Opinion

You might have noticed that in damn near every column I have written that mentions the orange mobster who is somehow once again disgracing our White House, I have dutifully referred to him as the “America-attacking Trump.”

I have used this deadly accurate compound modifier steadfastly and very intentionally to describe this despicable man. I have done this strictly for the sake of accuracy and credibility.

Word around the social-media campfire is Pete Hegseth is finished. The Times reported that the US secretary of defense was involved in yet another Signal group chat, only this time he set it up himself. In Politico, a former Pentagon official said other shoes are ready to drop. “It’s hard to see [him] remaining in his role for much longer,” he said.

I don’t think it’s that hard, but first, the details.

We’ve spent years watching Donald Trump attack our democratic institutions, inflame divisions, and corrupt the public discourse.

But focusing solely on Trump misses the larger, more disturbing reality: Trump isn’t acting alone. He’s a dangerous pathogen that found the perfect host in today’s Republican Party, an organism already compromised and eager to be infected.

Before this week, I didn’t think I could feel any deeper shame than I felt in February, watching Trump and Vance in the Oval Office attacking a real hero of democracy, Ukraine’s President Zelensky. Then, on Monday, Trump sat in the same chairs with President Bukele, brutal dictator of a notorious banana republic, and invited him to openly mock the United States Supreme Court.

Trump and Bukele tag-teamed their choreographed refusal to return Abrego Garcia to the US, which amounted to telling the Supreme Court ‘No,’ they will ‘not’ obey its unanimous order to remove Garcia from the El Salvador hell hole where Trump is paying Bukele to keep him.

On Monday, El Salvador’s self-described “cool dictator” President Bukele appeared in a skit in the Oval Office with Donald Trump, where both men pretended they couldn’t undo their own actions in imprisoning Abrego Garcia. Both Trump and Bukele delivered Oscar-worthy performances as they smirked for the cameras, mocking the audacity of a Supreme Court that would dare restrain a president’s unconstitutional overreach.

Acting pursuant to an agreement between the US and El Salvador, Trump officials arrested Garcia, a father and sheet metal worker, on March 12, 2025, held him without a hearing despite a known court order protecting him from deportation, and flew him to an El Salvador prison. After a DOJ lawyer truthfully admitted the administration’s error in court, Pam Bondi placed the lawyer on permanent leave.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

-Dr. Martin Luther King in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

In a recent edition, I wrote about how most people most of the time choose to believe in the existence of certain eternal rules that powerful figures must obey, and how they continue to believe in these rules even as powerful figures break them over and over again.

As if proving my point, a reader replied with a commonly held opinion that holds that Donald Trump’s attacks on Social Security are going to be a bridge too far for his own supporters. The cracks are showing, this reader said. If even a fraction of magaland breaks away, it’s over.

In three weeks, on my birthday May 7th, it’ll be exactly 80 years since Germany signed terms of surrender at the headquarters of US General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Reims, France.

That year, 1945, also signaled the official end of the Republican Great Depression. And May 7 of this year may well signal the beginning of the Second Republican Great Depression, the fourth major economic crash in our history. Troublingly, every one of the prior three financial crises also tripped off a major war.

Everything Donald Trump is doing and will do makes perfect and sudden sense if you understand one simple fact: For him, it’s all a show.

He views the White House as a sound stage, like the set made to look like a boardroom where he performed for NBC on The Apprentice. He sees the people around him as a supporting cast, who can each be easily and quickly replaced (and often are) if they fail to play their roles the way he thinks will work best for the program.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer stands, as U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) signs executive orders and proclamations, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 9, 2025.

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