is that he is still testing the ground, testing resistance inside Venezuela, testing Congress, testing the media, and testing us. He knows nearly 70 percent of people in the United States oppose a war with Venezuela. He knows he cannot sell another Iraq. So he is probing, pushing, looking for the line we will not let him cross.
We are that line.
If we do not challenge the lie now, if we do not demand release of the memo, if we stay silent, “narcoterrorism” becomes the new “weapons of mass destruction.” If we allow this test case to go unanswered, the next strike will be a war. We are the only ones who can stop him. And history is watching to see whether we learned anything from the last twenty years of fear, deception, and violence.
Because the next wars were always here, looming. We just need the clarity to see them and the force to stop them before they begin.
- Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK. She was born in Venezuela and holds a bachelor’s degree in languages and international affairs from the University La Sorbonne Paris IV, in Paris. After graduating, she worked for an international scholarship program out of offices in Caracas and Paris and was sent to Haiti, Cuba, The Gambia, and other countries for the purpose of evaluating and selecting applicants.
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One key issue shows inequality is out of control under Trump — it's time to fix it
As you know by now, I don’t like raising big problems without offering big potential solutions.
The big problem I want to talk about today is that CEO pay has become utterly untethered from reality.
When I was a young man in the 1960s and ’70s, CEOs typically made 20 to 30 times the pay of their workers. That was enough to reward leadership, but not so much as to distort the entire economy and alienate workers who could still aspire to the American Dream.
Today, the gap between CEO pay and the pay of average workers has exploded. The average CEO at a major corporation now takes home nearly 300 times what their employees earn.
In some cases, the disparity is so grotesque it defies belief. For example:
- Walmart’s CEO raked in $27.4 million last year — 930 times the median Walmart worker’s $29,469 salary.
- Coca-Cola’s CEO made $28 million — nearly 2,000 times what the average Coke worker earned ($14,144).
- Starbucks’ CEO pocketed $95.8 million in 2024 — almost 3,000 times the typical barista salary of $32,000. (By the way, I urge you to boycott Starbucks until they agree to a first contract with their striking baristas.)
- Tesla just approved a nearly $1 trillion pay package for Elon Musk — the world’s richest man (except for on Sept. 10, 2025, when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s net worth briefly surpassed his). This pay package would make Musk the first trillionaire in history.
The problem isn’t just these ridiculous sums. It’s also what’s happening to ordinary workers.
Undervaluing their labor while overvaluing the labor of CEOs has fueled resentment, anger, disillusionment, and fear — creating conditions ripe for a demagogue to exploit. This is what helped give rise to Trump.
The yawning gap between the wealth of executives and the everyday people who generate that wealth is beyond obscene. The American people agree: A staggering 62 percent support setting caps on CEO pay relative to worker pay.
CEOs aren’t worth nearly what they’re raking in. They get these pay packages because they’ve rigged their boards to award them.
They’ve also linked their pay to their corporations’ stock prices — and they cash in when their corporations buy back their stock to pump up share prices.
It’s immoral. Even Pope Leo has noted these concerns: “CEOs that 60 years ago might have been making four to six times more than what workers receive, the last figure I saw, it’s 600 times more.”
Referring to Musk, the Pope continued: “What does that mean and what’s that about? If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble.”
So, what do we do about this? How can outrageous CEO pay be stopped?
The best idea I’ve heard comes from Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who have introduced the “Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act.”
Under it, companies would pay higher taxes when the ratio of the pay of their CEO to their typical worker exceeds 50-to-1.
- If it exceeds 50-to-1, the corporation pays an additional 0.5 percent tax
- If it exceeds 100-to-1, the corporation pays an additional 1 percent tax
- If more than 200-to-1, a 2 percent tax
- If more than 300-to-1, a 3 percent tax
- If more than 400-to-1, a 4 percent tax
- If more than 500-to-1, a 5 percent tax
So, if Tesla’s board approves Musk’s staggering $975 billion pay package, Tesla would owe up to $100 billion more in taxes over the next decade.
It won’t be easy to get this idea implemented, given all the corporate and CEO money now polluting our politics. But if my guess is correct, we’re about to witness a giant backlash against Big Money in politics. If so, this idea has a chance, especially after the midterm elections.
Don’t wait. Please call your members of Congress today and tell them to support the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act. (To reach Congress via the Capitol Switchboard, dial (202) 224-3121, and ask the operator to connect you to your specific Representative’s or Senator’s office, by name or office.)
Thanks for demanding an economy that works for working people — and not just the wealthy few at the top.
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Head, meet desk: how one Republican posted GOP red-scare idiocy for everyone to see
When Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO) found out that radical communists from California were trying to meddle with the critical gerrymandering efforts of Missouri Republicans, she sprang into action.
Wagner took to X — platform formerly known as Twitter — to let it be known that she wasn’t about to stand for any of that. Here’s what she posted:
Now, that’s the kind of bold response we need more of in the country, by God. The last thing Missouri should stand for is to allow California puppets of George Soros to be pushing us around.
There was one small problem, however, with Wagner’s righteous indignation.
Just a detail.
It turns out that she had her Californians a little mixed up.
You see, the offensive post from the California Democrat was referencing a gathering of concerned citizens at the California City Hall Railroad Park right down there on 500 Oak Street in the fine little town of California, Missouri.
Population 4,458, nestled in beautiful Moniteau County, 24 miles west of Jefferson City.
As the great Gilda Radner’s legendary Saturday Night Live character Emily Litella would have said: “Never mind.”
In Wagner’s defense, both the state of California and the town of California, MO are indeed located to our west. The little town is about 140 miles from St. Louis County, conveniently on the way toward the West Coast.
And it turns out that California Democrat is the name of the hometown newspaper, not a political organization in Gavin Newsom’s west coast den of inequity.
That’s easily confused, isn’t it?
And who can blame Wagner for her outrage anyway? If I might really add fuel to the fire, it turns out that the Missouri citizens who gathered at the town railroad park were organized, at least in part, by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Now, if I didn’t happen to be a past president of the ACLU chapter, let me tell you, I’d really go off on the danger posed by this sort of thing.
But Mr. Soros won’t permit me to do that.
In any event, kudos to HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery, who grabbed a screenshot of Wagner’s tweet.
For some reason, Wagner has since deleted it.
I don’t know why Wagner would memory-hole the thing.
California needs to butt out of our elections. Right, Emily?
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Trump's terror grew out of this uniquely American evil
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848)
With so little pushback to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s murders in the Caribbean and ICE’s domestic cruelty and violence that highlights Trump’s brutality, we’re watching the final fulfillment of a 50-year plan. Louis Powell laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have followed it.
It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions.
As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough media — particularly if you are willing to lie — you can sell anybody pretty much anything.
You can even sell a nation a convicted felon, rapist, and apparent agent of America’s enemies.
America was overwhelmed in the 2024 election by billions of dark-money dollars in often dishonest advertising, made possible by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1,500 hate-talk radio stations and podcasters, many subsidized by Russia and rightwing billionaires.
Open the lens a bit larger, and we find that it goes way beyond just that election; virtually every crisis America is facing right now is either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by those corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.
They’re responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, $2 trillion in student debt, our housing crisis, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the ongoing brutality of ICE, and even the lack of affordable drugs, insurance, and healthcare.
All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yacht experiences and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, a spouse’s employment, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry.
For over two decades, according to reporting, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and mega-yacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs.
Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has reportedly made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch apparently got a sweetheart real estate deal and his mother had to resign from the Reagan administration to avoid corruption charges; Amy Coney Barrett has refused to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company.
None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes they legalized that same behavior for themselves.
As a result, we have oligarchs buying and running our media, social media, and funding our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process.
Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations should take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.
In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.
In the 200 preceding years — all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776 — no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.
The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that money is the same thing as free speech. In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth.
In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out:
“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.”
But the Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped get them on the Court in the first place. Who had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts.
Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires. Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision.
Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented:
“The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”
But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now virtually assured.
That ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt.
It’s no coincidence.
And it’s gotten worse since then, with the Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the 1800s.
Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And now it’s hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government.
No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class.
It’s why people living in other developed countries can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping.
It’s why — with the exception of Hungary, which Trump is now emulating — those countries are still functioning democracies.
The ability of America to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed, even with the extraordinary showing in the streets with the No Kings protests.
This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal and the behavior and violence of this administration certainly qualifies as a “bottom” in modern American history.
Thus, right now we need to prepare for the 2026 elections, join with organizations like Indivisible to stand up and protest this corruption, and make sure everybody we know is registered to vote.
Many Americans will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the morbidly rich supporters of this neofascism.
If you haven’t already, join us.
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This video proves Trump has completely lost the plot
His fantastical claims have become more unhinged. This is especially troubling, given that he is the oldest president ever to be sworn in and has a family history of Alzheimer’s.
Trump even seems to be confused about when he was president. And he keeps claiming that the Epstein files were a hoax created by his predecessors, even though the arrest and demise of Trump’s close friend Jeffrey Epstein happened during Trump’s own first term.
Paranoia and anger are common symptoms of dementia — so is a loss of impulse control. All have become cornerstones of Trump’s second term.
Trump’s Cabinet could invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. Instead, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, JD Vance, and RFK Jr. seem to be feeding into Trump’s paranoid delusions to increase their own power and advance their own fanatical agendas.
A person suffering dementia can be a danger to themselves and others. In the most tragic cases, they can be manipulated and taken advantage of by unscrupulous relatives or caretakers. Is this what’s happening in the White House?
It’s one thing to read about Trump’s mental decline — quite another to see it, which is why this week’s video is particularly important. Please help spread the truth by sharing it.
- Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Trump's eugenic horror is about to get the green light — and that's just the beginning
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a lawsuit regarding the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order to restrict the right to birthright citizenship. If the Supreme Court rules in Trump’s favor, then children born in the US would be denied citizenship if their parents are undocumented or residing in the country under temporary legal status.
Let’s not mince words here: Trump’s executive order is cruel and xenophobic. Children born of undocumented immigrants or visa holders have committed no crimes. They are not responsible for the circumstances of their birth. There is also no legitimate legal basis. The 14th Amendment is clear:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
None of these facts matter to Trump. His administration would readily tear families apart and see children born into a second-class status simply because their births were not to his liking.
This is only the beginning of the cruelty that his birthright ban would unleash. If the Supreme Court rules in his favor, it would pave the way for any president (or wannabe monarch) to redefine citizenship at their discretion. After all, if simply being born in the US is not enough to guarantee citizenship, then what is? Where do we draw the line?
Well, if you’re Trump, then it’s the color line. For the Trump administration, not all babies are created equal. Restricting birthright citizenship is their way of preventing “hundreds of thousands of unqualified people” from acquiring the “privilege of American citizenship.” It is about dissuading the wrong kinds of people from having the wrong kinds of babies.
Sound far-fetched? Well, consider this: Trump, the self-proclaimed “fertilization president” (gross!), has sought to expand access to in vitro fertilization (IVF). As Trump puts it, we want “beautiful babies in this country, we want you to have your beautiful, beautiful, perfect baby. We want those babies, and we need them.”
Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, champions the future of “Trump babies.” Vice President JD Vance literally says he wants “more babies in the United States of America.” The Trump White House insists that they need “growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”
But, if that’s true, then what is the purpose of Trump’s executive order? If they want more babies to be born in this country, then why push to deny babies their legitimate birthright? It’s because Trump is pro-baby so long as it’s the right kind of baby.
Beautiful, healthy, strong and perfect — those are the babies Trump wants. And those are the babies that, in his view, migrants do not have.
Trump has explicitly said that migrants have “bad genes” that cause them to commit crimes. That they are “not humans, they’re animals.” He has said that migrants from South America, Africa, and Asia are “poisoning the blood of our country” — a view that parallels Hitler’s rhetoric about “blood poisoning” and race mixing. Trump calls Somalis “garbage” and says that “I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you … their country is no good for a reason.”
He believes this about migrants, and he believes it extends to their children. This pseudoscientific eugenic drivel is at the core of his executive order.
That is the real danger of Trump’s birthright ban. As it stands, birthright citizenship provides a clear-cut metric. Aside from two niche exceptions, if you were born here, you are from here. There’s no loophole to exploit. There’s no definition to reevaluate and abuse. There’s no place for prejudice, discrimination, or bigoted understandings of what it means to be an American. There’s no ambiguity regarding who belongs. The simplicity of birthright is precisely its strength.
It’s also precisely why the Trump administration wants to undo it. Birthright citizenship is a strong barrier against the administration’s most fascist impulses to recreate “the meaning and value of American citizenship.” As he said on the campaign trail, “If I win, the American people will be the rulers of this country again. The United States is now an occupied country.” His current administration similarly claims that Europe faces “civilizational erasure” if it does not restrict migration and preserve its “Western identity.”
If Trump’s mission is, as he explicitly says, to liberate the US and protect Western values threatened by migration, then he won’t stop with the children of undocumented immigrants. Trump cannot be allowed to define who is a citizen. For the good of the nation and for future generations, we cannot let him succeed.
- Jordan Liz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at San José State University. He specializes in issues of race, immigration and the politics of belonging.
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Two events laid bare a dire reality we face in Trump's national hell
Ten years after Donald Trump first ran for president, he stands at the helm of Titanic America. How did this happen?
No factors were more pivotal than the outlooks and actions of the Democratic Party leadership. Scrutinizing them now is vital not only for clarity about the past, it also makes possible a clear focus on ways to prevent further catastrophe.
Here’s actual history that corporate Democrats pretend didn’t happen:
- 2016: Hillary Clinton offers more of the status quo. Her allies in the Democratic Party pull out all the stops so she can win the party’s presidential nomination. With a big assist from the Democratic National Committee, she prevails over the strong primary challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — but her campaign trail goes downhill from there. After rallying behind Sanders’s genuine progressive populism, many young people don’t trust the pseudo-populism of Clinton’s campaign. She has earned a millennial problem, and it prevents her from becoming president.
- 2017: Democratic Party leaders can hardly blame themselves or their nominee for the virtually unbelievable circumstance of the Trump presidency. A critical focus on Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street won’t do. Neither will critiquing her thinly veiled contempt for the progressive wing of the party. But blaming Trump’s victory on Russia becomes an obsessive theme.
- 2018: The Democratic leadership is mapping out a battle plan for the midterm elections in November. At the same time, a key priority is to thwart the inside threat posed by progressive forces. Establishment Democrats are keeping a watchful eye and political guns trained on Bernie Sanders.
- 2019: Democrats take control of the House, and a large cast of political characters is off and running for the party’s presidential nomination. Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) are at the left edge, while more than a dozen others jostle for media attention. For elites determined to retain undemocratic power, seeing either Sanders or Warren in the Oval Office would be the worst possible outcome.
- 2020: Early in the year, the economic populism of the Sanders campaign continues to catch fire, while many forces team up to function as fire extinguishers. The Democratic Party establishment acts to smother the grassroots blaze. After Joe Biden’s fifth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary puts his campaign on life support, rescue comes 18 days later from South Carolina, where Biden wins a landslide primary victory — and then several corporate-friendly contenders quickly drop out of the race and effusively endorse him. When Biden clinches the nomination, progressives largely close ranks behind him to defeat Trump. Biden squeaks through.
- 2021: President Biden’s first year includes backing and signing legislation with real benefits for tens of millions of Americans. But his resolve dissipates. Before the end of the year, he abandons Build Back Better legislation that would have been transformational. Notably, Biden withdraws all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in late summer — but overall he opts to fuel militarism, with ever-higher Pentagon spending instead of devoting adequate resources to meet human needs and protect nature. The president goes full speed ahead with “modernization” plans for ever more dangerous nuclear weapons that already have a pre-overrun price tag of $1.7 trillion.
- 2022: Biden relapses into his customary “moderate” political mode, while his capacity to speak coherently weakens. Party discipline, internalized by Democrats in Congress, precludes independent-minded leadership as they begin to proclaim that Biden should run for re-election. Conformity of groupthink and fear of retribution from the White House keep people quiet.
- 2023: A real-life Shakespearean tragedy unfolds as Biden throws down a gauntlet to run for re-election even while his mental frailty becomes more evident. Enablers ignore the party’s base, with polls continuing to show that most Democrats don’t want him to be the next nominee (including 94 percent of Democrats under 30). A common canard — pushed by Biden’s coterie of sycophants — contends that because he defeated Trump once, he’s the best person to do it again; the claim ignores the fact that Trump 2020 represented an unpopular status quo, and Biden 2024 would represent an even more unpopular status quo, as “right track/wrong track” polling makes crystal clear. Soon after Hamas attacks Israel on Oct. 7 and the Israeli military starts its siege of Gaza, Biden begins to further alienate many of his party’s usual voters by massively boosting U.S. military aid as the slaughter of Palestinian civilians escalates.
- 2024: Among top Democrats, denial about Biden’s evident cognitive infirmity grows along with the infirmity itself. Even after Biden’s disastrous debate performance in late June, the political reflex of dissembling prevents him from bowing out for another 28 days. That leaves 107 days for the newly installed nominee Kamala Harris to pick up the pieces before Election Day. At first it seems that she might find ways to depart from coming across as Biden’s yes-woman, but there is no such departure. Nothing epitomizes the Harris campaign’s moral collapse more than her insistence on echoing the Biden line about Gaza while the U.S. continues to arm Israel’s military as it methodically kills Palestinian civilians. In the process, Harris chooses to ignore both human decency and polls showing that far more voters would be likely to cast their ballots for her if she were to come out against sending more armaments to Israel. Electoral disaster ensues.
Last month, two events showed the huge contradiction between the potential for true progressive change and the dire reality of feckless Democratic Party leaders.
When socialist Zohran Mamdani won election as mayor of New York after running as a Democrat, he said: “If there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one.”
A week later, eight members of the Senate’s Democratic caucus surrendered to Trump, betraying efforts to defend Obamacare and a health-care status quo that still leaves tens of millions uninsured or underinsured. The capitulation meant that the nation’s health-care crisis would get even worse.
Craven and conformist Democratic Party leadership — coloring inside corporate lines while enmeshed with rich backers — hardly offers a plausible way to defeat the Trump forces, much less advance a humane political agenda. Saving the country from autocracy requires recognizing and overcoming the chokehold that Democratic leaders have on the party.
The timeline above is drawn from my new book about the 10-year political descent into the current inferno, The Blue Road to Trump Hell, which is free as an e-book or PDF at BlueRoad.info.
- Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine includes an afterword about the Gaza war.
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Here's why this malignant fool is the last person to deserve a Nobel Peace Prize
Trump recently had his name engraved on the U.S. Institute of Peace — now renamed the “Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace.” Last week, the White House confirmed the renaming, calling it “a powerful reminder of what strong leadership can accomplish for global stability.”
Actually, it’s a reminder of what a strong malignant narcissist can accomplish when untethered from reality.
On Friday, Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, the world football league, awarded Trump the first (and likely last) annual FIFA Peace Prize — along with a hagiographic video of Trump and “peace.”
What FIFA has to do with peace is anyone’s guess, but Infantino is evidently trying to curry favor with Trump. (Infantino, by the way, oversaw the 2020 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, defending and minimizing Qatar’s miserable human rights record. He also played a key role in selecting Saudi Arabia to host the 2034 FIFA World Cup, notwithstanding the Saudi murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.)
Both Trump’s absurd renaming of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the equally absurd FIFA award are parts of Trump’s campaign to get the Nobel Peace Prize — something he has coveted since Barack Obama was awarded it in 2009 (anything Obama got credited with, Trump wants to discredit or match).
Too late for this year. The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to María Corina Machado of Venezuela, “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” (The prize is awarded annually on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, in a formal ceremony at the Oslo City Hall. Trump has his eye on the 2026 prize.)
Ironically, Trump has declared war on Venezuela, without congressional authorization — causing the death so far of at least 87 people bombed by American military jets targeting vessels allegedly carrying drugs into the United States.
Those 87 include two people who barely survived a first bombing, only to be bombed again. (Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who saw a video of the second strike in a closed-door briefing, told CBS’s Face the Nation that the two survivors “were barely alive, much less engaging in hostilities,” when the follow-up strike took place.)
Trump has designated a Venezuelan criminal group — Cartel de los Soles — as a Foreign Terrorist Organization led by Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Yet analysts have pointed out that the Cartel de los Soles is not a hierarchical group but an umbrella term used to describe corrupt Venezuelan officials who have allowed cocaine to transit through the country.
Could it be that Trump wants access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves?
He doesn’t seem to be particularly upset about cocaine trafficking. While he’s bombing small vessels in the Caribbean allegedly for smuggling fentanyl into the United States, Trump is pardoning Honduras’ former president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of trafficking large amounts of cocaine into the United States.
Trump is also in the process of giving eastern Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s golf pal and itinerant diplomat, has offered Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy adviser, a plan for carving up disputed territory in a way likely to appeal to Putin.
As revealed in a transcript of a recent meeting, Witkoff told Ushakov, “Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere.”
Witkoff also advised Ushakov on how Putin can get the best deal for Russia — by having Putin flatter America’s narcissist-in-chief:
”Make the call and just reiterate that you congratulate the president on this achievement [in Gaza], that you supported it, that you respect that he is a man of peace and you’re just, you’re really glad to have seen it happen.”
Ushakov responded:
“Hey Steve, I agree with you that he will congratulate, he will say that Mr. Trump is a real peace man and so-and-so. That he will say.”
While Witkoff has been seeking a “peace” deal in Ukraine by giving Vladimir Putin much of what he wants, Witkoff and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner have been seeking billions of dollars in business deals with Russia. It’s a brazen conflict of interest.
Witkoff spoke on the record to The Wall Street Journal, characterizing the talks with Russia over oil, gas, and rare-earth minerals as “a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”
Everyone’s thriving, that is, except Ukrainians and those conscripted into the Russian army.
Other potential beneficiaries of the deal include ExxonMobil, along with a Trump donor and college pal of Donald Trump Jr. with the improbable name Gentry Beach. Beach hopes to acquire a 9.9 percent stake in a Russian Arctic gas project.
Meanwhile, Trump has allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to continue bombing Gaza, even after declaring a ceasefire there.
Peace prize? Please.
Trump is taking credit for achieving “peace” between nations that weren’t even at war.
He’s also trying to change the name of the Department of Defense back to the Department of War.
And he’s conjuring up “enemies within” the United States as pretexts for prosecuting political opponents, attacking American universities, and attempting to stifle media criticism of himself and his administration.
According to Alfred Nobel’s will, the Peace Prize is awarded to the person who in the preceding year “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Nobel’s will further specified that the prize be awarded by a committee of five people chosen by the Norwegian Parliament.
Memo to the Norwegian Parliament and the Nobel committee: No president in American history deserves the Nobel Peace Prize less than does Donald J. Trump.
- Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Trump's thug just revealed this cowardly truth about the GOP
When I interviewed Sanho Tree, I wanted to discuss a recent CNN report. Apparently, in 2016, when Pete Hegseth was still a Fox anchor, he said military personnel should refuse to obey unlawful orders.
I wanted to talk to Tree, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, about the hypocrisy of saying one thing when the president is Barack Obama and another when the president is Donald Trump.
That’s mostly what we discussed (see below) — until the last question.
That’s when Tree characterized the September boat bombing as a much bigger deal.
“I think this policy of murdering civilians goes much deeper in this administration … This was a conspiracy to commit murder and that's how it should be investigated.”
I’m putting up front this concept of a conspiracy to commit murder, because of what the Washington Post then reported: details from a meeting in October between congressional leaders and military officials on the killing of suspected drug runners in the Caribbean near Venezuela.
Evidently, the Pentagon did not send any lawyers to explain the legal basis for the boat attacks. (There have been nearly 20 since the first on Sept. 2.) The Department of Defense could not explain the mission’s “strategy or scope.” Leading Republicans complained about receiving more transparency from the Biden administration. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), who is chair of the House Armed Services Committee, was critical of the Pentagon’s “secrecy.”
Yet despite the “secrecy,” Adm. Frank Bradley, who was in charge of the Sept. 2 bombing, was expected to tell lawmakers during a classified briefing “that he considered the survivors viable targets, not shipwrecked, defenseless mariners.”
What was the legal basis for his decision that could not be explained by Pentagon lawyers? What was the “strategy or scope” of the mission that could not be explained by Department of Defense officials? Are lawmakers going to accept Bradley’s view or will they demand more?
The Post went on to say that support of Hegseth by GOP congresspeople has “atrophied,” because his “ability to lead the department, some people argued, could be weakened even if Congress ends up clearing him of wrongdoing in the boat strike inquiries.”
It’s still not clear to me why Hegseth is in trouble. After all, he survived the Signal scandal. But the reason might be suggested in three ways.
One is that subsequent strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean did not “kill everybody,” as Hegseth had ordered. According to the Post, “in the strikes occurring since [Sept. 2], the US military has rescued survivors or worked with other countries to attempt doing so.” Someone somewhere decided it was a bad idea to repeat the exercise.
Two is that Hegseth asked the man in charge of military operations in that part of the world to resign. According to a Wall Street Journal report, his argument with Adm. Alvin Holsey “began days after President Trump’s inauguration in January and intensified months later when Holsey had initial concerns about the legality of lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean.”
Reading between the lines, Hegseth wanted Holsey to commit murder.
Holsey said no.
But Adm. Bradley said yes.
And finally, the idea of killing drug runners without due process of law had been in circulation throughout the regime since at least February. That’s when former Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who is now a federal judge, said authorities shouldn’t bother ceasing drugs at sea anymore.
“Just sink the boats," he said, according to NPR.
“Bove's remarks, which have not previously been publicly reported, suggest at least some members of the administration were considering this policy shift as early as six months before the boat strikes began.”
Put another way: a policy shift away from due process to murder.
When six congressional Democrats with backgrounds in national security came out with a video last month reminding military personnel of their obligation to refuse illegal orders, the response by the White House was excessive even by its own hysterical standards.
Donald Trump suggested that they should be executed for sedition. Hegseth threatened to bring Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), who is a retired Navy pilot, back into service in order to court martial him.
But the reaction might have been appropriate if the White House believed the six Democrats had learned about a conspiracy to commit murder and were getting ahead of news about it coming to light.
The Democrats released their video on Tuesday, Nov. 18. Every day since then has brought headlines about illegal orders, putting the Democrats, especially Kelly, in a position of righteous indignation.
The indignation promises to rise even higher. At the classified briefing last week, lawmakers saw video of the first and second strikes on Sept. 2. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent: “It looks like two classically shipwrecked people.”
It is a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight,” Smith added.
I said Sanho Tree’s comment about the conspiracy to commit murder was the first thing I wanted to bring to your attention. But the rest of the interview is also important, because it suggests the disgusting belief underlying the conspiracy: that murder is OK when Republicans are the ones doing it.
That’s going to come as a shock to a lot of Americans and every single Republican in the Congress knows it. That explains why some of them are following Sen. Kelly’s lead and getting ahead of future bad news. Hegseth has survived plenty of scandal so far. Can he survive this?
JS: In 2016, Hegseth said the same thing that Mark Kelly and the other Democrats said — that military personnel should not obey illegal orders. Why is it OK when he says it but not OK when Kelly says it?
ST: Hegseth answered truthfully and now he's feigning ignorance so that his new stance comports to the whims of the Mad King. All policies in this administration cater to an audience of one. There is no sign of the old interagency process when stakeholders and agencies come to the table to give their best advice. It's all about kissing Trump's a--.
In his report, CNN's Andrew Kaczynski foregrounded the context. Hegseth made his remarks at the end of Obama's presidency. 'What's changed?' he asked. 'The president,' he said. What's your view on that?
The entire GOP has either reversed gear on their long-held beliefs to align with Trump or they've left the party to become Never Trumpers. It's certainly true in Congress. Marco Rubio is but one example.
Loyalty is at the heart of this. Under Obama, it was loyalty to the Constitution, not to the president. Under Trump, it's loyalty to the president, not the Constitution. Where is the honor in that?
Being craven is not honorable. I can see how one's views may evolve over time (and mine certainly have), but the GOP is doing so many 180-degree reversals in order to not contradict Trump that there can be no honor when it's so deeply rooted in dishonesty.
Because of the difference between what Hegseth said under Obama and what he is saying under Trump, I should point out the obvious color of law for Hegseth. White is legal, thus deserving of loyalty. Black is illegal, thus undeserving of loyalty. Any reaction to that?
Take Trump's attacks on Somalis as a response to an attack by an Afghan refugee. Those countries have nothing to do with each other. Around 90 percent of Somalis in Minnesota are citizens. Republicans call them "illegals" and attack them because they aren't white.
Trump laid out his attack against people of color when he rode down that escalator in 2015. He always links immigrants to crime, the same way Nazis linked Jews to crime. Der Stürmer had a daily column in the 1930s that highlighted crimes committed by Jews. Trump set up a similar office in the White House in January 2017 to publicize immigrant crimes. I outlined his worldview back in 2018.
If Hegseth is forced to resign, how would that affect cabinet members? How would it affect government workers who fear retribution? Seems like the floodgates would open and cabinet members would have targets on their backs? What do you think?
I think this policy of murdering civilians goes much deeper in this administration. Trump started ranting about taking Venezuela's oil in 2017. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller began asking about sinking boats in 2018. In February of this year, Emil Bove said we should “just sink the boats.” They actively sidelined critics and anyone else who raised any concerns. This was a conspiracy to commit murder and that's how it should be investigated.
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A vital struggle just exposed the breadth of this dark Trump threat
If Ukraine ends up capitulating to Russian demands to end the war, give the self-proclaimed peacemaker Donald Trump the lion’s share of the credit. Since he took office, Trump has done nothing but strengthen Russia’s hand while putting Ukraine in its weakest negotiating position.
Trump is far from an honest, impartial broker. He has been a great admirer of Russia’s murderous dictator, Vladimir Putin, for more than a decade, and in 2022 called Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “genius” and “savvy.” Trump has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — thereby putting the U.S. in league with countries including China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Nicaragua.
On the other hand, Trump has treated Ukraine’s courageous president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a minor-nation inferior, someone purely to bully. In 2019, Trump withheld military support from Ukraine for 55 days while trying to extract damaging information from Zelenskyy on political rival Joe Biden. In March this year, Trump berated and humiliated Zelenskyy at the White House.
He has called him a “dictator,” and criticized him for not showing sufficient gratitude for U.S. peace efforts.
Since Trump took office, the U.S. has reversed course on support for Ukraine. Under Biden, commitment to Kyiv was unwavering. Biden harshly condemned Putin, provided essential, reliable military aid, and was a unifying force in ensuring NATO support.
The Trump administration suspended military aid to Ukraine, saying it was “pausing and reviewing” the aid to “ensure that it is contributing to a solution.” Trump has splintered the NATO alliance by going it alone, presenting a pro-Putin peace proposal rejected strongly by European countries and Ukraine. He has put the burden of funding military aid to Ukraine on European allies.
When Trump and Putin met in Anchorage, Alaska, in August, they ostensibly agreed that Putin’s wish list for ending the war would be part of a U.S. peace proposal. This wish list included the industrial-heavy Donbas region of Ukraine becoming a part of Russia, the Ukrainian army reduced significantly, and Ukraine never being allowed to join NATO.
To Ukraine, these demands landed in a 28-point peace proposal like exploding drones.
Naturally, Ukraine rejected the proposal, European NATO nations huddled quickly to reject it, and Trump re-framed the proposal as a starting point for talks. A second, 20-point U.S. proposal was next offered — containing the same poison pills. It was another pro-Putin proposal, aimed at getting Ukraine to capitulate.
As Ukraine refused to meet Russian demands, Trump implied that Zelenskyy was the obstinate party that didn’t want peace and bore responsibility for the war dragging on, by not agreeing to Trump’s Russo-centric peace proposal.
“It takes two to tango,” said Trump — meaning that to end the war, Zelenskyy must dance the Russian polka.
Music to Putin’s ears, Trump has been telling Zelenskyy and the world that Ukraine can’t win, that Russia “has the cards,” and that for Kyiv, fighting on is a lost cause. Trump has put Ukraine in a weakened military and political position, empowering Putin to press the battle with renewed vigor. At some point, Zelenskyy may have no choice but to capitulate and cede a part of his country to Russia. If that occurs, a brutal aggressor will have been rewarded for invading a sovereign nation — with a huge assist from Trump.
Had Trump not been elected, the U.S. no doubt would have continued its commitment to helping defend Ukraine and working within the NATO coalition to put maximum military and economic pressure on Russia. Ukraine would be in a much better place today to sue for a just peace, one that doesn’t reward the invader and that addresses the horrendous atrocities committed against Ukraine and its people.
When Trump was elected in 2025, Putin was given the greatest gift he could ask for since his invasion of Ukraine: an ally in the White House. Putin knew Trump’s loyalty would lie with Russia given Trump’s friendship, his long-time business dealings with Russian banks, and Russian elites’ investments in Trump properties. He also knew that to Trump, Ukraine was a small, dispensable piece of the political puzzle.
Trump’s insatiable quest for a Nobel Prize drives him to seek peace at any cost to Ukraine. In addition, he has accomplished what Putin could never do by himself: splintering the NATO coalition, pitting Trump’s pro-Russian peace efforts against European nations’ pro-Ukrainian works. Thanks to Trump, Putin could now blame NATO for hindering U.S. peace efforts and claim European nations are “on the side of war.”
While Trump is selling out Ukraine, European allies are increasing military aid to help fill the gap left by U.S. disengagement. Unlike Trump, leaders in Germany, France, Britain, Sweden, and Demark, along with Canada and Australia, refuse to turn their backs on an ally in its time of greatest need.
Historically, though imperfect in its efforts, America has been a staunch defender of democratic countries against totalitarian aggression. Under Trump, the U.S. has aided totalitarian aggression against a sovereign democracy by cutting off support essential for an ally’s defense.
If a perfidious land-for-peace appeasement agreement is reached, who would rule out Putin rewarding Trump with a deal providing U.S. access to critical minerals in Russia’s new Donbas region? One filthy hand washes the other.
- Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor
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